Body and Soul

Katrina Reid: Mercury Rx--Review, Redo, Renewal

Katrina Reid (she/her) is a dancer and choreographer who crafts art projects rooted in improvisation, experimentation, and storytelling. Select presentations of her work include the Queens Museum, ISSUE Project Room, the Knockdown Center, Current Sessions, DoublePlus/Gibney Dance, AUNTS, the BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center, Florida A&M University, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX). As a collaborator, Katrina explores performance across dance, theater, music, ritual, and film. Most recent projects include [siccer] by Will Rawls, and the upcoming Spectral Dances by Jonathan González, as well as past works by David Thomson, Third Rail Projects, Kevin Beasley, Emily Johnson, Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, Marguerite Hemmings, and Megan Byrne, among others. Learn more at katrina-reid.com [katrina-reid.com]. For more, visit Eva Yaa Asantewaa's InfiniteBody blog here [https://infinitebody.blogspot.com/2024/04/body-and-soul-katrina-reid-mercury-rx.html].

Petra Kuppers: How to go on a crip drift

Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. She grounds herself in disability culture methods, and uses somatics, performance, media work, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. In these pandemic years, she’s been engaged in crip drifts: working with human and more-than-human others outdoors (or through dream journeys online), exploring interdependence, listening, being-with, and complex joy. Her latest academic study is Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters (University of Minnesota Press, 2022, open access). Her fourth poetry collection, Diver Beneath the Street, investigates true crime and ecopoetry at the level of the soil (Wayne State University Press, February 2024). She teaches at the University of Michigan, and is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. www.petrakuppers.com [https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/#] ht [https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/#]tps://wsupress.wayne.edu/9780814351116/diver-beneath-the-street/ [https://wsupress.wayne.edu/9780814351116/diver-beneath-the-street/] https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/eco-soma [https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/eco-soma] More on Eva Yaa Asantewaa's InfiniteBody blog here [https://infinitebody.blogspot.com/].

Daniel Phoenix Singh: True change from the roots

Daniel Phoenix Singh has worked in higher education, the field of dance, queer communities, South Asian communities, and in arts practice, policy, and funding at local and national levels. His identities lie at the intersection of his queer, antiracist, South Asian, immigrant, artist, and advocate roles in the various communities he inhabits. He acknowledges the complicity and internalization of colonial and racial oppressions in his life and works hard to approach issues from an anticolonial and antiracist perspective. He has been influenced by the work of Erode Venkatappa Ramasamy (aka Periyar | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periyar [https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/#]), Rabindranath Tagore, Arundhathi Roy, Toni Morrison, and particularly Justin Laing (http://hillombo.net/about/ [https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/#]) who work from intersectional frameworks. In his dance practice, Daniel was mentored by Pamela Mathews as curiosity took him from computer science to a dance major in college. He is deeply grateful to Lorry May, Harriet Moncure Williams, and Karen Bernstein for helping shape his choreographic voice. Madhavi Mudgal and Leela Samson in India have broadened his perspectives on the space Indian dance forms can occupy both within the body, in the pedagogy, and field of dance. He is a single parent to amazing twins who have been his foremost teachers and test his improvisational skills every day. https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielphoenixsingh/ [https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/#] For more, visit Eva Yaa Asantewaa's InfiniteBody blog here [https://infinitebody.blogspot.com/2024/04/body-and-soul-daniel-phoenix-singh-true.html].

Alexandra Beller: Mindful recuperation

NOTE: For a glossary of Laban terms mentioned in this episode, click here [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tif9acjAbH4fkjpkGmsq1hQkth5mfhTF/view?usp=drive_link]. Alexandra Beller, Artistic Director of Alexandra Beller/Dances, (2002-present), was a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company from 1995-2001. Alexandra created over 50 original Dance Theatre works, presented at theaters throughout the US and companies in Korea, Hong Kong, Oslo, and Cyprus. She has created dance theater works for over 45 universities throughout the US. Alexandra currently choreographs predominantly for Theater. Credits: Off Broadway: Sense and Sensibility (Sheen Center, Judson Gym, Folger Shakespeare Library, American Repertory Theatre, Portland Center Stage), (Helen Hayes Award, Lortel Nomination, IRNE Best Choreography), The Mad Ones (59E59), Bedlam’s Peter Pan (Duke Theatre), How to transcend a happy marriage (Lincoln Center Theatre), Regional: Two Gentlemen of Verona (Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival), As You Like It (Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Folger Shakespeare Library), The Young Ladies of... (Taylor Mac), Chang(e) (HERE), Current: Antonio’s Song (CATF, Milwaukee Rep), Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes) (La MaMa, and touring), Directing/Choreographing Macbeth. She wrote and directed an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for 92Y. She was on faculty at Princeton 2015-2022 and teaches at The Laban Institute for Movement Studies, HB Studios, UWM grad program. Alexandra holds a BFA/Dance, MFA/Choreography, and CMA (Certified Movement Analyst). www.alexandrabeller.com [https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/#] www.alexandrabe [https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/#]llerrdances.org [https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/#] www.praxispace.com [https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/#] For more, visit Eva Yaa Asantewaa's InfiniteBody blog here [https://infinitebody.blogspot.com/2024/04/body-and-soul-alexander-beller-mindful.html].

Valencia James: Dancing ancestry

Valencia James is an interdisciplinary artist from Barbados interested in the intersection between dance, theater, technology, art installation and activism. Her works have explored remote interdisciplinary collaboration, artist-driven open-source software tools and the combination of live performance with immersive interactive technologies. Currently, she is researching the relationship between performance and play and how traditional Caribbean cultural and spiritual forms have been used by communities in active resistance and problem-solving in the face of colonial systems. Valencia has been a 2020 Rapid Response Fellow at Eyebeam NYC and a 2021-2022 Sundance Interdisciplinary Fellow. She has presented work at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2015, SIGGRAPH 2021, and the 2022 New Frontier exhibition at Sundance Film Festival. Valencia has participated in group exhibitions in Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Budapest, San Francisco and Berkeley. http://valenciajames.com/ [https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/#] See Eva Yaa Asantewaa's InfiniteBody [https://infinitebody.blogspot.com/2024/04/body-and-soul-valencia-james-dancing.html] blog for more.