The final day at the conference started with the host reminding us to reflect over the past three days, to think over what had gone right for us and what kind of experience are we taking away with us, be it positive or negative. Even though the theme was dance and the digital age, I felt that it was about the connection with each other and how the digital space has extended that. The theory is still that we might lose the essence of human connection, but we can work on preventing that.
For our keynote speaker, we had Amanda Spann and Dr Sharon Watson who facilitated. The subject of the talk was ’Algorithms in Alignment: How to leverage technology to build buy-in brand engagement and boost business in the world of dance’. Amanda builds brands and invests in startups. Before taking us through her presentation she established three things that we are to acknowledge; 1. I am worthy 2. The world is abundant 3. I am ready to receive. A piece of advice Amanda gave was ’to not really think about the tools but more about the impact’. I found this sentence somewhat inspire me and my thought process. I thought Amanda was intelligent on her subject and had great charisma that responded well with the audience. Amanda presented advice on using AirBnB experiences as a way to generate revenue, and how finding high ranking keywords to increase views and help find the right audience on Youtube. Overall I found the keynote interesting as the ideas that were discussed I don't think I could think up myself. Also, Amanda had no performance background so her perspective on how to drum up business was refreshing.
Later on in the day, I chose to attend ’The Body As Archive in the Digital Age’, this would be split into three different presentations on the subject title. Dr Adesola Akinleye and Harry Fulleylove presenting ’The last place they thought of: dancing cartography of black woman’s spaces’ was the first of the three. Adesola introduced this presentation as a movement paper, using projections, shadows, lights and her body to create a physical space in order to share her analysis of her research with architects and engineer about ’the black female body in the city’ envisaging the body in a city space. Adesola talks about how her body is not often designed for and how we affect the space around with the shadows we make and the felt experience in that space.
The second presentation was by Gesel Mason, who spoke about ’No Boundaries: A Journey to Embody and Archive the Work of Black Choreographers’. Gesel spoke of a performance she had put together, an evolving repertoire of solos choreographed by some of the United States’s leading contemporary African American choreographers. The project featured work by Kyle Abraham, Robert Battle, Rennie Harris, Diane McIntyre, Bebe Miller, Donald McKayle, Reggie Wilson, Andrea Woods, David Rousseve and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. This project was created in 2004 in a way to celebrate the diversity of style. Some id the dances we're choreographed from the year 1940 to the present day, and some of the dances we're created especially for the project. We watched a few minutes of a documentary made for this project which showed short clips of the dances with interviews with the choreographers and experts in dance and the African Diaspora.
For the final presentation, Molly Christie Gonzalez presented ’Dance as a Social Act: The Pedagogy of Kathrine Dunham Technique and Philosophies. Molly was a student of Katherine Dunham and was a certified teacher of the Dunham technique, Molly introduced herself as a Dunham student, teacher and scholar. Katherine Dunham was an artist, anthropologist, educator, activist, scholar and humanist, born in 1909 and died in 2006. Katherine Dunham once said ”When I founded the Dunham school, the curriculum was often criticised. Why the teaching of the humanities, philosophy, languages, aesthetics, as well as the Dunham technique? I believe these things are necessary for the complete person, and so to be the complete dancer I could not simply teach dance”. Rather than separating the arts or artist from society Dunham believed that the arts had a social power to connect to different cultures and to build communities. Listen to this presentation about Katherine Dunham I found it fascinating and I agree with her thoughts and teaching involving socialisation through the arts. I believe Dunham will become useful to research in the next term when I want to look at subjects surrounding diversity.
This conference has been a great opportunity for me to learn a lot about the African Diaspora and how I might fit into that community. There's a lot of information that I'm still processing from the three days, I know it would take me some time to understand everything I attended but I look forward to expanding the knowledge I've acquired in my research and my reflection on my cultural identity.
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