Dance News

Assistant professor, Shaness Kemp has been invited as guest performer in the production “Jazz ain’t nothing but soul” – an original work by Artistic Director Thoms Talawa Prestø and the Tabanka African & Caribbean Peoples Dance Ensemble (Oslo, Norway). Tabanka is Northern Europe’s largest all Black dance ensemble and the home of the Talawa Technique that centers movement that comes from the Africana body and philosophies. Professor Kemps’ visit includes research into the Talawa technique which is based on 81 African and 56 Caribbean and circum Caribbean dances.

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https://tabankadance.com

 

Jill Vasbinder received the “Research Support Fund for Lecturers and Adjunct Faculty” for her project “Open Dance/Choreography: A definition, an initiative,
and a discovery of impact.”  She will be presenting at a Gathering during the DSA conference – Dancing Resilience: Dance Studies and Activism in a Global Age in October in Vancouver.

The goal of “Open Dance/Choreography” is to bring the possibility of Open Licensing to the field of dance and increase artists’ understanding of the existing construct of Open Access Resources. Her project seeks to offer alternatives to the existing structure of copyright by developing and promoting a definition of equitable licensure standards for Open Source in Dance and Choreography, similar to that put forth by the Open Source Initiative. The project
 will put together an expert group to steward this work by developing the definition and compiling a library of Open Dance/Choreography.  This follows up from research she began last year leading to this article: “There’s a long history of dances being pilfered for profit – and TikTok is the latest battleground” in The Conversation July 2021 and presentation: “Who owns the dance moves?” in January 2022

 

We are excited to announce that our Assistant Professor, Ann Sofie Clemmensen has been awarded the CIRCA-IMET Artist in Residency 2022-2023.

The fellowship is a collaboration between The Center for Innovation, Research and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA) and Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET), intended to support and promote significant collaborative research in the Arts between colleagues at IMET and UMBC. Professor Clemmenson’s residence at IMET will begin in Fall 2022. The award includes a course release for the Fall semester and a project budget up to $7000. Her proposed project, BodyScopymerges dance-for-camera and marine biology through an exploration of the human body as a tool for compositional rendering of data and research being done at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET). Through a series of short dance-for- camera works, the project asks what can be learned from transposing the kinetic world of microorganisms on the human body, and can the language of the moving body convey the stress that human actions have on marine health. Utilizing sensory, visual, and kinetic communication, the outcome of BodyScopy will be a multichannel video installation that presents new perspectives on the work being done to protect and preserve healthy marine ecosystems.

 

 

We would like to congratulate our Assistant Professor, Shaness D. Kemp who has been recognized as a certified Master Teacher in the Umfundalai technique of African Dance. She was mentored by the late Dr./Mama Kariamu Welsh, Umfundalai’s progenitor, and is one of six Dance Masters within this tradition