Symposium Differing bodyminds: Choreographing New Pathways (cancelled)

On April 23, 2020, the Centre for Cultural Studies (KU Leuven) and STUK House for Dance, Image & Sound are hosting their fifth annual symposium on choreographic issues. This year’s theme is: Differing bodyminds: Moving along New Pathways. The event brings together speakers from different theoretical fields with dance scholars, practitioners and an interested audience to think about issues that are situated at the border between dance and society.

Speakers: Prof. Jane Gallop (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Prof. Carrie Sandahl (University of Illinois at Chicago), Sonja Jokiniemi (performance artist), Prof. Robert McRuer (George Washington University)

PROGRAMME (in English):
14.00 – 14.15: Welcome and introduction
14.15 – 15.00: Presentation Jane Gallop
15.00 – 15:15: Short break
15:15 – 16.00: Presentation Carrie Sandahl
16.00 – 16.45: Presentation Sonja Jokiniemi
16.45 – 17.15: Coffee break
17.15 – 18.00: Round table (moderated by Robert McRuer)

Dance is traditionally associated with notions of fitness and ability. The trained body of the dancer is muscular yet supple, perfectly malleable, always ready to move. In recent years, however, choreographers have been increasingly questioning this conventional bodily regime, working with dancers that do not conform to the norms of “able-bodiedness” or age and taking the specificity of these dancers as a generative matrix for the exploration of new movement vocabularies. In so doing, these choreographers not only carve out new pathways in the field of dance, but they also disturb the conventional scripts that are entrenched in our cultural framework and that prescribe how bodies and minds are supposed to function and behave.

Differing Bodyminds will set up a dialogue between dance studies and insights produced by disability studies, CRIP theory and queer theory. It will explore the potential of dance to rethink notions of corporeality, ability, skill and virtuosity in relation to movement and bodyminds and raise the question: How can dance produce difference not as a divergence from the norm, but rather as a constant process of differing that opens up multiple ways of relating to body, mind and movement?

Doctoral Seminar
Differing bodyminds: Crip Theory in the Arts and Humanities

Tuesday 21 & Wednesday 22 April
08:30 - 18:00
STUK Verbeeckzaal

Language: English

Invited speakers: Prof. Robert McRuer, Prof. Jane Gallop, Prof. Carrie Sandahl

Antwerp University, KU Leuven and Ghent University are delighted to present the first doctoral seminar focusing on Crip Theory in Flanders..

Crip theory is a relatively young field of study, associated with the pioneering work of Robert McRuer and Carrie Sandahl. In the early 2000s, they developed a new approach towards disability, building on the work of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault. Like queer theory, crip theory starts from a pejorative term, ‘crip’ to expose our underlying norms with regards to bodies and physical and mental abilities, which they call ‘compulsory abled-bodiedness’. Moreover, they draw specific attention to the intersection of gender and disability, which locates crip theory on the edge of queer theory and disability studies.​

The two-day doctoral seminar with Robert McRuer, Jane Gallop and Carrie Sandahl focuses on the most recent theoretical and methodological developments in crip theory. Participants will be asked to prepare a short reader on crip theory, and then McRuer and Gallop will present their new research. The PhD students and postdoctoral researchers will bring their own research to the table, exploring how it might evolve in light of the new thinking they are exposed to over the two days of the course.