Let’s Go Outside: Dancing Beyond the Institution

The institutionalization of dance in academic settings has forced a reckoning with genre, access, aesthetics, and histories as an act of imagination, at least. This talk focuses on the ways that dance resists containment by institutions, and how imagination operates as a form of study. Calling on the rhetorics of dance as protest, as erotic demonstration of possibility, and as manifestation of outrageous style, we wonder together at the ways dance arrives outside of the scaffolding of the linguistic, to demonstrate ways to be in relationship to authority while moving in another direction. Afrofuturism might show us a way…

• Thomas F. DeFrantz directs SLIPPAGE, the Chicago-based group explores emerging technology in live performance applications. DeFrantz believes in our shared capacity to do better and engage creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, proto-feminist, and queer affirming. Creative Projects include Queer Theory! An Academic Travesty commissioned by the Theater Offensive of Boston and the Flynn Center for the Arts; fastDANCEpast, created for the Detroit Institute for the Arts; reVERSE-gesture-reVIEW commissioned by the Nasher Museum in response to the work of Kara Walker. Current project re-OrientationS, an exploration of concepts of queer phenomenology.

DeFrantz convenes the Black Performance Theory working group as well as the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, a growing consortium of 325 researchers committed to exploring Black dance practices in writing. DeFrantz consults often with dance programs around the globe, and has helped artists and educators rethink how critical studies are entirely foundational to the making of a fully engaged artist. 

DeFrantz has also chaired the Program in Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT; the concentration in Physical Imagination at MIT; the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke; and served as President of the Society of Dance History Scholars. DeFrantz acted as a consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture, contributing a concept and a voice-over for a permanent installation on Black Social Dance that opened with the museum in 2016.