Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study

A multivoiced dance history book, authored by mayfield brooks, thomas f. defrantz, maura nguyễn donohue, Keith Hennessy, Bebe Miller, Okwui Okpokwasili, Eiko Otake, Annie-B Parson, Javier Stell-Frésquez, Ogemdi Ude, Mariana Valencia, and Andros Zins-Browne. 

Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study interrogates the history of dance from the embodied and poetic perspectives of choreographers. Authored by twelve diverse American dance artists in the form of twelve small booklets, it approaches and celebrates dance history as a subjective, artistic inquiry. Written by working choreographers, it reimagines and radicalizes our understanding of dance throughout human history. Simultaneously, the project is dedicated to the power of an artist-centric view of history itself, thus placing the history of dance back into the body, where it began. Here, history occurs in vertical layers of time and space, moving dance history into the street, the football field, the yard, the screen, the memory, the womb, the sky, and the future. Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study enlarges and complicates the history of dance; it interprets history as unfixed, limitless, and prismatic. Edited by Annie-B Parson and Thomas F. DeFrantz.

Produced by Big Dance Theater with the support of The Howard Gilman Foundation, The Starry Night Fund, Virginia and Timothy Millhiser, and King’s Fountain.

Project Director: Sara Pereira da Silva / Managing Editors: Karen Kelly and Barbara Shroeder / Design: Omnivore / Press contact: Stephanie Elliott Prieto selliott [​at​] wesleyan.edu.

mayfield brooks is a dancer, vocalist, urban farmer, and writer. They are inspired by interspecies relations, ocean cosmologies, and regenerative ecological events such as land based compost systems or the whale fall—where the carcass of a whale falls to the ocean floor creating new ecosystems in its wake. brooks teaches and performs practices from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance project, which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing.

thomas f. defrantz is a professor at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, and director of SLIPPAGE: Performance, Culture, Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. DeFrantz received the Outstanding Research in Dance award from the Dance Studies Association in 2017. DeFrantz’s project soundz at the back of my head was nominated for a Bessie award in 2020.

maura nguyễn donohue is director of MFA Dance at Hunter College, City University of New York. She has been making dance-based performance works in New York for almost thirty years. Donohue has written for American Theater, Contemporary Directions in Asian American Dance, Culturebot, Dance Insider, Dance Magazine, Imaginings Journal, Movement Research Performance Journal, and Women & Performance Journal. 

Keith Hennessy is a frolicker, imperfectionist, and witch working in the fields of dance, performance, affordable housing, and gay sexuality. Raised on Atikameksheng Anishnawbek lands in Canada and living since 1982 on Ramaytush Ohlone lands (San Francisco), Hennessy engages in practices of improvisation, ritual, collaboration, and play to respond to political crises. His work is interdisciplinary and experimental, motivated by antiracist, queer-feminist, and anarchist movements. His honors include a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2012 USA Fellowship, a 2009 Bessie Award, and multiple Izzie Awards.

Bebe Miller is a native New Yorker. Her choreography has been performed by A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Oregon Ballet Theater, Philadanco, and PACT Dance of Johannesburg, among others. Named a Master of African American Choreography by the Kennedy Center, Miller has received honorary doctorates and numerous awards and is one of the inaugural class of Doris Duke Artist Award recipients. A professor emerita at Ohio State University, she currently lives on Vashon Island in Washington State.

Okwui Okpokwasili is a Brooklyn, New York–based performer, choreographer, and writer who creates multidisciplinary performance pieces. In 2022, she was the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a 2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, a 2018 Herb Alpert Award in Dance, a 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship. 

Born and raised in Japan and living in New York since 1976, Eiko Otake worked for more than 40 years as Eiko & Koma. Since 2014 she has performed as a soloist at more than seventy sites. In her Duet Project (2017-) , she has collaborated with artists of different disciplines, races, genders and generations. Eiko has also created videos, films installations and exhibitions. Her honors include 1996 MacArthur Fellowship, 2004 the Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award, 2012 the Doris Duke Artist Award. www.eikootake.org

Annie-B Parson is a choreographer and the artistic director of Big Dance Theater. Parson has also made choreography for opera, rock shows, marching bands, symphonies, movies, museums, objects, augmented reality, and people: David Byrne, David Bowie, Lorde, St. Vincent, Kim Deal, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Wendy Whelan, Laurie Anderson, Salt ‘n Pepa, Jonathan Demme, and the Martha Graham Dance Co.

Javier Stell-Frésquez (Piru and Tigua Pueblo ancestry, Mixed Chican@) grew up in El Paso, Texas, and moved to the San Francisco (Yelamu) area in 2008. In the short time since, she has seen an awe-inspiring eruption of two-spirit visibility, artistry, and cultural reclamation, inspired in large part by the Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits (BAAITS) Powwow. She produces, co-curates, and tours Weaving Spirits Festival of Two-Spirit Performance. Her dance/performance experience includes Indigenous contemporary, vogue, flamenco, and performance art. 

Ogemdi Ude is a Black femme dance and interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Brooklyn. Her performance work focuses on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. Her work has been presented at Gibney, Harlem Stage, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Recess Art, and BAX. She has taught at The New School, Princeton University, MIT, and Sarah Lawrence College. In January 2022 she appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine for their annual “25 to Watch” issue.

Mariana Valencia researches self-representation, collectivity, and abstraction through dance. Her work was included in the Whitney Biennial 2019. Valencia’s dance work reaches beyond the stage: she has published two books of performance texts, Mariana Valencia’s Bouquet (3 Hole Press, 2019) and Album (Wendy’s Subway, 2019); is a founding member of the No Total reading group; and has been the co-editor of Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence. Valencia has toured in the UK, Norway, and the Balkans. 

Andros Zins-Browne works at the intersection of performance and dance, extending choreographic notions into encounters with dancers, nondancers, singers, objects, and texts. Zins-Browne is the recipient of awards from the Goethe Institut, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Ministry of Culture of the Flemish Community, and the New York State Council on the Arts.