Dancing About Architecture: Strategies in Motion

"Strategies in Motion," the third installment of the Yale Schwarzman Center’s signature series Dancing About Architecture, grew out of a collaboration with Yale Theater and Performance Studies lecturer Iréne Hultman and was informed by Hultman's Yale College course, Moving Sites and Structures. An objective of the course—and this event—is to explore the intersection of forms, and to open dialogues between them…where dance, performance, and architecture, in communication expand the experiences of bodies in space. 
 
"Strategies in Motion" begins with a guided, outdoor walking tour of Yale University locations within one mile of the Schwarzman Center, each featuring its own site-specific performance by students representing a wide range of academic disciplines and movement experiences. Inspired by the works of dance pioneers such as Merce Cunningham, and Trisha Brown, the performances focus on relation, relatability, and the dependence of architecture on human emotion. 

The event culminates in The Well at Yale Schwarzman Center for a conversation with Yale architecture professor Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and contemporary choreographers Sarah Michelson, Rashaun Mitchell, and Silas Riener—moderated by director of the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University Joshua Lubin-Levy.
 
Register for the tour, conversation, or both. This event is open to the public.

Panelists

Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener are New York-based dance artists. Their work involves the building of collaborative worlds through improvisational techniques, digital technologies, and material construction. They met as dancers in the Merce Cunningham Dance company and since 2010 they have created over 25 multidisciplinary dance works including site-responsive installations, concert dances, gallery performances and dances for film in venues such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Barbican Centre, REDCAT, The Walker Art Center, and MoMA/PS1. Throughout they have maintained a commitment to queer culture and aestehtics. Their partnership intentionally blurs authorship and maintains a deep commitment to collaboration with a diverse community of dancers, performers, artists and cultural institutions.

Sarah Michelson is a choreographer living and working in NY since the early nineties. Her works have shifted modes back and forth over her 3/4 decades of work making - but share that they are centrally deployed as apperati of investigation.

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, PhD, is the Assistant Dean and Professor at Yale School of Architecture and an author of a number of prize-winning books, including Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity and Geopolitics (Yale University Press, 2009) and Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future (Yale University Press, 2006), which she co-edited with Donald Albrecht. Her next book Untimely Moderns: How 20thCentury Architecture Reimagined the Past will be out in July 2023. Her scholarly and curatorial work has been supported by Getty, the Graham Foundation, the Finnish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Austrian Ministry of Science and Research.
 

Joshua Lubin-Levy is a scholar, dramaturg, and curator. He is working on a monograph on the photography and performance work of Jack Smith. He is the Director of the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University and the Editor-in-Chief of the Movement Research Performance Journal. He received his doctorate from the Department of Performance Studies, New York University (2020). He is also consulting as a Curatorial Researcher Associate on an exhibition for the Whitney Museum. He previously held positions as Associate Director of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance, was the Senior Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and served as Interim Director of Visual Arts at Abrons Arts Center, and taught in the Department of Visual Studies, Eugene Lang, The New School. He was also 2016–2017 Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow in the Whitney Independent Studies Program.