The Body is a Time Machine
Course Description
Summary
What remains of dance? The lament of dance’s ephemerality coincides with broader Western temporal projects conceived through the linear unfolding of human progress and social evolution, relegating our movements to an irretrievable past. In this course we will interrogate these spatio-temporal frameworks in order to re-member and reimagine the multitudinous powers of re-activation, intervention and becoming made available through the dancing body as time machine. Together we will embark on adventures in Spacetimemattering, exploring the body as a conduit of asynchronous temporal rhythms, historical residues and future potentialities within a thick nonlinear matrix of heres, theres, thens and nows. Rooted in interdisciplinary inquiry, we will engage critical texts on quantum field theory, hauntology, queer temporality, Afrofuturism and Indigenous futurism, deep geologic time, more-than-human spacetimes and critical studies of the archive and trauma in order to examine the telekinetic transmission of gestures across time and space.
The course will culminate in a mixed-media group exhibition shaped through students’ performative archival interventions showcasing student research. Through labs, written and embodied research assignments, and project-based, creative engagement with the Bennington Dance Archives, students will explore dance as a site of memory, resistance, and speculative world-building. How might a recuperation of our bodies as time machines foster transtemporal interventions in that which is yet to come?
Learning Outcomes
- Investigate how dance functions as an archive and a method of historical transmission.
Examine how movement operates within and against dominant structures of time.
Explore the relationship between time and attention in embodied practice.
Engage with critical theories of hauntology, queer temporality, and non-Western conceptions of time.
Develop creative responses to the archive, culminating in a collective performance and exhibit.
Students will cultivate an expanded temporal awareness in their own dance practices.