Live Workshops/discussions with dancers of Yorke Dance Project
We invite you to come and watch live dance with Yorke Dance Project and join the discussion about what is grace?
The concept of grace has played a central role in defining dance aesthetics from ballet’s origins in seventeenth-century French court culture through nineteenth-century Russian classicism to neo-classicism in the twentieth century (e.g. George Balanchine or Kenneth MacMillan). But grace has also been challenged and contested throughout this history and especially by innovations in contemporary dance from the 1890s onwards (Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Katherine Dunham, Merce Cunningham). This project investigates grace as an ideal in dance and disruptive traditions that have explored the possibilities of ungraceful movement such as mechanical, disjointed, robotic, and deliberately “ugly” forms of expression. It also explores the question of whether grace is distinctively human or whether it can be achieved by machines or nonhuman agents (e.g. computer-generated figures).
Dates: 18 / 19 / 29 / 30 June 2021
Times: 12:00 - 14:00 BST
Venue: Jacqueline du Pre Music Building, St Hilda's College, Oxford
Registration: Do please rsvp asap susan.jones@ell.ox.ac.uk with your preferred date.
Please note: social distancing, very limited numbers and all COVID-19 measures are in place, so do book in now to ensure your seat.
Knowledge Exchange project page of Professor Sue Jones Dance as Grace: Paradoxes and Possibilities
