Plague Dances: Revisiting Choreographic Archives of AIDS during COVID-19

THEATER AND PERFORMANCE

SPEAKER: Ariel Nereson, University of Buffalo, SUNY

"Plague Dances: Revisiting Choreographic Archives of AIDS During COVID-19," brings together ideas and practices from Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane's choreography, critical race theory, and queer studies in order to make visible the ongoing contributions of queer artists of color to reimagining collectivity. "Plague Dances" shows how artists have (always) been developing tools that can address the urgencies of our contemporary moment, when the convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and institutionalized racial violence demand revitalized democratic formations. The talk explores "adjacency" as both an artistic and archival phenomenon, a queer and a critical position, that offers alternative choreographies of time and space to the linear biographies of queer artists whose lives were "cut short" by AIDS.

About the Speaker

Ariel Nereson is an assistant professor of dance studies and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She is the author of Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past (Michigan, 2022), as well as numerous essays about movement-based performance, race, and embodiment in the United States. In 2021–22, she was a Dance Research Fellow at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. Her research has been recognized with the Gerald Kahan Scholar’s Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research and, most recently, the Vera Mowry Roberts Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society. She is also a choreographer and dramaturg.