Sept 29: Defiant Daughters Dancing at TOPAZ ARTS

Defiant Daughters Dancing – a reading by Rina Angela Corpus
Sat, Sept. 29, 2012, 4-6pm: Admission is free.
Reservations recommended on facebook or at rsvp@topazarts.org
Directions to TOPAZ ARTS

TOPAZ ARTS welcomes guest artist Rina Angela Corpus who will talk about her book, “Defiant Daughters Dancing: Three Independent Women Dance,” which won her the University of the Philippines Center for Women’s Studies Award for Outstanding Thesis in 2006.

Corpus’ book navigates the histories of three contemporary Filipina choreographers – Myra Beltran, Kristin Jackson, Agnes Locsin – who have bravely produced themselves as independent dance-makers. Using feminist prisms in looking at women’s history in the dance world, the book lays down concrete questions and practical methodologies for mapping out a dance historiography that is informed by self-reflexivity and feminist consciousness. Straddling the discourses of art & dance history, feminist criticism, theory & aesthetics, this book is a first of its kind in Philippine dance scholarship that contemplates the depth and breadth of feminist thought within the study of Philippine contemporary dance.

The author will be joined by NYC choreographer Kristin Jackson and Marie Alonzo-Snyder, PhD, Filipina-American dancer and dance educator, to offer her commentary after the talk. The book will be available at the reading.

About the Author:
Rina Angela Corpus is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Art Studies of the University of the Philippines where she finished her BA in Art Studies (minor in Comparative Literature, cum laude) and MA in Art History. Her research interests include feminist aesthetics, dance history and alternative spiritualities. She trained and danced with the Quezon City Ballet and served as cultural editor of the Philippine Collegian. Her works have appeared in Bulawan: Journal for Philippine Culture and Art, Transit, Humanities Diliman, Diliman Review, Philippine Humanities Review, Review of Women’s Studies, Research in Dance Education, Peace Review: Journal of Social Justice, Philippines Free Press, Manila Bulletin and the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

About the book:
“Corpus challenges the manner in which histories of dance are crafted from a perspective that precludes the personage of woman as a productive agent in the invention of the art. She takes exception to this historiography by exercising her own form of inclusion and enlistment, foregrounding the practice of three women dance makers who have striven to remake the institution of dance itself and the subjectivities of its faithful. In enacting this complicated turn of the body against the gravity of its tradition, Corpus contrives the argument of independence and its logic of defiance. As she undertakes this task, she makes sense of dance not through technicist of purely hermeneutic means, she attempts to flesh out the gesture of the body through the trope of independence.”     - excerpt from the foreword by Patrick D. Flores

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