Dancing Resilience: Dance Studies and Activism in a Global Age

Vancouver poster

At this conference in Vancouver, the first DSA gathering in Canada and postponed from 2020, presenters will explore dance and activism in localized and transcultural settings, and share strategies for productive change on the stage, street, screen and within the academy.

Vancouver has long been a site of occupation, exchange, defiance and resilience. From time immemorial, it has been a location of trade and traversal across coastal Indigenous communities of the Pacific and, in more recent centuries, a place where diverse cultures from across the world have encountered each other and interacted through colonial pathways and settlement. In the same way that Vancouver serves as a powerful and complex example of both vexing histories and determined hope, participants will demonstrate how dance intervenes in a range of issues, including race relations, gender-related rights, and land disputes. We will share the frameworks of dancing and dance scholarship that provide space for optimism, activism, and social movement.


Fully paid and registered individuals can view the full 2022 Conference Schedule HERE.  You will access the full program schedule using the same email address that you used at registration.  As always, please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any trouble, [email protected]

For quick reference, click HERE for a simple PDF version of the schedule available to the public.  PLEASE NOTE: as the schedule changes, this PDF will be updated weekly.  Therefore, please check back for updated versions!  Also, this PDF will require that you use the Zoom function to read.  It is not meant to stand in for the richness of the digital program, it is simply a reference. 


 Presenter Resources:


 All in-person conference events will take place either at the Pinnacle Harbourfront Hotel or the SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Art.

READ THE CALL FOR PAPERS

SUBMISSION PORTAL CLOSED - deadline February 15, 2022 (submitters will be notified by the end of April)


Program Committee 

Vancouver CommitteePeter Dickinson, Local Arrangements Chair, Simon Fraser University [email protected]

Peter Dickinson is Professor and Graduate Program Chair in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, where he also directs the Institute for Performance Studies and edits the open access journal Performance Matters. He has published extensively on dance, theatre, film, and live art. Peter’s most recent book is My Vancouver Dance History: Story, Movement, Community (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020), which focuses on his collaborations (as a writer, researcher, facilitator, outside eye, co-creator, and occasional mover) with several Vancouver-based dance artists and companies. He also writes plays, some of them with movement, and his most recent audio drama, At the Speed of Light, can be streamed from Pi Theatre at the end of March 2022. 

Allana Lindgren, Program Co-Chair, University of Victoria [email protected]

Allana Lindgren is an Associate Professor and Acting Dean of Fine Arts at the University of Victoria (BC, Canada).  She received her BA (Honours) in English Literature from the University of Victoria, her MA in Dance History from York University and her Ph.D. in Theatre History from the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama at the University of Toronto. She has been a visiting faculty member at the University of Calgary and a Research Visitor at the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Canadian Studies. Her research and publications have been supported by a variety of funding agencies, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts. She is currently a co-investigator of "Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Canadian Performance," a nation-wide SSHRC-funded Partnership Development Grant. She is also the Dance Subject Editor for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism and the General Editor of The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernist Dance (forthcoming)

Hari Krishnan, Program Co-Chair, Wesleyan University [email protected]

Hari Krishnan is a Bessie (New York City) and Dora (Toronto) Award nominee dance artist, scholar, and teacher. He is Chair and Professor of Dance in the Department of Dance at Wesleyan University and the artistic director of Toronto-based company inDANCE. His choreography explores post-colonial complexities in South Asian dance and queer themes, as well as the intersection of traditional and global contemporary dance forms. His extensive body of work is based on critical perspectives on Bharatanatyam, fused with contemporary global dance styles and postmodern social critique. His scholarly interests include queer identities in dance performance, contemporary dance from global perspectives, colonialism, post-colonialism and Indian dance, Bharatanatyam in Tamil cinema and the history of courtesan dance traditions in South India. His monograph, Celluloid Classicism: Early Tamil Cinema and the Making of Modern Bharatanatyam (Wesleyan University Press, 2019) won a special citation from the 2020 de la Torre Bueno© First Book Award Committee of the Dance Studies Association. The book has been hailed as “an invaluable addition to the scholarship on Bharatanatyam.”

Committee Members:
Anurima Banerji 
Dasha Chapman 
Mique'l Dangeli
Kimberleigh Jordan
Emily Wilcox
Priya Thomas
Angelique Willkie