Black Performance Theory 2009
AFROSONICS: GRAMMARS OF BLACK SOUND
Schedule
This year's BPT focuses on the politics of black sound, and while we recognize that our family of black performance studies scholars stretches far beyond research that focuses specifically on music, our hope is that this gathering might encourage each of us to further examine the ways that our diverse interests and research projects engage with diasporic sonic cultures. What are the ways that theater, dance, and visual culture sustain an electric dialogue with black popular music culture and vice-versa? Let the listening begin.
As noted in our previous message, we ask that you bring along to BPT a crucial musical/aural/sonic file/artifact. The track can be anything you like that answers or poses a question you have about grammars of black sound. It could be a speech, a beat, a live or studio recording, a remix, mix tape excerpt, a sound(ed) expert from a visual text, a snippet of a score, a noise. It simply needs to be sonic and afro in some way that inspires you and/or that needles you and keeps you up at night-on the dance floor or in front of the computer with your headphones on.
On both Friday and Saturday, we'll be working initially in small groups- groups of roughly 8 or so- from 11am-2pm (with a working lunch included), and our aim will be to share the tracks we've brought with one another. Be prepared to present your material in any way you see fit. Similar gatherings of this sort (at, for instance, the Experience Music Project Museum in Seattle, where the "Critical Karaoke" panel was born and in the Annenberg School at USC where "critical listening" parties rule supreme) have asked participants to talk through, over or around a track while offering critical insight, questions, socio-historical, political and/or aesthetic ruminations, and/or illuminating poetic anecdotes about the track in question. Feel free to do the same for BPT. If you choose to do so, you may bring along a cultural object (e.g. a photo, a pair of shoes, a concert t-shirt, a costume garment) that enhances or speaks to the resonance of your track (but remember that we'll be placing emphasis on the aural in our conversations-what we're hearing and how it speaks to each of us).
Contextual information (artist biographies, etc.) is optional and up to you.
Because of the size of our group, we ask that you limit your comments to
10-15 minutes maximum (and for those of you who really want to play Critical Karaoke as a creative exercise that merges the economics of verse with critical inquiry, you might wish to try presenting your comments completely within the duration of time allotted to your track! For details on this exercise, contact Daphne).
In the afternoon, from 2-4pm (with a coffee break included) we'll come back together as a large group to listen together to selected tracks from each of the morning groups. Whereas our morning will have provided us with the chance to share our thoughts on the material that we've brought, the afternoon will serve as a space for those of us working in diverse areas of black performance studies to respond to various tracks without a framing device, without an MC. Our hope is that we might generate fruitful, imaginative, and collaborative ways of responding to and exploring sounded texts in a creative, communal environment.
On both days, we'll set aside time to breathe, break from the sound conversations and discuss our current projects in 3 minute sound bites.
We've also scheduled time on Saturday for a special lunch that will serve as a way for us to spend a bit of time talking about the shape of the fields where we work, tenure strategies, dissertation projects and mentoring strategies. We especially want to encourage and prioritize a helpful dialogue between our faculty participants and our grad student attendees during this session.
Be sure to save time for a celebratory Saturday night dinner and a closing brunch on Sunday. Two wonderful New Haven events to note while everyone is in the area: the Yale Rep presents Charles Dutton and an all-black cast in Death of A Salesman. BPTers may wish to pick up tix for this on Friday night. http://www.yalerep.org/ Also Beinecke Library has just mounted an exhibit of Carl Van Vechten's never-before-displayed photographs of black entertainers (Robeson, Kitt, Pearl Bailey, etc.).
http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/brblevents/brblexhibits.html
We hope that you all will take advantage of attending one or both of these events on your own, and we look forward to seeing all of you and hearing you in stereo real soon.
Final Reminders: In terms of format, a flash drive or SD card or ipod would be great; just please bring something that can be shared. And if you're really old school like Daphne, a good old cd will do just fine as well.
We'll have computers and boomboxes on hand for groups to use. In terms of duration, please bring something no longer than 4 minutes (of course this might be an excerpt from something longer).
Friday, May 8
10:00 - 11:00 Welcome and Opening Remarks, Introductions
11:00 - 2:00 Working Groups (Working Lunch)
2:00 - 4:00 GROUP WORK I
4:00 - 5:30 WORKS in PROGRESS I (3 minute sessions)
DINNER ON YOUR OWN
Saturday, May 9
9:00 - 10:30 WORKS in PROGRESS II (3 minute session)
10:30 - 12:30 GROUP WORK II
12:30 - 2:00 Working Lunch - Graduate Student Concerns
2:00 - 4:00 GROUP WORK III
4:00 - 5:30 ROUNDTABLE on the FUTURES of the FIELD: TENURE, PROMOTION, PUBLISHING, INFORMATION SHARING
7:00 CELEBRATORY DINNER
Sunday, May 10
9:30 - 12:00 BUFFET BREAKFAST OPEN SPACE COLLABORATIVE CONVERSATIONS
About Response Sessions: The group offers a selection from their numbers without comment. The working group listens. For 10 minutes, the working group members offer responses to the discussion. During that time, the group that offered the selection listens. For 5 minutes, the discussants respond to the group. Although it may sound strict, this method, developed by Anna Scott, allows for a juicy call and response among participants.
Information about BPT:
Begun in 1998 by Richard Green at Duke University, and convened since then by Thomas DeFrantz (MIT) working with a shifting roster of conveners from the group, the hosts for this year’s working group and conference are E. Patrick Johnson, Jennifer Brody and Harvey Young at Northwestern University. The theme for the gathering is “Theory in Motion.” We thought that the theme opens up all kinds of possibilities for discussion and performance. As in years past, the goals of this year’s event are to:
1) stimulate discussion and reflection
2) inspire action across disciplines/institutions
3) create environments for art/scholarship that nurtures growth
The Black Performance Theory Conference, a group of scholars from across the country dedicated to an open network of ideas on black performance, meet every couple of years for a colloquium and discussion group. Since 1998, the Black Performance Theory group has assembled a shifting roster of scholar/practitioners working with and through performance to investigate and articulate the emergence of black performance theory.
The working group offers a unique opportunity to gather and discuss issues, paradigms, and approaches to theorizing black performance. The group has taken as its primary inquiry concerns about an ontology of blackness, as in, What is a black sensibility? What is black performance? What is black music? What is black dance? What is black oratory? What is a black aesthetic?
The group has met at Duke University (1998, organized by Richard Colin Green); MIT (2000, organized by Thomas DeFrantz and Green), Stanford (2002, organized by DeFrantz and Green), at the University of Minnesota (2004, organized by Ananya Chatterjea and DeFrantz); at Williams College (2006, organized by Annemarie Bean and DeFrantz); and at Northwestern University (2007, organized by E. Patrick Johnson and DeFrantz). Other breakout events inspired by the group have met at University of California, Riverside (2003, organized by Anna Scott and DeFrantz). The majority of working group activity has been devoted to discussion, with the aim of raising questions and establishing frames for the critique and analysis of black performance.
For a 2009 meeting at Yale, Visiting Professor DeFrantz and Visiting Associate Professor Daphne Brooks will organize the event to meet in May at the Afro-Am House at Yale. The theme of BPT 2009 is Afrosonics: Grammars of Black Sound.
The group was formed as a resource and networking tool for junior faculty. Over time, many faculty affiliated with the group have been tenured, and there has been an increase in the number of graduate students interested in the field. These developments are exciting for us all, and they also shift the nature of the event quite a bit from its beginnings as a resource for junior faculty.
STILL, the event is designed to enhance possibilities for junior faculty to commune with each other, to refine ideas, to network among peers and senior faculty in the field, and to inspire a renewal of purpose for working in black performance theory in the academy.