SSHRC
Storyteller
2022
video
Credits
Angelique Willkie, PI
Dana Dugan, RA
Matthew-Robin Nye, RA
As PI, I position myself as a black dance artist-scholar and dramaturg of Western concert-dance. My research-creation has focused on the personal dramaturgy of the performer and the ways in which it engages (with) the overall dramaturgy of a dance creation. Through my performance experience and dramaturgical practice, my blackness has risen to the forefront of my interrogations of dance dramaturgy. Any decolonization of the field of contemporary dance cannot be dissociated from the methods of its creation, which are anchored in the origins of Western concert-dance, its Eurocentric aesthetics and the value systems they ensconce. Dramaturgy, as concept and praxis, has the potential to disrupt habitual modes of practice by placing things differently in relation, proposing other ecologies of creation. The dynamic plurality of dramaturgical possibility and configuration is the field's political potential. Investigating dramaturgies of and through blackness is a means of reflecting, and reflecting upon, blackness and its multiplicities and the ways in which they might interrogate, inform and generate choreographic processes. This is the context of Murmurations.​
website
"Looking at dramaturgy, looking at blackness, looking at dramaturgy, looking at blackness, looking at both all the time and trying to, I don't want to say understand, but identify what I understand, in fact, of each in relationship to the other. I find myself increasingly wanting to go to a place where I'm not separating those two concepts. I'm interested not in looking at the differences between them. I'm interested in looking at what binds them."
-Angelique Willkie