FREE or pay what you will
Wednesday, October 28, 2020 - 7:00pm
Dr. Lynn Matluck Brooks is the Arthur and Katherine Shadek
Humanities Professor Emerita at Franklin & Marshall College, where she
founded the Dance Program in 1984. A recipient of several distinguished awards
for her teaching, she has also earned grants from the Fulbright/Hayes
Commission, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the
Humanities, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Brooks has presented her work at
conferences and symposia in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, and has served on
boards of the World Dance Alliance, Society for Dance History Scholars, and
Congress on Research in Dance. She has authored books and scholarly articles,
served as performance reviewer for Dance Magazine, editor of Dance
Research Journal and Dance Chronicle, and writer and editor for
Philadelphia’s thINKingDance.org
In her illustrated Informance Dr. Lynn Matluck-Brooks will
focus on the critical “antebellum” period of Philadelphia’s history, from 1820
to 1860; it reveals the trajectory of the her current research, some important
findings, the nature of archival material available in Philly and elsewhere,
and the complexities of cultural, political, and scientific interplays in
shaping this city’s—and this nation’s—dance history.
She says, “ Dance exists in the ‘now,’ but it leaves traces:
memories, notes, reviews, schools of thought and of pedagogy, choreographic
traditions, designs, depictions, and a wide range of archival documentation.
These become the stuff of dance historiography. In my work as a dance
historian, these materials shape the territory I tread, abroad and at home.
They led me, for example, to the realization that professional theatrical dancing in the early United States started
here—in Philadelphia—laying a foundation that has sustained Philadelphia’s
dance scene to this day, and establishing ground on which dance in America has
continued to build.
An overlooked history, but a true one, it’s time to right the narrative that there was no ‘real’
stage-dance art in this nation until well into the twentieth century, and that
New York was where it all began. In fact, theatrical dancing was unfolding just
as the new nation’s political forms were taking shape, endeavors in which
Philadelphia played leading roles. Dancing
social and theatrical, in the City of Brotherly Love and elsewhere, figured
into contests about bodies, citizenship, rights, ethnicity, race, science, and
humanity.”
Join
us for conversation about this unique Philadelphia dance history.
Wednesday,
October 28 at 7PM. RSVP info
philadanceprojects [dot] org
