Tanya Calamoneri
Assistant Professor
Japanese butoh dancer Minako Seki joined Dance faculty Tanya Calamoneri and ACCAD faculty Vita Berezina-Blackburn and Jeremy Patterson in a two week residency to explore creative visualization and virtual reality experiences with the visceral imagery of Seki Butoh Method, such as hanging from the earth and moving our spines as if we have a heavy iron ball connected to our tailbones. The research team was joined by Dance graduate students Isa Bowser, Alisha Jihn, Kiki Williams, Ben Roach, Zoey November, Jiara Sha, and Mary Storm, ACCAD graduate student William Yuan, and Dance MFA Alumn Yukina Sato. Current students can engage with the tools we created through independent studies and future collaborative classes. Reach out to Tanya Calamoneri if interested!
Lexi Clark-Stilianos
Digital and Intermedia Dance Lecturer
Lexi Clark-Stilianos’ company STILGO dance + tech and Clark-Stilianos were one of six filmmakers awarded $25,000 each in grants from The Greater Columbus Arts Council (GCAC) as part of its previously announced Artist Projects community-reviewed grants. The grant will fund an experimental short-dance film focusing on reclaiming and reinventing narratives of feminine mythological monsters from an intersectional queer, feminist perspective through movement, integrated technology, and experimental cinematic techniques.
Alfonso Cervera
Assistant Professor
Since May, Alfonso Cervera premiered a new work with Primera Generación Dance Collective titled "Nostalgia Pop" at the Roy and Edna Disney RedCat Theatre in Los Angeles, CA. He has also embarked on a new project, "Café con Pan," with collaborators Ignacio Delgado Hernandez and Raveyn Armijo, set to premiere in Columbus and Los Angeles this academic year which will be part of his full-evening length work as a soloist. Following the RedCat premiere, Cervera was invited to join the Bates Dance Festival faculty, where he taught Poc-Chuc technique in the Young Professional Program and built lasting connections.
Additionally, Cervera has been commissioned to restage "Madre Tierra of the Yollotl y Ch’ul" at Booker T. Washington High School and create new works for Old Dominion University and Western Washington University's Fall and Spring dance concerts. He continues to guest teach and give artist talks, sharing his artistic journey and values, as highlighted in his interview in summer with Bold Journey. Cervera is concluding the summer with a performance of “Nostalgia Pop” at the first Latinx Dance Festival in Washington, D.C., before beginning a tour in California during the Fall semester.
Irvin Manuel Gonzalez
Assistant Professor
Dr. Irvin Manuel Gonzalez premiered NOStalgia POP at Redcat in Los Angeles, CA. This evening-length dance performance was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and developed in collaboration with Primera Generación Dance Collective. The work was shared recently at the inaugural Latinx Movement Festival in DC and will be toured to Phoenix, AZ, Joshua Tree, CA, and San Francisco, CA in Fall 2024. In June 2024, he had the pleasure of guest teaching cumbia and quebradita dance classes for youth at the Wooden Floor in Santa Ana, CA. Gonzalez was also elected to the Dance Studies Association (DSA) Board of Directors where he will serve a two-year term starting August 2024. Over the summer, he presented research on Latine social dance technologies for DSA in Buenos Aires, Argentina and was an invited keynote speaker for the 1st annual quebradita dance conference in Mexico City, MX.
Jonathon Hunter
Lecturer of Dance Production
Hannah Kosstrin
Associate Professor
Dr. Hannah Kosstrin completed the manuscript for her second book, Kinesthetic Peoplehood: Jewish Diasporic Dance Migrations. The book is about how people feel part of a diaspora through dancing, making dances, and watching dance performances, and shows how understanding the ways Arabic, African, South Asian, and queer Jewish dance practices have circulated across concert stages since the mid-twentieth century rewrites dominant perceptions of world Jewry. Dr. Kosstrin and programmer-collaborator David Ralley have recently released a version of the Laban movement notation app KineScribe for the MacOS operating system. Dr. Kosstrin continues to serve as Director of Ohio State’s Melton Center for Jewish Studies, and in autumn 2024 will also be Interim Director of Ohio State’s Barnett Center for Creative Arts and Enterprise. For more on Dr. Kosstrin and her work>
Daniel Roberts
Associate Professor
In May, Daniel Roberts led a group of fifteen BFAs on Ohio State Dance Denmark/Berlin. His joint manuscript of Merce Cunningham: Coincidence and Creativity, written with Professor Emerita Dr. Karen Eliot, is under review by the University Press of Florida and should be out in early 2025. In August, Roberts traveled to Reykjavik, Iceland, to arrange and promote screenings of his video dance Waters, made with María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir and Egill Jóhannesson.
Valarie Williams
Professor
Dr. Valarie Williams conducted research in special collections archives throughout the country and gathered oral history interviews in support of her co-authored book with Curator of Dance Mara Frazier. The completed manuscript is under contract with Oxford University Press. She collaborated with Associate Professor Crystal Perkins in preparation for the presenting partnership with Wexner Center for the Arts for the February 2025 residency of six Black women performers for their project Archiving Black Performance. Dr. Williams contributed to the editing process of the documentation of “The Gailliarde”, the lost section from the ballet of Agon, with the George Balanchine Foundation and planned for next summer’s conference of the International Council of Kinetography Laban and Labanotation hosted by Ohio State and Kenyon College.
Norah Zuniga Shaw
Professor
Norah Zuniga Shaw presented the Climate Banshee performance (part of her larger Livable Futures project) at the European Forum on Religion and Environment in Potsdam, Germany this summer and also presented the Livable Futures work at the Movement and Computing Conference (MOCO) in Utrecht, The Netherlands. She spent time in a book retreat with her co-editor Dr. Maaike Bleeker for the forthcoming Routledge Companion on Performance and Technology that our wonderful PhD student Bhumi Patel is assisting on as well. And Zuniga Shaw worked with Forsythe Productions and the Bundeskunsthalle of Bonn, Germany on a new exhibition of a long touring artwork that I co-created with Maria Palazzi of ACCAD and William Forsythe called Synchronous Objects.
