JANUARY THIRD THURSDAY

EVENTBRITE LINK

January 21, 2021
noon

For our first Third Thursday of Spring Semester 2021, CEE opened with Deborah Thomas offering comments on Jenny Chio's work  as a filmmaker, a writer, and also as a fieldworker, followed by an introduction to the work and background of Reggie Wilson, who is a choreographer, researcher, and artist

Jenny offered preliminary comments on her experience of returning to teaching and the change in priorities since COVID-19 and quarantine, as well has how impressed she has been with the resilience she has seen in LA and around the world.

Reggie spoke about identifying as a "lay anthropologist" in his artistic practice, drawing from his experiences reading Zora Neale Hurston. While reading Hurston as a student, Reggie began asking questions about what it means for him to examine cultures and communities that he is a part of. He reflected on his virtual travel back and forth between home sites, like Milwaukee, and the place of his work in New York, given the exigencies of COVID, and how the places you are, and who you are and what you are shape what your questions are and what your questions have been

Deb, asking after the way Jenny works, followed with a provocation about the relationship between people and place and what holds that relationship together. Jenny responded with the obligation to locality, and not the same as the obligation to countries. As well as the different ways she herself is coming to terms with both critique of nation and the support experienced within nations, contributing to who she is as ascholar. She spoke of the need for space to define such relationships ina way that is both critical and empathetic, critical and supportive.

Reggie spoke both of people and place as concepts that are both "infinite," the difference groups we expand into. It plays out in who you are and what you are trained to do, that influence of locality, of place, is not small in who we are. If people is the body, or the bodies, then place, or choreographic space, is the "where the body does its things". Also, Reggie offered reflections on place not just as a physical site outside the body, but place as site---place can be within one's head, or a specific spot on a wrist.

Jenny continued with reflections on portraiture and people and place, specifically, in portraiture asking what is the place that gets created in the contact between person and place. Furthermore, how people and objects come to make a place within the realm of portraiture.

In the question and answer session, Ore asked after process and positionality starting with Reggie who spoke of going first to begin research, the ways it moves between non-linear explorations and the pressure to make it linear for the sake of grant writing. But once established, there is a a research period, followed by being in the space, feeling it out, then sometimes the need to bring the company in, or part of the company, so that several people can begin moving in a space, then external forces and pressures to define it, to find definitions for the sake of presenting and funding.

Jenny Chio reflected on being introduced to a particular site for her PhD, and how things have unraveled between one village she worked in, the loss of touch with the field, and the way that a difference developed in relationship between towns and between times. She is thinking critically about preserving and nurturing relationships, and the work that it takes. And the difference in time in the research relationship, both over time, and in the way the length of time spent in research changes so dramatically.

Jenny also went on to speak of portraiture as context, the roll of setting, the relationship between the sitter and the photographer, and also the sitter and all the objects, the sites involved.

Jasmine Blanks-Jones posed a question about personhood to the speakers, asking for comments about how and where personhood is located. doesn't just reside in a body but between bodies, between individual bodies.

Reggie than offered reflections on site and place---the example of dance exploring site, diving into it. The need to understand different definitions of site.

Va Bene Elikem Fiatsi, posed a question about place in the context of the term "Africans in the Americas", and the mutations and relationships that the term implies. Reggie responded by turning attention tot the importance of local specifities and places in the lives of artists and people, and the critical process of "local" sites in shaping who people are.

reggie wilson

Reggie Wilson is Executive and Artistic Director, Choreographer and Performer of Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group. His work draws from the cultures of Africans in the Americas and is combined with post-modern elements and his own personal movement style to create what he sometimes refers to as "post-African/Neo-HooDoo Modern dances." He has lectured, taught and conducted workshops and community projects, and had his work presented nationally and internationally. Wilson is a recipient of the Minnesota Dance Alliance's McKnight National Fellowship (2000-2001), is a 2002 BESSIE recipient, and is a 2002 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. Wilson has been an artist advisor for the National Dance Project, a Board Member of Dance Theater Workshop, and in recognition of his creative contributions to the field, was named a 2009 United States Artists Prudential Fellow, as well as being a recipient of the 2009 Herb Alpert Award in Dance. In 2012 he was named a Wesleyan University’s Creative Campus Fellow, received an inaugural Doris Duke Performing Artist Award; And received the 2012 Joyce Foundation Award for his successful work Moses(es) that premiered in 2013. His critically acclaimed work CITIZEN premiered 2016 (FringeArts – World; BAM NextWave 2016 - NYC) and is currently touring. Wilson was curator of Danspace Project’s Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches, and Downtown Dance (Platform 2018) and created the commissioned work “…they stood shaking while others began to shout” specifically for the space at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. Most recently, he curated Grounds That Shout! (and others merely shaking), a series of performances in Philadelphia’s historic sacred spaces. His newest work is titled POWER.

JENNY CHIO

Jenny Chio is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in Visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths College, University of London. As a cultural anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker, her writing and filmmaking explore the shifting intersections of subjectivity, collective memory, and modernity, with an emphasis on race, ethnicity, and cultural heritage as powerful categories in the contemporary world. She investigates these issues through long-term ethnographic fieldwork and documentary filmmaking on independent and vernacular media practices, urbanization and the transformation of rural landscapes and livelihoods, and cultural tourism in the People's Republic of China. Her 2014 book, A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China, and 2013 film, 农家乐Peasant Family Happiness, examine how the expediencies of tourism, from landscapes and architecture to “learning to be ethnic” for tourists, have shaped the lives and livelihoods of rural, ethnic minority village residents in Southwest China. Her current projects include an ethnography of vernacular media practices in rural China and an ethnographic portrait film of two Miao women in Guizhou province. Most recently, she has written about tourism and race, theorizing ethnographic film, festival crowds and ethnic body politics, and the vernacular videography of bullfights. She served as Co-Editor of the journal Visual Anthropology Review from 2016-2018 and as Co-Curator of the Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival in 2013 and 2014. Her website is www.jennychio.com.