TEACHING
Teaching is like performance. It is a lifelong craft that requires me to prepare, rehearse, take feedback, try again, give feedback, take stock of the set (classroom, campus, city), design visuals, be present with others, improvise, give range, and move.To parallel teaching and performance doesn’t mean I enter the classroom just to put on a show. Rather, it invokes the work of framing, structure, and embodied presence that goes into cultivating a venue for the exchange of ideas and selves, one in which emotional and intellectual pushes and pulls between people are productive.
WORKSHOPS OFFERED
CRITICAL DRAG
Are you ready to lipsync for your life? I mean this quite literally: what can you know about your life, your self, and the world around you by lipsyncing? What can drag teach us about gender, bodies, aesthetics, politics, and our place in the world? How does drag give us tools to look differently into the world? As drag becomes ever more visible in mainstream global media, most recently with the launch of RuPaul's Drag Race in the UK, it has on the one had become sanitized of some of its subversive possibilities, but on the other it has become more accessible to a wider range of people. In LGBT spaces, drag has long been a practice that holds communities together, communicates political ideologies, and serves as a venue for self exploration. Critical Drag is a four-day performance-based workshop in which we will use drag techniques that emerge from LGBT nightlife communities to explore our bodies, artistry, and ideologies. The workshop begins with improvisational exercises that help participants develop drag personas, and concludes in a final lipsync extravaganza showcase. In between, we will rehearse routines, play with makeup, discuss films and readings about drag, and engage movement exercises that help us find new aesthetics in our bodies.
SYLLABI
Tufts University, undergraduate seminar
Tufts University, graduate seminar
Tufts University, graduate seminar
Tufts University, graduate seminar
Tufts University, graduate seminar
Tufts University, graduate seminar
Tufts University, undergraduate seminar
Tufts University, undergraduate practice & theory class
University of Texas at Austin, graduate seminar
University of Texas as Austin, undergraduate seminar
University of Texas at Austin, undergraduate seminar
BODIES IN MOTION
Northwestern University, undergraduate seminar
QUEER OF COLOR PERFORMANCE
Northwestern university, undergraduate performance class
BOLLYWOOD DANCE
Northwestern University, undergraduate performance class