Back

Session 29	Queer Readings
Angie Ahlgren	In Search of Something Else: Tiffany Tamaribuchi, Taiko Drumming, and Queer Spectatorship
	This paper argues for the possibility of queer spectatorship in renowned taiko player Tiffany Tamaribuchi’s performances. Taiko is an athletic and spectacular form of ensemble drumming with roots in Japanese culture. An award-winning taiko player who has trained and performed in the U.S. and Japan, Tiffany Tamaribuchi also founded the Sacramento Taiko Dan and Jodaiko, an all-women’s taiko group comprised of members from throughout North America. Despite working within a conservative performance framework and within a form that is often framed as “multicultural” performance, Tamaribuchi’s performances with the all-women’s group Jodaiko can be seen as queer. Using performance analysis and a close reading of Tamaribuchi’s performance of a solo called “Odaiko” in a 2006 concert, I argue that Tamaribuchi’s taiko performances invite queer spectatorship both through Tamaribuchi’s queer gender performance, and through the affective, kinesthetic relationship taiko drumming can produce between the audience and spectator.
Peter Carpenter	The Many Deaths of John Wayne: Toward A Butch-Femme Aesthetic of Democracy
	This essay looks at the negotiation of a lesbian feminist subject position within the choreographic production of cowboyness. I argue here that queering the cowboy image and destabilizing the cowboy's presumption to masculine authority offers an alternative model of democracy that is particularly potent in the contemporary United States given the cowboy's symbolic hold on the U.S. imaginary. To do this I develop Theater scholar Sue-Ellen Case's influential article "Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic" (1988) using the choreography titled Making a Disaster: The Many Deaths of John Wayne (Part II) (2006) by Marianne Kim and Lee Anne Schmitt as a case study.
Victoria Phillips Geduld	Sahdji - An African Ballet: Queer Connections and the 'Myth of Solitary Genius'
	In May 1931, the ballet Sahdji premiered at the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, New York: with a libretto by Harlem Renaissance's Alain Locke and Richard Nugent, music by composer William Grant Still, dedicated to the Eastman School's Howard Hanson, with the ballet by Thelma Biracree, the work set in Africa was performed by dancers in blackface. In 1934 the work was performed with an all-black cast in Chicago, and revived in Rochester until 1950. Sahdji demonstrates that the participants shared two tenets: the desire to create high art, and the belief in African forms to achieve artistic aims. Locke and Nugent had a small shared world that included Lincoln Kirstein. Locke wrote about The Rite of Spring and Sahdji became Locke's African answer to Spring. Sahdji begs for a reinvigoration of dance history that credits philosophical underpinnings of the American ballet to the Harlem Renaissance and its queer connections.
	Angie Ahlgren is a second-year Ph.D. student in Performance as Public Practice, and holds an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Minnesota. She is interested in the politics of “multicultural” performance, Asian American literature and performance, and queer studies. She presented “Watching With ‘Unholy Fascination’: Derek Jarman's Edward II, Its Critics, and Its Queer Moment” at the 2005 British Graduate Shakespeare Conference, and is developing a scholarly piece on race and gender in North American taiko drumming. She is a member of Mu Daiko, a professional taiko ensemble in Minneapolis, where she has performed and taught for the last nine years.
	Peter Carpenter is a choreographer and scholar interested in cultivating the tacit relationship between the dancing body and the body politic. Based in Chicago, his dances have garnered critical acclaim for their innovative structural devices, queer theatricality, and formal investigation. He received his MFA in Dance from UCLA (2003) and is currently ABD in the Culture and Performance Studies program where he is writing about gay dancing cowboys in ethnographic and concert stage contexts. He has been a tenure-track faculty member at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago since 2005.
	Victoria Phillips Geduld performed with the Wendy Hilton Dance Company and Anna Sokolow. She is a Ph.D. candidate in twentieth-century cultural and political history at Columbia University where she received her B.A., followed by an MBA in Finance. She holds two Master's degrees from New York University. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, Grant's Interest Rate Observer, Ethel Winter and her Choreography, American Communist History, and in an upcoming issue of Ballet Review. The Centre National de la Dance published her exhibition catalogue, Dance is a Weapon.
Back