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Session 38 Localized Feminisms/Globalized Spaces
  Panel Members: Ramie Becker, Alison Bory, Shakina Nayfack, Ahalya Satkunaratnam
 

This panel, Localized Feminisms/Globalized Spaces, explores contemporary feminist interventions in four disparate sites of dance: Western Post-Modern Concert Dance, Los Angeles Club Culture, Bharata Natyam in Sri Lanka, and Butoh Ritual Mexicano. Unified by a feminist analysis of bodies and locations, these papers present distinct approaches to writing feminism into dance sites and situations historically written out of the feminist project. Our interest in coming together is to have a conversation across forms and locations in order to consider strategies as to how dance scholarship can approach feminisms, and vice-a-versa. While the act of researching and writing these critiques is an element of this feminist praxis, we are also motivated to uncover the potential feminisms and agentive acts inherent or injected into these projects, and enacted by their practitioners. Taken together, these four presentations demonstrate the possibilities of dance to complicate feminist scholarship, while also encouraging further analysis of gender and power grounded in particular dance practices.

Ramie Becker Sneakers to Stilettos: the Changing Codes of Feminine Sexuality in Los Angeles Club Culture
  In this presentation, I will be looking at how shifts in popular culture, changes in what is considered accepted behavior, sexuality, and presentation of femininity, have resulted in distinctive re-packaging of the iconic ‘club girl’ aesthetic. In my studies of The Vanguard (an exclusive Los Angeles dance club) from 2003- 2008, the rough-and-tumble, sneaker and baggy pants-wearing raver girl has receded in favor of a hyper-sexualized vixen, complete with stiletto heels and low cut blouses. I will be exploring how a change in footwear, from functional soles to 4-inch heels, has had a profound impact on how feminine sexuality is displayed and agency sought.
Alison Bory Another Discussion of an Anterior Event: Examining Jennifer Lacey’s Autobiographical “I”
  In 2005, contemporary postmodern dance artist Jennifer Lacey began performing Two Discussions of An Anterior Event, a re-imagining of her provocative 1997 solo, Skin Mitten. Rather than revise or reconstruct the original choreography in this second incarnation, the re-worked version plays with her shifting and evolving relationship to this earlier work. In approaching this material again, I argue, Lacey layers her representations further by including (sometimes discordant) performances of subjectivity located in the intervening years. Reading this choreographic composition with the lens of contemporary feminist autobiography, I suggest, she exposes the multiple selves entrenched in the autobiographical “I” and re-imagines the autobiographical project.
Shakina Nayfack The Gender of Sacrifice, The Sacrifice of Gender
  In the summer of 2006, two separate weeklong workshops were offered at the Butoh Ritual Mexicano Dance Center in Tlalpujahua, Michoacán. The first was held for Diego Piñón’s Mexican students, the second for students traveling internationally. Both workshops shared the same themes, yet Piñón introduced an additional element for the second group of mostly American students: Sacrifice of the Woman’s Heart. This paper examines Piñón’s motivations for including this thematic element in the foreign student group, documents the conflicting responses to the gendering of the workshop environment, and theorizes the various implications such a scenario presents to the study of gender and power in transborder ritual.
Ahalya Satkunaratnam Women, Widows, Heads of the home: Dance pedagogy and ethnic politics in Sri Lanka.
  This paper investigates women-led spaces and the predominance of female head of households within the Bharata Natyam dance teaching community of Colombo, Sri Lanka. I focus on a dance community of older women, mostly widows in Colombo. Although living and practicing outside of the official battle zones of the ethnic war, these women remain head of households or live alone in the major city, with immediate family living abroad in order to escape ethnic hostilities and a stagnant war economy. This community of women came to the Bharata Natyam practice because of its link with a national, particularly, Tamil ethnic identity. However, the negotiations that they continue to make in their dance practice reveal an inherently feminist approach that works against frameworks of nationalism and sexism.
   
  Ramie Becker is a doctoral candidate in Dance History and Theory at UC Riverside, Ramie is fervently finishing “Body/Space/Music: The Politics of Dance Club Culture in 21st Century Los Angeles,” investigating places where people go to dance to electronic music in Los Angeles. Fusing theories of music, spatiality and corporeality, Ramie explores how personal and collective politics figure into the technologies of social dance spaces, or ‘discotechnes’. She is the founder/organizer of the dance collective RAID, Random Acts of Irreverent Dance, which performs regularly in the LA area. She also writes weekly articles for Los Angeles Citybeat, covering music, theater, and dance events.
   
  Alison Bory received her MFA in Experimental Choreography (2006) and her PhD in Dance History and Theory (2008) from the Dance Department at University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation, “Dancing With My Self: Performing Autobiography in (Post)Modern Dance,” examines contemporary modern dance choreographies of personal narratives as sites of performative self-making. She is currently choreographing new work and teaching in the Los Angeles area.
   
  Shakina Nayfack is a performance artist, theatre director, and a shotgun scholar. He holds an MFA in Experimental Choreography from the University of California, Riverside, where he also a Doctoral Candidate in Dance History and Theory. Shakina’s creative work ranges from cult film to musical theater, while his research focuses on ritual and community in the age of globalization, specifically in relation to Butoh Mexicano, which he has been studying and practicing for nearly seven years.
   
  Ahalya Satkunaratnam is a 2006-2007 Fulbright-Hays fellow and a Ph.D. candidate in Dance History and Theory at the University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation on Bharata Natyam dance practices in Colombo, Sri Lanka considers the ways the dance functions within a war economy, and plays within practices and beliefs of ethnic difference. Satkunaratnam is also an active dancer and choreographer. Her most recent piece, a collaboration with Sri Lankan musicians, explored cycles of memory and repetition. Prior to her current academic work, Satkunaratnam served as Art Education Director at Insight Arts, a Chicago-based arts organization committed to social justice and human rights.
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