The Institute for Dance Studies (IDS) is a research community hosted within the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. Through working groups, events, practice based research and resource sharing we are a platform of support for scholars, students, dance related professionals and people who dance in all ways and aspects of life. It is our mandate to work towards the advancement of the discipline and to encourage re-imaginings of the contours of dance studies within the academy.
We are committed to dialogues and activities surrounding dance that are inclusive of Indigenous / Aboriginal people, persons with disabilities, racialized persons / persons of colour, LGBTQ individuals, and women. Our scope of dance is global and inclusive of traditional, theatrical, popular, community, social, somatic, recreational, pedestrian, folk and forms that do not fit into these categories.
The IDS evolved out of the SSHRC supported symposium The Other D: Locating Dance in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies in Canada, in January 2016. Organizers for this event were Seika Boye, Nikki Cesare Schotzko, Heather Fitzsimmons Frey and Evadne Kelly.
Seika Boye
[email protected]
Seika Boye is a scholar, writer, educator and artist whose practices revolve around dance and movement. She teaches practical and lecture courses and is the Director of the research oriented Institute for Dance Studies.
From 1995-2010 Seika performed and presented her choreography across Canada. She danced professionally with Ballet Creole, Electric Company Theatre, Judith Marcuse Projects, and various independent choreographers. Most recently, Seika has worked as a movement dramaturg with Syreeta Hector (Distant Histories, 2018-19); Deanna Bowen (The Long Doorway, 2017/Gibson Duets2019); Heidi Struass/adelheid dance (re*researchchoreographic intensive, 2018); and Djanet Sears (Adventures of Black Girl in Search of God, 2015).
Invested in movement histories and the archive, Seika’s current research explores blackness and dancing in Canada. In 2018, she curated the archival exhibition It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900-1970 (Dance Collection Danse Gallery/ OCAD Ignite Gallery). Her publications include writing for Dance Chronicle (forthcoming), Canadian Theatre Review, alt.theatre, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, Performance Matters, Dance Collection Danse Magazine and The Dance Current.
Seika participates in and collaborates on a range of research communities and projects including the Toronto Photography Seminar and Gatherings: archival and oral histories of Canadian performance (SSHRC Partnership Development). She was recently appointed Adjunct Curator at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.
Seika’s book project Dancing on Dime: Social Dance within Toronto’s Black Population at Mid-century, is contracted to McGill-Queens University Press. Her research was supported by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship and SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. She completed her doctoral degree at the University of Toronto in 2016.
From August 2018 - February 2019 Seika is an Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Seika lives and works in Toronto with her husband and their two sons.
Xing Fan
[email protected]
Xing Fan is assistant professor of Asian theatre and performance studies at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. Xing is a dancer with training and stage experience in the dance and performance cultures including ballet, gudianwu(Chinese classical dance), xiqu(Chinese indigenous theatre), nihon buy (Japanese dance), and Balinese dance. As an educator, Xing commits herself to introduce to students the Asian concept of “total theatre,” a practice through which performers tell stories and portray characters by means of a combination of performance techniques, to which dance is an integral part.
It has been Xing’s long-term academic effort to explore the theoretical, practical, and aesthetic intersection of dance studies, theatre studies, and performance studies. Her first book, Staging Revolution: Artistry and Aesthetics in Model Beijing Opera during the Cultural Revolution (Hong Kong University Press, 2018), examines ten Beijing opera productions designated as models for literature and art during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), a decade of turmoil in the People’s Republic of China. This book is a refutation of the deep-rooted notion that artworks overtly in service of politics are by definition devoid of artistic merits. It provides a much-needed analysis of the decisions made in the real, practical context of bringing dramatic characters to life on stage, examining how major artistic elements interacted with each other in defining and communicating era-specific aesthetics. Xing’s peer-reviewed articles and translations appear in Asian Theatre Journal, Performance Matters, andRenditions; her essays and chapters also appear in the books Women in Asian Performance: Aesthetics and Politics, Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre, New Modern Chinese Women and Gender Politics, and A Dictionary of Critical and Cultural Theory. Xing is serving as a re-elected vice president of the Association for Asian Performance.
Stephen Johnson
[email protected]
Stephen Johnson is a Full Professor in the Department of English and Drama at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and in the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. His university training was at the University of Guelph (BA), the University of Toronto (MA), and New York University (PhD). He has published widely on 19th and 20th century popular performance, with articles in The Drama Review, Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Topicsand Nineteenth Century Theatre, as well as Theatre Research in Canada, which he (co)edited for ten years. He has been active in a number of scholarly organizations, serving on the executive of the Theatre Library Association, the Society of Dance History Scholars, and as president of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research / Association canadienne de la recherche théâtrale.
His primary research is in the history and historiography of popular performance and the performance of race, including substantial work on the history of blackface minstrelsy. This includes the book length publication Burnt Cork: Origins and Traditions of Blackface Minstrelsy(UMassPress, 2013), and an online database and resource, The Juba Project, which focuses on the introduction of minstrelsy to the Great Britain. He has done extensive work on dance in early minstrelsy, and in the life, career and legacy of tap dance, through the life of William Henry Lane ('Master Juba'). His work more generally includes dance as a significant and integrated component of any popular performance, and can be seen, for example, in The Tyranny of Documents: the Performing Arts Historian as Film Noir Detective (TLA, 2011), as editor, which includes forty essays on historiography and microhistory, and Cross Border Blackface: Traditions and Legacies of American Minstrelsy in Ontario, a project that explores the history and legacy of the performance of race in the region variously called Upper Canada, Canada West, and Southern Ontario.
VK Preston
[email protected]
VK Preston is a dance scholar whose research cuts across interdisciplinary theatre, contemporary art, performance historiography, and queer arts. She has most recently participated in curating “Indelible Refusal: Bodies, Performances, and Walking Resistance” with Stephanie Springgay (OISE), and she comes to University of Toronto by way of postdoctoral fellowships at McGill and a Visiting Assistant Professorship at Brown University. She holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies, with a Ph.D. minor in History, from Stanford University.
In addition to her work as a historian of seventeenth-century French-language texts on dance, performance, baroque decriminalization of witchcraft, and colonization in the Americas, VK writes on twenty-first century choreography, directing, and curation. Her work appears in TDR, Performance Research, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theatre, Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, History, Memory, Performance, Theatre Journal, and Canadian Theatre Review. She is currently working on her first book.
VK comes to performance research through a background in contemporary dance and theatre. Before embarking in scholarship, she studied interdisciplinary fine arts at Concordia University and trained at professional dance conservatories at Les Ateliers de danse contemporaine de Montréal and Le Groupe de la Place Royale. Most recently, she has enjoyed participating in the Faculty Writing Seminar at the Mellon School for Theatre and Performance Research at Harvard University as well as the Dance in/and the Humanities Mellon initiatives at Brown and Northwestern. Her chapter to the Mellon Dance Studies initiative’s The Futures of Dance Studies volume is forthcoming in 2019. She teaches critical dance studies and theatre history, politically engaged performance, dramaturgy, and archival research. In winter 2019 she will offer the graduate course, “Embodiments: Critical Dance Studies and Performance Theory” at the Centre for Drama Theatre and Performance Studies.
We are committed to dialogues and activities surrounding dance that are inclusive of Indigenous / Aboriginal people, persons with disabilities, racialized persons / persons of colour, LGBTQ individuals, and women. Our scope of dance is global and inclusive of traditional, theatrical, popular, community, social, somatic, recreational, pedestrian, folk and forms that do not fit into these categories.
The IDS evolved out of the SSHRC supported symposium The Other D: Locating Dance in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies in Canada, in January 2016. Organizers for this event were Seika Boye, Nikki Cesare Schotzko, Heather Fitzsimmons Frey and Evadne Kelly.
Seika Boye
[email protected]
Seika Boye is a scholar, writer, educator and artist whose practices revolve around dance and movement. She teaches practical and lecture courses and is the Director of the research oriented Institute for Dance Studies.
From 1995-2010 Seika performed and presented her choreography across Canada. She danced professionally with Ballet Creole, Electric Company Theatre, Judith Marcuse Projects, and various independent choreographers. Most recently, Seika has worked as a movement dramaturg with Syreeta Hector (Distant Histories, 2018-19); Deanna Bowen (The Long Doorway, 2017/Gibson Duets2019); Heidi Struass/adelheid dance (re*researchchoreographic intensive, 2018); and Djanet Sears (Adventures of Black Girl in Search of God, 2015).
Invested in movement histories and the archive, Seika’s current research explores blackness and dancing in Canada. In 2018, she curated the archival exhibition It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900-1970 (Dance Collection Danse Gallery/ OCAD Ignite Gallery). Her publications include writing for Dance Chronicle (forthcoming), Canadian Theatre Review, alt.theatre, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, Performance Matters, Dance Collection Danse Magazine and The Dance Current.
Seika participates in and collaborates on a range of research communities and projects including the Toronto Photography Seminar and Gatherings: archival and oral histories of Canadian performance (SSHRC Partnership Development). She was recently appointed Adjunct Curator at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.
Seika’s book project Dancing on Dime: Social Dance within Toronto’s Black Population at Mid-century, is contracted to McGill-Queens University Press. Her research was supported by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship and SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. She completed her doctoral degree at the University of Toronto in 2016.
From August 2018 - February 2019 Seika is an Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Seika lives and works in Toronto with her husband and their two sons.
Xing Fan
[email protected]
Xing Fan is assistant professor of Asian theatre and performance studies at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. Xing is a dancer with training and stage experience in the dance and performance cultures including ballet, gudianwu(Chinese classical dance), xiqu(Chinese indigenous theatre), nihon buy (Japanese dance), and Balinese dance. As an educator, Xing commits herself to introduce to students the Asian concept of “total theatre,” a practice through which performers tell stories and portray characters by means of a combination of performance techniques, to which dance is an integral part.
It has been Xing’s long-term academic effort to explore the theoretical, practical, and aesthetic intersection of dance studies, theatre studies, and performance studies. Her first book, Staging Revolution: Artistry and Aesthetics in Model Beijing Opera during the Cultural Revolution (Hong Kong University Press, 2018), examines ten Beijing opera productions designated as models for literature and art during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), a decade of turmoil in the People’s Republic of China. This book is a refutation of the deep-rooted notion that artworks overtly in service of politics are by definition devoid of artistic merits. It provides a much-needed analysis of the decisions made in the real, practical context of bringing dramatic characters to life on stage, examining how major artistic elements interacted with each other in defining and communicating era-specific aesthetics. Xing’s peer-reviewed articles and translations appear in Asian Theatre Journal, Performance Matters, andRenditions; her essays and chapters also appear in the books Women in Asian Performance: Aesthetics and Politics, Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre, New Modern Chinese Women and Gender Politics, and A Dictionary of Critical and Cultural Theory. Xing is serving as a re-elected vice president of the Association for Asian Performance.
Stephen Johnson
[email protected]
Stephen Johnson is a Full Professor in the Department of English and Drama at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and in the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. His university training was at the University of Guelph (BA), the University of Toronto (MA), and New York University (PhD). He has published widely on 19th and 20th century popular performance, with articles in The Drama Review, Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Topicsand Nineteenth Century Theatre, as well as Theatre Research in Canada, which he (co)edited for ten years. He has been active in a number of scholarly organizations, serving on the executive of the Theatre Library Association, the Society of Dance History Scholars, and as president of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research / Association canadienne de la recherche théâtrale.
His primary research is in the history and historiography of popular performance and the performance of race, including substantial work on the history of blackface minstrelsy. This includes the book length publication Burnt Cork: Origins and Traditions of Blackface Minstrelsy(UMassPress, 2013), and an online database and resource, The Juba Project, which focuses on the introduction of minstrelsy to the Great Britain. He has done extensive work on dance in early minstrelsy, and in the life, career and legacy of tap dance, through the life of William Henry Lane ('Master Juba'). His work more generally includes dance as a significant and integrated component of any popular performance, and can be seen, for example, in The Tyranny of Documents: the Performing Arts Historian as Film Noir Detective (TLA, 2011), as editor, which includes forty essays on historiography and microhistory, and Cross Border Blackface: Traditions and Legacies of American Minstrelsy in Ontario, a project that explores the history and legacy of the performance of race in the region variously called Upper Canada, Canada West, and Southern Ontario.
VK Preston
[email protected]
VK Preston is a dance scholar whose research cuts across interdisciplinary theatre, contemporary art, performance historiography, and queer arts. She has most recently participated in curating “Indelible Refusal: Bodies, Performances, and Walking Resistance” with Stephanie Springgay (OISE), and she comes to University of Toronto by way of postdoctoral fellowships at McGill and a Visiting Assistant Professorship at Brown University. She holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies, with a Ph.D. minor in History, from Stanford University.
In addition to her work as a historian of seventeenth-century French-language texts on dance, performance, baroque decriminalization of witchcraft, and colonization in the Americas, VK writes on twenty-first century choreography, directing, and curation. Her work appears in TDR, Performance Research, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theatre, Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, History, Memory, Performance, Theatre Journal, and Canadian Theatre Review. She is currently working on her first book.
VK comes to performance research through a background in contemporary dance and theatre. Before embarking in scholarship, she studied interdisciplinary fine arts at Concordia University and trained at professional dance conservatories at Les Ateliers de danse contemporaine de Montréal and Le Groupe de la Place Royale. Most recently, she has enjoyed participating in the Faculty Writing Seminar at the Mellon School for Theatre and Performance Research at Harvard University as well as the Dance in/and the Humanities Mellon initiatives at Brown and Northwestern. Her chapter to the Mellon Dance Studies initiative’s The Futures of Dance Studies volume is forthcoming in 2019. She teaches critical dance studies and theatre history, politically engaged performance, dramaturgy, and archival research. In winter 2019 she will offer the graduate course, “Embodiments: Critical Dance Studies and Performance Theory” at the Centre for Drama Theatre and Performance Studies.
