Info Session: School for the Movement of the Technicolor People

Public meet & greet and info session with taisha paggett and Seika Boye
Thursday, November 8th, 7:00—9:00pm

Join us for casual discussion and snacks with some of the lead artists of Gallery TPW’s performance-exhibition project, the School for the Movement of the Technicolor People (SMTP). Artistic director taisha paggett (Los Angeles) and curatorial consultant Seika Boye (Toronto) will be present to discuss both the history of the SMTP and the vision for this work in Toronto.

In the fall of 2019, the SMTP exhibition will turn Gallery TPW into an environment reminiscent of a dance school with a series of guiding visual and material gestures and an experimental, free-to-the-public curriculum of movement-based classes, workshops, and events facilitated by a selected core group of Toronto participants across the show’s eight-week run. The exhibition’s experimental curriculum will address a guiding conceptual question: “What is a Black. Dance. Curriculum. Today?” (Here “Black dance” is a play on words meant not just to point to the canon of African diasporic dance but to the perpetually unstable condition and resiliency of Black life in the United States and Canada.)

This session is open to all. We encourage both interested members of the public and those who have applied to join the SMTP Toronto collective to attend.

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Biographies

taisha paggett is a Southern California-based dance artist whose individual and collaborative interdisciplinary works re-articulate and collide specific western choreographic practices with the politics of daily life to interrogate fixed notions of queer Black embodiment and survival. Such works include the dance company project, WXPT (we are the paper, we are the trees) and the School for the Movement of the Technicolor People, both of which seek to radicalize questions held within contemporary dance by way of intersecting with social practice; radical pedagogy; somatic and contemplative investigations; queer, feminist and Black studies; performance and visual art; and the political and philosophical mesh of personal history. paggett's work has been supported by the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts; Clockshop; the MAP Fund (in conjunction with Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions); the National Performance Network; Diverseworks in Houston; the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and Danspace Project in New York, amongst other institutions. She’s currently assistant professor of Dance at UC Riverside. In 2018, her work was included in the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. biennial, and she was an artist-in-residence at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Working as a dance artist, dramaturge, movement instructor, curator, and scholar, Seika Boye’s hybrid practice has contributed to her attentive and distinct understanding of the diversity of Black dance aesthetics in Toronto. Her academic research has considered the largely undocumented histories of Black dance in the city, and her teaching appointments cover both practice-based movement classes and theoretical courses on performance and dance history. Boye is a Lecturer at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies and Director of the newly established Institute for Dance Studies at the University of Toronto. She has been published in The Dance Current, Dance Collection, Danse Magazine, alt.theatre and The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. Seika’s recent projects include movement dramaturgy for Djanet Sears’ A Black Girl in Search of God (Centaur Theatre/National Arts Centre) and Ars Mechanica’s Sisi (2016 Hatch Series, Harbourfront Centre). Her PhD dissertation “Looking for Social Dance in Toronto’s Black Population at Mid-century: A Historiography” was completed in 2016. She is currently the AGO’s 2018—19 artist-in-residence, where her research, movement, and pedagogical work will converge in a new project on Black female artistry in Canada.