DeFrantz: Bass Connections, SLIPPAGE residencies, and professional works

Thomas F. DeFrantz received a Bass Connections Information Society and Culture Theme for the project “Live Processing and Live Art.” The project will be undertaken by DeFrantz with Tyler Walters (Dance) and Martin Brooke (Electrical and Computer Engineering). DeFrantz also received funding from the Mellon-funded Duke Humanities Writ Large for an arts initiative project “Performing Culture: Performance Studies, Live Arts, and African and African American Studies” that will involve the convening of a large academic conference on African American Dance at Duke, February 8-9, 2014.

DeFrantz and SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology in residence at Duke will sponsor the residency of choreographer Dana Ruttenberg (February, 2014), as well as the artists of Wideman-Davis Dance (April, 2014). Wideman-Davis Dance and SLIPPAGE presented CANE: a responsive environment dancework at Sheafer Theater April 20-29, 2013.

In 2013-2014 DeFrantz will teach Performance and Technology and create a Dance Theater Repertory work for the spring. In addition, he will offer two new courses: Let’s Dance! Live Art and Performance (Fall 2013), and Black Dance (Spring 2014). Let’s Dance! is designed as an introductory lecture course for a general Duke student body interested in studies of dance and live art. Black Dance is designed as a seminar- styled exploration of dances of an African diaspora.

DeFrantz was the Scholar in Residence at the Alabama Dance Festival (January 2013); acted as an adjudicator for ACDFA at the University of Minnesota, Mankato (March 2013); and delivered the keynote address, “Tarred and Feathered: The Black Tradition in American Dance” at the University of Texas, Austin, event “I Am Here and I Am Real: Dancing Blackness, Negotiating Black Subjectivity” (April, 2013). DeFrantz is currently serving as the President of the Society of Dance His- tory Scholars.