The Duke Dance Program MFA in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis (MFAEIP) presented a six-week movement and creative practice intensive designed to support the artistic evolution of Duke graduate dance students and alumni. Participating artists received dedicated time, space and mentorship from a range of interdisciplinary guest artists.
Participants engaged in movement classes, workshops on creative strategies and critical response to works in progress, and built their existing networks through collaboration with the artists and faculty of partnering organization, the American Dance Festival (ADF).
Workshop: This Action
What's available to you in your process? Are you sure? What possibilities have yet to be considered? This week, we'll explore strategies for weaving through various domains of creative practice. We'll sense what it might be like to embrace context and contingency as baselines for making; the temporary, transient, and tangential will help us snake through skillsets we may find familiar, less familiar, unfamiliar, and otherwise.
Ajani Brannum is a transdisciplinary artist born in Anchorage, Alaska, raised in Columbia, South Carolina, and currently living in Los Angeles, California. Their practice — which spans performance, video, sound, writing and cartomancy — explores the problematics of belief; constructs of selfhood; and practices for moving, thinking and being. Ajani appeared as a guest artist with Cullberg (based in Stockholm, Sweden) for their 2015-2016 season, and danced in the Merce Cunningham Trust's Night of 100 Solos. A graduate of the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities, Ajani holds a B.A. in English and Certificate in Dance from Princeton University, a Ph.D. in Culture and Performance from UCLA, and is an alum of Jade T. Perry's Cecilia Weston Tarot Academy.
Dance Program