Director, Scapegoat Garden
Executive Director of the Austin Arts Center and Artist-in-Residence in Theater and Dance, Trinity College
Deborah Goffe is a dance maker, performer, educator, and performance curator who cultivates environments and experiences through choreographic, design, and social processes. She is driven by an enduring commitment to world-making, support of vibrant local dance ecologies, and the role of curatorial practice in those processes. Since its founding in 2002, Scapegoat Garden has functioned as her primary vehicle for artistic and curatorial practice—a means to forge relationships between artists and communities, helping people see, create and contribute to a greater vision of ourselves, each other, and the places we call home.
Deborah’s performance works have been performed in homes, churches, gardens, galleries, and regional, national, and international performance venues. She is a 2022 Creative Capital Awardee for her current project, Liturgy|Order|Bridge, and a Pillow Lab Residency artist at Jacob’s Pillow.
Through the years, Deborah has channeled her interests in local arts ecosystems through initiatives that provide space for artistic process, incubate new work, and strengthen networks. Her graduate research at Wesleyan University’s Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) focused on the intersection of sustainable dance practice, locality, arts ecosystem formation, habits of perception, and black radical tradition(s) as an urgent form of curatorial practice. These concerns form a foundation for her current artistic work and her position as Executive Director of the Austin Arts Center and Artist-in-Residence in Theater and Dance at Trinity College (Hartford, CT).
Workshop Description:
Creative Praxis: Friday, Aug. 16, 1pm-4pm and Saturday, August 17, 1pm-4pm
Over the course of two afternoon sessions, Deborah will invite participants to gather in much the same way she has been gathering with local culture bearers in the making and re-iteration of her current project, Liturgy|Order|Bridge. We will draw from its toolbox of processes, structures, rituals and origin stories to generate something(s) we might carry forward into our own experiments. Along the way, we’ll consider the ways we navigate inside and outside authorized infrastructures to define trajectories that are responsive to (and adamant about) the needs of our work and the people with whom (and for whom) we make it.
This will be followed by a facilitated group discussion on Sunday, August 18, 10:30am-noon: Future Dreaming, Nesting Dance Ecosystem, lead by Deborah Goffe and Professor Sarah Wilbur.