Gerald Casel

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: Antiracist Creative Praxis
In this workshop, students look at methods that integrate social practice with creative research. Reflecting on Not About Race Dance, a collaborative choreographic response to the unacknowledged racial politics in U.S. postmodern dance along with his work on Dancing Around Race, a social practice working group that interrogates inequity in dance, Casel will encourage participants to articulate their own histories and practices doing similar endeavors and to see how they can contribute to the discourse on antiracsist and decolonial approaches to research. 

Gerald Casel (he/they/siya) is a dance artist, equity activator and antiracist educator. As director of GERALDCASELDANCE, his choreographic work complicates and provokes questions surrounding colonialism, collective cultural amnesia, whiteness and privilege and the tensions between the invisible/perceived/obvious structures of power. Casel is Professor and Chair of the Dance Department at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. He has previously been a faculty member at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Palucca Hochschule für Tanz Dresden, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, California State University Long Beach, and UC Santa Cruz where he also served as the Provost of Porter College. A graduate of The Juilliard School with an MFA from UW-Milwaukee, they received a New York Dance and Performance Award “Bessie” for sustained achievement dancing in the companies of Stephen Petronio, Michael Clark, Stanley Love, Zvi Gotheiner, Sungsoo Ahn, and The Metropolitan Opera Ballet. Dancing Around Race, an ongoing community engaged-participatory process that interrogates systemic racial inequity in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, continues to grow.