Theater & Dance Making Dances, Doing Research and Problem-Solving During the Zombie Apocalypse

The Department of Theater and Dance welcomes Chris McMillan to host a Zoom workshop, "Making Dances, Doing Research, and Problem-Solving During the Zombie Apocalypse"! McMillan’s workshop will frame creative research (choreography) as multifocal compositional process(es) that can be mobilized as a problem-solving tool. The workshop will seek to answer the question: How does the making of choreography complicate, probe and deconstruct questions of power as they relate to race, class and gender?

The “body,” in study, and in life more generally, is at the center of the arts and humanities. For what can one do without a body? Dance's focus on the body makes critical choreographic study a uniquely situated lens from which to engage all disciplines (probably). We will look at artists/theorists such as Beyonce, Kendrick Lamar and bell hooks, and consult cultural products such as The Night of the Living Dead / The Walking Dead to playfully come up with artistic problem-solving and world-making techniques that might save lives (in theory).

Christopher-Rasheem Mcmillan is a performance-related artist and scholar. He has a joint appointment between dance and gender, women's and sexuality studies at the University of Iowa. McMillan has an MFA in experimental choreography from the Laban Conservatoire, London (2011), and his Ph.D. in theology and religious studies from King’s College, London (2017). His writing has been published in The Journal of Dance, Movement & Spiritualities, Kinebago and Contact Quarterly. Currently, Mcmillan is a visiting assistant professor and fellow at The Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University