Brooke Allison Parkinson, Beck Kimbro, Lia Smith-Redmann and Katie Speltz, “Queering Translation: The Radical Play of Moving Between Tongues”
Mentor: Maria Gillespie, Dance, Arts (Peck School of the)
Performing Arts: 9:30am Union Cinema
This dance-based research project works with queer and intersectional identities through embodied practices. We draw upon queerness as an identity and practice that disrupts traditional power structures or exists within liminal or in-between states. This project reimagines translation and from Queer and Chicano scholars Gloria Anzaldua and Sara Ahmed, to guide our dance research. Anzaldua’s mixed-race (mestizaje) consciousness, indigenized and feminized knowledge (conocimiento), and language as a metaphorical border is foundational to our exploration of queer liminality. By centering feminist and queer writers, we resist traditional Cartesian philosophies that split the body from the mind. We developed a practice based on three prominent elements: 1) hyphenated body (a body that morphs continuously between multiple identities and is thus uniquely liminal); 2) queer phenomenology (alternative metaphysics and theories on the nature of being in a radical body); and 3) metaphor, both in a linguistic context (the untranslatability of metaphors between languages) and in an embodied context (in that dance is symbolic in nature). Inspired by these themes, our dance practice includes a set of improvisational dance scores, which are performance instructions and creative prompts designed to initiate movement. Through scores we arrive at radical play as a dance technique. Our goal is to develop a pedagogical method that explores liminality in one’s body, language, culture, and identity through dance. We aim to do this through codified workshop structures and a deck of cards that contains our queering dance scores. Central to the mission of this project is to be accessible to marginalized communities, particularly BIPOC and LGBTQ+ youth and non-dancers. Queering Translation is about generating possibilities, not answers, thereby addressing the ambiguous and untranslatable space—Anzaldua’s metaphorical “borderlands”—occupied by queer, marginalized, and intersectional communities.