Thompson Room, Barker Center
Harvard University
12 Quincy Street, Cambridge MA
performances * papers * discussions * refreshments
free and open to the public
Sponsored by: the Office of the Provost, the Committee on Degrees in Folklore & Mythology, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies,
the Committee on Dramatics, the Mahindra Humanities Center, the Department of Music,
and the Department of Anthropology at Tufts University
Participants:
Short biographies of our participants!
Keynote:
Diana Taylor is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. She is the author of the award-winning Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991), Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (1997), and The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke U.P., 2003), which won the Outstanding Book from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education, and the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for Best Book in Latin American and Hispanic Studies from the Modern Language Association. She has recently published several books in Spanish: PERFORMANCE, Buenos Aires: Asuntos Impresos (2012); Acciones de memoria: Performance, historia, y trauma, Peru: Fondo Editorial de la Asamblea Nacional de Rectores (2012); Estudios avanzados de performance, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica (co-edited, Marcela Fuentes, 2011). O arquivo e o repertório (The Archive and the Repertoire) appeared in Portuguese in the UFMG Press (Brazil, 2013). She has edited over a dozen books, has lectured extensively around the world, and is the recipient of many awards and fellowship, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. She is founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, funded by the Ford, Mellon, Rockefeller, Rockefeller Brothers and Henry Luce Foundations.
Speakers:
Henry Cataldo is a photographer who received his MFA from Yale University. He teaches photography at Massachusetts College of Art & Design and Concord-Carlisle High School. His work as an artist has always gravitated towards the visual discipline of working on his subjects as a series. Cataldo has worked on many different series throughout the years (religious feasts, Ecuador walls, Somerville gardens, gesturing trees, night upon the Charles River, and more recently zoos). In the similar manner that a painter might approach his subject by reworking a sketch over and over, he’ll often work with his subjects as motifs. He’ll return to the same subject on different times of the day, in different seasons, and in different years. This visual restriction allows his vision to focus more carefully on any subtle growth or change that has transpired. He hopes then to capitalize upon this opportunity and to expand this new information into a deeper appreciation/ respect for his subjects.
Reebee Garofalo is Professor Emeritus at University of Massachusetts Boston. His most recent book is Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the USA. He has written numerous articles on popular music and has lectured internationally on a broad range of subjects relating to the operations of the music industry. Garofalo has been active in promoting popular music studies internationally, as a member of the Executive Committee and past Chairperson of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US, and an editor for several popular music journals, including the Journal of Popular Music Studies. At the local level, Garofalo serves on the organizing committee for the HONK! Festival, an annual gathering of activist street bands. For relaxation, he enjoys drumming and singing with the Blue Suede Boppers, a fifties rock ‘n’ roll band, and marching with the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, an activist New Orleans-style brass band.
Joy Brooke Fairfield is a Ph.D. student in Theatre and Performance Studies at Stanford University. She graduated from Harvard as a special concentrator in Performance Studies in 2003, completing a thesis production entitled HouseBreakHeart in the Loeb Ex. She received a Master’s degree in Performance Studies from NYU in 2010, where her research focused on queer and sex-positive cultural practices. She has presented and published on physical theatre training modalities, identity-construction in internet meme-culture, and representations of queer and transgender figures onstage and in literature. In addition, Joy is a San Francisco-based theatre director specializing in new play development and ensemble-generated work.
Augusto Ferraiuolo is a lecturer and visiting scholar at Boston University, where he teaches Folklore and Folklife, and Ethnography of North America. His works on religiosity and folklore are published in Europe and the US. His last book is Religious Practices in Boston’s North End: Ephemeral Identities in an Italian American Community, SUNY Press.
Charlie Keil is the author of Urban Blues (1966); Tiv Song (1979); Polka Happiness (1992); and Bright Balkan Morning (2002). He retired from teaching in 1999 and has been morphing into an instrument playing poet who gardens sloppily ever since.
Brenna McDuffie is a sophomore at Harvard College concentrating in South Asian Studies. Throughout her undergraduate career, Brenna hopes to explore the spiritual and religious aspects of Indian theater and performance, as well as the relationship between Hindu tradition and contemporary Indian culture. This January, Brenna travelled to the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad to observe performance, ritual, and pilgrimage. Brenna also participates in theater herself as both a performer and producer for many of the student run productions sponsored by the Harvard Radcliffe Dramatic Club.
Bruce McCoy Owens is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Coordinator of Asian Studies at Wheaton College, and Resident Director of the Wheaton/Royal Thimphu College Semester Abroad Program, Thimphu, Bhutan (Spring 2013). He has conducted research on religious festivity in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal over the past thirty years, focusing particularly on a set of interrelated festivals devoted to deities that their Buddhist participants are likely to view as incarnations of the bodhisattva, Avalokiteśvara, and their Hindu participants typically identify as manifestations of the mahāsiddha, Matsyendranāth. The festival that is the focus of his talk at this symposium is the largest of these, and the largest procession festival (jātrā) in the country. Since the jana āndolan (“people’s struggle”) of 1990-91 and the democratization that followed, he has also been studying the transformations of monumental sites of devotional practice in the Kathmandu Valley, especially Swayambhū (probably the most widely revered stūpa of Nepal), and more recently, Newar Buddhist monastic compounds.
Erminio Pinque founded the puppet-sculpture-performance group BIG NAZO in the streets of Italy in the late 1980’s; as director, performer, and fabricator, he and his team of collaborating artists, larger-than-life-sized aliens, robots and animal hybrid characters have performed in thousands of parades, festivals, street & stage shows throughout the USA, Europe, and Asia. In addition to performing throughout New England and international Festivals around the world, Erminio teaches “Creature-Creation” at Rhode Island School of Design and forms creative working relationships with local community and student populations by hosting internships at the BIG NAZO LAB in Downtown, Providence. Links for more images & info: bignazo.com
Panagiotis Roilos is the George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the author and editor of eight books, which cover a broad range of topics: postclassical cultural history and literature, Byzantine rhetoric and secular literature, British aestheticism and modernism, ritual theory, anthropology and literature, cultural politics, gender studies.
Doris Sommer is Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies. She is also Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University, to promote social development through arts and humanities. Her research includes 19th-Century novels that helped to consolidate Latin American republics, the aesthetics of minority literature, including multilingual virtuosity, and she is now focused on art’s constructive work in expanding rights and resources. Among her books are Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (1991); Proceed with Caution when Engaged by Minority Literature (1999); Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (2004); Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations, edited, (2004); Cultural Agency in the Americas, edited (2006); The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency in Art and Interpretation (forthcoming). Professor Sommer has enjoyed and is dedicated to developing good public school education; she has a B.A. from New Jersey’s Douglass College for Women, and her Ph.D. from Rutgers The State University.
Kay Turner received a Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Texas at Austin. Her area of specialization is in women’s performed folklore, especially in the arenas of story telling and folk religion. Her publications include Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars (Thames and Hudson); “Voces de Fe (Voices of Faith),” on modes of communication used in private devotion; and “Giving an Altar: Sicilian St. Joseph’s Tables in Bryan, Texas.” Turner is adjunct professor in Performance Studies at New York University, where she teaches courses on oral narrative theory, temporality, and the performance of gender. Turner also works as Director of Folk Arts at the Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC), where she researches and presents the diverse folk arts and artists of Brooklyn. In 2012 she curated and directed Half the Sky Festival: Brooklyn Women in Traditional Performance, a six week series of concerts and panels inviting a deeper understanding of gender and diaspora as they affect women’s traditional expressive arts.
Grete Viddal is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She conducted field research in the eastern provinces of Cuba, which were host to several waves of migration from Haiti. Grete’s dissertation explores how folkloric performance groups, religious practitioners, government programs, academic institutes, and transnational contacts interface with haitiano-cubano identity. Grete has published in the New West Indian Guide, the Journal of Haitian Studies, ReVista: the Harvard Review of Latin America, and contributed to the edited volume “Making Caribbean Dance,” published by University Press of Florida.
Maria Cristina Vlassidis Burgoa is a Th.D. Candidate (ABD) in the Religion, Gender, and Culture Doctoral Program at Harvard Divinity School. Her work focuses on the lived religious and spiritual experiences of Queer Puerto Ricans. Her ethnographic research is located in Loiza Aldea and Rio Piedras, where diverse religious traditions and practices converge. At the heart of her project is storytelling as an academic methodology and transformative spiritual practice.
Kera M. Washington is a Ph.D. student in the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program at Tufts University. With a focus on Haitian folkloric arts and ethnomusicology, Kera completed an undergraduate degree from Wellesley College, a Master’s degree from Wesleyan University, and post-graduate studies at Brown University. Kera is on Faculty at Wellesley College and teaches in the Boston Public Schools. She is a multi-instrumentalist and, as founder and leader of Zili Misik, an all female ensemble that performs world music of the African diaspora, performs on multiple percussion and vocals. Kera’s research at Tufts is on the formation of Haitian identity through folkloric arts in the work of Emerante de Pradines Morse.
Michael Witzel is Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University. He is the author and editor of nine books, which cover comparative historical World Mythology (2012), ancient Indian history and thought, and a translation of the oldest Indian text, the Rgveda, see: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwbib.pdf. He has conducted research in India, and on the traditions of the Kathmandu Valley during his stay (1972-78) as director of the Nepal German Manuscript Preservation Project. Nepalese New Year festivals and their liminal, disruptive, and re-integrating rites are the focus of his talk at this symposium.
Hosts:
Deborah Foster, Head Tutor and Senior Lecturer on Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University, received her Ph.D. in African Languages and Literature with a minor in Dance Performance and Choreography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was also an active performer and choreographer. Before coming to Harvard in 1988, she taught in the African and Asian Institute’s Department of Folklore at the University of Khartoum in Sudan, and in the Dance Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently working on Zamani za Kale: Telling Stories in Gestures and Words, a book project based on her research on the nonverbal aspects of Swahili storytelling in Vanga, Kenya.
David Guss is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Tufts University. He has worked on various aspects of festive behavior throughout Latin America and the United States for a number of years. Among his publications are The Festive State: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance and a study of the Fiesta del Gran Poder in La Paz, Bolivia, where he has danced as a member of the Diablada Internacional Juventud Relámpago del Gran Poder. He is also a founding member of Endangered Species with Lipstick, a dance comparsa that regularly participates in Honk!
