Brazil’s Grupo Corpo performed its Cal Performances debut with two works that showcase the dance company’s distinctive style, rooted in classical ballet but enriched by folk and popular dance. Under the artistic direction of choreographer Rodrigo Pederneiras’ brother Paulo Pederneiras, the troupe’s dancers are celebrated for their athleticism, versatility, and deep respect for the connections between music and movement. The choreography in 21 is derived from the rhythmic sequences in the score by Marco Antônio...
These lectures explored an anthropogenic history of sound during the first half of the twentieth century (up to the 1960s), a period of intense imperial expansion of the United States in Latin America and the Caribbean. In the first three lectures, Ochoa approached the centrality of media and the development of new sound technologies in such a history. Ochoa particularly focused on the transformation of the relation between histories of life, extractivism, and sound produced by sound technologies. In the last two...
These lectures explored an anthropogenic history of sound during the first half of the twentieth century (up to the 1960s), a period of intense imperial expansion of the United States in Latin America and the Caribbean. In the first three lectures, Ochoa approached the centrality of media and the development of new sound technologies in such a history. Ochoa particularly focused on the transformation of the relation between histories of life, extractivism, and sound produced by sound technologies. In the last two...
In recent decades, an explosion of critical interventions from multiple fields has emphasized the return to the archive as one of the key axes from which central problems of the culture and history of the Americas are thought about, read, and discussed. However, studies on critics and artistic practices have, to different extents, always been anchored in and in conversation with the archive.
This set of presentations sought to reflect on the way in which Latin American studies have positioned themselves...
Taking as its point of departure the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s notion of the “organic line,” a line of space that appears between a painting and its frame, a door and its lintel, or tiles on the floor, art historian and theorist Irene Small tracks the emergence of the concept in Clark’s work circa 1954. But it also comprehends the organic line as a generative conceptual tool, one that does expansive aesthetic, epistemological, and political work well beyond Clark’s immediate context. Mobilizing a rich...
Many scholars have traced the momentous historical consequences of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), seeking to redraw Euro-American maps of the revolutionary era, complicate the relation of imperial center to colonized periphery, and historicize modern categories of race and nation. But research into the varied and vibrant musical cultures of colonial Saint-Domingue and the Haitian revolutionary period, and the subsequent global dispersion and transformation of these cultures, are sparser, especially when it...
