July 17/19/21: Ileanna Sophia Cheladyn
Photo by Teresa Salas
Class Description:
Slow Disorientations.
Working with an interest in resensitization, we will get dizzy, fall down, break verticality, and shake. We spend time with experiences of being disoriented to build resilience and curiosity in a place of not-knowing.
With a broad attention to common, habitual ways we organize ourselves in dance and beyond (thinking about notions of control [of axis, of limbs, of self as civil] and the relationship between the visual and a belief in truth or authority), we improvise through our sensitivities, experimenting with the ways we can enter into and exit from disorientation. This class is very much a question of “what-if?”
We will unsuture, disentangle, and spill, together and solo.
Ileanna Sophia Cheladyn is a Canadian dance artist and scholar currently based on Patwin lands (Davis, California) and on Coast Salish lands (Vancouver, BC, Canada), pursuing a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at UC Davis.
Her work is critical of prescriptive mind/body dualisms and hegemonic approaches to kinesthetic experience. She makes movement, textile, and text-based art in quiet, devoted, clumsy, and rigorous ways to bring creative and infrastructural change to her communities.
Ileanna is currently working s l o o o o o o o o o o o o o w l y with slowness and disorientation.
Her research, activist phenomenology, attends to the ways that dancers, who spend decades experimenting with their bodies as sensing and moving social intelligences, are uniquely reflective and insightful about how ideas emerge at the intersection of creative acts of meaningful performance making, pedagogical hierarchies, and social justice issues. As in: dancers invent new worlds.