How do we imagine our place in the world?
How do we create worlds in our imagination?
And how do our bodies - the way we dress, move, and experience sensations - express and inform our ideas about our place and relationship to the world around us?
These are the questions that the Humanities Center explored during the 2022-2023 academic year.
Inspired by the new “Worldbuilding” theme of UCI Humanities Core and a revived collaboration with faculty in the Claire Trevor School of the Arts, the UCI Humanities Center will be co-hosting a yearlong dance festival, entitled “Cultural Resonance in Contemporary Bodies: Worldmaking through Dance.”
Worldmaking, here, gestures to Nelson Goodman’s concept that worlds are not given, but are made, as well as to the vision sketched by performance theorist José Esteban Muñoz, of performance as mapping other worlds—worlds of futurity, of belonging, and of self-expression available to those who too frequently are denied their full subjectivity. Worldmaking performances initiate both the performers and the audience into a sense of alternative possibilities—and suggest that these need not be only utopian, or far off in the future, but can be performed into existence, in the here and now.
The festival emphasized dance as a force of worldmaking, to insist on the material corporeal effects of performance: worlds cannot be made apart from the bodies that inhabit them. Here, dance is a form of mobilization, of knowledge production, and of history making.
Though worldmaking can envision and enact new social and personal possibilities, it can just as easily be hegemonic, a force wielded to maintain oppressive structures of power. Worldmaking then, even in its reparative dimensions, is always tied to the embodied conditions by which we know our present world.
Worldmaking Through Embodiment Featured in New University, read the article in UCI's campus newspaper.
