Choreographer Will Rawls and scholar and Performa associate curator Adrienne Edwards will discuss relationships between objects, animal figures, and blackness in performance. Rawls is currently working on a digital project for Triple Canopy that investigates the personal and symbolic lineage of a herd of foam-core German shepherds he created for several recent dance works. Rawls and Edwards will consider the German shepherd as symbol for obedience, statehood, violence, domesticity, and identification; they will also discuss the afterlife of objects in research-based performance.
Participants
- Will Rawls is a choreographer, performer, writer and curator. His work has appeared at Danspace Project, the Brooklyn Museum, the Emily Harvey Foundation, the Chocolate Factory and Williams College, among other venues. As a dancer, Rawls has performed with many artists, including Jérôme Bel, Maria Hassabi, Neal Medlyn, David Neumann, Shen Wei Dance Arts, and Katie Workum. From 2006–2013, Rawls collaborated as one half of the performance duo Dance Gang with Kennis Hawkins. Rawls was a 2013 MacDowell Colony Fellow and is a 2014 LMCC Process Space Artist.
- Adrienne Edwards is a curator, scholar, and writer of performance with a focus on artists of the African diaspora and the Global South. She is a PhD candidate in performance studies, the associate curator for Performa Inc., and curator-at-large for Third Streaming. Edwards’s curatorial projects include Rashid Johnson’s first live work, Dutchman, Dave McKenzie’s All the King’s horses…none of his men, and Clifford Owens’s Five Days Worth, among others.