Dancing Life Stories/Dancing Biographies/ Forming the WE

Join us for an evening of dance as students from the Department of Contemporary Dance bring embodied (auto-)biographical narratives to the Acts of Listening Lab. Such storytelling in motion – based on life history interviews that students conducted with one of their peers – constitutes what Christine Thurner once called “emphatically fragile, deliberately contingent narrative acts.” These gestural narratives break free of the frame of linear, literary (auto)biography. Seen in relation to one another they form a complex and rich society.

This event is based on students’ coursework in the Department of Contemporary Dance, who, under the guidance of Professor Lília Mestre, are exploring the possibilities of danced life narration, this time in a collective improvisation setting.