Experiencing Time/Embodying Rhythm Symposium

September 19-20, 2024

"Rhythm is crucial — we can ride it, hang behind it, get in front of it or go around it. We need to understand the pulse. In African aesthetics, the percussive attack has a snap or a pop to it, the strut or swagger has a beat"
— Dr. Thomas DeFrantz

There is no denying the presence of rhythm in our everyday. From the imperceptibly tiny to the improbably vast, rhythm plays along an infinite scale as a structure, a construct and interpretation of time, as practice, routine, ritual.

Rhythmic patterns and cadences in movement, music, and language spawn multiple forms and genres and as many ways to perceive them. How it looks isn’t the full story. From the poetic foot to the musical beat to the body’s relationship to pulse and phrasing, rhythm is movement and meaning.

Certain dance forms and bodies are considered more dominant in their relationship to rhythm. Often positioned as an essential attribute of people of color, the choice to make rhythm primary in this Symposium is to raise the question of how do bodies, spaces, places, identities, relationships, and power constructs support it? What corporal geographies subvert it? From the individual to the community, from the simple to the complex, rhythm is the thread.

Rhythmic ingenuity through devising, combining shared space and time, and making connections across different ways of being in the body, are distinctive attributes of the dance curriculum at Columbia College Chicago. For the 2024 Symposium, Co-Curators and Dance Associate Professors Lisa Gonzales and Darrell Jones invite session proposals on rhythm across disciplines. What will multiple vantage points reveal about this phenomenon that saturates everything and everyone?

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