Join the Brown University Library and the Department of Music on Wednesday, October 22 at 6 p.m. in the Digital Scholarship Lab for a lecture by Harmony Bench entitled, “Gestural Indebtedness: Social Obligation and Circulations of Dance Online.” In her talk, Bench will consider the impact of “spreadable media” and what has been called the sharing economy on the ways that dance circulates in and through digital spaces.

In particular, she will argue that analyzing dance as partaking in a gift economy, with its attendant social obligations, sheds light on some of the tensions that arise when movements and gestures circulate beyond the communities that produce them. Gifts are never free, as Marcel Mauss argues. How, then, do economies of movement operate when dancers source their material from YouTube or video games, thus removing themselves from reciprocal relationships vis a vis other practitioners and movement innovators? What other forms of relationality appear as dancers assert a collective ownership of popular choreographies such as those in music videos? And how does the position of “fan” differ from that of “artist” when considering these alternate economies of movement?

Free and open to the public, this event is part of the Department of Music’s Fall Colloquium series.

Harmony Bench is Assistant Professor of Dance at Ohio State University, where she teaches in the areas of Critical Dance Studies, Dance History, and Performance Studies. Her research focuses on digital and screen media as they intersect with and inform choreography, movement, gesture, and dance as a social practice. She is the incoming co-editor of the International Journal of Screendance and serves as Secretary on the board of directors for the Congress on Research in Dance. She is currently working on a book entitled Dance as Common: Movement as Belonging in Digital Cultures. Harmony received her PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA, and she holds additional degrees in Performance Studies from NYU and in Ballet and Women’s Studies from the University of Utah.

Date: October 22, 2014
Time: 6 p.m.
Location: The Patrick Man Digital Scholarship Lab, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library, 10 Prospect Street, Providence