Dance Professor Lailye Weidman’s New Course Invites Students to Explore Movement as a Tool for Political Inquiry

Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Lailye Weidman is leading Dancing Coalition: Contact, Partnering, and Ensemble Improvisation, a course exploring the connections among movement, mobilization, and discussion. Blending improvisation, partnering techniques, and interdisciplinary inquiry, students develop embodied tools for coalition-building.

We spoke with Weidman about the grant, her class, and her work.

Tell us about the new course.

This course invites dancers and movers of all experience levels to dive into the bold work of moving together. Over the semester, students learn contact improvisation, contemporary partnering, and ensemble improvisation. They engage with dance artists who utilize these practices and view choreographic works generated through related inquiries. In dialogue with readings, viewings, and audio materials, students ask how dancing together might offer metaphorical and actual tools for political mobilization.

Midterm projects will ask students to draw from their own involvement in community work and organizing — whether in formal or informal organizing spaces — as they develop collaborative structures for an improvisational performance. Such structures are often a set of guidelines known as a “score.” The final assignment will prompt students to draw from their experience in the course, in paired and ensemble dance practice, and to shape something to offer back to their ongoing sites of community work and engagement. 

How did you get inspired to create it? 

The idea was initially spurred by the recent passing of the late musician and civil rights activist Bernice Johnson Reagon. Reagon’s 1981 essay, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” became a central text for my M.F.A. thesis in 2016, when I was researching consent and consensus through a choreographic process. I returned to the essay this summer when she passed and found that it spoke just as urgently to the present political moment.

Reagon offers a sharp critique of white-dominant women’s spaces that are organized around a politics of sameness and comfort. She advocates instead for coalition as the necessarily uncomfortable paradigm for bringing about political change. 

Making space for embodied learning in diverse groups of students has often meant figuring out how to make space for students to name their differences from one another and not need to denounce or silence one another.

Perhaps, when we study, practice, and engage with dance and political inquiry side by side, we might begin to dance the politics we want to live by.

This year, the villainization and violent repression of students involved in campus protests across the nation demonstrated the danger of interpreting critique and discomfort as a threat. This course aims to build spaces where students can move and speak from their distinct positionalities, address and name conflicts and difficulties that arise, and cultivate more capacity for the rigor and complexity of community, solidarity, and coalition.   

The dance classroom can be a laboratory for practicing civic and democratic learning. As a dance artist and educator, I utilize movement as a methodology and mode of research regarding a wide range of topics. However, dance is not just a tool for integration and digestion; it also activates, produces, and transforms knowledge. Although dance is often described as free, easeful, fun, and liberatory, I believe that liberation is possible only if we acknowledge and address the systems of power that we live inside. Perhaps, when we study, practice, and engage with dance and political inquiry side by side, we might begin to dance the politics we want to live by.  

How does it fit in with your other teaching interests? 

Building and enhancing this course aligns with goals and desires for my own creative work and research. This course has roots in my graduate thesis, Social Animal Please Tame Me, which explored the imprints and scars of togetherness arrived at through consensus, consent, dissent, and collective decision-making. This research also spurred workshops called Communal Body: Collective Tools and Obstacles Iterations, which were presented at the 2018 Dance Studies Association conference “Contra: Dance and Conflict in Malta,” as well as at Bowdoin College, Moving Target Portland, Lightbox in Detroit, and the University of Illinois.   

This project came from more than two decades of my immersion in contact improvisation (CI), a movement form that emerged during the 1970s. The artists who initiated CI often expressed a desire for more “democratic” and less hierarchical organizations of space and the body, and a breakdown of roles among choreographer, performers, and audience. Despite the liberatory promises of this practice, I often found that hierarchical power dynamics were replicated in CI and its practitioners. In the years since my thesis research, there have been several important shifts, developments, interventions, and spaces for critique in some communities of practitioners. 

This course offers an opportunity to bring CI and other improvisational practices and principles to Hampshire students, and inviting them to question, critique, and transform what they encounter. I’m very curious to see how they experience and discuss the potentials and limitations they find within these practices. For this particular enhancement proposal, I’m excited about students hearing from guest artists who are on the forefront of expanding space for critical and political discourse around CI and other related dance practices. 

Students in this course will find parallels and points of tension between the relational and group dynamics generated by our dance practices and those found in their other spheres of community engagement.

How did/will the grant help you support the development of the class? 

The grant funding so far has supported me to bring two artists, Makisig Akin, a Berlin-based dance artist, and Anya Cloud, a dance artist and member of the faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder, to Hampshire for a multiday residency working with the students in this course.

Makisig and Anya taught two class sessions and led a workshop in which all students in the dance program gathered to immerse themselves in their research. The artists worked to facilitate generous spaces of improvisation and discussion, animated by their central research questions: “What can we do together that we cannot do alone?” and “What is possible when love is stronger than fear?”

Students were moved by their time with the visitors, and it felt like they stepped even deeper into their coursework. It was galvanizing for all of us to learn from artists working in bold and innovative ways with themes that are similar to the investigations of our course. The visit helped to open up new questions, articulations, and possibilities.