ICTS Webinar Series Spring 2021 –
“(Un-)Dancing Charlie Chaplin: material trace, embodiment and the ephemeral”
by Dr Eva Bru-Domínguez (Bangor University),
15 Apr 2021 @ 18:00 GMT (online)

 
The Irish Centre for Transnational Studies (ICTS) is delighted to invite you to our next webinar, taking place on Thursday April 15th, 2021 @ 6pm.

In the early 1970s, the American dance critic Marcia Siegel famously observed that ‘Dance exists at a perpetual vanishing point’ and is ‘an event that disappears in the very act of materializing’. Despite its undeniable impermanent quality, the practice of dance is subject to regulatory systems, such as, verbal or written instructions and movement techniques, which ultimately function as a means to codify the motile body. This paper explores the 4-minute film Sol (Lacuesta 2008) performed by the Barcelona-based dancer and choreographer Sol Picó. The short was produced for the exhibition ‘Chaplin in images’, the first large exposition in Spain to explore this iconic figure through visual documentation. In Sol, Picó dances in and out of Chaplin’s archive, traversing temporal, cultural and material boundaries, embodying and disembodying the actor’s renowned posture and gestures to recover and assert, eventually, her own signature dancing style. Attentive to notions of authorship, document and trace, I suggest that Sol is not only a bodily and textual intervention in the archive of classical cinema, but it also engages with the history and ontology of dance.

Eva Bru-Domínguez is a Visiting Lecturer at Bangor University. Her main research interests are the representation and construction of the body in visual culture, performance art and dance with a particular focus on Catalan cultural production. She is the co-editor, with Helena Buffery, of the special issue ‘Contaminated and dislocated bodies in Catalan visual and performance cultures’ in Journal of Romance Studies (2019) and co-editor of the artist booklet Olga Diego. Transgressive Architecture (2014) with the architect and poet Gaspar Jaén Urban. Eva is the author of Beyond Containment. Corporeality in Mercè Rodoreda’s literature (2013). She has also published articles and book chapters about cinema, photography, performance art and dance.

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Fáilte Roimh Chách