Diagramming Dada: Dance, Poetry and Gender in the Archives of the Avant-Garde

Friday, September 22, 2023
7:00 PM 8:15 PM 19:00 20:15

Contemporary Calgary 701 11 Street Southwest Calgary, AB, T2P 2C4 Canada (map)

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Diagramming Dada: Dance, Poetry and Gender in the Archives of the Avant-Garde

September 22, 2023 | 7 PM | Theatre

How to preserve for the purposes of repetition what is intended to be ephemeral? This traditional task of the score or diagram was put under pressure by the poets and dancers associated with the Dada movement in Zurich during the years of the First World War who invented new forms of notations for their chaotic dance and poetic performances. It will also reflect on the status of gender in Zurich Dada and the limitations of the archive.

This lecture is extended as a public program of Carol Sawyer: The Natalie Brettschneider Archive.

Friday, September 22

Doors: 6:30 PM
Talk begins: 7 PM

FREE with registration.

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About the Speaker

Trevor Stark

Trevor Stark is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Total Expansion of the Letter: Avant-Garde Art and Language After Mallarmé (The MIT Press, 2020).

About the Artist

Carol Sawyer

Carol Sawyer is a visual artist and singer working with photography, installation, video, and improvised music. Since the early 1990’s her visual art work has investigated the connections between photography and fiction, performance, memory, and history. In 2017 The Canada Council awarded Sawyer the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography. In 2021, she was nominated for the prestigious Scotiabank Photography Award.

Sawyer earned an Honours diploma in photography from ECUAD, and a Masters in interdisciplinary arts from SFU, where she studied acting, music performance, critical theory, and music composition. As a young woman, Sawyer studied classical singing, focusing on opera and art songs, before training in extended voice with Richard Armstrong. She has performed extensively in improvised music contexts and incorporated her singing voice into her artworks in performances and videos. She has released three CDs with her improvising ensemble ion Zoo, and collaborated and recorded with American composer and trombonist Michael Vlatkovich. The much-awaited Natalie Brett Quartet LP was launched in December 2022, with music recorded at the Warehouse Studio, using vintage microphones, plate reverbs, and other historical analog gear.