CARe is delighted to announce an exciting upcoming event with our Dance Scholar in Residence, Dr. Alexander H. Schwan, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Theater Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and Visiting Scholar at the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.
Alexander H. Schwan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Theater Studies at Freie Universität Berlin with a research focus on spirituality, religion, and dance. He is also a Protestant theologian and an ordained pastor in the Protestant Church in the Rhineland, Germany with education in pastoral care and healthcare chaplaincy. Alexander has been a Visiting Lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton University and Harvard University.
Parallel to the spiritual turn in humanities – the recent trend in cultural and social studies to analyze and theorize topics of spirituality and connectivity in the context of multiple secularities – the field of contemporary dance practices has seen a similarly growing interest for spiritual components of movement practices. Increasing in number and intensity, young dancers and choreographers in Europe, Asia, and the US address issues of spirituality in an unconventional way. This spiritual dimension of contemporary dance is often connected to a new consciousness for vulnerability, resilience, and resistance. Spirituality in contemporary dance motivates and fosters resilience on an individual, social, and ecological level. With a deliberately wide and nonesoteric understanding of spirituality as a reflected connectivity in the largest possible sense, the research project investigates the impact of the spiritual turn on contemporary dance, and how this turn reinvigorates the ethical responsibility of dance.
Please either register for the online version here, or email lwebster@gtu.edu to let us know you plan to attend in person. Reading materials will be provided prior to the event.
The Collaborative Learning Space is the large glass room on the main level of the library.