Sustaining Communities: Forging Collective Memories

Big City Forum in conjunction with Cal State LA's American Communities Program presents:

Sustaining Communities: Forging Collective Memories

Monday, January 31st, 2011
4:30 - 6:30 pm

Cal State LA
University Student Union
5151 State University Drive
Los Angeles, CA

Join scholars, cultural theorists, and artists as they explore the ways and rituals through which specific communities are performed, remembered, memorialized, and narrativized.

Presenters include:

ELIZABETH CHIN Elizabeth Chin has a BFA in Drama from NYU where she trained with Anne Bogart and Stella Adler; she has a PhD in Anthropology from City University of New York where she worked with Delmos Jones and Vincent Crapanzano. She has studied, taught, and performed Haitian Folklore for over 20 years, both in the U.S. and in Haiti. Her teachers include Jean Leon Destiné, founder of Haiti’s national ballet, Emerante de Pradines Morse, Mona Amira, Florencia Pierre, Elle Johnson and Katherine Dunham. A professor of Anthropology in the department of Critical Theory and Social Justice at Occidental College, she is at work on an ethnographic project examining contemporary dancers, race, and the preservation of Dunham Technique.

DAVID DELGADO SHORTER David Shorter was raised in New Mexico, USA, and studied Religious Studies and Women’s Studies at Arizona State University for both his Bachelors and Masters degrees. He then attended the University of California Santa Cruz. After receiving his PhD in the History of Consciousness, he went on to teach in American Studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and then in Folklore at Indiana University in Bloomington. Currently a professor at the University of California Los Angeles, he lives in Los Angeles. His first book, We Will Dance Our Truth, evolves from decades of learning about indigenous lifeways, primarily among the Yoeme communities in northwest Mexico. Dr. Shorter's work explores other-than-human relations and the myths and rituals of native people around the globe. Among his favorite classes to teach are "Tribal Worldviews," “Indigenous Film and Video,” and “Ethnographies of/as Colonialism.”

KIANGA FORD Kianga Ford works primarily with sound and environment. Her installations and site-specific projects like The Story of This Place, are often grounded in narrative and ask questions about the relationship between physical and cultural proximity. In the increasingly considered field of sound art, she has worked collaboratively with a range of international composers from Toronto to Berlin. She has been working on The Story of This Place since 2003 and has completed stories for Los Angeles, North Miami, Bergen, Norway, and Alexandria, Egypt and is currently developing new works for Italy and Turkey. Her work has been shown at venues including The Studio Museum in Harlem, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, The Banff Centre (Alberta, Canada), USF Verftet (Bergen, Norway), The Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, and the 2006 California Biennial at The Orange County Museum of Art.

ARI KLETZKY Ari Kletzky works on integrated projects that draw on a variety of disciplinary perspectives based on the topic. This approach is informed by an interplay between theory and function or efficacy. In 2007, he founded Islands of LA, an evolving project that uses pedestrian accessible traffic islands to explore the desire and possibility for assembly and voice in publicly owned space. It has been on the cover of the LA Times calendar section and, more recently, in Cabinet Magazine. He graduated from UC Berkeley with dual degrees – BA in Rhetoric and BS in Business Administration – and from CalArts with an MFA in Art.

moderated by:
MICHAEL WILLARD, Professor, Department of Liberal Studies
Cal State LA