PhD Studentship: Community performance and gestures of migration

SCIENTIFIC DEPARTMENT (LABORATORY’S NAME): LITT&ART / Pacte (UMR 5194 https://www.pacte-grenoble.fr/)

DOCTORAL SCHOOL: Langues, Littératures et Sciences Humaines / or Sciences de l’Homme et du Politique according to the main discipline of the young researcher (dance –performing arts – geography)

SUPERVISORS NAMES: Anne Laure Amilhat Szary & Gretchen Schiller

The PERFORMANCE LABORATORY brings together UGA’s performing arts, geography-urban studies and computer science communities to produce innovative performance as research. This new interdisciplinary community of 41 academics will allow the development of cutting edge art research, digital documentation, performance literacy tools and innovative forms of material and immaterial heritage. This will push the very boundaries of the scientific disciplines themselves, both methodologically and epistemologically, and in turn, create a new pluridisciplinary ecosystem at CUGA.

Subject Description:

Community performance and gestures of migration

The Performance Laboratory is developing a performance as research (PAR) platform intersecting situated gestures and transnational movement patterns in geography and dance. The PhD subject: Community performance and gestures of migration looks at the ways in which the personal practices of movements (gestures) and the collective patterns (choreography) (Schiller & Rubidge 2014) are coupled through the movement of people across borders (Amilhat Szary & Giraut 2015).

On one hand, in geography, many projects focusing on international migration today highlight the present day “crisis” and less the transgenerational heritage through gesture and embodied memory. On the other, in dance, gestural literacy has focused on situated gestures and less on transnational migration of gestural repertoires.

The geographers and choreographers working on this project question the ways in which the migration of gestures can be explored through corporeal narratives and embodied memory as well as gestural repertoires across time and place. As such the project aims to produce new community driven choreographic cartographies.

Objectives

The project will concentrate on questioning the existence of specific gestural repertoires linked to the memory of past mobilities with a specific attention dedicated to the experiential of international migration. Bodily movements, are effort-felt repertoires of repeated, situated and inherited actions which we carry with, through and across our bodies and borders. This project aims to provide alternative embodied ‘readings’ of transnational qualitative repertoire which often falls of the map so to speak.

The candidate will work closely with researchers in the Performance laboratory as well as artistic choreographic professionals. Within this interdisciplinary context the candidate will develop a practice based project site-sensitive project to be deployed within a specific community in the Grenoble urban area.

The candidate must hold a Master's degree (or be about to earn one) or have a university degree equivalent to a European Master's (5-year duration),

 

Selection Process

Application deadline: May 15th 2018 at 17:00 (CET)

Applications will be evaluated through a three-step process:

1. Eligibility check of applications in May 17th 2018

2. 1st round of selection: the applications will be evaluated by a Review Board and results will be May 25th.

3. 2nd round of selection: shortlisted candidates will be invited for an interview session in Grenoble as of May 31st 2018. (if necessary)

Results during the month of June.