Friday, April 28 at 4:30 PM – 6:30 PM 

Saturday, April 29 at 8PM

The Swarthmore College Dance Program presents the 2017 Spring Dance Concert. Wonderful work from our African, Ballet, Modern, Kathak and Tap repertory classes will all be included this year. Several pieces feature live music, video, and singing! Come celebrate our graduating seniors and the hard work of all our dance students and faculty. The concert, which is appropriate for all ages, is free and open to the public. This show is uplifting and joyful!

Sunday, April 30 at 2 PM – 5 PM in LPAC Troy Dance Lab

touching

you are encased by arms. it is soft, warm, dark.
soft hums reverberate through you. you echo,
finding skin, rotating forward.
touching, we are safe, we know. we follow by sight, touch
memory,
force.
we make sound.
we don’t know who is leading anymore.

The Department of Music and Dance presents an Honors Choreography Project choreographed and directed by Erica Janko ’17. This multimedia, experimental dance production explores embodiments of group form.

*Please note that there may be loud vocalizations from the performers during the show.

A talkback will follow each performance.

Directed and choreographed by Erica Janko ‘17
Set and media design by Yoshifumi Nomura ‘17
Lighting design by Clarissa Phillips ‘19
Costume design by Rebecca Rosenthal ‘20
Video design by Chiara Kruger ‘17

Monday, April 17 at 2:30 PM – 4 PM

Location: SCI 104

Amanda Weidman is a cultural anthropologist whose work in Tamil-speaking South India has centered on gender, technological mediation, music, sound, and performance. She is the author of a book on the social history of Karnatic (South Indian) classical music, Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India (Duke Univ. Press, 2006). Her current research project is on playback singing in the South Indian Tamil-language film industry. She is also a Karnatic violinist.

Playback singing in Indian popular cinema is more than simply a technical process of substituting one voice for another; rather, it is a culturally and historically specific phenomenon that has generated novel forms of vocal sound and performance practice, celebrity and publicity, and affective attachment to voices. I situate these forms within the cultural and political context of South India from the post-Independence period to the post-Liberalization present. I examine the discourses and practices that were generated when playback singing first emerged and became standard practice in the 1940s-50s, the aesthetics that became normalized in the 1960s as certain voices began to dominate, and the ways the status and vocal sound of playback singers have changed since the liberalizing reforms of the 1990s.

Free and open to the Swarthmore community.