Department of English

• Tuesday, October 18, 2022 - 6:00pm to 7:00pm

Kelly Writers House Arts Café and on YouTube

Co-sponsored by Creative Ventures, Poetry & Poetics Reading Group, and The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation
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Join us for Dance and the Poetics of Proximal Distance, a participatory workshop lab with Dahlia Li and Elisa Zuppini. This program will present Dahlia Li and Elisa Zuppini’s work through a hybrid writing/movement workshop. Dahlia, an Asian Diasporic artist from the US, and Elisa, an Italian artist based in the Netherlands, collectively research how a collapse in traditional poetics of center and periphery produces new forces for experiences of individual and collective bodies in space. 

Dahlia Li is a trans Chinese diasporic artist and writer currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She works primarily out of dance, poetics, and moving image practices that explore histories of diaspora and alternative cosmologies of the erotic. She is finishing a PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania where her dissertation, Caress without Body, is a series of performance ethnographies on dance as embodied diasporic technology. Additionally, she is writing a book-length collection of personal essays that explores psychoanalysis, time, gendered embodiment, and the fleshly afterlives of 20th-century Asian wars and revolutions. She collaborates extensively with dance artists Be Heintzman Hope, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, and Yin Mei.

Elisa Zuppini (Italy/Netherlands) is a choreographer and movement researcher based in Amsterdam. She graduated from the SNDO school for new dance development in Amsterdam in June 2018. Through her movement practice De.sy.re., she creates pieces for various locations, such as the club, academic conferences, the museum and the theatre. Her research focuses on the constant transformation of the human body, the ability to change and be changed. Since February 2019 Elisa is part of the ICK - Artist Space and was involved in curating Body Drop (2019), in collaboration with the Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE) and her performance Himalaya premiered during the ICKFEST 2019. In 2020 she participated in the residency programme New Adventures in co-production with Dansmakers Amsterdam.