Gerald Casel: Work-in-Progress Showing

Join NCCAkron Resident Artist Gerald Casel for a work-in-progress showing!

This showing will be followed by an ice cream social, for an opportunity to taste the latest collaboration between NCCAkron artists and Chill Artisan Ice Cream: “Ube Chilling,” a ube- (purple yam popular in Filipino cuisine) and coconut-flavored ice cream.

This event is FREE, but registration is encouraged at the ticket link.

While in Akron, Gerald will build on his work Not About Race Dance, which critiques the unmarked predominance of whiteness in US postmodernism. It cites Neil Greenberg’s Not About AIDS Dance to connect the silence around the AIDS epidemic and the unacknowledged racial politics of postmodern dance. Occupying a space defined by white artists, it contests the structural endurance of white postmodernity by disidentifying with the white cube activated by Trisha Brown’s Locus and asks how difference can be made visible through choreographic structures that do not make space for brown and black bodies.

Gerald Casel was born in the Philippines and raised in California where he began dancing in public school. He received a BFA in Dance from The Juilliard School in 1991 and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2007 assisted by a fellowship from the Advanced Opportunity Program. His choreographic work complicates and provokes questions surrounding colonialism, cultural amnesia, whiteness and privilege, and the tensions between the invisible/perceived/obvious structures of power. As a teacher, he employs somatics as a way to amplify knowledge production through movement and to identify and undo coded systems of dance training that privilege Eurocentric canons and aesthetics.