What's On

Dancers on Film: Maya Deren in Context

GETTY CENTER

Museum Lecture Hall

This is a past event

In 1986, the film screening, "Maya Deren in Context," at The Kitchen placed the groundbreaking filmmaker among European and American avant-gardes. Yet Deren’s experimental films were also deeply influenced by the dances and rituals of Haiti, and her early work for the choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, who studied and made dances reflective of the African diaspora in the Americas.

The third program in the film series, Dancers on Film, revisits this 1986 screening with a focus on the Black dancers in these films and the impact they had on their creative communities. In this conversation, research specialist Kristin Juarez, scholar James Smalls, and multidisciplinary artist Kandis Williams screen films—including a selection of Deren shorts, experimental films from the 1930s and 1940s, and Williams's Annexation Tango (2020)—and discuss the influence of Black dance within an ongoing lineage of experimental film.

James Smalls is professor and chair of visual arts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research and publications consider the intersections of race, gender, and queer sexualities in the art of 19th-century Europe and in the art and visual culture of the Black diaspora.

Kandis Williams is a visual artist whose practice spans collage, sculpture, film, performance, writing, publishing, and curating. She explores and deconstructs critical theory around race, nationalism, authority, and eroticism.

Kristin Juarez is a research specialist for the African American Art History Initiative at the Getty Research Institute.

The conversation will be available on the Getty Research Institute YouTube channel following the event.

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