Image courtesy of Laura Risk.
The pilot for a Speaker Series took place in the fall of 2024 led by cluster member Laura Risk. Risk curated and hosted an artist workshop-performance-presentation that focused on sustainable working conditions and sustainable creative practices for freelance artists, specifically in the traditional arts. Internationally acclaimed dancer and dance researcher Nic Gareiss presented a talk entitled “Corporeal Sustainability, Movement as Sound, and Queer Dancestry” and led a participatory movement workshop. He was joined by Appalachian fiddler Jack Devereux, an Appalachian musician and graduate of the Berklee College of Music.
Gareiss drew on thirty years of ethnographic study and performance of percussive clog, step, and flatfoot dance to reflect on the experience of his moving body in cultivating sustainable creative practice making contemporary work in folk dance forms. An interdisciplinary artist and performer who collaborates with musicians in both concert hall and recording studio, Nic spoke about the queering of disciplinary boundaries implicated in his work as a dancer who considers how movement is or is not valued in the world of sound, and how percussive dance blurs ableist sensory delineations of sight, hearing, and touch. Nic demonstrated this in dialogue with his research as a queer nonbinary person within forms that have historically erased 2SLGBTQIA+ contributions, outlining his queer dancestry of audible gesture across time, corporeal cultural practice, and geography.
About Nic Gareiss: One of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch,” Nic Gareiss (he/they) has been hailed by the New York Times for his “dexterous melding of Irish and Appalachian dance” and called “the most inventive and expressive step dancer on the scene” by the Boston Herald. Nic has performed in seventeen countries including at London’s Barbican Centre, the Irish National Concert Hall, the Munich Philharmonic, and the Kennedy Center. Holding degrees in music and anthropology from Central Michigan University and a MA in ethnochoreology from the University of Limerick, Nic’s thesis was the first piece of scholarship to query the experience of LGBTQ+ Irish step dancers. Publications include Queer Dance: Meanings & Makings ed. by Clare Croft on Oxford University Press and the journals Critical Studies in Improvisation and Americas: a Hemispheric Music Journal.
This speaker series activates CLCF’s second theme “Creativity: Artistic Responses to AI in a Digital World,” which focuses on how artists’ projects can inform and contribute to pathways for building more equitable futures in the changing world of digital labour.
Read more about Risk’s research here.
