TDPS Speaker Series

About the Series

The TDPS Speaker Series presents a diverse range of lectures and conversations with artists and scholars from across the fields of theater, dance, and performance studies. Events generally take place on select Thursday afternoons throughout the academic year. All events are free and open to the public.

Please check this page or our calendar for upcoming Speaker Series events. To receive event reminders, subscribe to our email list.

Spring 2021 Events

'Attending to Black Death:' Black Women’s Bodies in the Archive and the Afterlife of Captivity (April 29, 2021)

This talk considers the archives of slavery, their afterlives, and the future archives of black death, to track the technologies that colonial and state authorities deploy to obliterate their culpability in black deaths.

Against Isolation: Pandemic Connections through the Arts (March 15, 2021)

The 2020 pandemic scattered us into disconnected spaces, interrupting our physical interactions along with our art-making. Responding to these times, performance makers Erika Chong Shuch and Amara Tabor-Smith have each created intimate connections within their communities of artistic practice, among isolated elders and individuals.

Anne Anlin Cheng & Kevin Quashie in Conversation: Racialized Embodiment & Political Life Beyond Resistance (February 11, 2021)

Anne Anlin Cheng is Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University and affiliated with the Program in Gender and Sexuality and the Committee on Film Studies. Kevin Quashie is a professor in the Department of English at Brown University who teaches Black cultural and literary studies.

Performing Cultural Exchange on Ohlone Homelands in Huichin (February 1, 2021)

Director of Miriki Performing Arts (Pauline Lampton), co-founder of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust (Corrina Gould), and Northern Pomo Dancer (Erica Estrada) will participate in a panel discussion on the role of cultural exchange on the UC Berkeley campus, a campus that obtained its land through the Morrill Land-Grant Act and resides on the Ohlone Homelands in Huichin.

Previous Series Highlights

The House of the Spirits: Isabel Allende in conversation with Caridad Svich

Author Isabel Allende and Caridad Svich, theater-maker and playwright, discuss The House of the Spirits in its may iterations: novel, play, and the staged performance by the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, directed by Michael Moran at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Playhouse. Michael Moran moderates.

Dancing with Robots: Expressivity in Natural and Artificial Systems

Movement seems to encode information. How does this work? We know that animals, including humans, use the motion of counterparts to produce coordinated, social behaviors. But how do we resolve the discrete measures of communication and information theory with the continuous laws of motion and mechanics?