Trans-Screens of Gender and Jewishness in Jill Soloway's Transparent: Post-Network TV and the Screendance Scene

This essay analyzes the artful insertion of screendance scenes in Season Two of Jill Soloway’s Amazon hit, Transparent (2014- ), highlighting how bodies and camera choreograph affective connections core to the plot in this televisual portrait of a Jewish American family. In doing so, I underscore a layered screenic trans-ness that conjoins circular manipulations of time and bodily action to overlay transgender and transhistorical experiences as co-constitutive themes

White Nose, (Post) Bawdy Bodies and the Un/dancing Sexy Jewess

"White Nose, (Post) Bawdy Bodies and the Un/Dancing Sexy Jewess" looks at asks how and why the 19th century figure of the exotic Jewess reappears in progressive US pious and porn subcultures, recent cabaret and burlesque acts, mainstream dance films, and magazine spoofs of the sexier Israeli sabra to articulate an updated Jewish femininity through various techniques of parody. I argue that today's Sexy Jewess embodies the most recent addition of a specifically American lineage of Jewish jokes predicated on an excessive and unattractive Jewish female body, and assess how the self-professed sexiness of contemporary Jewish female performers both challenges and reiterates long-standing cultural anxieties tied to race, gender, class, and sexuality. The phenomenon of the Sexy Jewess raises questions about the so-called `post-assimilatory' and `post-feminist' implications of Jewish female performance modalities that tweak and play with stereotypes even as they insist upon a double Jewish and gender difference. My research: 1) introduces how performers complicate self-critical jokes of the inferior Jewish female body through both marking and modifying a Jewish otherness, 2) documents the techniques Jewish female performers employ to mimic and master `sexiness' and, 3) theorizes how performances of Jewish female identity use the body to both participate in and parody `appropriate' femininity toward distinct ends. In order to question the viability of sexy ruse as a critical means of performing Jewishness, I draw on and intervene in three interrelated fields: Jewish Studies, Gender and Feminist studies, and Dance and Performance studies.In order to contextualize the Sexy Jewess construct and its relationships to spectacles of US Jewish femininity, I take a dance studies approach that combines methods of choreographic analysis, participant performance ethnography, and archival work on genealogies of Jewish female performers to theorize how the body renders meaning in historical and contemporary contexts. I use print and online reviews, and performance ephemera like program notes, posters, photographs, giveaways, blogs and even tweets to discuss the textual and visual material surrounding live and online Jewess performances. My project also makes use of personal interviews with performers, choreographer-directors, and audiences as well as focus groups among viewers with ranging familiarity with dance and Jewishness to better understand how Jewish female shtick operates from a diverse set of perspectives. To frame my research, I borrow from scholarship on Jewishness and humor, gender and feminist studies dance and performance studies to analyze sexiness and funniness in relation to femininity, race, and social mobility

Towards planetary performance pedagogy: digital companions in multipolar classrooms

This article proposes ‘planetary performance pedagogy’ as a theoretical and practical framework for spatially and temporally distributed teaching and training in higher education, combining remote and experiential modes of interaction to facilitate an awareness of multiple planetary perspectives. Our argument deploys the creative potential of several concepts that we develop within this framework: the idea of the planetary classroom, the digital companion, and the multipolar performance prompt. We develop these concepts in relation to a series of experiments conducted by the authors using mobile technologies and video-conferencing platforms in performance pedagogy and training settings, connecting across different continents (North America, Australia, and Asia) with a focus of activity around a Practice Research class at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore.In using asynchronous communication over Telegram text and video messages, collaborative Google Docs, and multimodal performative lectures over Zoom, our research questions have taken on an even more urgent dimension as the COVID-19 pandemic has radically transformed the delivery of higher education, as well as our wider awareness of the economic and material flows of globalisation. But we argue that the experiential and somatic values of performance might find new manifestations in a technologically distributed teaching practice, complicating the binary model of face-to-face versus anonymous multi-user, and instead creating hybrid and multi-bodied ways of moving through and engaging with the world and its pedagogical and technological inequalities

Towards planetary performance pedagogy: digital companions in multipolar classrooms

This article proposes ‘planetary performance pedagogy’ as a theoretical and practical framework for spatially and temporally distributed teaching and training in higher education, combining remote and experiential modes of interaction to facilitate an awareness of multiple planetary perspectives. Our argument deploys the creative potential of several concepts that we develop within this framework: the idea of the planetary classroom, the digital companion, and the multipolar performance prompt. We develop these concepts in relation to a series of experiments conducted by the authors using mobile technologies and video-conferencing platforms in performance pedagogy and training settings, connecting across different continents (North America, Australia, and Asia) with a focus of activity around a Practice Research class at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore.In using asynchronous communication over Telegram text and video messages, collaborative Google Docs, and multimodal performative lectures over Zoom, our research questions have taken on an even more urgent dimension as the COVID-19 pandemic has radically transformed the delivery of higher education, as well as our wider awareness of the economic and material flows of globalisation. But we argue that the experiential and somatic values of performance might find new manifestations in a technologically distributed teaching practice, complicating the binary model of face-to-face versus anonymous multi-user, and instead creating hybrid and multi-bodied ways of moving through and engaging with the world and its pedagogical and technological inequalities

Towards planetary performance pedagogy: digital companions in multipolar classrooms

This article proposes ‘planetary performance pedagogy’ as a theoretical and practical framework for spatially and temporally distributed teaching and training in higher education, combining remote and experiential modes of interaction to facilitate an awareness of multiple planetary perspectives. Our argument deploys the creative potential of several concepts that we develop within this framework: the idea of the planetary classroom, the digital companion, and the multipolar performance prompt. We develop these concepts in relation to a series of experiments conducted by the authors using mobile technologies and video-conferencing platforms in performance pedagogy and training settings, connecting across different continents (North America, Australia, and Asia) with a focus of activity around a Practice Research class at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore.In using asynchronous communication over Telegram text and video messages, collaborative Google Docs, and multimodal performative lectures over Zoom, our research questions have taken on an even more urgent dimension as the COVID-19 pandemic has radically transformed the delivery of higher education, as well as our wider awareness of the economic and material flows of globalisation. But we argue that the experiential and somatic values of performance might find new manifestations in a technologically distributed teaching practice, complicating the binary model of face-to-face versus anonymous multi-user, and instead creating hybrid and multi-bodied ways of moving through and engaging with the world and its pedagogical and technological inequalities

Towards planetary performance pedagogy: digital companions in multipolar classrooms

This article proposes ‘planetary performance pedagogy’ as a theoretical and practical framework for spatially and temporally distributed teaching and training in higher education, combining remote and experiential modes of interaction to facilitate an awareness of multiple planetary perspectives. Our argument deploys the creative potential of several concepts that we develop within this framework: the idea of the planetary classroom, the digital companion, and the multipolar performance prompt. We develop these concepts in relation to a series of experiments conducted by the authors using mobile technologies and video-conferencing platforms in performance pedagogy and training settings, connecting across different continents (North America, Australia, and Asia) with a focus of activity around a Practice Research class at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore.In using asynchronous communication over Telegram text and video messages, collaborative Google Docs, and multimodal performative lectures over Zoom, our research questions have taken on an even more urgent dimension as the COVID-19 pandemic has radically transformed the delivery of higher education, as well as our wider awareness of the economic and material flows of globalisation. But we argue that the experiential and somatic values of performance might find new manifestations in a technologically distributed teaching practice, complicating the binary model of face-to-face versus anonymous multi-user, and instead creating hybrid and multi-bodied ways of moving through and engaging with the world and its pedagogical and technological inequalities