Congratulations to Dr. Joan Frosch, professor and director of the Center for World Arts, on being named a 2014-2015 Elizabeth Wood Dunlevie Honors Term Professor. Frosch was one of four distinguished UF faculty members to receive this appointment.
The Elizabeth Wood Dunlevie Honors Term Professorships are made possible by a generous endowment gift from Elizabeth Wood Dunlevie, a UF graduate. The goal of the program is to encourage the most esteemed UF faculty to participate in the University Honors Program as instructors and mentors. The endowment provides summer salary and support for the faculty members’ activities.
Frosch will offer a course titled Choreographing Africa: Inheritance, Imagination, and Innovation. Students will broaden their awareness of global culture and performance and will have the opportunity to interact with leaders in African dance via campus residencies and Skype sessions. Most importantly, they will have the chance to feel welcome in a dance studio to experience the movements, rhythms, traditions and innovations of African dance.
Dr. Frosch explains,”The best of the contemporary dance scene unpacks a fresh perspectives on the inner and outer realities that Africans—and the world—face. Some leaders of the experimental dance-theatre movement are activists—like Faustin Linyekula from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Panaibra Gabriel from Mozambique—whose creative work models societal change, growth, and innovation. Indeed, they organize their companies, transmit ideas to others, determine their choreographic methods, and build new networks in which to create work along re-imagined trajectories. More specifically, by recycling and repurposing tools of inheritance, such artists are crafting change and newly “choreographing Africa.” Such imagination and innovation can be applied in creative encounters of all sorts and we can learn from the example of such artists.”
