Re/Choreographing Worlds in Violent Times

Ciudad de México/Mexico City
June 22 – June 25, 2027 

Conference Co-Chairs: 

Jose Luis Reynoso Bello (University of California Riverside) and
María Sicarú Vásquez Orozco (Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México)

With Collaboration From 

Alonso Alarcón Múgica (Coordinación Nacional de Danza, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura)

Anáhuac (“land close to water[s]”) was the territory where the Mexicas (colonially known as the Aztecs) founded their capital, Tenochtitlan. It represented a multicultural and cosmopolitan epicenter where people from across Mesoamerica conducted business, diplomacy, and cultural exchanges. Five centuries after the start of its colonization in 1521, this land, now known as Mexico City, continues to be a vibrant meeting place of exchange for people from the world over—a hub for transnational commerce, a platform for national and international politics, a global center for the arts. In its physical urbanite body—its historical and contemporary architecture—the cosmopolitan city retains visible remnants of its violent histories of colonization and postcolonial modernization. The city’s complex history serves as a microcosm of forms of violence caused by economic inequities, endemic corruption, drug and human trafficking, sexual and gender biases across Mexico.

In 2027, what does it mean for la Ciudad de México, with its histories of colonial and contemporary forms of violence, to host an international dance conference in a historical time of ongoing violent neocolonialist projects of conquest across the globe? In the Americas, recent military and political incursions into Venezuela, and similar threats to Panama, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Canada have revived memories of previous manifestations of nineteenth-century doctrines of hemispheric expansionism for two centuries. This pattern extends to countries around the world. Nation-states with imperialist aspirations continue long-standing efforts, some with renewed force, to redraw geographical maps, reshape regional politics, and demolish democratic institutions among and within countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. At different moments, these projects of expansionism and extractivism have prompted increased levels of tolerance to individual, structural, and state-sanctioned forms of violence, cruelty, and necropolitics, manifested in the treatment of entire ethnic groups; people who experience forced displacement, immigration, asylum seeking; women, children, and elderly people who live in conditions of vulnerability; people of color, indigenous, Black, and queer people; people with disabilities and those who experience poverty; the non-human, the environment. What are some of the precedents to the cyclical intensification and normalization of different forms of violence and resistance to them, between countries, within nations, within communities—including dance communities? What are some of the artistic, social, political, and economic structures and ideologies that enable individual and systemic acts of aggression in the quotidian, from socially stratified dance aesthetic hierarchies to histories of gender violence, from histories of war and displacement to genocides? What are the resistive strategies and forms of solidarity people and dancers employ to survive, thrive, reimagine, restructure, rechoreograph their worlds?

Conference Co-Chairs

José Luis Reynoso Bello is Associate Professor of Critical Dance Studies at the University of California Riverside. He was the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Dance Studies in/and the Humanities at Northwestern University (2012-2014). He completed his doctoral degree in Culture and Performance (specialization in Dance Studies) and Masters of Fine Arts in dance and choreography at the University of California Los Angeles. José Luis also earned a master’s degree in Psychology from California State University Los Angeles. His research interests include how narratives (mythologies) that dancers and dance scholars create about their practices also serve to form a sense of who they are, to distinguish themselves from others, and to position themselves and others within social, artistic, and academic hierarchies. He has published articles on dance and performance in Latin America, the United States, and Europe. His book, Dancing Mestizo Modernisms: Choreographing Postcolonial and Postrevolutionary Mexico won the Dance Studies Association’s Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research in 2024.

María Sicarú Vásquez Orozco, Ph.D. (Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México) earned a Bachelor’s degree in Art History in 2013, a Master’s degree in Art Studies in 2018, and a Ph.D. in the History and Critical Theory of Art in 2022, all from the Universidad Iberoamericana. She has worked as a registrar at the National Museum of Art and as a cultural manager. Her research focuses on dance representation, visual culture, imaginaries, and identities. She is a member of the Dance Studies Association and the Dancing with Decolonization Conference board. She is also a member of the National Council of Dance and the Dance Research Network in Mexico. She coordinates the BA in Art History program and is an academic manager in the Art Department at Universidad Iberoamericana.