A Colombian-born multidisciplinary artist, director, and choreographer, Garnica—along with her partner, Shige Moriya—are the co-founders of LEIMAY and the LEIMAY Ensemble. Their works include live installations, performances, sculptures, publications, research, and community projects and have been presented at BAM, The New Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The Watermill Center, HERE, Japan Society, and The Asian Museum of San Francisco, as well as in Colombia, France, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and The Netherlands. Garnica has also been nominated for the USA Artists Fellowship and the Herb Alpert Award and was a recipient of the Van Lier Fellowship for extraordinary stage directors. She has participated in the Bessie Schoenberg Individual Choreographers Residency at The Yard, the Watermill Center Residency Programs, and the HERE Artist in Residency Program. She was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California, Riverside, and was recently published in The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance for her article, “LEIMAY, CAVE, and the New York Butoh Festival.” SLC, 2022–
Undergraduate Courses 2024-2025
Dance
Butoh Through LEIMAY Ludus
Component—Spring
DNCE 5541
This course is an introduction to butoh through the lens of LEIMAY’s Ludus practice, which is the embodied research being taught today by LEIMAY Artistic Director Ximena Garnica. Butoh is a Japanese performing-art form that was created by Tatsumi Hijikata in the 1950s and 1960s. The course will start with an introduction to Hijikata’s butoh-fu, a choreographic method that physicalizes imagery through words. The course will then expand into LEIMAY’s Ludus practice, using multiple physical explorations to embody imagery and enlarge states of consciousness, enabling multiple realms of perception while challenging Eurocentric notions of body, space, and time. Each dancer’s physical potential will be cultivated to develop a unique movement language that is rooted in butoh's ideas of transformation. Simultaneously, we will focus on the conditioning of a conductive body through the identification of the body’s own weight in relation to gravity, along with the cultivation of internal rhythm and fluidity. Together, we will decentralize self-centered 34 Dance approaches to movement and explore the possibilities of “being danced by” instead of “I dance,” “becoming spacebody” rather than occupying space. We will challenge our body’s materiality and enliven our sensorium through listening to the rhythms and textures of the nonhuman. And we will use impossibility as a spark to enrich the ways in which we create and inhabit the world. This course is based on principles developed through Garnica’s nearly two decades of study of butoh. Historical and cultural context will be offered throughout the course. This class is open to dance, theatre, and any other students who are curious and interested in discovering alternative approaches to body and movement practices.
Faculty
Previous Courses
Dance
Performance Project
Component—Year
Performance Project is a component where a visiting artist or company is invited to create a work with students or to set an existing piece of choreography. The works are performed for the College community at the end of the semester.