Jonathan González is an artist working at the intersections of choreography, sculpture, text, and time-based media. Their practice speculates on circumstances of land, economies of labor, and the conditions that figure black and contemporary life through research-based processes synthesized through performance.
Their writings have been published by Contact Quarterly, Cultured Magazine, deem journal, among others.
They have received fellowships from the Rauschenberg Foundation, Art Matters Foundation, Foundation for Contemporarye Art and the Jerome Foundation, and were an artist in residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, Trinidad Performance Institute, Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Shandaken Project on Governors Island.
González is a graduate of LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts in Classical Vocal Performance and has a B.A. from Trinity College in Africana Studies and Theatre/Dance, a certificate in Dance Theatre from Trinity Laban Conservatoire, and an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College.
MFA Dance
Graduate Seminar—Spring
7001
If ambivalence refers to “having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone,” what might dancing ambivalently imply? Why might the desire to dance ambivalently present itself? What are the social and aesthetic concerns of an ambivalent Dance historical lineage?
In Arabella Stanger’s, Dancing on Violent Ground: Utopia as Dispossession, Stanger analyzes how state and federal agencies collaborated with Euro-American Modernist pioneers of Dance and Architecture. Reviewing seminal dance works like that of Martha Graham’s, Frontier (1935), and Graham’s collaboration with the United States Indian Removal Act (IRA), Stanger illustrates how contemporary techniques of Euro-American dance and choreography, such as “taking up space”, are referential to choreographies of urban renewal and settler colonialism. Following this underside of reading Euro-American dance history, Saidiya Hartman’s, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, identifies how mandated dances served as a measure of management and surveillance upon the enslaved in the plantation economy and Great Migration passage aboard ships of the Trans-Atlantic. Within Hartman’s speculative and archival text, a counter-archive of Dance is presented to readers – an archive resistant to colonial impositions (Jasmine Johnson, Black Laws of Dance) – wherein the testimony of an enslaved woman, Mary Glover, appears through an act of refusal to dance: “[…] the promotion of innocent amusements and harmless pleasures was a central strategy in the slave owner’s effort to cultivate contented subjection. However, the complicity of pleasure with the instrumental ends of slaveholder domination led those like Mary Glover to declare emphatically, “I don't want [that kind of pleasure].” (Hartman, 11)
How might an orientation of ambivalence lead us to towards a multidirectional understanding of dance and choreography?
How might thinking with dance, beyond the dominant discourse of consent and pleasure, reveal Dance’s entanglement with aesthetic, sociopolitical, and necro-political practices for disciplining the body?
Reaching for an underside comprehension and counter-archive of Dance, inspired by the orientation of ambivalence, students will engage scholarship across forms of film, essay, poetry, image, sound, performance and choreographic exercises. A dialogical setting will allow us to familiarize ourselves to the coursework, and pose queries of its relation to our own ongoing scholarship. The conclusion of the semester will require an original work in response to the course material.
