Parallel Practices: A Double Workshop in Movement/Dance and Language/Writing with Milka Djordjevich and Litia Perta

Photo credit: Left, Litia Perta. Right, Milka Djordjevich, from her installation titled "Mirror Stage."

Explore how art, writing, dance, and performance can be in dialogue with one another  through an experimental double workshop in using language and movement with Milka Djordjevich and Litia Perta! 


Art writer, theorist, teacher, and curator Litia Perta, well-known in the art world for her genre-defying, shape-shifting, but relentlessly rigorous work in opening up the way language is presented and theorized (e.g. the multi-part “Just Speak Nearby,” a bi-coastal continually reformulating exhibition-conference-performance experiment where she extended Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept of proximity as feminist/post-colonial ethos), is currently working on “Parallel Practices,” a project intended as a project/space to show the many things artists and writers and musicians and performers make to nourish themselves and each other. Interested in artists’ work in mediums that parallel, but are not, the ones for which they are known (e.g. a painter making clothes; a writer performing; a sculptor gardening; a potter writing, etc.), Perta’s project can be described a form of investigating the “care of the self (and others)” that gives the artists pleasure, community, and reflection. One way to interpret Perta’s project is to imagine, fully, the ethos of art-into-life in a time of precarity.

 
LA-based choreographer/dancer Milka Djordjevich is among the most important and innovative dance artists in the contemporary dance scene. Her work, especially with women performers, extends post-modern dance’s project of incorporating everyday movement where the gestures, weight and habits of the body are used to challenge the hierarchical codification of the technique-based, highly-trained, specialized choreography of modern dance. In dances that are simultaneously diegetic and durational—Djordjevich presents bodies, especially women’s bodies, moving in concert to express the poetry and rhythm of everyday life; implicitly critiquing traditional performatives of hierarchies, such as gender. Instead, Djordjevich combines aspects of the phatic, the ritual, the semi-conscious, the off-handed, to render through bodies the complexity of emotional states like pleasures or solidarity or reticence or persistence as aesthetic and social atmosphere. Her work has been presented both in important dance venues such as REDCAT in Los Angeles and the Chocolate Factory in New York; as well as site-specifically in public non-art spaces and private residences.
 
Event Description: In this experimental double workshop for an embodied exploration of movement and language, we learn about the work of Milka Djordjevich and Litia Perta, who will each conduct a workshop based on their primary disciplines of, respectively, dance and writing. Beginning with a presentation of Djordjevich’s dance work in a lecture setting, we will undo and re-imagine the spatial and disciplinary segregation of art forms by transitioning to a movement workshop with Djordjevich in another location. In the second half of this event, Perta will respond to Djordjevich’s presentation/workshop and discuss her thinking on “parallel practices.” Our event will culminate in a second workshop focused on writing, conducted by Perta, in a third location. For more information or questions, please contact Prof. Simon Leung at leungss@uci.edu.


Event Schedule:

6:00 – Introduction to the dance work of Milka Djordjevich
6:30 – Movement workshop with Milka Djordjevich (in Art Dept Courtyard)
7:15 – Response and conversation with Litia Perta
7:30 – Transition into writing workshop with Litia Perta (in ART 165)
8:30 – Event ends

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Simon Leung, Professor of Art

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