Kathleen A. Spanos

• Doctor of Philosophy
• University of Maryland, College Park

The term “dances of resistance” refers to dances around the world that are involved in strategic processes of liberation, activism, or racial, social, or ethnic identity formation for marginalized populations. This chapter discusses how dance is a valuable source of power for the socially excluded and how dancers implement various kinesthetic strat...

Frevo is an energetic dance from Recife, the capital of Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco. Frevo is a dance of resistance because it narrates complex notions of identity that contribute to social empowerment through strategic processes of liberation for marginalized groups. The carnivalesque dance originates from the Brazilian martial art o...

This article is an ethnographic investigation of Montserrat's "triangular" cultural heritage, comprised of Irish, African, and Montserratian identities. I examine the annual St. Patrick's Festival and short-lived African Music Festival (2013-2014) through a performance studies lens to understand how national symbols, masquerades, and music and danc...

Frevo dance comes from the cities of Recife and Olinda in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco. We expand on previous research by Valéria Vicente to apply Homi Bhabha’s concepts of pedagogy and performativity to a study of how frevo dancers fight for multiplicity and individuality. We explore how the group Guerreiros do Passo (Frevo Dance...

On 17 March, the last day of Montserrat's annual St. Patrick's Festival, locals and tourists gather at the culminating Slave Feast event to commemorate the island's attempted slave rebellion on that same day in 1768. At the Slave Feast, festivalgoers enjoy local foods, buy handmade crafts, and watch artists perform music, dance, and poetry. Masquer...

How can we create more inclusive spaces in the field of dance? This book presents a framework for dance practitioners and researchers working in diverse dance cultures to navigate academia and the professional dance field. The framework is based on the idea of "cultural confluences," conjuring up an image of bodies of water meeting and flowing int...

Tes Slominski Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2020 ISBN: 978-0-8195-7929-4 (paperback) In Trad Nation: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Irish Traditional Music , Tes Slominski explores the origins and effects of ethnic nationalism in the Irish traditional music scene over the past century, primarily in Ireland and the United States. Slomin...

This essay is a reflection on my experience in Pernambuco in 2018 studying regional popular dances, including frevo, capoeira, cavalo marinho and maracatu rural. My research focused on how these dances are “dances of resistance” that demonstrate strategies for decolonization of the mind and the body – both the individual body and the collective bod...

In this dissertation, I demonstrate how improvisations within the structures of performance during Montserrat’s annual festivals produce “rhythms of change” that contribute to the formation of cultural identities. Montserrat is a small island of 39.5 square miles in the Caribbean’s Leeward Islands, and a volcanic disaster in the 1990s led to the lo...

Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices. Edited by DeeReynolds and MatthewReason. Bristol, UK: Intellect Ltd., 2012; pp. 224. $43 paper. - Volume 55 Issue 2 - Kathleen Spanos

This paper addresses the ways in which Irish dance creates a common landscape and shared rhythm that is able to transcend geographical boundaries, producing cultural knowledge and establishing connections within and across diasporic communities. The Irish step dancer navigates a soundscape, or a musical "floor," through audible foot movement, and a...

Planes of Composition: Dance, Theory, and the Global, an expansion of TDR's Dance Composes Philosophy Composes Dance series on new choreography (vol. 50, no. 4; vol. 51, no. 2), is precipitated by questions of mobilization that arise when the circulation of bodies and capital in the contemporary global marketplace is understood through the perspect...

We tested the perceptual reality of synaesthesia in two phases. During the first phase, four color-grapheme synaesthetes reported on the synaesthetically induced colors of the letters A-Z and the numbers 0–9 in two sessions. We computed consistency within and between the two sessions and identified letters and numbers whose colors are consistently...

We tested the perceptual reality of synaesthesia in two phases. During the first phase, four color-grapheme synaesthetes reported on the synaesthetically induced colors of the letters A--Z and the numbers 0--9 in two sessions. We computed consistency within and between the two sessions and identified letters and numbers whose colors are consistentl...