Speculative Choreographies: Bodies, Economies, and Movement in a World in Flux

About This Event

This conference explores how dance speculates—how it reflects, resists, and reimagines—the forces that shape our contemporary world, including migration, memory, media, markets, and the social choreography of bodies across borders, platforms, and stages. Set in Los Angeles, a region with indigenous populations, diverse diasporic communities, histories of resistance, and global entertainment industries, it offers fertile ground for rethinking dance's entanglement with questions of value, visibili

The conference examines how bodies move through—with and against—systems of control, extraction, discipline, and erasure in a post-truth moment shaped by spectacle, migration, media, labor, and ecological extremes. It asks what possibilities emerge when movement is imagined as an affirmative form of world-making. The site is the original Tongva village of Puvungna, meaning 'gathering place,' featured in Tongva/Gabrieleno/Acjachemen creation stories and emergence narratives. Conference co-chairs

Topics & Focus Areas