In her book Contemporary PerforMemory: Dancing Through Spacetime, Historical Trauma and Diaspora in the 21st Century (2020), interdisciplinary scholar and artist, Professor Layla Zami coined the concept of perforMemory, both as a noun and as a verb. Drawing on interdisciplinary theory, interviews, performance analysis, and personal storytelling, and moving across geographies and historical entanglements she examines how contemporary dance-makers engage with historical traumas, corporeality and diaspora to reshape memory and imagine new futures.

In her talk, Zami will discuss selected performing and visual arts by Black diasporic artists grounded in African American, Caribbean and Afropean communities, with particular attention to women. Engaging Black Performance Studies and Sound Studies, she will examine how tropes of freedom, possibility and spacetime are (re-)negotiated through the intersections of traumatic memory and future-oriented artistic practice.

This event is also available via Zoom. (https://uiowa.zoom.us/j/99429063111?pwd=6kdfMltXh7s5t9ieDbBJJrhYKMv4Ly.1 or using the QR code in the poster)