Festival Flamenco Alburquerque History Conference Keynote Speakers Announced

The National Institute of Flamenco and Festival Flamenco Alburquerque are honored to announce 8th Biennial New Perspectives in Flamenco History and Research Symposium keynote speakers Dr. Brenda Dixon Gottschild and Meira Goldberg.

Photo: Ryan Collerd for Pew Center For Arts & Heritage, courtesy of Dr. Dixon Gottschild

Brenda Dixon Gottschild is the author of Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts; Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era (winner of the 2001 Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Scholarly Dance Publication); The Black Dancing Body–A Geography from Coon to Cool (winner, 2004 de la Torre Bueno prize for scholarly excellence in dance publication); and Joan Myers Brown and The Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina-A Biohistory of American Performance.

Additional honors include the Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Leadership in Dance Research (2008); a Leeway Foundation Transformation Grant (2009); the International Association for Blacks in Dance Outstanding Scholar Award (2013); the Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus Civil Rights Award (2016); and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2017).

A self-described anti-racist cultural worker utilizing dance as her medium, she is a freelance writer, consultant, performer, and lecturer; a former consultant and writer for Dance Magazine; and Professor Emerita of dance studies, Temple University. As an artist-scholar she coined the phrase, “choreography for the page,” to describe her embodied, subjunctive approach to research writing.

Nationwide and abroad she curates post-performance reflexive dialogues, writes critical performance essays, performs self-created solos, and collaborates with her husband, choreographer/dancer Hellmut Gottschild, in a genre they developed and titled “movement theater discourse.”

More about her work can be found at www.bdixongottschild.com and Facebook - Brenda Dixon Gottschild

Photo Credit: Michael Penland, courtesy Dr. Meira Goldberg

K. MEIRA GOLDBERG is a flamenco performer, choreographer, teacher, and scholar. In 1980s Madrid, she performed nightly in flamenco tablaos alongside artists such as Antonio Canales, Arturo Pavón, El Indio Gitano, and Diego Carrasco. In the US, she was first dancer with Carlota Santana, Fred Darsow, and Pasión y Arte. Since going grey, she has instigated and collaborated on 100 Years of Flamenco in NYC (NYPL, 2013), Flamenco on the Global Stage (McFarland, 2015), The Global Reach of the Fandango in Music, Song and Dance (Cambridge Scholars, 2016), and Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados in Music, Song, and Dance (Cambridge Scholars, 2019). Forthcoming projects include the collaborations Flamenco: History, Performance and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Indígenas, africanos, roma y europeos. Ritmos transatlánticos en música, canto y baile (Música Oral del Sur, 2021), The Body Questions: Celebrating Flamenco’s Tangled Roots (Cambridge Scholars, 2021), and a monograph, Perra Mora: Love and War in the Body of a Woman. She teaches at FIT and is Scholar-in-Residence at the Foundation for Iberian Music (CUNY). Her monograph, Sonidos Negros: On the Blackness of Flamenco (Oxford University Press, 2019), won the Barnard Hewitt Award for best 2019 book in theatre history or cognate disciplines, as well as Honorable Mention for the Sally Banes Publication Award for best exploration of the intersections between theatre and dance/movement, both from the American Society for Theatre Research.

Learn more about the 8th Biennial New Perspectives in Flamenco History and Research Symposium here.

FESTIVAL FLAMENCO ALURQUERQUE: WHY THE "R" IS NOT EXTRA

Levi Romero, Inaugural New Mexico Poet Laureate, was kind enough to let us share his words about the spelling of Alburquerque with the "r":

"Alburquerque with the 'r' was the original spelling. Acclaimed Chicano writer Rudolfo Anaya used the spelling in the title of his 2006 novel 'Alburquerque.' The Chicano writers of the 60s and 70s used the colloquial pronunciation 'Alburque' in their poetry and literature. The contemporary popularization evolved among the cholo/as of the 80s to 'Burque.' We should continue to use the 'r' in Alburquerque, and not just in posters and poems."

Levi Romero, Inaugural New Mexico Poet Laureate