This is an event hosted by the critical humanities platform Bras Basah Open School of Theory and Philosophy. More details here.

Welcome to our TheoryFILM "online super tech support group"! This will be a session that varies somewhat from the usual, firstly because it will take place completely online on Zoom, and also because we've planned a number of activities that we will all do together as a workshop-group. We're testing out a format to see what kinds of practices we can co-create online if this will have to be the case for subsequent sessions for some time to come. It's also meant to be a support group of sorts for anyone who might be on quarantine or issued a stay-home notice or is doing physical distancing. [Because of this, we are limiting the number of participants to 20 -- so we don't stress out our internet bandwidths.]

This TheoryFILM session will examine the choreography of illness, community and border control against the backdrop of a growing pandemic, and the kinds of daily rituals we keep as our own iterative performance scores. How is sickness/health choreographed on screen, in our daily life, and in state practice? How does the state attempt to regiment and realign both mobile and immobile bodies in the wake of a border-crossing viral bedfellow? What are resistive gestures of solidarity when strategies of countering virality are only considered efficacious in terms of surveillance, atomization and physical solitude?

We will be sharing a number of short "viral" video vignettes from across the region to do with dancing & disease, which will be paired with a chapter from Kélina Gotman's Choreomania: Dance and Disorder (Oxford University Press, 2017). As it moves through a dizzying array of geographies and dance archives, Choreomania traces the emergence and spread of the choreomania ('dancing mania') through colonial medical and ethnographic circles, showing how fantasies of instability—and of the 'Oriental' other—haunted western scientific modernity. Through an epidemiology of dance and its intersections with social disorder, political agitation, anti-European revolt and decolonization, Kélina's text rethinks epidemic madness and the organization and disorganization of bodies and disciplines in the modern age.

Through screenings, small-group discussions, collective mappings and a few participatory exercises, this workshop will take a closer look at border regimentation and unruly, locomotive bodies, and frame this through the logics of choreography. This session will be co-facilitated by Corrie Tan (National University of Singapore/King's College London) and Shawn Chua (Bras Basah Open).

** This is a private event limited to 20 participants. To participate, please register via the link provided below to confirm your attendance. The confirmation email will contain the readings for this session, as well as the Zoom meeting details.

Registration link: https://forms.gle/MDp3yMY7ir55f1PE7