Jeffrey Friedman

Professor of Dance Studies
Dance Department
Mason Gross School of the Arts

Key topics

TOPIC SET 1: Dance history topics on a variety of historical eras and geographic locations such as pre-historic dance, Greek/Roman dance, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque dance; The Romantic and Russian Classical Ballet; Sergei Diaghilev and the avant garde Russian Ballet. Isadora Duncan and the foremothers of modern dance such as Martha Graham/Doris Humphrey/Charles Weidman/Jose Limon and Alwin Nikolai. German modern dance and its influence on American modern dance; Jewish women's Leftist Dance in the 1930s. Avant garde post-modern dance in the 1960s and 70s. African and African diasporic dance, especialy focusing on dance by enslaved Africans in the American South; the development of Haitian voudun (often called "voodoo") and Afro-Brazilian capoeira and sacred orixa dances of candomble. Asian dance forms, especially in regards to the effects of colonialisims, including Balinese, Filipino, Korean and Japanese dance (including Noh and Kabuki dance-theater); Middle-eastern belly dance, the Turkish Whirling Dervish dance, and the effects of Orientalist ideologies; Hawai'ian hula (sacred, touristic and politically-resistant forms) and New Zealand Maoir indigenous dance forms.

TOPIC SET 2: Jeff also specializes in oral history interviews with dancers and has a 30-to-45 -minute lecture that includes a short dance-theater performance of his oral histories called "Muscle Memory." For more adult audiences, he also performs a more advanced version of this lecture titled "The Eros of Oral History," discussing his innovative approach to oral history AS an embodied performance, citing cognitive linguistics.

TOPIC SET 3: Jeff has also branched out to include lecture topics on dance and disability, speaking to issues of aging and chronic illness, with a particular focus on Parkinson's disease and dance; as well as theories and discussion on why dance performance is ideal for "normalizing" the disabled body. This lecture can include a very short 10-minute "mini-dance class" that focuses on increasing brain plasticity through shorted seated movement sequences.

Biography

Jeff Friedman is a dance artist and choreographer with a PhD. in dance history and theory from the University of California. He specializes in oral history interviewing methods, focusing on documenting and preserving the life-stories of dance community members. Jeff was a Fulbright Senior Research and Teaching Fellow in Frankfurt, Germany in 2010, has published in the U.K., Germany, Spain, Korea and New Zealand, where he was guest senior lecturer at the University of Auckland in 2005, and has performed his lecture "The Eros of Oral History" in Hamburg, Leipzig and Frankfurt, Germany; the Silesian Dance Festival in Bytom, Poland; Coventry and Roehampton Universities, England; Auckland and Victoria Universities, New Zealand; Calgary and York Universities, Canada; and throughout the U.S. His collection of dance oral histories at the San Francisco Museum of Performance & Design celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2013. Jeff is currently the director of the Mason Gross Integrated Dance Collaboratory, specializing in research, teaching and community engagement on the topics of disability and dance.

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