Dance Lineages and Legacies: Embodied transmissions through the generations

Join our panel discussion with choreographer Lucy Guerin in conversation with French-Senegalese choreographer, dancer and pedagogue Germaine Acogny and philosopher, writer and dance critic Dr Philipa Rothfield, facilitated by dance curator and researcher Angela Conquet.

The panel will consider modes in which dance transfers its knowledges and legacies from one body onto the other, from one generation to the next, as well as how movement lineages inhabit a dancer’s body and memory depending on practice, culture and context.

If you would like to request an Auslan interpreter at this event, please email programs@acca.melbourne by 10am Wednesday 29 March 2023. Read more about access at ACCA here.

Contributor Biographies:

Senegalese and French, Germaine Acogny has evolved her own technique of Modern African Dance and is considered worldwide as the “mother of Contemporary African Dance”. From 1977 to 1982, she was the Artistic Director of Mudra Afrique, created by Maurice Bejart and the President L.S. Senghor in Dakar. She dances, choreographs and teaches all over the world and has become a forceful ambassador of African Dance and Culture. In 1997, Germaine Acogny was appointed Artistic Director of the Dance section of Afrique en Creation in Paris. With her husband Helmut Vogt, she created in Senegal the International Centre for Traditional and Contemporary African Dance, the Ecole des Sables, inaugurated in 2004. It’s a place of exchange between African dancers and dancers from all continents. Here dancers from all over Africa receive the rigorous training which guides them towards Contemporary African Dance. Since 1988 Germaine Acogny creates regularly solo pieces for herself and since 2003/2004 she choreographes for her company Jant-Bi which tours successfully all over the world. Germaine Acogny is Chevalier de l’Ordre du Merite, Officier des Arts et Lettres, Chevalier de l’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur, and Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the French Republic. She is also Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Lion and Officier des Arts et Lettres of the Republic of Senegal. In 2007, she received, jointly with the Japanese Kota Yamazaki, a BESSIE Award in New York for the choreography of their piece “Fagaala“.

Angela Conquet is a Melbourne-based independent dance curator, consultant, researcher and editor, working across and within a multiplicity of disciplines, contexts and territories, locally and globally. Her 20-year career spans three continents – Europe, Australia, Canada – and she brings curatorial, artistic and executive expertise in performing arts, festivals, arts leadership, publishing, arts policy and advocacy. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne.

Dr Philipa Rothfield is honorary fellow in Dance at the Victorian College of the Arts. She is also an adjunct professor in philosophy of the body and dance at the University of Southern Denmark. She is co-author of Practising with Deleuze, Design, Dance, Art, Writing, Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press), and author of Dance and the Corporeal Uncanny, Philosophy in Motion (Routledge Books). She is on the Dance Panel of the Green Room Awards, reviews dance and has served as a judge for the Melbourne Fringe Festival. She dances and practices Tai Chi and Yoga.

Lucy Guerin AO established Lucy Guerin Inc in Melbourne 2002, to support the development, creation and touring of new works with a Europe, Asia and North America as well as to most of Australia’s major festivals and venues. She has been commissioned by Chunky Move, Dance Works Rotterdam (Netherlands), Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project (USA), Lyon Opera Ballet (France), Skånes Dansteater (Sweden) and Rambert (UK) among many others.