Tara Aisha Willis is a dancer, writer, and Curator in Performance & Public Practice at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University, where she received the Deena Burton Memorial Scholarship in Dance Scholarship Award and was the first arts-focused candidate to receive the University-wide Outstanding Dissertation Award in Arts & Humanities. Her dissertation focused on contemporary practices of improvisation and experimentation in Black dance performances. Willis performed in a collaboration between Will Rawls and Claudia Rankine (2016–21) which traveled to Bard College, Danspace Project, Walker Art Center, REDCAT, MCA Chicago, and ICA Boston, and in the 2016 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award-winning performance by The Skeleton Architecture; she is a recent recipient of a Ragdale Foundation residency for her choreographic work. She held a Jerome Robbins Dance Division Research Fellowship at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and has been an editorial collective member of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory since 2013. She has served as co-managing editor of TDR/The Drama Review, and was co-editor of both a special issue of The Black Scholar with Thomas F. DeFrantz and the performance writing project, Marking the Occasion (Wendy's Subway, 2021) with Jaime Shearn Coan. Her writing appears in the exhibition catalogue, Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures (Getty Research Institute/X Artists’ Books, 2022) and is forthcoming in the anthology, Dancing on the Third Coast: Chicago Dance Histories (University of Illinois Press, 2023; eds. Susan Manning and Lizzie Leopold). Willis also worked in programming at the NYC dance incubator Movement Research, where she was the founding administrator of the Artists of Color Council. She was an original working group member of “Creating New Futures," the COVID-19 responsive guidelines for ethical dance presenting, and currently sits on the board of Links Hall, on the Anti-Racism Task Force of Chicago Dancemakers Forum, and on the Artistic Advisory Board of The Field Center residency in Vermont.
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Courses
TAPS 10900 Moving and Thinking / Thinking and Moving
Though we often imagine a divide between the physical practice of dance training and the intellectual practice of dance history and theorization, in reality they overlap: movement training is embodied research and a form of intellectual labor, while dance theorization and scholarship is deeply connected to the physicality of thought. This course offers an introduction to dance with an integrated approach to thinking and doing. Students will explore a range of embodied research methodologies that draw from improvisational forms, codified techniques, and social and cultural dance practices. No prior dance experience is required for this hybrid seminar/ studio course.
TAPS 10900 Moving and Thinking / Thinking and Moving
Though we often imagine a divide between the physical practice of dance training and the intellectual practice of dance history and theorization, in reality they overlap: movement training is embodied research and a form of intellectual labor, while dance theorization and scholarship is deeply connected to the physicality of thought. This course offers an introduction to dance with an integrated approach to thinking and doing. Students will explore a range of embodied research methodologies that draw from improvisational forms, codified techniques, and social and cultural dance practices. No prior dance experience is required for this hybrid seminar/ studio course.
TAPS 26215 Dance Improvisation in Theory & Practice
This course has a strong component of movement practice and is open to students of any experience level who are willing to move with creativity and generosity. The course takes a broad look at dance improvisation, exploring in equal parts key theoretical readings, historic and contemporary performance examples, and movement practices in the classroom. On its surface, improvisation is often understood to be based on total freedom or openness, where any movement choice can be made. Here, the notion of freedom in improvisation is reconsidered through the sociopolitical realities of how dancers’ bodies move through society, and across the studio or stage.