
Dr Claudia Brazzale
Senior Lecturer
Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Performance Practices and Dance, co-director of CPAD
Department of Music, Writing & Performance , School Of Arts And Creative Industries
Claudia is a scholar, choreographer, performer and teacher originally from Italy. Her performances and interdisciplinary collaborations have been presented at different venues in the US, Italy and the UK (among others, Joyce SoHo, Dixon Place, 92nd Street Y, DIA Centre for the Arts, PS 122 in New York; Festival Fabbrica Europa in Florence and the Capstone Theatre Festival in Liverpool).
She has taught at Liverpool Hope University, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, Princeton University (Lewis Centre for the Arts), Rutgers University (Women’s and Gender Studies Department), and the University of California-Los Angeles (World Arts and Cultures Department) and has held positions as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers University (IRW) and the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Analysis at London South Bank University. In 2010-11 Claudia was the recipient of a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the American Association University of Women to support her research at Rutgers University (2010-11).
Claudia holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Master in Performance Studies from New York University. She also is a certified Iyengar Yoga teacher.
Qualifications
- PhD
- MA
- FHEA
Areas Of Interest
- Politics of contemporary performance
- Feminist ethnography
- Autoethnographic writing/performance
- Performative writing
- Space, place and migration
- Globalisation, cosmopolitanism and mobility
- African diasporic dance
- Afropeanness
- Fashion, the body and consumer culture
OVERVIEW
My scholarship and pedagogical approach are deeply influenced by my cross-cultural intellectual and artistic trajectory as well as my continuing dance-theater and somatic practices. My interest in the body and movement has led me to explore diverse forms of dance and performance genres and to study the moving body through different media. My work focuses on the seduction, potentiality, limits and consequences of mobility by placing these studies in a critical interrogation of my own transnational formation as a dancer and scholar.
I approach the moving body as a productive avenue for rethinking the politics of labouring, globalization and cosmopolitanism, not only in dance training and the performing arts, but also in domestic and entrepreneurial spaces as in my doctoral research on the family firms of North East Italy. Through writing, choreography, and video, my work engages the body in relation to space, place and mobility, whether the mobility of global flows of bodies and traditional dance forms or clothing, fashion and consumer culture.
My scholarly and teaching activities are crucially informed by my performance practice as well as video and documentary experience. I first became interested in filmmaking when I worked with Alan Lomax for his project The Global Juke-Box and learned his Choreometrics system for the cross-cultural analysis of dance through film. Since then, I directed Heritage for Sale (1999), a short documentary on the performance of 'Italian-ness' in New York's Little Italy; created the video-dance Looping Corridors and the video support for the performance The Aging Daughter; provided academic consultancy to Riva Freifeld's documentary America’s West-Europe's Myth (forthcoming); and written reviews for the documentaries Calypso Rose and Virgin Tales.
My current and principal research examines the circulation of West African dance and artists in Italy in relation to growing national concerns over migration.
External roles
External Examiner: MA Choreography - Lincoln University
CURRENT RESEARCH
Afropean Choreographies: The Economy of West African Dance in Italy
The research engages with ideas around space, movement and mobility in relationship to performance. Thinking through the implications of mobility for performance, and more specifically dance and moving bodies, this body of work engages with the mobility paradigm that has emerged in the last 15 years in social sciences.
The work addresses the research through different formats as a way to translate complex theoretical issues and make different fields and conceptual frameworks converse with each other.
FUNDING
- International Postdoctoral Grant, American Association University of Women (AAUW) Chancellor's Fellowship, UCLA
TEACHING
MODULES
Module Leader
Postgraduate
- PX7410 Cultures of Performance
- PX7411 Artistic Leadership
- PX7529 Research Methods in Creative Practice
- PX7002 Performance Platform
- PX7020 Performance Praxis
Undergraduate
- PA5213 Rethinking Choreography: Bodies, Sites and Digital Spaces
Modules
- Choreography
- Screening Dance, Dance on Screen
- Site-Specific Contexts
- Final Project
- Supervision of PhD students
- Cultures of Performance
- Artistic Leadership
- Research Methods in Creative Practice
- Performance Platform
- Performance Praxis
- Screendance: Design and Composition
- Hip Hop and the Choreography of Digital Activism
- Rethinking Choreography: Bodies, Sites and Digital Spaces
Related Professional Activities
- Academic Consultant, film-producer Riva Freifeld, Riva Productions, NYC 2012-
- America's West-Europe's Myth, a documentary-in-progress on Europe's longstanding fascination with the mythical American West.
- Director, video documentaries-in-progress
- Retracing Steps: Connecting Dancers Now and Then (2011-); Afropean Choreographies (2010-)
- Research Assistant, Prof. David Rousseve, Dept. World Arts & Culture, UCLA, Fall 2004
- Editor and Research Assistant, Prof. Mauro Calamandrei, Il Sole 24 Ore, NYC, 1999-2001
Publications
Browse past publications by year.
Full publications list
Visit the research repository to view a full list of publications
- Strategies for Subverting the Tyranny of the Corporate Map: An Interview with Babak Fakhamzadeh Streetnotes. 27, pp. 82-98. https://doi.org/10.5070/S527046496
- Cell-Out: A Long-Distance Mobile Performance of Scores, Reflections, Confessions Streetnotes. 27, pp. 99-136. https://doi.org/10.5070/S527048035
- Introduction: Walking in the Digital City Streetnotes. 27, pp. 1-8. https://doi.org/10.5070/S527053476
- “I've danced my whole life, but none of that is useful at all”: Netflix’s We Speak Dance (2018), Vulnerability and Collaborative Critiques Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies. XXXVIII, pp. 54-60
- The Economy of West African Dance in Italy Congress on Research in Dance. 2014, pp. 27-31. https://doi.org/10.1017/cor.2014.4
- (Un)covering ground: dance, space and mobility Theatre, Dance and Performance Training. 5 (2), pp. 107-118
- Introduction: Fashioning the Global City Streetnotes. 20, pp. 1-6
- Tailoring Cosmopolitanism in the Italian Nordest Streetnotes. 20, pp. 7-30