The Women’s Center will be dance-happy Thursday as special guest Tresa Randall, assistant professor in the School of Dance, will speak at the center’s weekly Brown Bag Lunch & Learn about modern dance and how it has helped in giving women a voice.
“(I’ll be) looking at how modern dance relates to ideas of gender and, in particular, how modern dance offered a way for women to have a sense of self-realization and self-mastery,” Randall said. “Through mastering their body, it allowed them to feel that they were more whole.”
Randall will lecture for about 20 minutes with a slideshow before opening up the discussion for the audience to ask questions.
“I was very much inspired by the fact that modern dance had been created mostly by women who were creating modern dance out of social concerns,” Randall said. “They created modern dance from within their limited social spheres, which largely had to do with other women.”
Randall has been dancing since she was 6 years old and studied classical ballet for 12 years before performing professionally as a modern dancer in New York and Santa Fe, N.M.
Randall then went back to school to study the history of dance.
“That’s interesting to me, to look back historically and investigate what were some of the ideas at that historical time in that culture that were circulating around that the dance was responding to,” Randall said.
Marianne Jacobs, a freshman studying applied nutrition, had not heard about the luncheons in the Women’s Center before. She said she would be interested in learning about how modern dance helped to shape the role of women.
The Brown Bag Lunch & Learns started in 2008 and usually have an audience of anywhere from five to 55 people, said Susanne Dietzel, director of the Women’s Center.
“We always try to have programming in our Brown Bags that is relevant to our population and that is relevant to our mission,” Dietzel said.
There have been a variety of speakers this year, including a Coming Out Day panel, female artists and bisexual activist Robyn Ochs.
“It is through history that we gain perspective on the present as well as the past and that I do that looking at dance history in particular,” Randall said.
je726810@ohiou.edu
