I am an academic and dancer whose research on performing bodies combines dance history, performance studies theory, cultural studies, experimental practice, and technology. In 2009, I received my doctorate from the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar and joined the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford University, and then CalArts and the University of Bristol. I am now Head of Digital Research and Professor of Performance and Technology at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, where I am Co-Director of the Centre for Performance, Technology, and Equity. I sometimes explain that I teach bodies and performance to theorists and historians, and history and theory to performers, but I like it best when those get mixed up together. I am committed to multiple possibilities, both implicit and explicit, for working between practice and research.

Together with Harmony Bench, I've been working for over ten years on the kinds of questions and problems that make the analysis and visualization of data meaningful for dance historical inquiry, funded by a Battelle Engineering, Technology, and Human Affairs (BETHA) Endowment Grant, and subsequently a project grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for Dunham's Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry (AH/R012989/1, 2018-22), which is winner of the joint ATHE-ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Theatre Scholarship. The next step building on this research is an AHRC Research Development and Engagement Fellowship for Visceral Histories, Visual Arguments: Dance-Based Approaches to Data (AH/W005034/1, 2022-2025). Based on this body of digital research, we were commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art to produce dance history visualizations as part of their upcoming Edges of Ailey exhibition (September 2024).

My first book Watching Weimar Dance (Oxford University Press, 2014) is about the strange things people claimed to see while watching dances in and from the Weimar Republic, and received both the Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research for best book in dance and the Joe A. Callaway Prize honorable mention for best book on theatre or drama. I also have a small book on the interdependence between Theatre & Dance (Theatre& series, 2018). My major awards for scholarly publications also include the Biennial Sally Banes Publication Prize for best publication at the intersections of theatre and dance/movement and the Gertrude Lippincott Award for best article in dance studies, which I received twice. These books as well as my seventeen peer-reviewed essays touch on exile and migration, spectatorship, bodies in technology and medicine, digital humanities, archives and reenactment, interdisciplinary performance, infrastructures of circulation, and modernism in and beyond Europe. My other major current project deals with the intersections of breath, performance, and measurement from the Victorian era to the present.

As an artist, my recent collaborations include Future Memory, as dramaturg with Rani Nair, which has been presented internationally, among other places at ImPulsTanz (Vienna), the Singapore International Festival of Arts (Singapore), Ignite! Festival of Contemporary Dance (New Delhi), and Dansenshus (Stockholm). I am also co-director of the Breath Catalogue project that combines dance, medicine, and technology to create a cabinet of breath curiosities in performance. I was on the commission for Germany's first practice-based masters degree in dance, MA Solo/Dance/Authorship at Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin, and I also produce and convene events in the arts, including as curator for Dansbyrån (Gothenburg) and The Garage (San Francisco). I am co-editor of the New World Choreographies book series, on the editorial boards for Performance Matters and ASAP/Journal, and an advisor for Good Form and Spectacle, a design shop in service of cultural heritage.

I live and work in San Francisco and London.

Selected Awards, Grants, and Commissions:
2024-30	Research England, Expanding Excellence in England (E3) to found the Centre for Performance, Technology, and Equity
2023-25	Whitney Museum of American Art, Commission
2023	Dance Studies Association, Gertrude Lippincott Award
2022-25	Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Research Development and Engagement Fellowship for Visceral Histories, Visual Arguments: Dance-Based Approaches to Data
2021	Association for Theatre in Higher Education and American Society for Theatre Research, ATHE-ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Theatre and Performance Scholarship
2018-22	Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Three-Year Standard Project Grant for Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry
2020	American Society for Theatre Research, Biennial Sally Banes Publication Prize Honorable Mention
2017	Dance Studies Association, Oscar G. Brockett Prize for Dance Research
2016	New York University, Joe A. Callaway Prize Honorable Mention
2016	Batelle Engineering, Technology, and Human Affairs (BETHA) Endowment Grant, with Harmony Bench, The Ohio State University
2015-16	University Research Fellowship, Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Bristol
2015	Green Apple Award, Education for Sustainable Development, University of Bristol
2015	Community Arts Grant, Zellerbach Family Foundation, with Megan Nicely for Breath Catalogue
2015	Digital Humanities Summer Grant, University of Bristol
2014	Higher Education Academy Fellowship (FHEA)
2013	Lilian Karina Foundation, 2013 Research Grant in Dance and Politics
2012-13	Kings College London, Research Initiative Fund, with Ben Schofield on “Staging German Culture: Representations of Germany in the Cultural Olympiad”
2009-12	Stanford University, Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities
2010	Society of Dance History Scholars, Gertrude Lippincott Award
2009	American Society for Theatre Research, Biennial Sally Banes Publication Prize
2009	St. Catharine's College Cambridge, Graduate Prize for Distinction in Research
2008	Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, Research Grant
2007-08	University of Cambridge: Overseas Research Students Awards Scheme, Tiarks German Scholarship, Cambridge Overseas Bursary
2007	German Historical Research Institute London, Research Grant
2007	Society of Dance History Scholars, Graduate Student Travel Grant
2004-07	Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission, Marshall Scholarship
2001	Northwestern University, Undergraduate Summer Research Grant
2000	Northwestern University, Lynn Ann Blom Award
Academic Positions:
2016-	Professor of Performance and Technology and Head of Digital Research (promoted from Reader), The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
2012-16	Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies (promoted from Lecturer), University of Bristol
2012	Visiting Faculty in Critical Studies, MA Aesthetics and Politics, CalArts
2009-12	Lecturer/Mellon Fellow in Drama/Dance and German Studies, Stanford University
2006-09	Lecturer, MA Dance Theatre: The Body in Performance, MA Choreography, and MA Performance, Laban
Education:
2009	Ph.D. German, University of Cambridge
2005	M.A. European Dance Theatre Practice, Laban
2002	B.S. Dance, Northwestern University also B.A. Comparative Literary Studies

Monographs:

• Watching Weimar Dance. New York: Oxford University Press (2014) download introduction
  *Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research from the Dance Studies Association, for best book on dance published during the previous three years
  *Joe A. Callaway Prize honorable mention, for best book on drama or theater published during the previous two years
  
• Theatre & Dance. London: Palgrave Macmillan (2018, Theatre& series) download opening pages
  *Biennial Sally Banes Publication Prize Honorable Mention from the American Society for Theatre Research, for best book at the intersections of theatre and dance/movement in the previous two years
  

Peer-Reviewed Articles and Essays:

• “The Body is Not (Only) A Metaphor: Rethinking Embodiment in DH” (with Harmony Bench). Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023, eds. Matt Gold and Lauren Klein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. open access

• “Dancing with Coronaspheres: Expanded Breath Bodies and the Politics of Public Movement in the Age of COVID-19”. Cultural Studies 37.6 (2022), 894-916. open access

• “Visceral Data for Dance Histories: Katherine Dunham’s People, Places, and Pieces” (with Harmony Bench). TDR: The Drama Review 66.1 (2022), 37-61. open access
  *Winner of the Gertrude Lippincott Award from the Dance Studies Association for best English-language article published in dance studies in 2022

• “Performative Measure”. In Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data (2021), eds. Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Daniela Agostinho, Annie Ring, Catherine D’Ignazio and Kristin Veel. Cambridge: MIT Press.
• “Katherine Dunham’s Global Method and the Embodied Politics of Dance’s Everyday” (with Harmony Bench). Theatre Survey 61.3 (2020), 305-330. open access
• “Dance History and Digital Humanities Meet at the Archives: An Interim Project Report on Dunham’s Data” (with Harmony Bench). Dance Research 38.2 (2020), 289-295.
• “A Living Cabinet of Breath Curiosities: Somatics, Bio-media, and the Archive.” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 15.3 (2019), 340-59
• “Performing Anti-Nationalism: Solidarity, Glitter, and No Borders Politics with the Europa Europa Cabaret”. Theatre Research International, 43.1 (2018), 25-44
• “The Micropolitics of Exchange: Exile and Otherness After the Nation”. In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics (2017), eds. Randy Martin, Rebekah Kowal, and Gerald Siegmund. New York: Oxford University Press, 417-438 download full text
• “Letters to Lila and Dramaturg's Notes on Future Memory: Inheriting Dance’s Alternative Histories” (with Rani Nair). In The Handbook of Dance and Reenactment (2017), ed. Mark Franko. New York: Oxford University Press, 177-214.
• “Mapping Movement on the Move: Dance Touring and Digital Methods” (with Harmony Bench). Theatre Journal, 68.4 (2016), 575-596 open access
  
• “Inheriting Dance’s Alternative Histories”. Dance Research Journal, 46.1 (2014), 3-22 download full text
  
• “Ten Evenings with Pina: Bausch’s ‘Late’ Style and the Cultural Politics of Co-Production”. Theatre Journal, 65.2 (2013), 215-233
  
• “Back Again? Valeska Gert's Exiles”. In New German Dance Studies (2012), eds. Susan Manning and Lucia Ruprecht. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 113-129 / Abridged German translation “Wieder zurück? Die Exile der Valeska Gert” in Valeska Gert Tanz Fotografien (2013), ed. Hedwig Müller
• “So You Think You Can Dance Does Dance Studies”. TDR/The Drama Review, 56.1 (2012), 133-142 download full text
  
• “Accessing Unison in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility”. Art Journal, 68.2 (2009), 50-61
  
• “‘Berlin . . . Your Dance Partner is Death’”. TDR/The Drama Review, 53.1 (2009), 73-92
  *Winner of the Gertrude Lippincott Award from the Society of Dance History Scholars for best English-language article published in dance studies in 2009
• “The Some of the Parts: Prosthesis and Function in Bertolt Brecht, Oskar Schlemmer, and Kurt Jooss”. Modern Drama, 51.3 (2008), Theatre and Medicine, 389-410
  *Winnner of the Biennial Sally Banes Publication Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research for best book or article to explore the intersections of dance/movement and theatre between 2007-2008
• “Petrified? Some Thoughts on Practical Research and Dance Historiography”. Performance Research, 13.1 (2008), On Choreography, 61-69
  

Online Writing:

• “Dancing with our Coronasphere to Navigate the Pandemic”, Dance Magazine (2020)
• On the Visceral Histories, Visual Arguments Research Blog, with Harmony Bench:
  “Dance Documentation and Computer Vision” (2023) “Mapping Movement on the Move, Ten Years On” (2022); “Practicing Ethical Entanglements: A Roundtable About Thinking Forward in Technological Praxis” (2022); “Attending the Dunham Teacher Certification Workshop” (2022); “Toward a Dance History Dataset that Comes from the Studio” (2022);
• On the Dunham's Data Research Blog, with Harmony Bench:
  “Teaching with Dunham’s Data” (2023); “Creative Flows Poster for DH2022” (2022); “A Nested Hierarchy of Katherine Dunham's Dance Company Repertory” (2021); “Interactive Visualizations: Work in Progress Videos” (2020); “Poster for the Association for Computers and the Humanities Conference” (2019); “Datasets are Research” (2019); “Checking In: The Flows of Dunham’s Performers” (2019); “Tracking Dunham's Everyday, 1950-53,” (2018); “Welcome to Dunham's Data” (2018)
• “Dance Touring and Embodied Data: Some Approaches to Katherine Dunham’s Movement on the Move.” Co-authored with Harmony Bench. Current Research in Digital History 2 (2019) doi.org/10.31835/crdh.2019.12
• “On Palpability and Breath: Thinking Through a Kind of Limit Case for Touch” (2019) on the IN-TOUCH: Digital Communication blog
• On Moving Bodies, Moving Culture:
  “Mapping Touring through the Dancers' Eyes, Redux” (2016); “Mapping Tours through the Dancers' Eyes” (2015); “Mapping a More Distributed Picture of Exchange: ABC Traveler Demographics” (2015); “Colliding with Other Datasets” (2015); “Historical Basemaps” (2015); “Merging Tables and Layering Maps” (2015); “Getting an Outside Eye” (2015); “Animating Performances on Tour with CartoDB” (2015); “Returning to Palladio” (2015); “American Ballet Caravan Intro, Part 2: More Datasets” (2015); “American Ballet Caravan Intro: Identifying Datasets” (2015); and “Ballet, Digital History, and the Cold War: Visualizing the Labor of Dance Touring” (2014).
• On Breath Catalogue:
  “Breath in Conversation” (2015); “Choreographing with Spire, Part 2” (2015); “Cataloging Breath through Choreography” (2015 repost); and “Using Spire in Dance Choreography, Part 1” (2014 repost)
• “Mapping Touring, Onstage and Backstage” (2015) with Harmony Bench on the Digital Methods Blog for the American Society for Theatre Research
• “Cataloging Breath through Choreography” (2015) on the Life of Breath Blog
• “Using Spire in Dance Choreography, Part 1” (2014) on the Spire Blog
• The Page 99 Test for Watching Weimar Dance (2014) on The Page 99 Test

Other Writing:

• “Radical Accounting and the Edges of Archives: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre's Historical Data”, with Harmony Bench. Edges of Ailey (2024). Exhibition catalogue, ed. Adrienne Edwards. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• “The Scale of Research Has Already Changed.” Contribution to “Digital Scholarship Roundtable: The State of the Field,” with Sissi Liu, Derek Miller, Erin B. Mee, and Sarah Bay-Cheng. Theatre Journal. 76.2 (2024): E17-E30
• “Reflections on Bodies in Lockdown: The Coronasphere.” Multimodality and Society. 1.1: 69-74
• “What We Know and What We Want to Know: A Roundtable on Butoh and neuer Tanz”. With Migawa Mariko, Eiko Otake, and Tara Rodman. In The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2018), 126-136.
• “Watching Modernist Bodies, Watching Modernist ‘Dance’”. In Moved Bodies: Choreographies of Modernity / Poruszone ciała. Choreografie nowoczesności (2017), Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi, 103-114
• “What is a Question?”. In ASAP/Journal, 2.1 (2017), 34-36
• “Kurt Jooss”. In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (2016) [digital], ed. Stephen Ross
• “Valeska Gert”. In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (2016) [digital], ed. Stephen Ross
• “The Dance Bar”. In Dansbaren: The Mob Without Flash (2016), ed. Ingrid Cogne and Marika Hedemeyr

Book Reviews:

• Modern Drama, 65.2 (2022), 593-595. Review of Miguel Escobar Varela, Theater as Data: Computational Journeys into Theater Research. University of Michigan Press, 2021.
• New Theatre Quarterly, 34.1 (2018), 95-96. Review of Jens Giersdorf and Gay Morris, ed., Choreographies of 21st Century Wars. Oxford University Press, 2016.
• Dance Research Journal, 49.1 (2017), 91-93. Review of Katherine Profeta, Dramaturgy in Motion: At Work on Dance and Movement Performance. University of Wisconsin Press, 2015.
• TDR: The Drama Review, 56.3 (2012), 192-193. Review of Rebekah Kowal, How To Do Things with Dance: Performing Change in Postwar America. Wesleyan UP, 2010.
• Los Angeles Review of Books (2012) online. Review of Anton Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War. Princeton UP, 2009.
• Dance Research Journal, 42.2 (2010), 111-113. Review of The Returns of Alwin Nikolais: Bodies, Boundaries, and the Dance Canon, eds. Claudia Gitelman and Randy Martin. Wesleyan UP, 2007.

i try to post as much as i can, once pieces of writing are out of embargo. if you would like to read something not posted here, and don't have institional access, please get in touch.

As Head of Digital Research for a small specialist institution, I build institutional infrastructures and practices to champion research that stems from and centers artistic practice in relation to technology. In 2024, we received a £5.6 million grant to found a Centre for Performance, Technology, and Equity (PTEQ) on the principle that performance-led perspectives and promotion of social equity are critical to technological innovation both for the arts and beyond. PTEQ will train a new generation of early career researchers and catalyze research and development with partners from across a range of industries and the wider community including the arts, theatres, festivals, applied theatre, restorative justice, industry bodies, technology, manufacturing and SMEs.

In my own research, I have been working with Harmony Bench for ten years to facilitate a dialogue between the experimental digital humanities and dance history, under a research umbrella we call “Movement on the Move” as well as the company Moving Data.

Our AHRC-funded project Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry (2018-2022, AH/R012989/1) focuses on the questions and problems that make the analysis and visualization of data meaningful for the study of dance historical inquiry, through the case study of African American choreographer Katherine Dunham. Dunham’s Data is winner of the 2021 ATHE-ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Scholarship. The datasets associated with the Dunham’s Data AHRC project were acquired by the National Archive for Data on Arts and Culture where they will be maintained in perpetuity. In addition, the full website and portfolio for Dunham’s Data was chosen to be archived for future access by the Library of Congress as part of the Performing Arts Web Archive.

Dunham's Data became the model for a commission from the Whitney Museum of American Art to produce dance history visualizations for the Edges of Ailey exhibition. Open from September 2024 to February 2025, the exhibit focuses on choreographer Alvin Ailey's life, work, and legacy. Installed across three 75" screens, the Radical Accounting series enables us to futher explore how dance-led ways of working with data can change public engagement with dance history.

Visceral Histories, Visual Arguments: Dance-Based Approaches to Data represents our newest line of research, for which I was awarded an AHRC Research Development and Engagement fellowship (2022-25, AH/W005034/1). We investigate how a data-driven approach that is tailored to the medium of dance can transform the use of digital tools to evidence and elaborate the historical study of embodied knowledge more broadly. Visceral Histories, Visual Arguments curates historical data that centres dance-based knowledge practices to create palpable visual arguments in the form of digital visualizations and immersive experiences, guided by choreographic principles. Research strands related to Visceral Histories are further supported by a grant for Artificial Intelligence for Creative Movement Analysis and Synthesis from The Ohio State University.

Earlier funded digital projects include Moving Bodies, Moving Culture (2014-16) and Dance in Transit (2016-2018).

I am a choreographer, dramaturg, and curator, and work with a variety of collaborators to make multimedia dance theater performances.

I collaborate with Swedish choreographer Rani Nair as dramaturg and historian on Future Memory, based on her inheritance of the German choreographer Kurt Jooss’s last dance, which was given to Swedish-based Indian dancer Lilavati Häger. Future Memory has been shown at ImPulsTanz Festival in Vienna, the IGNITE! Festival in New Delhi, the Singapore International Festival of Arts, Dansens Hus in Stockholm, the Scenkonst Biennialen in Jönköpng, and SEAD in Salzburg. Check out an interview with us about the project, selected reviews, and an essay I wrote. For a full list of performances and other related events, see Upcoming. We have also just premiered a new project with Astad Deboo: the biographical dance An Evening with Astad.

My other current choreography project is Breath Catalogue, which combines choreographic methods with medical technology to create a cabinet of breath curiosities in performance. The first performance phase of the project was in collaboration with artist/scholar Megan Nicely, digital interaction designer Ben Gimpert, and composer Daniel Thomas Davis, using breath sensors from the medical technology startup Spire and later Stretchsense, and the second phase of this work was developed in connection with the Wellcome Trust-funded Life of Breath project, and the Respiratory Unit at Southmead Hospital. In 2018, I had the opportunity to speak about this work on BBC Radio 4. From 2011-2012, Nicely and I also collaborated on the Animation Project, with workshops, installations, and performances in Ann Arbor, San Francisco, London, Chicago, and Leeds.

I am also choreographer and dramaturgical consultant for SIX. TWENTY. OUTRAGEOUS. Three Gertrude Stein Plays in the Shape of an Opera, by composer Daniel Thomas Davis, librettist Adam Frank, and director-designer Doug Fitch, which premiered at Symphony Space in New York in 2018.

From 2010-11, I curated a series of international lectures and workshops at Dansbyrån, funded by the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, was on the committee for a practice-based research symposium on Movement, Somatics, and Writing, organized by Petra Kuppers at the University of Michigan, and curated the first annual Bay Area Dance Camp, as part of VERGE Fest. From 2009 to 2013, I was also on the editorial board for the wonderful and now gone Dance Theatre Journal.

Long ago, I performed with companies including Hedwig Dances, Lucky Plush Productions, Compagnie Felix Ruckert, Chicago Moving Company, Light Opera Works, and Striding Lion Interarts Workshop. More recently, I also worked with Big Art Group on The People - SF, as well as with The New Urban Naturalists. I have also danced in pieces by Molly Shanahan, Charles Weidman (reconstruction by Deborah Carr), Lisa Wymore, Rebecca Rossen, Melissa Thodos, and Brian Jeffery.

Other choreography includes Open Letter, which I developed under a RAW residency at the Garage in San Francisco in 2010, as well as Places Don't Place Us Until We've Left, London (2009); So Here We Go, Berlin and Gothenburg (2007 - 08); Estranged Animals and Valeska, London (both 2005); Words of Clay, Chicago (2004); Erotopaegnie, Chicago (2001); and Down Into, Chicago (2000).

Radical Accounting: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Data as a Framework for Historical Imagination

“The three animations of visualized data charting Ailey’s impact on dance throughout time and space are an unexpected delight. Researchers Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit spent almost three years combing through over thirty thousand documents in the archives to create them. The animations are fascinating, quite beautiful and worth a view.”

“... fascinating computerized data sets by scholars Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit that chart, in animated graphic form, all the places the company has performed and all the people who danced Ailey’s work”

Dunham’s Data

“Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit’s groundbreaking work demonstrates how critical digital methods, data analysis, and visualization can reinvigorate and reshape dance history.”

“Stands as a model of how digital scholarship can transform the practice of historical research and historiography and points to the ways in which large datasets can be used to illuminate as-yet-untold stories of performers’ lives and works.”

Theatre & Dance

“The book was excellent ... If you work in a department of Theatre and Dance and you have an annual department retreat, I do think everyone should buy this book and read it and talk about it together.”

“The ideal guide to the complex entanglements of theatre and dance. A distillation of Elswit’s expertise, broad in scope and rich in elegantly formulated insights.”

“A brilliantly lucid account of the tangled histories and contemporary partnership of theatre and dance.”

“Kate Elswit’s Theatre & Dance is an endlessly useful book ... Elswit’s text manages the difficult task of distilling with energy, clarity, and insight an interdisciplinary and often contentious conversation about performance histories, aesthetics, and practices.”

Watching Weimar Dance

“Groundbreaking ... Kate Elswit's writing is lucid, and her scholarship impeccable ... she cares passionately for the origins of the traces which she analyses (that is the dance themselves).”

“Watching Weimar Dance is a stellar work of scholarship. Elswit tackles some of the central issues in how dance history is researched and narrated, and her points are all the more convincing because they are supported by meticulous research. ... Watching Weimar Dance should be a welcome addition to dance studies, German studies, and as a model for interdisciplinary scholarship on the body.”

“Kate Elswit thinks across history, theory, reception and corporeality and in so doing rethinks Weimar dance for the 21st century.”

“In Watching Weimar Dance, Kate Elswit takes the traditional ‘obstacles’ of dance history — the fragmentary archive, ephemeral performances, and unstable objects — and transforms them into its very strengths. Approaching Weimar dance as a series of eventful and relational encounters, in which spectators contributed as much to the generation of meaning as the performers themselves, the book rediscovers modern dance both as a specific medium and as a forum shot through with broader issues of visual and corporeal culture.”

“Elswit provides an interdisciplinary framework that reveals new insights about topics of longstanding interest to scholars of Weimar culture, including expressivity and representation, the mechanization of bodies, and the commodification of art ... a valuable new resource on modernist performance culture.”

“Elswit has made an important contribution to the way we practice dance historiography.”

“Watching Weimar Dance makes a significant contribution to the literature on German dance in the early twentieth century.”

“Kate Elswit's Watching Weimar Dance offers a compelling addition to an emergent literature on spectatorship and dance. As part of her original contribution, Elswit develops the notion of ‘archives of watching’, theorizing watching itself as a form of motion, and in her words, ‘a peripheral dance between the physical and abstract’, to show how historically-situated viewing practices shape dance performances, and how these performances in turn impact upon spectator subjectivities. She begins with an important reorienting of German dance within the first few decades of the twentieth century, commonly articulated in dance histories as Ausdruckstanz, and reframes it as Weimar Dance, a more inclusive term that embraces not only concert dance, but also popular forms of cabaret, revue, an experimental theater. Through meticulous archival analysis, in conversation with contemporary ideas in dance studies, Elswit shows how audiences saw things in performance that could not have occurred, but instead reveal the scocial anxieties that audiences experienced during this period. She persuasively argues in lucid prose how viewing German dance in different national contexts, and at different temporal moments, complicated political investments and the histories that we construct in response to dance. Watching Weimar dance demonstrates eloquent and engaging dance research that is thoroughly deserving of the 2017 Oscar G. Brockett Prize for Dance Research.”

Breath Catalogue

“Marrying intelligence and art together seamlessly.”

“Throughout, it was clear that the content emerged from a deep conversation between choreographic thinking and technology ... What stayed with me most after the work was how, through subtle means, Nicely and Elswit created a work with visceral impact ... Breath Catalogue points to a different future wherein technology has the potential to facilitate embodiment.”

“For art to be contemporary, it must reflect our current conditions. Digital and information technology is part of the fabric of our society — it can exploit or it can inspire. When handled thoughtfully, emerging technology can deepen the human experience, as Nicely and Elswit demonstrated in Breath Catalogue.”

Future Memory

“It is a gift to inherit something significant, but it can also mean a lot of pressure. You may even need to distance yourself and revolt ... And capture the time elapsed between the generations ... The dancer Rani Nair does all this in the solo ‘Future Memory,’ a wonderful, soul-searching, smart, funny and deeply personal act.”

“The performance was riveting in its inventiveness and unpredictability. ... We saw, we touched, we heard and thus entered the world of Hager. ”

“Future Memory (from 2012) is a layer- upon-layer choreography, a witty and profound dance performance that mingles with the discussion about the choreographic heritage that is lively today.”

“This is a show with great humor and sincerity that raises questions about ethnicity, identity and artistic creation.”

“A warm-hearted, humorous approach to a personality and her legacy, to the dance of another time and the reflection upon it that inheritance is not only a gift.”

“An unusual dance historical dialogue. Rani Nair's way to confront herself as a dance historical heir resembles an artistic research project, which includes data collection, critical attitude and an exploratory form of work.”

“As with Jooss’s work, everything here must have the effect of being particularly simple, unpretentious, and as though improvised. Her ‘dialogue' with a haute couture outfit was especially inventive; she uses a hairdryer to make a dancing partner, into whom she breathes life through currents of air.”

“Nair sought to represent all the layers of her heirloom, which she performs not simply as reconstruction; instead she expands upon Häger and Jooss themselves.”

“It is as if she creates a dance's own ‘In Search of Lost Time’ (after Marcel Proust's famous novel) - but, in broken modernist form, more than futurism cubism, between humor and sadness, in her own style, which is constantly questioning itself, mirroring inward-outward.”

Courses Developed and Taught:

• Automatons, Puppets, and Cyborgs
• Bodies Watching Bodies: Participation, Spectatorship, and the Ethics of Witnessing
• Choreography for Theatre
• Contemporary European Performance
• Critical Theory
• Dance+Theatre: Twentieth-Century German Encounters
• Dynamic Anatomy
• Histories of the Body
• Methods and Questions in Performance Research: Practice-Based Research
• Performing Bodies
• Performing the Archive: Performance Re-Use and Re-Enactment
• Performing Theatre History
• Photography and Performance
• Popular Performance: Cabaret, Revue, Music Hall
• Theory Seminar

Guest Classes:

• Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin, 2017; UC Riverside, 2017; UC Berkeley, 2016; Princeton University, 2014 and 2021; Temple University, 2014; University of Copenhagen, 2014; Taipei National University for the Arts, 2010; Emory University, 2012; CalArts, 2012; Central School of Speech and Drama, 2008; Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin, 2008

Team Teaching:

• Choreographic Research and Development
• Modern Drama
• Modern German Cultures of Performance
• Modern German Culture, 1890 to the present day
• Performance Forms and Analysis
• Performance Contexts
• Performing the Body
• Staging the Text
• The Body Paper

Where I’ve been (recently) and where I’m going:

2025

• March 27 . Invited talk for Music, Dance, Drama, and Performing Arts Research Group, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth
• March 19 . Invited talk for Moving Modernisms, Princeton University, Princeton
• March 19 . Panel on AI in Performance, Centre for Performance, Technology, and Equity, London
• February 9 . Closing for Edges of Ailey, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
• January 30 . OnTAP Podcast, Episode 77, with Pannill Camp, Brian Herrera, Shoyoni Mitra, Harmony Bench, and Kat Profeta
• January 3 . Talk for Archives as Data, Columbia University History Lab, with Harmonay Bench, New York

2024

• December 10 . Invited early career researcher workshop for Digital Black Dance Ecologies on Developing a Competitive Research Profile
• November 18 . Invited talk for Quantitative Theory and Methods and Department of Dance, Emory University, Atlanta
• November 14-17 . Working Session on Big Histories: Experimental Methods for Tracking Change Across Bodies, Generations, and Geographies in Performance for ASTR 2024, Seattle
• October 30 . Invited talk for the Shapiro Digital History Seminar, Massachusetts Historical Society, with Harmony Bench and respodent Jacqueline Wernimont, Boston
• September 25 . Opening for Edges of Ailey, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
• September 10 . Invited keynote for Dance Research Matters Conference, Coventry
• June 20-23. Panel for Performance Studies international, with Harmony Bench, Teoma Naccarato, Jessica Rajko, and Tia-Monique Uzor, London
• May 30 - June 1 . Talk for Movement Computing Conference, with Harmony Bench, Utrecht

2023

• October 27-29 . Invited keynote for German Society for Dance Research and German Dance Archive Cologne, (Virtual) Ecologies in the Field of Dance, Cologne
• October 6 . Invited talk for MetaLab event on Data Kinesthetics: Mapping Data to and from the Body, Harvard University, Cambridge
• September 30 . Gathering on Race, Motion Data, and Artificial Intelligence, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London
• September 7-9 . Talk for Digital Humanities Research Association, with Harmony Bench, Turin
• August 29-30 . Gathering on Race, Motion Data, and Artificial Intelligence, The Ohio State University, Columbus
• July 11-13 . Invited keynote for Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities (DCDC) 2023, Radical Reimagining: Interplays of Physical and Virtual, Durham
• June 30 . Invited panel on Building Global Digital Humanities Projects, University of Birmingham, Stuart Hall Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, with Alex Gil, Ryaan Ahmed, and Tia-Monique Uzor, Birmingham
• June 29-30 . Talk for Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) 2023, with Harmony Bench
• March 30 . Invited workshop for Freie Universität, Critical Digital Summer School, Berlin
• February 13 . Invited talk for Love Data Week, National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture/ICPSR, with Harmony Bench, Ann Arbor
• February 7 . Invited panel for National Dance Education Organization, with Heather Beal, Harmony Bench, Penny Godboldo, and Catherine Scott, Rutgers
• January 31 . Invited talk for Body and AI Lecture Series, C-Dare, with Harmony Bench, Coventry University, Coventry

2022

• December 15-16 . Invited talk for UPES University, School of Liberal Arts, Intersections: International Conference on Digital Humanities, Dehradun
• November 3-5 . Invited talk for Newberry Library, Smith Center for the History of Cartography, Kenneth Nebenzahl Jr. Lectures in the History of Cartography, with Harmony Bench, Chicago
• October 12-16 . Panel for Dance Studies Association, with Harmony Bench, Ashley Ferro-Murray, Ian Heisters, Teoma Nacarrato, John McCallum, Vancouver
• July 27-29 . Poster for DH2022, Association of Digital Humanities Organizations, with Harmony Bench, Antonio Jimenez-Mavillard, and Tia-Monique Uzor, Tokyo
• June 30 . Case Study for Digital Arts and Humanities Lab, London Arts and Humanities Partnership, Freie Universität, Humboldt Universität Berlin
• June 22-24 . Talk for Movement Computing, with Harmony Bench, Chicago
• May 17-19 . Talk for DH Unbound 2022, Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and CSDH/SCHN, with Harmony Bench
• March 9-10 . Invited talk and workshops for Institute for Dance Studies / iSchool, with Harmony Bench, University of Toronto, Toronto
• February 3-4 . Talk for Graphs and Networks in the Humanities: Technologies, Models, Analyses, and Visualizations, with Harmony Bench and Antonio Jimenez-Mavillard, Amsterdam

2021

• November 18-20 . Invited talk for Producing Memory in Dance: Oral History and Mnemotechnics, Université Côte d’Azur and Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Venice
• November 16 . Invited talk for Dance Studies Colloquium, with Harmony Bench, Temple University, Philadelphia
• November 4-7 . Panel for Modernist Studies Association, with Susan Manning, Soo Ryon Yoon, Harmony Bench, Elizabeth Schwall, Chicago
• October 28-31 . Plenary lecture at American Society for Theatre Research, with Harmony Bench, San Diego
• October 14-17 . Panel for Dance Studies Association, with Tia-Monique Uzor and Harmony Bench, New Brunswick
• July 21-23 . Poster for Association for Computers and the Humanities, with Harmony Bench, Antonio Jimenez-Mavillard, and Tia-Monique Uzor
• May 27 . Invited panelist for Dance Research Matters: The Future of Dance Research in the UK, C-DaRE/AHRC, Coventry
• April 28 . Invited talk for Uncertain Archives Book Launch, University College London
• April 12 . Invited interview for the Guild of Future Architect’s Embodied Intelligence Group, Providence
• February 9 . Invited talk for National Archives for Data on Arts and Culture / ICPSR Love Data Week, with Harmony Bench, Ann Arbor

2020

• November 5-8 . Plenary lecture at American Society for Theatre Research, with Harmony Bench, New Orleans *postponed to 2021 for covid-19
• November 4-6 . Invited talk for What is the Digital Doing? A Workshop in the Interface, with Harmony Bench, Freie Universität, Berlin
• September 28 . Invited talk for Columbia University, Studies in Dance University Seminar, with Harmony Bench, New York
• July 22-24 . Talk at DH2020, with Harmony Bench, Ottawa
• July 13-17 . *Talk at IFTR, Feminist Working Group, Galway *cancelled for covid-19
• May 7 . *Invited talk for London Theatre Seminar, London *cancelled for covid-19
• March 26 . Invited talk for Feminist Digital Humanities, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen
• March 9-10 . Invited talk for Humane Infrastructures, UCLA Experimental Humanities Workshop, Los Angeles
• February 21-23 . Panel for Collegium for African Diasporic Dance conference, with Harmony Bench, Takiyah Nur Amin, and Tia-Monique Uzor, Durham

2019

• November 11-12 . Invited Talk for Distinguished Visiting Scholars Lecture Series, University of Tennessee Humanities Center, Knoxville
• November 7-9 . Invited Panel at Re:generations, with Takiyah Nur Amin and Harmony Bench, Dance of the African Diaspora / One Dance UK, Salford
• October 10-12 . Talk at MOCO International Conference on Movement and Computing, with Antonio Jimenez-Mavillard, Tempe
• October 2 . Invited talk for QUORUM, Department of Drama, Queen Mary University of London
• August 8-11 . Program Co-Chair for Dance Studies Association Annual Conference, Dancing in Common, Evanston/Chicago
• July 24-26 . Talk at Association for Computers and the Humanities with Harmony Bench, Pittsburgh
• July 12 . An Evening With Astad, HochX, Munich
• April 28 . Annual Donor Ballet History Lecture for San Francisco Ballet, San Francisco
• March 9 . Talk at Current Research in Digital History, with Harmony Bench, Arlington

2018

• November 15-18 . Talk at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, panel on Quantifying the Body and Its Extensions, Toronto
• October 22-23 . Invited talk for Making Change Through the Humanities, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm
• October 18-20 . Talk at Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black, with Harmony Bench, University of Maryland
• October 17-19 . Talk at Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, Panel on Data Bodies in/as Performance
• September 28 . Invited presentation at Life of Breath Reading Group, University of Bristol
• August 21 . Featured interview on BBC Radio 4 series The Rhythm of Life, The Symphony Within
• July 15-21 . Talk at ISA World Congress of Sociology, panel on The Politics of Sensation, Toronto
• July 9-13 . Talk at International Federation for Theatre Research, working group on Digital Humanities in Theatre Research, with Harmony Bench, Belgrade
• May 8 . Book launch for Theatre & Dance, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London
• March 22 . Invited talk and workshop for Hold Me Now: Feel & Touch in an Unreal World, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
• March 8-9 . Invited talk for Global Dance Studies Seminar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
• February 9-11 . SIX. TWENTY. OUTRAGEOUS. Three Gertrude Stein Plays in the Shape of an Opera, Symphony Space, New York City

2017

• November 16-19 . Working Group on Performing Extra/Ordinary Bodies of Data and Surveillance at ASTR, Atlanta
• October 26-28 . Talk at Association for the Study of the ASAP conference, Oakland
• October 19-22 . Roundtable on Digital Methods at SDHS/CORD with Kiri Miller, Harmony Bench, Paul Scolieri, and Sarah Whatley, Columbus
• August 9-11 . An Evening With Astad premiere, Stenkrossen Theatre, Lund
• July 7-8 . Con|VERGE residency and performance, The Finnish Hall, Berkeley
• June 14 . Invited talk for Global Theatre Histories at Ludwig Maximillians Universität München, Munich
• June 8-11 . Roundtable at PSi 23 with Nasim Aghili, Azadeh Sharifi, and Rani Nair, Hamburg
• June 7 . Invited talk for MA Solo/Dance/Authorship, Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz, Berlin
• May 18-19 . 10 Years of Interdisciplinary Humanities conference (organizer), Stanford University, Stanford
• May 18 . Future Memory performance at Stenkrossen, Lund
• May 16 . Invited talk for Department of Dance, University of California Riverside
• April 19-22 . Talk at Dance Fields: Staking a Claim for Dance in the 21st Century, with Harmony Bench, University of Roehampton, London
• April 13 . Invited talk at Dance Studies Working Group, University of California Berkeley
• February 14 . Talk for The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London

2016

• December 8 . Symposium on Composition Across/Between Edges, Surfaces and Materialities, University of California Los Angeles
• December 2-4 . Invited talk at Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi for How Does the Body Think? Corporeal and Movement Based Practices of Modernism and Modernity, Lodz
• November 17-19 . Breath Catalogue at the Feel It! Festival, Circomedia, Bristol
• November 14 . Breath Catalogue at Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Performance, London
• November 3-6 . Talk for SDHS/CORD conference, Pomona
• October 28 . New Urban Naturalists performance at the De Young Museum, San Francisco
• August 10-11 . Talk for Perforformance Studies Focus Group ATHE Preconference on Spectacular Labor, Chicago
• July 30 . Breath Catalogue at the MilkBar #38, Cotati
• July 23-30 . Breath Catalogue site-specific performance residency, Cotati
• July 22 . Sasha Petrenko/New Urban Naturalists performance at Art on The Grounds, Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga
• March 21-24 . Invited talk for Culture Analytics Beyond Text: Image, Music, Video, Interactivity and Performance at UCLA's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, Los Angeles
• February 25 . Graduate Seminar at UC Berkeley, Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, Berkeley

2015

• November 20 . Talk for the Life of Breath project working group, Bristol
• November 8 . Breath Catalogue at The 2015 Bridge Project: Rewriting Dance, Talk the Walk performance, Joe Goode Annex, San Francisco
• November 5-8 . Working group on Collaboration, Evaluation, and Access in Digital Theatre Scholarship at ASTR, Portland
• October - November . The Life of Breath Project artist-in-residence at Southmead Hospital, Bristol
• October 14 . Invited talk on Breath Catalogue at Southmead Hospital, Bristol
• September 5 . Dance Marathon Archive Box: Open with a Punk Spirit with Rani Nair at Singapore International Festival of Arts, Singapore
• September 2 . Future Memory performance at Singapore International Festival of Arts, “POST-Empires,” Singapore
• August 4 & 6 . Future Memory performance at ImPulsTanz - Vienna International Dance Festival, Vienna
• July 16-17 . Breath Catalogue performance at Fort Mason Center Firehouse, San Francisco
• April 10-12 . Animation Project workshop at Performance Philosophy conference, School of the Art Institute, Chicago
• April 2 . Invited talk at Princeton University, Dance Program, Princeton
• March 31 . Invited talk at Temple University, Temple Dance Studies Colloquium, Philadelphia
• March 26 . Invited performance lecture at University of Copenhagen, seminar on Invisibility Studies, Copenhagen
• January 17 . Future Memory performance at IGNITE! Festival of Contemporary Dance, New Delhi
• January 16 . Gifts, Inheritance, and Passing Things On workshop at IGNITE! Festival of Contemporary Dance, New Delhi

2014

• December 4 . Talk for Art Writing, Writing Art working group, University of Bristol
• November 20 . Invited talk for the Lilian Karina Foundation, Dansmuseet, Stockholm
• November 13-16 . Panel at SDHS/CORD joint conference, Iowa City
• November 5 . Invited talk at Kings College London for the German in the World lecture series, London
• May 3 . Roundtable at University of Salzburg, symposium on Material and Bodily Archives, Oral Histories, and Kinesthetic Connections, Salzburg
• May 2 . Future Memory performance at the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance, Salzburg
• April 4-5 . Invited talk at Oxford University for Film and Other Arts, 1895-1955 symposium, Magdalen College/New College, Oxford
• April 3 . Talk for the Political Cultures research cluster event on Media and Political Culture, University of Bristol
• March 14-15 . Future Memory performance and post-show talk with Rani Nair and Sandra Chatterjee at Dansens Hus, Stockholm
• March 13 . Post-show talk with Olga de Soto at Dansens Hus, Stockholm
• March 10 . Conversation with Olga de Soto and Rani Nair at Dansens Hus, Stockholm
• March 7 . Gifts, Inheritance, and Passing Things On workshop at Dansens Hus, Stockholm
• February 10 . Invited talk for the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network, Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, Cambridge

2013

• December 11 . Invited talk for Reenactment Lecture Series at Universität Potsdam and Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam
• November 14-17 . Panel at SDHS/CORD joint conference, Riverside
• October 21 . Future Memory performance and post-show talk with Rani Nair at Kungliga Konsthögskolan, Skeppsholmsstudion, Stockholm
• October 9 . Future Memory performance at Skånes Dansteater's dance and cultural heritage festival, Malmö
• August 12-21 . Future Memory residency at Dansens Hus, Stockholm
• June 26-30 . Panel at Performance Studies International (PSi), Palo Alto
• June 13 . Invited talk at University of Edinburgh, School of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures, Edinburgh
• May 22-23 . Performance of Future Memory at Scenkonst Biennialen, Jönköping
• February 15th . Invited talk at Brown University, Department of Theatre, Speech, and Dance, Providence

2012

• December 4th, 5th, 7th, 8th . Premiere of Future Memory, plus post-show talk with Rani Nair, Malmö and Lund
• November 29th . Invited talk at the London Theatre Seminar, London
• November 2nd . Working Group on Theatre and Dance at the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), Nashville
• October 25th . Panel on Germany and the Cultural Olympiad with Ben Schofield, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, and Emily Oliver at Kings College London, Arts and Humanities Festival, London
• September 18th . Invited talk at Emory University, Friends of Dance Lecture Series, Atlanta
• July 10th . Invited talk at Kings College London, Department of German, London
• June 29th . Animation Project Workshop with Megan Nicely at PSi, Leeds
• June 25th . Animation Project Performance with Megan Nicely at the Centre for Contemporary Theatre, Birkbeck College, London
• June 16th . Keynote at the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA), Bodies Working Group, interim event on Pina Bausch, London
• June-July . Cultural Olympiad Reading Groups at Kings College London
• February 2nd . Nick Ridout at WHAP! Lecture Series at the West Hollywood Library, Los Angeles
• January 24th . Talk at CalArts, MA Aesthetics and Politcs, Theory Tuesdays, Los Angeles

2011

• December 16th-17th . Animation Project Performance with Megan Nicely at The Garage, San Francisco
• November 28th . Talk at Stanford University, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, German Department Colloquium, Palo Alto
• November 20th . Working Group on Theatre and Intellectual Property at ASTR, Montreal
• September 16th-17th . The People SF performance with Big Art Group at Z Space, San Francisco
• August 29th-September 2nd . João Fiadeiro Workshop on Real Time Composition at Dansbyrån (part of the Dance Bar series), Gothenburg
• September 1st . João Fiadeiro Dance Bar “Blind Date” with Devdatt Dubhashi
• June 20th-July 29th . DAAD Junior Faculty Summer Seminar on Theatre and Media with David Levin at University of Chicago
• July 9th . Dance Camp at The Garage, San Francisco
• June 25th . Talk at Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS), Toronto
• May 31st-June 3rd . Petra Kuppers Workshop on What Dance Can Do.: Experimental Community Performance at Dansbyrån (part of the Dance Bar series), Gothenburg
• April 27th . Talk at Stanford University, Stanford Humanities Center, Working Group on Visualizing Complexity and Uncertainty, Palo Alto
• April 2nd-5th . Erin Manning Workshop at Dansbyrån (part of the Dance Bar series), Gothenburg
• February 18th-19th . Movement, Somatics, and Writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

2010

• December 2nd . João Fiadeiro Dance Bar at Dansbyrån, Gothenburg
• November 21st . Concurrent Panel Paper at ASTR, Seattle
• November 4th . Erin Manning Dance Bar at Dansbyrån, Gothenburg
• October 8th . Talk at German Studies Association (GSA), Oakland
• September 5th . Invited talk at Taipei National University for the Arts, Dance College, Symposium on The Green Table, Taipei
• September 3rd . Harmony Bench Dance Bar at Dansbyrån, Gothenburg
• August 24th . Göteborgs Dans & Teater Festival, breakfast talk with Lisi Estaras (Les Ballets C de la B), Gothenburg
• August 12th-13th . Performance with Christi Weindorf at The Garage, San Francisco
• August 3rd . Talk at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), Los Angeles
• July 11th . Talk at SDHS, Surrey
• June 11th . Talk at PSi, Toronto

The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
62-64 Eton Avenue
London NW3 3HY
United Kingdom
kate.elswit@cssd.ac.uk

@somethingmodern