Raven Malouf-Renning

Raven Malouf-Renning is a queer, nonbinary, neurodivergent, fat dancer, choreographer, and musician based in New York City. They received their BA in 1997 and a Graduate Certificate in 1998 in Theater Arts (Dance) from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and are currently an MA Candidate in Performance Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Their primary area of research investigates the role of inclusive performance in creating sites of alchemical kinesthetic worldmaking. Prior to coming to New York, Raven worked as an an Adjunct Lecturer in the Theatre and Dance Department at California State University, East Bay, where they served as the Associate Director of the Wandering Ensemble, a mixed ability dance/theater group under the umbrella of Dandelion Dancetheater, founded in 1996 by their longtime creative collaborator, Professor Eric Kupers. Together with Kupers, Raven has spent nearly ten years of practice based research at the intersection of Dance Studies, Disability Studies, and Queer and Trans Studies. In addition, Raven spent four years as a Lead Artist In Residence at SAFEhouse for the Performing Arts, a San Francisco based organization dedicated to showcasing the choreographic works of marginalized dancers. Creating raw, honest, inclusive art and empowering others to do the same is at the heart of their artistic and spiritual practice, and is a driving and animating force for their scholarly research.

Project Title: I Am Waiting: A Choreographic Experiment in Alchemical Kinesthetic Worldmaking

Project Description: This project poses the following question: What is the role of Inclusive Performance in addressing the gaps in the archives of Disabled, Queer, and Trans people, and how can the body serve as a living archive to bridge those gaps? For this symposium, I will be presenting my new work-in-progress entitled I Am Waiting, a new dance/theater piece that explores the uncomfortable liminal space of waiting, whether that be for gender affirming surgery, medical test results, or news about whether we will be able to retain the same human rights that cisgender, white, heterosexual people take for granted. The process of creating this performance piece draws heavily from the Inclusive Performance methodologies I have developed over the past decade with my artistic collaborator Eric Kupers as well as ethnoautobiographical techniques designed to translate the affect we hold inside of us into embodied movement, story, and song. These methods of creation owe a great debt to the archival choreographic practices of transgender choreographer Sean Dorsey, as well as Professor Diana Taylor’s theory of “acts of transfer,” disability scholar Arseli Documaci’s theory of microactivist affordances, and queer scholar Sarah Ahmed’s theory of Queer Phenomenology. This iteration of I Am Waiting is a draft of what I hope will eventually be an evening length performance piece. By centering the bodies and stories of marginalized people in dance, story, and song, I aim to widen the conversation regarding which bodies get to be seen onstage, and whose stories get to be shared.

Project Inspiration: I got this idea after presenting on Cameron Awkward-Rich's article "The Disabled Histories of Trans" in Jeannine Tang's "Trans Histories" class. When receiving feedback from my classmates, it struck me that what the intersecting identities of Disabled and Trans had in common with one another was the temporality of waiting. I knew then and there that I wanted my Symposium presentation to be a group dance piece entitled "I Am Waiting."

Academic Interests: Dance and Inclusive Performance, Dance Studies, Disability Studies, Queer and Trans Studies