Coffee and Concepts – Seattle amongst Avant-Garde Geographies

“Seattle amongst Avant-Garde Geographies”

Jasmine Mahmoud’s talk “Seattle amongst Avant-Garde Geographies” considers the role of Seattle within her book project, Avant-Garde Geographies: Race, Austerity, and Experimentation in the Urban Frontier. The book investigates the trend of experimental theater and performance practices making (and taking) space in urban margins in New York, Detroit, Chicago, and Seattle. It examines how, from 2001 to 2017, many practitioners of avant-garde theater, performance art, social practice, and experimental dance moved into urban margins often called frontiers, and interacted with pre-and-post-collapse political economies, austere policy, and processes of urbanization and racialization including gentrification, erasure/displacement, and “renewal.” Critically, this work integrates theories on settler colonialism, race, and the avant-garde to theorize “avant-garde geographies,” that is, that the avant-garde is a geographic practice that imbues aesthetic and racial meanings into geographic space, and that policy influences embodied geographic practices, including avant-garde performance.

This talk will focus on the manuscript’s chapter on Seattle: on Seattle-based artists and venues including DK Pan, Sara Porkalab, Implied Violence, Annex Theatre, The Satori Group, and King Street Station, as well as the enduring, colonial role of the “frontier” in claiming urban space in Seattle.

BIO:

Jasmine Mahmoud (PhD, Performance Studies, Northwestern University) is Assistant Professor in Arts Leadership in the Department of Performing Arts & Arts Leadership at Seattle University. A performance historian and urban ethnographer, her work engages contemporary artistic practices, arts/cultural policy, black aesthetics, embodiment, and spatial racism. Her writing has been published in Modern Drama, Performance Research, TDR: The Drama Review, and Women & Performance, and in the anthologies Theater and Cultural Politics for a New World and Postdramatic Theatre and Form. Invested in public scholarship and art criticism, she has also written for Canadian Art, The Common Reader, Hyperallergic, and the Urban Cultural Studies Blog, where she is an Assistant Editor. In 2009, she co-founded and edited The Arts Politic, a magazine dedicated to solving problems at the intersection of arts and politics. She is currently co-editing the book Makeshift Chicago Stages: A Century of Theatre and Performance with Megan Geigner (Northwestern University) and Stuart Hecht (Boston College), under contract with Northwestern University Press.

At Seattle University, co-curates the quarterly Arts Leadership Book Club, and teaches courses including “Public Policy and Advocacy in the Arts,” a course in which she and her students launched the Seattle Arts Voter Guide.