and in the many case studiesthat inform my work, for Northwest Coast dance artists, protocol is more than a set of restrictions.It is the artistic lens through which they create performances affirming their people’s land rights,epistemologies, and hereditary privileges.

S7aplek agreed to the collaboration, emphasizing again the importanceof creating new songs and dances to address the unique demands of such a performance. 2

“dancing in non-traditional environments a

The term ancestral songs refers to songs that

oundational understanding

made sure that we did ourhomework for about six months before we left our shores. By that I mean, everyonewas required to research their family names, what songs we could use, how to usethe songs, and where they can be used. . ..

by speaking with elders and other knowl-edgeable people in their Nation about protocol.

you have to acknowledge that, you can’t just come ashore—youhave to stop and think where you are, what you are doing, and what’s being repre-sented at that point [of coming ashore]. A

Holding myself accountable to shared protocol governing the use ofsongs and dances as well as the ethics inherent

7aplek activates the response-ability of his collab-orators through forging Chiax-based relationships and generating host/guest relationscapes.

, and to negotiate non-normative codes of behaviour for specific tactile encounters.

of how touch insinuates in the making of any artwork

indicate that the two figures

way to generate descriptive and conceptual vocabulary for a contemporary tactile aesthetics.

experience of touch tours into words, she was struck by a poverty of language:

xplicitly as a central force in my artistic practice

Less successful touch tours

touch tours are usually rushed

direct the hands of the beholder to facets and features that are not visible to the eyes alone

I always get something out of the experience.

ut also to recognize the textural qualities of different finishes.

we foreground our personal connections to the project, trace our meeting of minds and politics in asserting the perceptual and social value of touch, a

introduced forbidding touch

We must learn to seemore, to hear more, to feel more

n overrun by interpreters

n. To avoid interpretation, art may become parody. Or it maybecome abstract. Or it may become (“merely”) decorative. Or it maybecome non-art.The flight from interpre

(“Never trust the teller, tr

t doesn’t matter whether artists intend, or don’t intend, for their works tobe interpreted.

Real art has the capacity to make usnervous.

Actually, they have no meaning without interpretation. Tounderstand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon,in effect to find an equivalent for it

The interpreter, without actually erasing orrewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit to doing this. He claimsto be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning

translation.

(or thought one knew)

Art is useful, after all, Aristotlecounters, medicinally useful in that it arouses and purges dangerousemotions

the value of art

that viewers who arenot black females find it hard to empathize with the central charactersin the movie. They are adrift without a white presence in the film.

gestures of affirmation, often expressed by eye-to-eye contact, the direct unmediated gaze of recognition

s influenced her, black woman filmmaker Julie Dashexclaims, “I make films because I was such a spectato

been through resistance, struggle, reading, andlooking “against the grain,

female identit

, cultivated a way tolook past race and gender for aspects of content, form, language.Foreign films and U.S. independent cinema were the primary loca

s one black woman put, “I couldalways get pleasure from movies as long as I did not look too deep.”For black female spectators who have “looked too deep

consciously resisted identification with films— t

about racial purity that the best blondes have all been brunettes(Harlow, Monroe, Bardot)?

al of Difference: Theories of Cinematic Identification” she stressesthat “identification can only be made through recognition, and allrecognition is itself an implicit confirmation of the ideology of the statusquo. ”

hey were all acutely aware of cinematic racism—its violent erasure of black womanhood

inematic context thatconstructs our presence as absence

Emmet Till after interpreting his look as violation, as“rape” of white womanhood

daring to look,

a critical gaze, one that “looks” todocument, one that is oppositional

and over my gaze was never so absolute that I didnot dare to look, to sneak a peep, to stare dangerously

were such that the slaves weredenied their right to gaze

I read in history classes that white slaveowners (men, women, and children) punished enslaved black peoplefor looking, I wondered how this traumatic relationship to the gaze hadinformed black parenting and black spectatorship.

Look at me when I talk to you.

rawn from her own teaching in the history of art,

“science of learning,” three speakers addressed the “art of teaching”

good teaching