The lecture series Energy Flows: Performance, Modernity, and the Histories of Science and Technology addresses performance modernity through the lens of dance and music’s entanglement with electrical technologies (including amplification and lighting), communication technologies, medical science, social science methods from anthropology and sociology, as well as technologies arising from the military industrial complex (surveillance tech, Virtual Reality, etc.), and digital and data-based technologies. 

Approaching music and dance as a series of flows is also about understanding aesthetics as something that is grounded at a broader infrastructural level. Recent research on "audible infrastructures" has focused on the material-environmental relations and political-economic conditions in different geographies, tracing the connection between music industries, forestry, and mining, and linking music to broader circularities of resource extraction, politics of production, and waste, among others (Devine and Boudreault-Fournier 2021). This approach often makes colonial logics visible, and we are also interested in this lecture series to highlight the potential of music and dance to imagine and create spaces that intentionally or unintentionally reject the capitalist logic of technological development and innovation as the sole driving force of modernity.

The vast majority of speakers in Energy Flows are early-career scholars who have just published their first book or are in the process of completing it. The series will traverse the early modern period to the present century, drawing together scholars whose work shows how science and technology have not merely contributed to the performing arts of dance and music, but that, indeed, the performing arts have in many ways shaped science and technology in turn.

April 14
Lindsey Drury & João Romão
Freie Universität
Introduction

April 28
Sarah-Indriyati Hardjowirogo
Leuphana Universität
Digital Circuits, Sonic Currents: On Energy and Diversity in Contemporary Music Production

May 5
Stefanie Alisch
Humboldt Universität
Charged! Electronic Dance Music, Pleasure, and Violence in the African Mega-City Luanda

May 12
Hyoung-Min Kim
Korean National University
The Movement Under the Light

May 19
Leendert van der Miesen
Humboldt Universität
Music’s Natural History: Song, Science and Animals in the Eighteenth Century

May 26
Christopher Klauke
Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte
(Un-)Transcribing Race. Eugenic Musical Data, The Fisk Jubilee Singers, and the Politics of Knowing the African-American Singing Voice around 1920

June 2
Viktoria Tkaczy
Humboldt Universität
Tuning the Empire: The BBC, Wireless Networks, and the Politics of Time and Space

June 16
Johanna Pitetti-Heil
Universität zu Köln
Movements without Volition. A Critical Reading of Isadora Duncan’s Dance Practices

June 23
Nina Tolksdorf
Freie Universität
Choreographies of Body-Technics. Pantomime and technological developments

June 30
Whitney Laemmli
Pratt University
Making Movement Modern: Science, Politics, and the Body in Motion

July 7
Viktor Ruban
National University of Physical Education and Sport of Ukraine
Energy crisis in the context of embodiment practices or, “What about the Body?”

July 14
Camilla Bork & Lucia Ruprecht
Freie Universität
Closing