April 14
Lindsey Drury & João Romão
Freie Universität
Introduction

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.