The SLIPPAGE lab started over 20 years ago. Today, the lab is exploring a variety of topics, including Black social dance practices and the intersection of music and dance as abstract art forms.
The SLIPPAGE lab is a cross-disciplinary research arts lab that explores how people, especially people of color, interpolate and present research, Managing Director Shireen Dickson said.
The lab originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, moving to Duke in 2011 and then to Northwestern in 2022.
The lab attempts to provide a platform for people who might not otherwise have the means to present high-level research in spaces where people can understand and celebrate the work, Dickson said.
“One of the things that I am particularly proud of working with SLIPPAGE is our commitment to encouraging people to think about research and archiving in ways that are non-traditional and that aren’t necessarily celebrated in more traditional Western institutions,” Dickson said.
SLIPPAGE’s Artistic Director and Performance Studies and Theatre Prof. Thomas F. DeFrantz created the lab after realizing that a space was needed to experiment through “form and thought” and thinking alongside others, DeFrantz said.
Most of the lab’s projects are in relationship to dance, DeFrantz said.
“Dance offers a lever of expression that exceeds language. It’s more than language,” DeFrantz said. “Dance is an urgent capacity that people (use) to wonder with what could be next, or who else could we be. So dance, for me, offers a terrific way to think with curiosity and empathy.”
The lab received a $500,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation in 2023. It used this money to fund a project that explores how Black dance practices across the United States constitute African American identity and Black freedom, DeFrantz said.
DeFrantz said the research is still ongoing, but the end result of the three-year research project will likely be two or three written works.
Another one of the lab’s projects is “Abstract Black.” The project began when DeFrantz and Musicology Prof. Ryan Dohoney were looking into a grant that encouraged collaboration between schools and departments, Dohoney said.
The two began to explore the intersection of dance and music as abstract art forms and the idea of “aesthetic abstraction,” which is a strategy that Black artists use, Dohoney said.
“I like this idea of (abstract being) kind of a refusal to be reduced to representing one thing and to mean one thing and to resist being pigeonholed,” he said.
Dohoney said that his and DeFrantz’s work led to a two-day event where musicians and dancers, mainly from the Chicago area, were invited to “reflect on abstraction.” The event, which took place in the fall of 2023, included brief artistic presentations and time for collective dance improvisation.
Another “iteration” of “Abstract Black” is planned for this spring as a collaboration with another one of the lab’s projects, “Make Black Art Live Now!”
In addition to the lab’s projects, DeFrantz also offers a class titled “Performance and Technology.” The class combines interactive media with technology, like robots and 3D printing, to bring together different students and is a collaboration with the Segal Design Institute, DeFrantz said.
DeFrantz said researchers at universities can encourage “stronger social interactions.”
“Universities and the research that they produce are essential to any sort of shared future,” DeFrantz said. “The rogue government that we’re experiencing right now trying to shut down knowledge, learning, wondering are examples of exactly why the research of different labs … around the planet are so incredibly important to our shared futures. … We must not let this be our future.”
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