Congratulations to Professor VK Preston for being the recipient of the esteemed 2018 Gertrude Lippincott Award from the Dance Studies Association (DSA) for her essay, “Baroque Relations: Performing Silver and Gold in Daniel Rabel’s Ballet of the Americas.” This award recognizes the best English-language dance studies article published in the last year, recognizing excellence in the field of dance scholarship.
The DSA Selection Committee had the following to say about VK’s essay: “Based on its imaginative and original contribution, its excellent synthesis of theoretical and empirical dimensions, including the rigour of its argumentation, and also its impact on the field, we award the Gertrude Lippincott Prize to VK Preston.” To learn more about the award, visit the Dance Studies Association.
Please join us in congratulating VK on her outstanding achievement.
VK will also be presenting on her work titled, Dancing Monsters: Punishing. Baroque. Remains. as part of York University's Graduate Dance Department Symposium Series on Thursday, February 28 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm in Room 311, Accolade East Building, 83 York Blvd, North York.
Exploring baroque performance and histories of racialization, this paper on ballet and colonization examines travel writing alongside early modern dance records. Addressing masks, matter, and the metaphorical blackening and whitening of alchemy, VK inflects this study of performance’s remains with analyses of race and religious difference evidenced in ballet’s records, traversing histories of the expulsion of minority populations, gender fluidity, and baroque performance.
VK works across and between critical dance studies, performance theory, disability studies, early modern, and Indigenous/settler studies. Her writing appears in TDR / The Drama Review, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theatre, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, TheatreForum, Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage, History, Memory, Performance, Theatre Journal, Performance Research, and is forthcoming in The Futures of Dance Studies.