Body Language: An Exploration of Movement and Poetry

Body Language: An Exploration of Movement and Poetry
with Hermitage Fellows Jules Downum and Pedro Serrano

Friday, October 15^th @ 6pm

The Hermitage Campus, 6660 Manasota Key Road, Englewood, Florida 34223

Attendees are encouraged to dress comfortably for some voluntary, light movement participation!

Dancer, choreographer, and producer Jules Downum facilitates a “Dance 101” workshop on the Hermitage Great Lawn! No judgments and no prior experience needed as you start to learn the language of movement through common footwork patterns and dance vocabulary. The use of language will also be explored on the page and out loud by internationally celebrated bilingual poet and Guggenheim Fellow Pedro Serrano, who shares works in both English and Spanish.

Register here.

Hermitage Fellow Jules Downum is a dancer, choreographer, producer, director, and a co-founder of The Pop-up Project, a Chattanooga based non-profit organization that creates large scale, cross-genre performances in non-traditional spaces. Through The Pop-up Project, she has directed eleven site-specific films; produced dozens of events, and worked with over one hundred students and professional artists throughout Tennessee and the United States. Jules has danced professionally since 2006; she has travelled internationally to teach and perform as a solo artist and as a member of Urban Tribal Dance Company (based in San Diego, California). She has an MA in applied cultural anthropology from San Diego State University.

Hermitage Fellow Pedro Serrano is a poet, essayist, and translator born in Montreal. He was director of the Banff International Translator Centre and editor of Periódico de la poesía. He published Defenfsas, a book on poetry and other wanderings in 2014 and La construcción del poeta moderno (The Construction of the Modern Poet), an essay on T.S. Eliot and Octavio Paz in 2012. With Carlos López Beltrán, he published La generación del cordero (The Lamb Generation), a bilingual anthology of Contemporary British Poetry. He translated William Shakespeare’s King John and Edward Hirsch’s Gabriel: A Poem. His poems have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Verse, Sirena, The Rialto, The Red Wheelbarrow, Nimrod, and Bomb. He has been also included in the anthologies Reversible Monuments (Copper Canyon, 2002) Connecting Lines (Sarabande Books, 2006), Mexican Poetry Today 20/20 Voices (Shearsman Books, 2010), Being Human: More Real Poems for Unreal Time (Bloodaxe, 2011) and Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, poetry, drama and Writing, edited by X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. He was granted the Guggenheim fellowship for poetry in 2007 and the Prix international de poésie Antonio Viccaro in 2016. Peatlands, translated by Anna Crowe and introduced by W.N. Herbert, was published by Arc in 2014.