Joe Bowie (Dance) is a member of the 23–24 graduate cohort for “Improvise and Intervene,” the second Interseminars project funded by the Mellon Foundation. He shares about his experiences with Interseminars below.

How has your understanding of “improvisational practice” evolved over the course of this fellowship so far?

As a third-year Dance MFA graduate student, I come from an improvisational artistic practice. My creative research as a dance artist is spontaneous and embodied. Dance has inherent interdisciplinarity, but there is always space to engage new perspectives. The Interseminars Fellowship offers current methods of improvisational practice and invites us to evolve new ways of thinking. We connect across disciplines, investigate new entry points, and assemble multimodal approaches to our praxes. Participating in this fellowship has reminded me that improvisational practices are intentional and purposeful. These practices sometimes bring us to the brink of discomfort and precarity, but in those moments, we are called to new ways of thinking; we take a new path, discover a new technology/methodology, intervene, shake ourselves up, and get in our way. An improvisational practice allows us to create in real time with a present-minded awareness that speaks to the artistry evident in our daily lives, particularly during challenging moments.

“My improvisational practice has broadened to include perspectives and entry points from Anthropology, Geology, Social Work, Mixed Media Visual Arts, and Ethnic Studies. From my cohort, I’m learning new ways of caring and cultivating kindness. I am gaining profound respect and gratitude for different points of view and different ways of thinking. I’m recalibrating, reconsidering, and reconnecting during each seminar session.”

Joe Bowie

How has the Interseminars initiative impacted the way you approach your research?

This Interseminars Initiative, “Improvise and Intervene,” has contributed to my research methodologies toolkit. When I started my MFA in Dance, my creative research centered on the body and somatic methods. I used dance improvisation as a generative tool to make movement. My dance improvisation practice employed multimodal approaches that included visual art, music, storytelling, and African-American poetry, but my praxis needed the depth of theoretical inquiry. The Interseminars initiative has invited that profundity.

Our conveners, Maryam Kashani, Junaid Rana, and Eli Velásquez Estrada are all brilliant scholars. They align under an umbrella of Activist, Fugitive, and Multimodal Anthropologies–each offering an informed yet different approach to research methods. Their lenses have included the practices of film-making, devised theatre, social justice, Marxism, and Abolition, among others. They have been generous with their knowledge, sharing easily and thoughtfully. They have provided an example of what interdisciplinary collaboration and social justice work could be; how we might work together in provocative and evocative ways without being pedantic or dismissive.

I am grateful to have engaged with the work of wonderful authors: Stuart Hall, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Cedric Robinson, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Courtney Desiree Morris, Dylan Rodriquez, and Trinh Minh-Ha, but more than that, I applaud the way our conveners have modeled working together with our cohort. They have provided new theoretical methodologies along with rigorous inquiry. They have consistently “shown up.” Interdisciplinary work requires this level of sustained effort, and being a part of the Interseminars Initiative reminds me that I have always been readying myself for this work.

Can you describe a group interaction or activity from Interseminars that has been particularly memorable?

“Warm Fuzzies.” I had no idea what to expect for or Interseminars Summer Intensive. I had taken a seminar on Transnational Feminisms with Maryam Kashani, one of our conveners, and collaborated with Gabriel Eng Gonzales, who is a second-year Dance MFA candidate, but otherwise, knew no one else in our cohort. What are we going to do during this intensive week? How would we begin our study of the theme “Improvise and Intervene”? I had made interdisciplinary collaboration a priority in my graduate work, adding a minor in Gender and Women’s Studies to my MFA in Dance, but I still wondered what we were going to do. What would our synthesis look like? Our week was spectacular! One of the first activities we did to get to know one another was to bring in favorite objects to share with our cohort. This seemingly simple sharing provided an opportunity for us to see and gently hold space for one another. We talked, listened to music, studied, played, and thought together. There was a genuine effort toward valuing the process of coming together as a cohort over a product we would show at the end of our intensive week. We were visited by and introduced to the work of professors Siobhan Somerville, Jenny Davis, and Antoinette Burton, who have been instrumental in bringing the Interseminars Initiative to fruition.

As our week together concluded, we did my favorite activity: “Warm Fuzzies.” To participate in this activity, we each took Post-its and wrote things we enjoyed about the other members of our cohort and our conveners—all the warm and fuzzy feelings we held for one another. We then posted these colorful Post-its on the window of the room we had been in for the week. This display of warmth was so beautiful and touching. At the end of our last day together, we each collected our “Warm Fuzzies” to take with us. When I got home and read mine, I cried. I was so moved. I now had an answer to my initial question, “What are we going to do during this intensive week?” We came together and placed our improvisational practices alongside one another. We looked at the imbrications, glitches, and parallels. We said “Yes!” to process, presence, and possibility.

How will you bring interdisciplinary collaboration into the next phase of your graduate school experience?

The next phase of my graduate school experience will be creating a thesis project, writing an accompanying document to support my embodied work, and finishing up my graduate career at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I plan to interweave interdisciplinary collaboration into every aspect of my next phase. My thesis will invite the work of dance artists, theatre artists, African American queer poets, several genres of music, and lots of autoethnographic “me-search.” It will build on improvisational practices and methodologies I have shared and cultivated in the Interseminars Initiative. This project will create a capacious container that makes room for all of us—our stories, lived/living archives, specificities, and embodied knowledges. I plan to bring intentional purposeful interdisciplinarity to my work. I will invite new methods, theoretical frameworks, and rigorous inquiry. I will show up for my collaborators and always work to create with kindness, respect, and gratitude.