Contemporary PerforMemory ? Dancing through Spacetime, Historical Trauma, and Diaspora in the 21st Century (Critical Dance Studies)

Contemporary PerforMemory looks at dance works created in the 21st century by choreographers identifying as Afro-European, Jewish, Black, Palestinian, and Taiwanese-Chinese-American. It explores how contemporary dance-makers engage with historical traumas such as the Shoah and the Maafa to reimagine how the past is remembered and how the future is anticipated. The new idea of perforMemory arises within a lively blend of interdisciplinary theory, interviews, performance analysis, and personal storytelling. Scholar and artist Layla Zami traces unexpected pathways, inviting the reader to move gracefully across disciplines, geographies, and histories.
Featuring insightful interviews with seven international artists: Oxana Chi, Zufit Simon, André M. Zachery, Chantal Loïal, Wan-Chao Chang, Farah Saleh, and Christiane Emmanuel.

Layla Zami (Dr. phil., Dipl.-Pol.) is Postdoctoral Researcher in Performance Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, where she works in the Collaborative Research Center on Intervening Arts. Zami spent several years as a Visiting Assistant and later Adj. Associate Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute in New York, and teaches at Pratt Berlin. As an Interdisciplinary Artist-in-Residence with Oxana Chi Dance & Art, Zami creates and performs music/sounds, spoken words, and physical theater in dialogue with the choreography. She holds a PhD from the Center for Trandisciplinary Gender Studies at Humboldt-University in Berlin, where she was awarded a Teaching Quality Prize for her seminar Performing Memory. She serves on the Editorial Board of *Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies* (DSA).