Heather Rastovac Akbarzadeh & Nidia Bautista, with Xóchitl C. Chávez as a respondent

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Heather Rastovac Akbarzadeh

 “where ghosts reside at the end of the world:” Hauntings of Empire and Spectral Choreographies of Survivance in Extraterritorial

In the collaborative performance project Extraterritorial (2020), Iranian-born artist Sholeh Asgary and Iraqi-born artist Dena Al-Adeeb use video, sound, and choreography to engage in what they call a feminist refugee praxis toward their reclamation of “post-apocalyptic landscapes… where ghosts reside at the end of the world” (artists’ statement). Two dancers move slowly along a shallow shoreline of the San Francisco Bay – Ohlone land marked by settler colonialism and techno-capitalism – wrapped in reflective Mylar emergency blankets, appearing and disappearing. These metallic forms shimmer against a landscape imprinted by dispossession, even as the dancers’ bodily archives stretch the site toward transnational borderlands shaped by U.S. imperialism in their ancestral homelands. Their bodies mark the indeterminate zones between arrival/departure, home/exile, citizen/refugee, and their decelerated movements gesture toward the slow and persistent violence of colonialism and capital that undergird these ontological states. I put Extraterritorial into conversation with Indigenous epistemologies that frame the apocalypse as an already ongoing condition of settler colonialism, and with Black feminist theories of hauntology, which trouble linear time and foreground the persistent presence of racial and colonial violence. Through performance and media analysis, I contend that the artists’ moving bodies re/member through the spectral figures of “ghosts” to activate liberatory futures that the “end of the world” as we know it has the potential to afford. Through its choreography of refusal, Extraterritorial engages hauntology as both method and politics, foregrounding how bodies, even when illegible or made spectral, persist as archives of survivance despite erasure and displacement.

Nidia Bautista, with Xóchitl C. Chávez as a respondent

Sonia Madrigal’s “La Muerte Sale por el Oriente:” Objects, Corporeality, and the Reframing of Feminicidal Space

Working from Nezahualcóyotl, at the periphery of Mexico City’s art world and feminist movements, Sonia Madrigal’s series La Muerte Sale por el Oriente (2014-ongoing) foregrounds the choreographic force of an object: a feminine form constructed from mirrors. Madrigal’s work begins not with the placement of the silhouette but with the artist’s own bodily labor, carrying, balancing, and transporting the object. Once installed, the mirrored figure continues to choreograph; it diffracts sunlight, redirects sight lines, and mobilizes the viewer’s body through a constantly shifting field of reflections. In this sense, the silhouette is not only an object but a performer whose reflective surface enacts a poiesis of space: it fabricates new relations among bodies, infrastructures, histories, and the absences and presences of feminicidal violence. Approaching Madrigal’s silhouette as choreographic infrastructure, this talk will explore how the mirrored body operates within a network of agencies. I examine how the silhouette’s negative space produces a corporeality that is constantly shifting; through the act of being there, it reframes the spectatorship of bodies and the spectatorial expectations placed upon feminized bodies in public space. By centering the mirrored silhouette as an agentive, choreographic body, I argue that Madrigal’s work offers a critical vocabulary for understanding how objects move us, physically, perceptually, and politically, within landscapes marked by gendered violence.

Participants:

Heather Rastovac Akbarzadeh (she/her) is an interdisciplinary scholar-artist and an Assistant Professor in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her research extends upon two decades as a dance-maker, artistic director, and dramaturg among diasporic SWANA (particularly Iranian American) communities. Heather earned her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from UC Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Following her doctoral studies, she was the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Dance Studies in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University (2016 - 2018) and the University of California Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Asian American Studies at UC Davis (2018 – 2020). Heather’s research engages transnational feminist critiques of war and Euro-American empire through examining diasporic SWANA performances of refusal and futurity that are choreographically oriented toward undermining neocolonial structures of seeing, feeling, and knowing the “Middle East.”  She is currently working on her first book manuscript, tentatively titled Choreographing the Iranian Diaspora: Dance, Spectatorship, and the Politics of Belonging, which was selected for the Dance Studies Association’s 2019 First-time Author Mentorship Program. Her publications include chapters in Futures of Dance Studies (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020); Performing Iran: Cultural Identity and Theatrical Performance (I.B. Tauris Press, 2021); Dance in the Persianate World: History, Aesthetics, and Performance (Mazda Press, 2023); and the Oxford Handbook of Dance Praxis (Oxford University Press, under review).

Nidia Bautista (she/her) is a researcher and journalist with ten years of experience documenting feminist activism in Mexico. Her scholarly research examines how feminist activists and artists contest feminicide in Mexico City and Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl. Analyzing feminicide as both a social and sensory crisis—shaping how we see, hear, and engage with public space—Bautista’s work focuses on how activists and artists disrupt dominant sensory orders through visual, sonic, and spatial interventions that open new political and temporal possibilities. In addition to her engaged scholarship and journalism, Bautista also participates in performance.  As a doctoral candidate in UCLA’s Department of Gender Studies, her research has been supported by UCLA’s Institute of American Cultures and International Institute. She has also received support from the Gender Studies Research Center and the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Science and Humanities at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS).

Dr. Xóchitl C. Chávez (respondent), Associate Professor in the Department of Music at the University of California, Riverside, is the first tenured Chicana in any UC system music program. With a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz and interdisciplinary training in Museum Studies, Ethnomusicology, Folklore, and Social Documentation, Dr. Chávez's research focuses on multi-generation Zapotec philharmonic bands in Los Angeles and their transborder relationships with Oaxaca, Mexico. As an Activist Scholar and musician, she ethically documents the cultural practices of Mexican Indigenous migrants and Latinos in the U.S. Her forthcoming book, La Guelaguetza: Oaxacan Migrant Festivals and the Making of Transborder Indigeneity (University of Oxford Press, 2026), represents groundbreaking transborder ethnography based on extensive fieldwork. Dr. Chávez continues to bridge academia and cultural preservation, securing grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and contributing to significant projects that deepen understanding of transnational Indigenous experiences and expressions. Her work has been recognized by the Smithsonian Institution, where she served as a curatorial advisor for the National Museum of the American Latino, and through collaborations with The Cheech Museum. Dr. Chávez's research, which bridges academic study with cultural practices, has been published in Spanish and English in respected journals and prestigious university presses.

Part of “Transversal Re/Configurations: Flesh, Bodies, and Matter in Motion”

Current Topics in Dance Research Colloquium Series: January 08 - March 12, 2026

– María Regina Firmino-Castillo, Curator & Coordinator 

Transversal Re/Configurations: Flesh, Bodies, and Matter in Motion was made possible through generous sponsorships from the California Center for Native Nations; the Rupert Costo Endowment in American Indian Affairs, University of California, Riverside; the CHASS Dean's Office and the Center for Ideas and Society; and the Departments of Music, Ethnic Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Media & Cultural Studies.

Many thanks to: taisha paggett (Department of Dance, Chairperson), Anthea Kraut (Department of Dance, Vice-Chair), Courtney Brubaker (Events Specialist), and Pete Pace (Technical Director) for their generous support of the Colloquium, and to Jonathan Ritter (Department of Music, Chairperson) and María del Rosario Acosta López (Professor, Hispanic Studies Department) for their vision and collaboration.

For Accessibility and Accommodations, contact mariafc@ucr.edu 

Photo Credit: ©Sonia Madrigal, La Muerte Sale por el Oriente, 2014-ongoing

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