taisha paggett & Joel Mejia Smith: “dance work” & “digital landscaping”

Event Description:

taisha paggett 

“dance work”

Joel Mejia Smith 

“between mark/It/s : digital landscaping and practices of de/compression”

Participants:

taisha paggett (they/\she) is the continuation of Cheryl Yvone McGhee, Arveal Paggett Jr, and the relatives who’ve held her. paggett respectfully resides on the original gathering lands of the Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, and Serrano, colonially called Riverside, CA. paggett’s research speaks from and beyond a black, queer, insider/outsider vantage, upholding dance, choreography, and its methodologies as something to break open--a lens and lung through which to engage ideas--specifically concerning questions of language, form, presence, and the terrain of racial trauma, grief, land longing, and manufactured identities. paggett’s projects have been presented at the Remai Modern (Saskatoon), Redcat, Hammer Museum; Commonwealth & Council; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, ICA Philadelphia; DiverseWorks (Houston); the Whitney Museum; Studio Museum in Harlem; Danspace at St Mark’s Church (New York); Defibrillator (Chicago); Gallery TPW (Toronto); the Audain Gallery (Vancouver), and their home, amongst other known and emergent venues. Additional project and research support has been provided by MacDowell, the Graham Foundation, MAP Fund, National Performance Network, Clockshop, Show Box LA, and the Headlands. paggett was the recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ honorable Merce Cunningham Award in 2019 and is currently collaborating with Tara Aisha Willis and Jaime Shearn Coan on an artist book to be released in 2026 via Soberscove Press.

Joel Mejia Smith (he/him) is a queer, mixed Latino dance and visual artist who creates live, digital and web-based projects around identity and meta-theatricality, or performances that call attention to their making. The focus of his creative research is in his shared role as artistic director of duet dance theater company casebolt and smith, established in 2005 with Liz Casebolt, whose mission/work demystifies and challenges gender power structures and binary social roles largely choreographed and constructed as female/male partnerships in theatrical dances; and in the solo improvisations, new collaborations and digital projects that support and inform inquiries around queerness, gay male subjectivity, ethnicity, intimacy, eroticism and pleasure. His work has been presented at the National Theater of Taiwan in Taipei, 92nd Street Y’s Buttenweiser Hall in New York City, Miami Dade Cultural Art Center in Miami, REDCAT and Broad Museum in Los Angeles, ODC Theater in San Francisco, Vancouver International Dance Festival in Vancouver, Dance Theater of Ireland in Dublin, Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival in Belfast, Lee Theater in St. Louis, Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, and the Southern Theater in Minneapolis among others. More recently his films have been presented at the InShadow Lisbon Screendance Festival in Lisbon, Portugal, ScreenDance Film Festival in Stockholm, Sweden, ScreenDance Film Festival in Scotland, UK, QueerBee LGBT Film Festival in London, England, 4th Dimension Film Festival in Bali, Indonesia, and Istanbul Improvisation Dance Festival in Istanbul, Turkey. His work is taught by scholars and artists, and has been written about on multiple occasions by the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Dance Magazine, LA Weekly and others.

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 Credits: 

taisha paggett, production still, by meital yaniv, 2024.

Joel Mejia Smith, 2018

Download the poster here [LINK COMING SOON]

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