Following UW’s guidance in response to the omicron variant, this event will be broadcast live in front of a small studio audience. We encourage you to RSVP by Thursday, January 13 at 8am in order to receive link reminders: bit.ly/Katz-Cole. You can also bookmark the live broadcast URL: bit.ly/katz-cole-live.

Unresolved pasts tend to return. In the aftermath of state-perpetrated injustice, a façade of peace can suddenly give way. In such circumstances, the voices and visions of artists can help us see what otherwise evades perception. Focusing on contemporary performance in post-apartheid South Africa, this lecture will explore how unresolved racialized histories of state-perpetrated violence create conditions of possibility and impossibility for performance artists, choreographers, and theater makers. Cole will be presenting from her recent book, Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice, which brings the most social of art forms—live performance—together with questions about how societies change in the wake of state perpetrated atrocities.

Catherine M. Cole is Divisional Dean of the Arts and Professor of English and Dance at the University of Washington. Her most recent book, Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice (2020), received an Honorable Mention for the 2021 de la Torre Bueno Prize®, awarded annually by the Dance Studies Association for a book published in the English language that advances the field of dance studies. Cole’s other books include Performing South Africa’sTruth Commission: Stages of Transition (2010) and Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre (2001). She has received fellowships and grants from the National Humanities Center, Mellon Foundation, Freie Universität Berlin, National Endowment for the Humanities, Fund for U.S. Artists, and the American Association of University Women. Cole’s disability dance theater piece Five Foot Feat, created in collaboration with Christopher Pilafian, toured North America in 2002-2005.

Free and open to the public. Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by January 9 to scevents@uw.edu, 206-685-5260.