Lecture: Citing Site: Landscape and Ritual

LA Spring Lecture Series presents Jeff Friedman

Wednesday, February 16 at 4:00 pm,Cook/Douglas Lecture Hall;

3 College Farm Road, New Brunswick, NJ

Citing Site: Landscape and Ritual

Traditional societies often use ritual events as a performance-based index for expressing cultural values about landscape. These ritual events often celebrate and consecrate the siting of sacred buildings or reflect how societies si tuate themselves within the context of their cosomology, writ small in the form of sacred landscape and architecture.  In the 20th and 21st centuries, site-specific performance strives to interrogate, interpret and stimulate a performance-based discourse about land, architecture and "site." The lecture briefly surveys both practices, with visual examples of both traditional and contemporary works.

Jeff Friedman ran away from Cornell University's architecture school to be a dancer. He sustained a professional career as a dancer and choreographer in Boston and New York before returning to the University of Oregon where he completed his B.Arch in 1979. Based in San Francisco for 18 years, from 1979-1997, Jeff was a professional performer and choreographer, touring nationally and internationally with the Oberlin Dance Collective and specializing in multi-disciplinary site-specific performances in outdoor land and hard-scapes as well as architectural interiors. He completed his Ph.D. in dance history and theory at the University of California in 2003 and was appointed to the dance faculty at Rutgers where he is now Associate Professor, teaching both studio and theory courses. His research takes the form of both print publication and choreography, with a focus on oral-kinesthetic tradition, oral history theory, method and practice, and performance culture. Recent invited lectures include the Korean Arts Council in Seoul, Auckland and Victoria Universities in New Zealand, and Giessen and Leipzig Universities, during his 2010 Fulbright Fellowship in Germany.