The complex but short career of composer, singer, and performance artist Julius Eastman (1940-1990) demonstrates the difficult journeys that many Black American avant-garde artists endure. Eastman composed many musical works and performed frequently in other people’s creations, even as he struggled to secure a stable living for his creative practices. This talk explores the precarity of expressivity for African Americans engaged in systems of avant-garde artmaking. How can we understand Eastman’s achievements within systems of a Black American avant-garde that resisted a politics of respectability?

Thomas F. DeFrantz is Professor at Duke University, and director of SLIPPAGE: Performance, Culture, Technology - a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. DeFrantz believes in our shared capacity to do better, and to engage our creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, anti-homophobic, proto-feminist, and queer affirming. He convenes the Black Performance Theory working group and in 2013, working with Takiyah Nur Amin, he founded the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, a growing consortium of 300 researchers which staged the conferences Dancing the African Diaspora. He acted as Dance Curator for the National Black Arts Festival in 2015, has taught at the American Dance Festival, ImPulsTanz, and the New Waves Dance Institute, as well as at MIT, Stanford, Yale, NYU, Hampshire College, and the University of Nice, and created musical scores for the Dance Theatre of Harlem. He served as President for the Society of Dance History Scholars. In 2017, he received Outstanding Research in Dance Award from the Dance Studies Association.