Architecture of Life Lectures | Life and Dance: Trajal Harrell on The Ghosts of Montpellier at Cal Performances in dialogue with Kate Mattingly and Megan Hoetger

Trajal Harrell’s work has been presented at many venues including The Kitchen, Danspace Project, The New Museum, Dance Theater Workshop, P.S. 122, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) Boston, The Margulies Art Warehouse (Miami), The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Art Basel Miami Beach, Dance Mission (San Francisco, CA), Cornell University’s Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts, Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), Snug Harbor Cultural Center, and CUNY’s Martin Segal Theater and Proshansky Auditorium. His work has been presented internationally, in France, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Croatia, and Mexico.  Speaking about his choreography and performances, Harrell says, “I am most interested in how the imagination can re-think the ‘omissions’ of history. In this way, performance can be a way in which we collectively reimagine the impossibilities of history and thus make room for new possibilities in the world we make today.”

Kate Mattingly graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Architecture and received her master’s of fine arts degree in Dance from NYU where she performed works by William Forsythe and other choreographers. Her articles about dance have been published in the New York Times, Village Voice, Washington Post, Dance magazine, and Dance Research Journal. From 2006 to 2008 she lived in Austria where she worked as a dramaturg for the contemporary performance festival, Sommer Szene. She is currently a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley.

Megan Hoetger received her B.F.A. in Drawing and Painting and her B.A. Art History, M.A. Art History from the California State University, Long Beach. Hoetger’s work looks at performance after fascism in Central Europe. Her research interests include feminist and queer theories of sexuality and identity; experimental cinema, sexploitation, and pornography; vision and visuality; kinesthetic knowledge; collective memory and cultural amnesia; nationalism and national identity; trauma studies; and performance art exhibition histories.