Max Abner and Dahlia Nayar, Ph.D. candidates in performance studies, will present their in-progress dissertation research.

This event is free and open to the public. Register here to receive an email reminder one day in advance: https://events.berkeley.edu/tdps/event/performing-quiet
Max Abner is a PhD candidate, musician, and curator who hails from Louisville, KY, has deep roots in Chicago, and is currently based in Oakland. Working from an anti-colonial settler positionality, he draws together discourses from sound studies, Indigenous studies, and critical theory to approach what he calls settler sound, a concept that accounts for the ways in which contested relations to colonized land play out in aural aesthetics. His dissertation attends to settler sound in the Bay Area experimental music/sound art scene. He has essays set for publication in Revealing Posthuman Encounters in Performance (Routledge) and Power in Listening: The Sound Out! Reader (NYU Press), his recorded curations can be heard on his music label Pontac Publications, and his live performance curations can be experienced at Beauty Supply Arts in Oakland.

Dahlia Nayar’s project studies embodied manifestations of Quiet in multiple mediums of minoritarian performance. Her study curates a constellation of contemporary artists working in dance, theater, sound, and visual art with an attention to how Quiet emerges through bodies in relation to layered contexts and multiple subjectivities. She proposes that, as a minoritarian aesthetic, Quiet activates an ephemeral commons through resonance and attunement that allows expansive possibilities of relationality. Prior to her doctoral studies, Dahlia toured nationally and internationally as a choreographer, performer, and multimedia artist. She is a recipient of the Jacob Javits Fellowship, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Choreography, and the National Dance Project Touring Award.