Byron Suber
Senior Lecturer
607-254-2746
pbs6@cornell.edu
Department Affiliations
- Theatre, Film, & Dance
Research Overview
- Suber's work encompasses projects in performance and architectural/urban history. He is a creative artist in the realms of choreography and experimental film, music and theatre, as well as a scholar. As a scholar his areas of interest are French History 1600-present, History of Russia and Soviet Union, Modernism, History of Classical Ballet, French and Italian African Colonialism, French, Italian and American Cinema and Carceral Histories.
- Suber's present creative project (2010-11) will engage in the development of performance work in both body movement and vocalization. For several years, Suber has been working with William Forsythe's system of movement development elaborated in Forsythe's CD ROM, Improvisation Technologies. Suber will also return to a related system of movement development he created in the mid 90's and incorporate work he has done with Cornell Professor Francis C. Moon, Joseph C. Ford Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Moon is the Curator of the Cornell Collection of Reuleaux Kinematic Models (http://kmoddl.library.cornell.edu/). This is the most extensive collection of kinematic models created in the 19th century demonstrating basic elements of mechanical motion. Suber will also work with architectural students who will design architectural interventions that will focus on framing body movements in various locations around Ithaca and beyond and will culminate in a full performance in March 2011 in the ultimate theatrical frame of a proscenium theatre.
- A recent course Suber developed titled, "50's Movie Musicals and Modernism" explored the ways in which the tensions between stage and screen and cinema and television produced a preoccupation with tenets of Modernism essentially predicting a "pre-post-modern" aesthetic. The course focused specifically on Modernism in Dance and Architecture and worked towards deconstructing notions of modernism as it relates to concepts of folk art and primitivism.
- In his Masters thesis in History of Architecture and Urbanism he was looking for a site for study where the moving (or immobile) body is inescapably bound to architecture, his present project titled, The Poetics of Incarceration, considers the ways in which prison space behaves as a persistent metaphor while engaging the body as a specific form of cultural production. This requires an exploration of how the body and carceral environment intersect with urban space, domestic space and theatrical space, specifically in the sphere of cinematic expression.
- Suber will return to his interest in Utopia as a literary genre, architecture genre proposing a similar categorization for Western concert dance. Looking to the position of master of choreography, a modernist notion, the isolated worlds of Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and George Balanchine will be closely examined as possible utopias in comparison to self proclaimed utopias in other fields.
Courses Taught
- DANCE 1200 - Dance Technique I
- DANCE 2220 - Dance Technique II/Modern
- DANCE 2500 - Beginning Dance Composition
- DANCE 3210 - Dance Technique III/Classicals
- DANCE 3500 - Intermediate Composition I
- DANCE 3510 - Intermediate Composition II
- DANCE 4210 - Dance Technique IV/Classical
- DANCE 4500 - Advanced Composition I
- DANCE 4510 - Advanced Composition II
- DANCE 3550 - Techno Soma Kinesics: Repositioning the Performing Body in Space through the Lenses of Digital Media
- DANCE 4080 - Seminar In Dance Studies
Publications
selected publications (listing in progress)
- Working on a book that considers the philosophical implications of the work of choreographer Elizabeth Streb.
- He is also working on a textbook titled Identity and Ideology in Classical Ballet. This text considers the history of western classical dance as it both perpetuated and confronted western ideology in the realms of race, class, gender and sexuality
