Image Description: A side profile of Miggy, who crouches amidst bushes and white flowers that recede blurrily into the background. Miggy’s fingers gently crawl up from a long-sleeved maroon shirt, over chin and lips, and toward a small ocean of black, wavy hair. The brown skin of Miggy’s cheek is caressed by the palm of a hand, supporting closed eyes that look down in contemplation.
Jose Miguel ‘Miggy’ Esteban is a dance/movement artist and educator based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Miggy’s choreographic work develops improvisational practices of navigating mad and queer routes to embody Filipinx remembering and belonging through (un)rest. Currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Social Justice Education, OISE/University of Toronto, Miggy’s research and teaching are oriented through disability studies, black studies, and dance/performance studies. Miggy’s dissertation project reinterprets practices of teaching and learning dance through methods of choreographic narrative that are influenced by disability/mad arts, Black radical traditions, Indigenous storytelling, and queer performance.
Choreographing Care, Improvising through Crip/Mad Provocations October 9, 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM Presenter: Jose Miguel 'Miggy' Esteban Location: Studio 2 Inspired by Kelly Fritsch’s (2011) suggestion that “to crip is to open up with desire to the ways that disability disrupts,” this workshop invites us to rethink what it might mean to dance through a desire for the creativity of disabled/mad life. As an entry point into this exploration, we will engage with Asian American, gender, and disability studies scholar Mimi Khúc’s (2024) suggestion of a “pedagogy of unwellness” that invites us to consider questions of care and access as our choreographic task within the studio and on the stage. Moving beyond expectations of mastering the body and its movement—expectations that often work to exclude disabled/mad embodiment from dance creation, we will engage in somatic/movement practices to understand and care for how our bodyminds are accessing creative space. Learning from such explorations we will develop dance phrases that express gestures of care for ourselves and for each other. We will finally navigate how our different embodiments of care might move and perform together through an improv jam. Reflecting on this experience, we will consider how a desire for disabled/mad embodiments of creativity might shift how we understand our choreographic and production practices.