“A System in Collapse Is a System Moving Forward” 
A Dance Performance-Lecture by Aimar Pérez Galí and Daniel Méndez Piña 

Reception to follow.

ADMISSION & CAMPUS ACCESS:
Admission is free. Reservations are required. Campus access is limited to registered guests and USC students, staff, and faculty with current USC ID.

RSVP beginning Monday, March 3, at 10 a.m. 

DESCRIPTION: 
Before passing away as a result of AIDS in 1988, photographer, choreographer, and dancer Arnie Zane said to his artistic and life partner Bill T. Jones, “A system in collapse is a system moving forward.”  

Spanish dancer Aimar Pérez Galí and Venezuelan dancer Daniel Méndez Piña will perform an original piece named after that quote. Set to a lecture by Jon Greenberg, a member of ACT UP NY and brother of dancers and choreographers Neil and Renni Greenberg, who was speaking at Arteleku in San Sebastián, Spain, in 1992, the dance powerfully explores the impact of AIDS on the queer dance community. Galí and Piña evoke the ghosts of those who perished, and, through the creative emphasis on tact and contact as survival strategies, challenge the taboo on touching that AIDS brought.  

Encouraging the audience to bear witness to the traces of trauma associated with the loss, illness, and mortality caused by the AIDS virus while gesturing towards an aesthetic, ethical, and political transformation, the dance performance-lecture will be followed by a roundtable discussion and reception.  

Panelists: 
Aimar Pérez Galí, Dancer 
Amelia Jones, Vice Dean and Professor, USC Roski School of Art and Design 
Patrick Corbin, Associate Professor, USC Kaufman School of Dance 
Gian Maria Annovi, Associate Professor, Italian and Comparative Literature, USC Dornsife College 
Miguel Caballero-Vázquez, Assistant Professor, Iberian Studies, Northwestern University 

Bios:  

Aimar Pérez Galí develops his artistic practice in the dance and performing arts field as a dancer, choreographer, researcher, pedagogue, and writer, always departing from the body as a reference place, understanding dance as a tool for critical transformation. The Spanish scholar and artist studied modern dance at the Amsterdam High School of the Arts and earned a master’s degree in museology and critical studies in the Independent Studies Program at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA). He has been the co-founder and artistic director of Espacio Práctico since 2010; since 2014, he has taught in the Choreography Department at the Conservatori Superior de Dansa of the Institut del Teatre of Barcelona; and since 2017, he has co-coordinated the reading group ¡Encarna! at MACBA. His work unfolds between research on dance, pedagogy, history, and the development of new methodologies and performance practice. Some of his most important recent performance works are èpica, The Touching Community, and Sweating the Discourse: An Embodied Critique.  

Daniel Méndez Piña is a Venezuelan dancer and a gardener. His relationship with the body in movement began at a very early age with artistic gymnastics. At the age of 12, he moved with his family to Barcelona, and a few years later he decided to exchange gymnastics for contemporary dance. In 2013, he received a scholarship to pursue professional training in contemporary dance at AREA Espai de dansa i creació in Barcelona, where he had the opportunity to train with renowned dancers and choreographers and began to collaborate with Mauro Barahona and his company Proyecto Experimental. In 2014 he founded Dimpro, his own dance company with Angel Mateo, creating works such as Kataratas, Puppets, and With-in, among others, that were performed at festivals and theaters in Spain and Europe. Since 2017, he has worked as an interpreter for Aimar Pérez Galí in The Touching Community, the performance-lecture A System in Collapse Is a System Moving Forward, and the film Touching Blues.  

Gian Maria Annovi is an associate professor of Italian and comparative literature at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Originally from Italy, Annovi studied philosophy at the University of Bologna, where he graduated with a dissertation on Giacomo Leopardi and Andrea Zanzotto. He then pursued graduate research in the field of contemporary Italian literature under the direction of Niva Lorenzini at the University of Bologna. After studying abroad at the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain, and UCLA, Annovi went to Columbia University to pursue a PhD in the field of Italian studies. In 2011, his PhD dissertation on writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was granted the P. P. Pasolini Award for Best Doctoral Dissertation. He taught at the University of Denver from 2011 to 2013 before joining USC. Annovi’s main interests include twentieth-century Italian literature, cinema, and visual arts. He also has a strong interest in critical thought, specifically in the areas of psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies, and gender and sexuality studies. In 2015 he received a Creative Capital | The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.  

Miguel Caballero-Vázquez is an assistant professor of Iberian studies in the Spanish and Portuguese department and affiliated faculty in art history at Northwestern University. Caballero-Vázquez teaches literature and art with a focus on the Iberian Peninsula, yet always in transnational context with the Americas, Northern Africa, Europe, and Russia. He is currently finishing his first book manuscript, tentatively entitled “The Monument of Tomorrow: Conservation and Avant-Garde in the Spanish Civil War.” For his next book project, Caballero-Vázquez plans to move from the construction of public space to private space and intimacy, which he will explore through the lens of the HIV/AIDS pandemic after the development and commercialization of antiretroviral therapies in 1996.  

Patrick Corbin is an associate professor of contemporary dance, modern dance, and dance and health at the USC Kaufman School of Dance. An internationally renowned dance artist whose career has spanned over 30 years and bridged the worlds of classical ballet, modern, and contemporary dance, Corbin was born and raised in Potomac, MD, and studied tap and jazz from the age of five at Art Linkletter Totten studios. Corbin later studied ballet at the Washington School of Ballet and School of American Ballet. Corbin danced professionally for The Washington Ballet, Kansas City Ballet, and ABT II between 1981 and 1985. After dancing with the Joffrey Ballet for four years, Corbin joined the Paul Taylor Dance Company in 1989 and became one of the company’s most celebrated artists until his departure in 2005. In addition to his career as a dancer, Corbin has been a guest faculty member at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, University of California at Irvine, George Mason University, SUNY Purchase, University of Kansas, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Michigan, and has taught professionally for American Ballet Theatre, Miami City Ballet, and San Francisco Ballet. 

Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of Faculty and Research at the USC Roski School of Art and Design, and is a curator and scholar of contemporary art, performance, and feminist and sexuality studies. Recent publications include Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts; a volume co-edited with Erin Silver, Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories; and the edited special issue “On Trans/Performance” of Performance Research. Jones’s catalogue Queer Communion: Ron Athey, co-edited with Andy Campbell, which accompanied a retrospective of Athey’s work at Participant Inc. (New York) and ICA (Los Angeles), was listed among the Best Art Books 2020 in The New York Times. Her 2021 book entitled In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance  explores the history of performance art and queer theory since the 1950s, from a queer feminist point of view.  

Related event: 

Contact Improvisation Workshop with Aimar Pérez Galí 
Tuesday, April 15, 2025, from 5 to 7 p.m. 
Friends of the USC Libraries Lecture Hall, Doheny Memorial Library 240 
For more info, click HERE. 

Presented by USC Visions and Voices. Organized by Jennifer Miller (Visual Studies Research Institute) and Julian Gutierrez-Albilla (Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Comparative Literature). Co-sponsored by USC Visual Studies Research Institute and the Instituto Cervantes of Los Angeles. 

Photo: Siddharth Gautam Singh