May 15 & 16 | Austin, Archibald, and Uddin: A Shared Evening of Dance

Linda Austin, WHELMING (solo research)

Linda Austin will share work-in-process, solo research towards a new group performance to premiere in 2027.  With this work, inspired in part by Virginia Woolf’s The Waves,  Linda aims to develop an interdisciplinary, and at times goofy, performative language analogous to  Woolf’s use of syntax and rhythm to disrupt linguistic norms.

Linda Austin has been creating and performing a singular body of work since 1983. Her work deploys an assortment of sound, text, visuals, props and movement to create non-linear, poetic works, often laced with an eccentric wit, that have been presented in New York City, Mexico and throughout the Pacific NW.  Linda is co-founder (with lighting wiz Jeff Forbes) and director of Performance Works NorthWest.. Honors include a RACC Fellowship in the Performing Arts, the 2017 Merce Cunningham Fellowship from Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and two Oregon Arts Commission Fellowships.

Renée Archibald & Lisa Uddin, In Lignancy

The new multidisciplinary duet, In Lignancy, enfleshes, expands relations, and raises eyebrows at the itineraries and protocols of the “mal.” Choreographer Renée Archibald and art and cultural-studies scholar Lisa Uddin make room for living and dying otherwise– where the “otherwise” is their embodiment in imperfect solidarity with bodies under strain everywhere.

Renée Archibald is a dancer, choreographer, curator, and Associate Professor in the Department of Theater and Dance at Whitman College. Despite her BFA and MFA, her most influential education was her ten years living, dancing, choreographing, and seeing live performance in New York City. During this time, Archibald performed internationally and nationally with Ann Liv Young, Christopher Williams, Rebecca Lazier and others as well as created her own choreographies presented around NYC venues including Danspace Project, The Kitchen, and The Chocolate Factory. Her current cross-disciplinary collaboration with Lisa Uddin has been a rich mobius strip of experimentation and sharing, where movement, uncertainty, and friendship have been the guides. Other important collaborations have been with Melinda Ring on Shiny Angles in Angular Time (2018) performed in New York and PDX, Heather Kravas on a Covid Zoom and studio-project Other Mother (2021) performed for an audience of three in Walla Walla, and Mallory Rubin on SHIFT (2025) at Whitman College’s Harper Joy Theater. Her next project, likely in collaboration with students, is currently titled scablands and foothills.

Lisa Uddin is a teacher-scholar of visual culture and the built environment. She focuses on how visual and architectural practices in the lands known as the United States have shaped racial formations, migration, and settler colonialism. She is the author of Zoo Renewal: White Flight and the Animal Ghetto (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), essays and reviews in U.S. art and architectural history, Environmental Studies, and Black Studies, and co-editor of the online art criticism series, Black One Shot. Her current book project examines Black visual archives of Western U.S. settlement. Before coming to Whitman, Uddin taught art history at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, and held postdoctoral fellowships in Environment, Culture, and Sustainability at the University of Minnesota and at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. She received her doctorate in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester, and her research has been supported by the Getty Research Institute, the Smithsonian Institution, the Social Science Research Council of Canada, Whitman College, among others.

Photo collage by Lisa Uddin