Writing

Satin's writing engages a range of approaches to thinking about dance and to seeing dance as it intersects with other arts. Much of her recent work has explored the relationships of dance to the work of writer Georges Perec (who did not write about dance!). Other recent and earlier work has explored dance's interactions with autobiography, culture, ethnicity, and gender; social dance; historical and contemporary post-modern dance; mediated, historical, and embodied memory; site-based dance and performance; experiencing space and place; everyday culture, everyday bodies.

Satin's performance texts and writings on dance and performance appear in numerous journals, including Dance Research Journal, Performing Arts Journal (PAJ), Movement Research Performance Journal, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Literary Geographies (England), Theatre Journal, Choreographic Practices (England), Dancing Times (England), Gesto (Brazil), and Street Notes, and in edited collections, including Georges Perec's Geographies: Material, Performative and Textual Spaces (eds. Charles Forsdick, Andrew Leak, Richard Phillips, 2019), Cultural Memory and Popular Dance: Dancing to Remember, Dancing to Forget (ed. Clare Parfitt, 2021), The Routledge Companion to Site-Specific Performance (Routledge, forthcoming), Re-Inventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible (ed. Sally Banes, 2003), and Moving Words: Dance Criticism in Transition (ed. Gay Morris). Satin served on the Editorial Board of Women & Performance, and co-edited its theme issue, Performing Autobiography. She co-edited Movement Research Performance Journal #34. 

New Work

Satin’s new book (Routledge 2024), Dancing with Georges Perec: Embodying Oulipo, considers the work of experimental 20th-century French writer Georges Perec from a dancer’s perspective. This interdisciplinary work brings together art-making parallels and their individual and sociocultural contexts. It focuses on the relationship of Perec’s writing to the ideas and practices of the Judson Dance Theater and the contemporary choreographers whose work extends its lineage, as well as to iconoclasts in other art forms. It addresses his writing as “ludic literature,” linked to the writerly “constraints” of Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature) and to other score-based compositional approaches across the arts. It addresses, too, Perec’s having been orphaned as a small child by the Holocaust; Dancing situates his work historically and personally, linking it to his experiences of loss and his thoughts about Jewishness. Moreover, Dancing is framed as a performative autobiographical enactment of Satin’s relationship to Perec, a convergence of textual, danced, remembered, and imagined selves.

Responses to Dancing with Georges Perec: Embodying Oulipo

“Leslie Satin, dancer and dance scholar, deftly claims Georges Perec for the dance world. She invites him into her own family history as she imagines herself ‘dancing with Georges Perec.’ Her recollections of Perec’s significant presence in her own path through a dancing life ranges from aspirational flights of fancy to embodied experiences with Perec’s ideas writ large, all through the lens of postmodern dance. Satin’s scholarship and analysis of Perec is deeply rooted in an interdisciplinary framework, while her prose metaphorically dances across time and the pages of this timely text.”
Douglas Rosenberg, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison

“Dancing with Georges Perec is an examination of the work of an experimental French writer and his choreographic contemporaries in New York City. Leslie Satin has created an imaginative and personal work that brings them together, though neither culture had probably ever heard of the other. A fascinating enterprise.”
Yvonne Rainer, co-founder of the Judson Dance Theater; author of Work: 1961-1973; co-editor of Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019

“Across his novels, essays, and place-based writings, Georges Perec radically expanded our understanding of how we inhabit and interact with everyday spaces. His work foregrounds questions of embodiment, in both historical and relational terms, and proposes experimental forms of engagement with the world in which we dwell. Perec’s influence is increasingly evident across multiple disciplines and fields of creative practice. In this welcome exploration of the intersections of Perec’s writing with dance, Leslie Satin urges us to consider his oeuvre in new ways while exploring its implications for embodied performance more broadly.”
Charles Forsdick, Drapers Professor of French, University of Cambridge, UK

Forthcoming Work

Forthcoming writings include "On the Rocks: Two Encounters," for The Routledge Companion to Site-Specific Performance (Routledge) and “'A few dance lessons with James Waring and who knows?: Maybe something will happen': Remembering the Teaching of James Waring,” for a collection about Waring edited by Carrie Noland and Alla Kovgan.

Recent and Related Work

“Mother Tongue: Dance and Memory, an Autobiographical Excavation” (2021). In Cultural Memory and Popular Dance: Dancing to Remember, Dancing to Forget (Clare Parfitt-Brown, editor). Palgrave MacMillan: 243-258.

“Cell-Out: A Long-Distance Mobile Performance of Scores, Reflections, Confessions” (2021). Co-written with Claudia Brazzale. Streetnotes: Ethnography, Poetry and the Documentary Experience 27: 99-136.

"Walking as Site Dance: Choreography and Conflict in Tel Aviv" (2019). Choreographic Practices 10.1: 25-42.

“Embodiment and Everyday Space: Dancing with Georges Perec.” 2019. In Georges Perec's Geographies: Material, Performative and Textual Spaces (Charles Forsdick, Andrew Leak, Richard Phillips, editors): 154-169.

"Georges Perec and On Kawara: Endotic Extravagance in Literature, Art, and Dance" (2017). Literary Geographies 3.1: 50-68.

"Dancing in Place: Exhaustion, Embodiment, and Perec." (2015). Dance Research Journal 47.3: 85-104.

Selected Publications