Deeply satisfying SMRN meeting of May 30, 2026

June 18, 2026

This meeting was deeply satisfying for the breadth and interconnection it showed among SMRN members’ projects. 

First Edward Sembatya, in Vancouver, shared his doctoral research on the traditional dances of the Karamajong people of Uganda, which he learns and then teaches to Western dancers, incorporating Western dance techniques. For Karamajong people, like other Africans, dance is a living archive. Edward works to safeguard these practices as he brings them to new contexts, including by inviting Karamajong dancers to share their stories, meanings, and patterns with dancers in Vancouver through videoconference. It’s very difficult for Western-trained dancers to learn these energetic dances: one of the ways Edward teaches them is to have them drum the rhythms. We talked about how the dancers who receive this embodied and deeply cultural knowledge function as less dense but still important living archives.

Next Zev Powell, staying up very late in Melbourne, shared his master’s research on political machinima. His dense theoretical approach includes Deleuzian concepts of reframing chaos (Elizabeth Grosz.) Machinima reworks video games, which basically function as capitalist affect modulation, to release new stories and new affects. They refuse the positions that video games offer, reframe them, and redistribute agency. One of Zev’s examples was Grand Theft Auto Palestine. Zev told us that machinima is usually exhibited in art galleries, and we wished he could show it to everyday gamers, especially people like the mostly African-American kids he worked with in Minneapolis.

–Laura