CREATING LIBERATORY POSSIBILITIES TOGETHER
Dancer, Educator, Scholar-Choreographer
2023 EVENTS
SCREEN DANCE AND MEDIA INSTALLATION PERFORMANCE
Exhibit: Gather
Curator: Jinchul Kim
The new exhibition celebrated Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month and features sixteen contemporary Asian American artists. The exhibit is featured in the Thaler Gallery.
Screen dance and Media Installation Title: Shǒusāng; keeping watch
Choreographer, Cinematographer, Media Installation Artist: Jen Leung Johnson
Dancer: Alexia Buono
voice: Carrie Leung
music: Jesse Ahmann, Rachel Bower Karrflowers: Masterpiece Flower Farm
special thanks: Lawrence Chan, Mary Avara, Assateague Island National Seashore, Jinchul Kim, Art League of Ocean City
This Friday, from 5-7pm is the free First Friday Opening Reception for May exhibits. I will be performing in a multi-media installation piece choreographed, filmed, and installed by Jen Leung Johnson. The piece is called Shousang 守丧. It explores "Shousang as a mourning period, an exploration of rites and rituals of loss." The piece explores "something lost, eternal and, in time, released."
CONFERENCE PRESENTATION
"The 4th Artful Inquiry Research Group International Symposium is an interdisciplinary forum for sharing scholarship, practices, and research on artful inquiries and methods. This year the theme of re/emergences will focus our conversations, art-making, learning and (un)learning. This year, there will be a 1.5 day in-person symposium."
I presented a paper presentation entitled "Critical Somatic Inquiry: Methods of Practice Informed by Movement Organizers and Transformative Justice"
CONFERENCE PRESENTATION
Stories of Humanizing Assessment: Disrupting, Dismantling and Reimagining Assessment in Teacher Education and Beyond
Division K - Teaching and Teacher Education/Division K - Section 02: Emancipatory Movements and Transformative Interruptions in Teaching and Teacher Education
Presenters: Katarina Silvestri, Brittany Adams, Alexia Buono, Charles Gonzalez
Chair: Ian O'Byrne
The primary objective of this working group roundtable is to collectively imagine transformative possibilities of educational spaces without grades. We endeavor to come together to share and learn about experiences with ungrading, feedbacking, and other humanizing models of assessment and evaluation in teacher education. We expect that participants, ourselves included, will come away with new ideas, strategies, and resources for adopting more relational-based models of learner assessment and evaluation.
WORKSHOP
In cooperation with Svenska Folkskolans Vänner, Åbo Akademi and TaiKon, PTAK organizes a workshop for dance artists and performing arts pedagogues on March 24. from 9:00 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. in TaiKon's Tupa 2. The workshop is led by Alexia Buono, an assistant professor at Salisbury University who is a professional in abolitionist teaching and dance/art education. The training is conducted in English.
More information about the training and registration will be available on the Regional Dance Center website soon.
PERFORMANCE
How do we recognize what we consider home?
Can improvisation allow us to travel far from home and then help us to find our way back?
“A moment of improvisation is informed by every moment that came before it. A tree follows the movement of the Sun across the sky. Each day, twisting and arcing from under shadows of canopy. A sapling’s growth is collaboration, of trees, water, soil, and sun, each converging upon its delicate, skyward pathway.” — Kayliani Sood
Dancer/choreographer Jungwoong Kim returned to perform at Studio 34 for the first time in over a decade, this time in collaboration with fellow dancers Alexia Buono, Ashmina Chremos, Germain Ingram, Jorgie Ingram, Kaijo Caggins, Kayliani Sood, Sol Cort, and Anya Smolnikova.
This hour-long performance also featured live music by Tim Motzer and sculpture by Andy Davis.
Part of the 4th Friday Winter Performance Series, Studio 34’s café (food from That Pikliz Jawn) and gallery (“Best of Fun-A-Day” from the 2023 show) open at 7:30. Performance began at at 8:00 PM.
Guest Teaching
Alexia was invited to facilitate a workshop-lecture on “abolitionist liberation practices in dance education,” to undergraduate students in the course "Dance Education: Practice and Performance" in the Dance Program at Bryn Mawr College in February.
2022 EVENTS
CONFERENCE PRESENTATION
Alexia will be presenting an interactive talk, Justice-oriented teaching practices in CI: How community-based teacher education can help at the CI@50 Contact Improvisation conference at Oberlin College in July 2022.
CONFERENCE PRESENTATION
Alexia and Rebekah Chappell will be presenting an interactive workshop, Practicing somatic social justice together: Slowtime and spaciousness at the 2nd Annual ARTS + Change conference June 2-5 2022.
CONFERENCE PRESENTATION
This is Community: Decolonizing Arts Research & Practice Group
Alexia has been invited to facilitate a movement session, Sensing, Feeling, and Moving as Anti-Colonial Praxis for the Decolonizing Arts Research & Practice Group's conference event through the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in July 2022.
MENTORSHIP
Mentoring for Arts Education Scholars Program
Alexia is a mentee in the Australian/international Mentoring for Arts Education Scholars Program initiated by Dr. Peter Cook and Dr. Anne Harris. Her mentor is Dr. Mary Ann Hunter from Univeristy of Tasmania.
OLDER EVENTS
Photographer Jim Bush
EMBODIED-COMMUNITY FOR FOOD AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
Over the 2020-2021 winter, Alexia worked with the Core Scope of The Everything Space Garden Project, a ShiftMeals Grow Team site, to reshape their values, vision, and positionality statement to better reflect their embodied-community approach to food and environmental justice. During the 2021 growing and harvest season, she developed curricular content for this project and served as the "Values-Tender" in the garden.
EMBODIED SOCIAL JUSTICE CERTIFICATE
Alexia recently completed a 50 hour Embodied Social Justice certificate program through The Embody Lab. She was financially supported by an internal grant through the Individual Development Award granted by the United University Professions (UUP) to support her in this endeavor.
CONFERENCE PRESENTATION
LRA Conference (December 2021)
Along with Dr. Katarina Silvestri, Dr. Andrea Tochelli-Ward, and Dr. Charles H. Gonzalez, Alexia presented an alternative session, Coalition-building to support sustainable activism for racial justice in higher education, at the 71st Annual Literacy Research Association Conference Conference: Widening the Angles of Literacy Research: Honoring Untold Stories Using Contrapuntal Approaches in Atlanta, GA.
Fall Community Dance Weekend (October 2021)
Alexia attended the Fall Community Dance Weekend at Earthdance in October 2021. This was a fully vaccinated event.
CONFERENCE PRESENTATION
Alexia presented two sessions at the virtual conference Bodily Learning "at" the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway April 2021. She presented a paper on the topic of Somatic movement literacy: Decolonizing early childhood education through restorative bodily learning. Additionally, she and Anne Burnidge presented an experiential workshop on the topic of Dance integration: Centering the role of the body in science learning and education.
CONFERENCE PRESENTATION
Alexia presented at the online 5th Annual SUNY Cortland Literacy Department Conference: Cultivating Self-Awareness with Critical Literacies through Anti-Racist and Anti-Oppressive Pedagogies. She presented an experiential workshop on the topic of Somatic movement literacy: An embodied learning mode of generating self-
awareness, critical consciousness, and healing to 35 participants.
SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATION
Alexia was a participant in the online embodied social justice summit hosted by The Embody Lab.
CONFERENCE PRESENTATION
Alexia and Dr. Chaz Gonzalez presented at the virtual edition of the 3rd International Symposium of AIRG "at" McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. The title of their presentation was Transformed by our arts-based research: Actioning into bodily justice in teacher education.
SITE-SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE
Alexia was a performance artist in the Art of Walking at Artpark in Lewiston, NY during summer 2020. She and fellow performer Michael Wells lead socially distanced groups of headphone-wearing audience members through a moving meditation combining walking, stillness, listening and site-specific performance. Art of Walking was created through an international collaboration between New York-based theatre and visual artist Carin Jean White and artists Itsaso Iribarren & Germán de la Riva from Spain.
Alexia attended the Authentic Movement and Action Theatre workshop by Carolyn Shakti Sadeh and Cass Tunick at Earthdance in Janaury 2020.
CONTACT IMPROVISATION
Alexia was in Israel for one month from December 2019 to January 2020 where she spent three weeks dancing at the international Israeli Ci Festival. She studied with Katja Mustonen, Gregory Chevalier, Noa Dar, Dafna Hemmendinger, and others across Kfar Blum, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the Northern Arava Dessert, Vertigo Eco-villago, and more!
CONTACT IMPROVISATION
Alexia participated in the Jam Jam hosted by The Everything Space (Abbi Jaffe and Amanda Franz) in December 2019. The Jam Jam was a co-created laboratory retreat space where participants practiced contact improvisation, authentic movement, deep connections with nature, and more, all within community.