The American photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston had a “talent for detail.” She possessed a choreographic sensibility which highlighted the deep contradictions underlying the social moments she photographed. Her commissions in documentary photography brought her into close proximity with some of the most “controversial,” meaning genocidal, educational experiments in American history, including the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School’s aim was to re-educate Indigenous American students for their forced, integration into white capitalist society. These “progressive” pedagogical aims were carried out by this school and many others like it by punishing adherence to Indian ways and the practice of Indian languages or culture, while affirming the superiority, dominance and benevolence of the white race and its culture.

“Who are the students in this photograph? Can this photograph be viewed as a representation of Indigenous Americans? Can it be understood as a photo of students? And who am I to say if it can or can’t? What is my agency as a reader? While opening up complexities that lie between the image and the body in (im)motion, or, as I will refer to it, the dancing-body-resisting-in-stillness, in this presentation I will also discuss complexities related to the body-as-archivist and that body as agent in interaction with space-as-image-archive. My hope is that these complexities will offer us new ways of thinking the dancing body.”

In conversation with theories from art-history, philosophy, visual studies, theater studies and dance theory, William Locke Wheeler’s lecture will trace the history of the development, aims and failures of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School while exploring ways that we can “collect resistances” by collecting and re-mounting images on paper and in movement, bringing images into dissonantly harmonious relationships with each other – and with the bodies that handle them – through practices that tap the potential of the epic montage.