Associate Professor of Dance Simone Linhares Ferro and Professor Emeritus Meredith Watts will participate this fall in the 2010 Joint Conference of The American Society for Theater Research, The Congress on Research in Dance and the Theater Library Association in Seattle, Washington.
Together Ferro and Watts have been researching popular dance and festivals in Brazil for several years and have recently authored both "The Coexistence of Folk and Popular Culture as Vehicles of Social and Historical Activism: Transformation of the Bumba-meu-Boi in Northeast Brazil" and "'Cultura Popular' and 'Popular Culture:' The Hybrid Latin American Space Between Folklore and Modernity." During the November conference, Ferro and Watts will participate in the working session "Popular Fiesta and Carnival: Movement, Politics and the Body en Masse."
Simone Linhares Ferro is Associate Professor of Dance at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she has also served as Director of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Dance. A native of Brazil, she had an extensive professional career in classical ballet and modern dance in Brazil and Europe. She has won numerous awards for her choreographic work and for her research on Brazilian dance culture, and has collaborated often with both university and repertory theater. She continues to translate her Brazilian movement research into dance production, and in recent years has choreographed many original dance works based on Brazilian popular dances. This includes work performed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Bucknell University, the Milwaukee Ballet, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, the Quad-Cities Ballet and her one-woman shows Simone Ferro and Friends 1 & 2. She is also currently choreographing for the premier of the opera "Rio de Sangre" presented by the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee.
Meredith W. Watts is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and has also served as Adjunct Professor in the Department of Dance, both at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has been a senior Fulbright scholar and published extensively on subjects of political behavior in Europe and the United States. Some of his recent works have been a book-length work on xenophobia in contemporary Germany and a jointly authored evaluation of a work counseling program for HIV/PLWA’s. He is continuing research on popular culture in Brazil both as a social scientist and photographer.
