VK Preston is a cultural historian of the Early Modern period with areas of focus in the history of dance and gendered performance. Their research examines performance archives that reveal charged circulations of both written and unwritten practices. This research into histories of the performing arts, pre-modern cultural forms, and artists’ interventions focuses on Atlantic-World histories (C.E. 1500–1800), ecological crisis, as well as contemporary artistic production.
In dance studies and in research creation, VK works alongside artists as a practice of critical research ethics and methodology, investigating histories of the senses and embodiment through experiential, narrative approaches.
VK is currently working on their first book manuscript, on records of disability, gender, race and colonial representations of dance in Early-Modern print histories and visual cultures. Dr. Preston’s writing appears in Theatre Journal, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, Performance Research, TDR/The Drama Review, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theatre, Canadian Theatre Review, and History, Memory, Performance. VK’s current writing projects include studies of art and performance entangled with the colonial invasion of the Americas, from baroque performance to contemporary visual and performance art. Their approaches engage with histories of the Atlantic world, and of Turtle Island, addressing genealogies of racial capitalism, decolonization, non-binary gender, historical memory, and translation.
In 2021, VK’s “Queer and Indigenous Art: Performing Ice Times in Climate Crisis” received an honourable mention from the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) for the Gerald Kahan Scholars' Prize. “Baroque Relations: Performing Gold and Silver in Daniel Rabel’s Ballets of the Americas” received the 2018 Gertrude Lippincott prize for best English-language essay from the Dance Studies Association. In 2014, Alanna Thain and VK Preston won the Richard Plant award for best article in English on a topic in Canadian theatre and performance studies for “Tendering the Flesh: the ABC’s of Dave St-Pierre’s Contemporary Utopias” in TDR / The Drama Review. VK comes to performance scholarship by way of practice, following professional training in dance and theatre.
Affiliations
Centre for Oral History (COHDS), Centre for Interdisciplinary Society and Culture (CISSC), Centre for Sensory Studies, Feminist Media Studio, Le Parc (Milieux)
Fellow
Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia University
Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto
Education
B.A. Concordia
M.A. State University of New York Binghampton
PhD Stanford University (Theatre and Performance Studies; History)
Selected Publications
Preston, VK. 2021. “Sitting on a Man's Head: Danspace Project, St. Mark's Church, New York, NY,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 43 (3), ed. Benjamin Gillespie, 39–42.
Preston, VK. 2020. “Queer and Indigenous Art: Performing Ice Times in Climate Crisis,” Theatre Journal 72 (2), ed. EJ Westlake,143-162. (Honourable mention: Gerald Kahan Scholar's Prize, ASTR)
Preston, VK. 2020. “Performance, Climate, and Critical Art,”Theatre Journal 72 (2), ed. Margherita Laera, E-7-E-13.
Preston, VK. 2020. “Convening Muses and Turning Tables: Reimagining a Danced Politics of Time in Jordan Bennett and Marc Lescarbot.” Futures of Dance Studies (Studies in Dance History). Eds. Susan Manning, Janice Ross, and Rebecca Schneider. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 269-285
Preston, VK. 2018. “Reproducing Witchcraft: Thou Shalt Not Perform a Witch to Live,” TDR / The Drama Review (62)1 (T237). Special issue: on reproduction. Ed., Rebecca Schneider. 143-159.
Preston, VK. 2017. “Baroque Relations: Performing Silver and Gold in Daniel Rabel’s Ballets of the Americas.” In The Oxford Handbook of Reenactment. Ed., Mark Franko. New York: Oxford University Press, 285-310. (Gertrude Lippincott Award for best essay from the Dance Studies Association)
Contributor to Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage (2017), ed. Dan Sack. New York: Routledge.
Preston, VK. 2016. “A Dictionary in the Archives:Translating and Transcribing Silenced Histories in French and Wendat.” Performance Research 21(5), Trans/Performance, special issue, ed. Amelia Jones), 85-88.
Preston, VK. 2015. “How Do I Touch This Text?: Or, the Interdisciplines Between, Dance and Theatre in Early Modern Archives.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater. Ed., Nadine George-Graves. New York: Oxford University Press, 56-89.
Thain, Alanna and VK Preston. 2013. “Tendering the Flesh:the ABC’s of Dave St-Pierre’s Contemporary Utopias,” TDR / The Drama Review57(4), 28-51.
Events and Public-Facing Work
"Dancing Dissent," Between, Across, and Throughpodcast hosted by Keven Lewis O'Neill and the Centre for Diaspora &Transnational Studies, University of Toronto
Indelible Refusal: Bodies, Performances, and WalkingResistance, with Stephanie Springgay (OISE)https://walkinglab.org/indelible-refusal/
