BU Humanists at Work: Meet Amanda Lee
When Amanda Lee, Visiting Assistant Professor in French in the Department of Romance Studies, came across the job post for her current position, she was delighted that it called for a “scholar” and “practitioner.” For Lee, who is both an academic and a dancer/choreographer, the unusual inclusion of the word “practitioner” conjured an image of BU as a place that might fully value all aspects of her interdisciplinary work.
Lee’s work sits at the intersection of literary studies, performance studies, and performance. As both a scholar and practitioner, Lee finds herself uniquely positioned to “engage with the authors and the time periods that [she is] working in from several vantage points.” “I get to read 18th and 19th century texts and also perform them, or restage them, or make new work that is related to what I’ve studied,” she explains. Her latest choreographic work is quite literally an embodiment of this multifaceted methodology. Titled Miserere, the work interprets the Heptaméron, a 16th century text by Queen Marguerite de Navarre. Inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron, the Heptaméron imagines an isolated community of young people who entertain each other with stories as they escape from the black plague. Of course, during a pandemic, the relevance of this text from the French Renaissance to an audience and to the student performers at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, became more overt. “I feel like everyone kind of gets what these young people [in Heptaméron] are going through now that we’ve been through the pandemic . . . so I choreographed a piece based on this text,” Lee explains. Lee, who received her Ph.D. in French Language and Literature from Washington University in St. Louis, currently spends her summers at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee working toward an MFA in dance. She sees this embodied work as a perfect complement to her academic research for her book manuscript, titled French Dance Poetics: Transcribing Movement, Gender, and Culture.
Through performance, Lee hopes to make the “fascinating cultural histories of France that are very far away from us . . . live again.” To the viewer, Miserere may read as being quite contemporary; however, a historic throughline is present in much of Lee’s original choreography. Lee’s academic engagement with primary sources like historic dance notation and iconography positions her, as she describes it, “to trace gestures through time and allow them to update and modify with the centuries that they’re in.” Describing her process Lee notes, “sometimes my imaginations are more balletic, sometimes they’re more modern and contemporary, but I try to trace movements to history and aesthetic history.”
Lee also sees the creation of original choreography as a tool that allows her to engage with the performance and cultural histories that she studies. Choreography of distant centuries was not often written down, and if it was, it may now be lost or only exist in fragments. Through research and her own creative process, Lee can give voice to forgotten works and their creators that deserve to be remembered. “I use my imagination to fill in the gaps and create something new that might make those voices that are lost live again. There are a lot of really interesting figures that might not have left written traces of their [choreographic or performance] work,” Lee notes.
The relationship between Lee’s scholarship and creative work is fully symbiotic. Her practice also informs her scholarship. Returning to the example of Miserere, Lee reflects on the experience with the student dancers at Milwaukee:
“Seeing how the work played out in the bodies of these amazing young dancers, there were a lot of connections that I was able to draw that I maybe didn’t see the first time I read Heptaméron. There’s a way in which each member of this isolated community gives you a larger picture of society in the 16th century. Seeing these characters come alive made me think about the text as a larger global picture that asks, how do we represent portraits of different sectors of a community . . . and then draw sustenance from that picture of humanity and all of its complexity? I think this experience will change the way that I read the text and the way I study it next time.”
Lee also brings her experiences as a practitioner to the classroom. “Students have different learning styles. Writing is such an essential skill, but the ability to tap into that creative, active-learning mindset and apply knowledge through the creation of new works, I think, is really key. So I’ve tried to apply the same principles that I apply in my research to my teaching, where I invite students to not only be writers, but also critics and also creators of works that interpret what they’re learning about,” said Lee.
This semester, Lee is teaching “Reading the French Way,” a writing intensive course geared toward developing techniques for close reading and interpretation of French literary texts, with special attention paid to lyric poetry, drama and short narrative. Unsurprisingly, Lee’s seminars reflect her dual scholar/artist identity. This semester, she is also teaching “Queering the Court of the Sun King: Performing the Body Politic in 17th century France.” In this class, students study 17th century theatrical works, including ballet, opera, and theater, in conjunction with 17th century French philosophy, 21st century performance studies theory, and queer theory to understand how 17th century theatrical works, which often feature queer or fantastical characters, dealt with questions of gender and sexuality in the context of an absolutist court. Next semester, Lee will teach “Modern French Theatre,” in which students will explore the many ways that theatre (including dance, opera, and performance art) can be understood in the 20th century while deepening their understanding of performance studies.
To Lee’s great delight, thus far, BU has proven to be a place that fully embraces her interdisciplinary work, and her position as Visiting Assistant Professor in French lives up to its call for a “scholar” and “practitioner.”