Jeff Kaplan

Jeff Kaplan is a first-year doctoral student in Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies.  Jeff holds an MFA in Dance from Texas Woman’s University and a BA in History from Grinnell College.  In fact, Jeff was going to pursue a career in diplomacy up until his last semester of college, when he enrolled in a modern dance class.  Thus, as Fate often smiles kindly upon heroes, fools, and modern dancers, Jeff enjoyed a 15-year career as a performer, choreographer, and dancer.  His scholarly/performance interests evolved into the research, creation, and presentation of solo “text and movement” works based on history, language, and problems in the humanities, often working in foreign and ancient languages.  Jeff recited 500 lines of the Beowulf epic in Anglo-Saxon while dancing for Beowulf is min Nama…, donned a strait-jacket to perform Act III of Shakespeare’s King Lear as a danced/spoken solo, and painted himself green for The Erl King, a World War I movement-based adaptation of Goethe’s poem Der Erlkönig.  Jeff also dances while presenting academic papers at conferences, using movement as a tool for critical analysis and commentary.  His research interests include the body in performance, corporeal encoding, body rhetoric and poetics, translation, and dramaturgy.