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The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics

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DOI: 10.1017/S0149767718000268

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 The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics ed. by Rebekah
Kowal, Randy Martin, and Gerald Siegmund (review)

Sarah Wilbur

Dance Research Journal, Volume 50, Number 2, August 2018, pp. 77-88 (Review)

Published by Cambridge University Press

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DRJ Review
Essay
 Copyright © 2018 Dance Studies Association

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics

edited by Rebekah Kowal, Randy Martin, and Gerald Siegmund. 2017. New York: Oxford University Press. 656 pp., 32
photographs. $150.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780199928187.
doi:10.1017/S0149767718000268

At 656 pages wide and 31 authors deep, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics collection
contains a veritable who’s who of US, UK, and EU dance scholarship. It also importantly documents
the weight of the loss to the field of coeditor Randy Martin, whose materialist investigations of
dance and politics influence the volume’s contributions in powerful and explicit ways. Through
the dedicated energies of Martin’s fellow coeditors Rebekah Kowal and Gerald Siegmund, the vol-
ume updates an editorial burden assumed by earlier collections1 and field progenitors: interpreting
dance’s irreconcilable relationship to politics, a tension that the volume’s contributors do not
promise to reconcile. But what the text does, and with great urgency, is to revise and update long-
standing debates on dance’s politics of representation while also flagging hierarchical issues internal
to dance research as areas for future investigation.

In contrast to extant anthologies, in this work dance functions as both a liability and a resource for
the study of bodies and power across the critical arts and humanities. Contributors offer nuanced
readings of politically oriented dances, analyze political enactments using dance methods, and cri-
tique oppressive norms of practice, policy, and production internal to dance scholarship. Highly
memorable essays critique issues that hold dance back as an inclusive and global area of study
and offer historically informed accounts of silences that undergird intellectual and artistic research
in dance, such as the enduring subordination of non-Western epistemologies as a condition of
dance’s disciplinary ascendancy in the United States and Western Europe. This reflexive turn in
critical dance studies has been long coming. It marks an arrival point and documents a discernable
willingness among dance scholars and practitioners to put dance’s disciplinary hierarchies and
exclusions to the test.

In the volume’s introduction, Martin, Kowal, and Siegmund acknowledge the conjectural “and” sit-
uated between the terms “dance” and “politics” in the book’s title as an undefinable tension that
forms the book’s central problematic. Contributions are split into two parts, with a palpable degree
of overlap across the five sections. Authors in Part 1 (“Dancing Structures”) consider the structural
constraints of dance’s political economy (section 1) and the politics of choreography (section 2),
embodiment (section 3), and history (section 4), respectively. The essays in the second half
(“Dancing Interventions”) refresh running debates on dance’s political resignification (5), and rene-
gotiation (6) in turn. I will refer readers to the volume introduction for the coeditors’ thoughts on
Martin’s theoretical influence and use this space to unpack each essay’s contributions and limita-
tions for readers invested in dance’s political entanglements, broadly construed.

Section 1, “Dance’s Political Economy,” introduces five essays that consider dance’s politics of
transmission, commodification, and organization across an array of institutional contexts.
Continuing her long-standing tango with questions of cultural assimilation, appropriation, and
ownership (1997, 1999), Jane Desmond’s opening essay “Tracking the Political Economy of
Dance” follows dance performances on Broadway, the Hawaiian tourist industry, and African
American concert dance to reveal how specific artists are deauthorized and reauthorized as dances
traverse mainstream, transnational, and nonprofit dance venues. Desmond’s account of the inter-
ventionist production politics of the late “Baba” Chuck Davis, in particular, takes a critical leap

78 DRJ 50/2 • AUGUST 2018

forward for dance studies by highlighting Davis’s nonprofit organizational practices, an underexa-
mined area of dance study.

Susan Leigh Foster’s “Dance and/as Competition in the Privately Owned US Studio” intertwines her
prior work on the politics of US dance training (1997, 2010) with her later work on power and
empathy (2011) to connect competitive commercial dance training and performance to the neolib-
eral commodification and circulation of affective labor under late capitalism. In addition to offering
a valuable pocket history of the ascension of competition dance studios as a cottage industry (a
market that forms a pipeline to many US academic dance programs),2 Foster looks at how affective
codes proliferate across studio training and commercial dance performances and argues that this
circulation problematically fuels mainstream absorption of toxic able-isms, racisms, sexisms, and
hetero-norms. While this materialist turn in Foster’s work pivots away from her long-standing pre-
occupation with political semiotics inside dance studies, her approach does not sacrifice her lifelong
promotion of “body theorics” (1995) in that she peppers the text with surgical movement descrip-
tions for which she is well known.

Staging academic dance institutions as political battlegrounds, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild’s “Racing

in Place: A Meta-Memoir on Dance Politics and Practice” places the practice of dance research
under the analytical spotlight to track race-based roadblocks that endure and continue to thwart
the advancement of African diasporic dance scholars in the field. She uses the literary form of a
memoir to connect her own vocational itinerary and foundational ideas on the trenchant
Europeanisms that undergird US dance representation and training to larger gatekeeping practices
in academic dance research, hiring, recruitment, advancement, promotion, and curricular design.
While Dixon-Gottschild generously cites colleagues whose work and activism have pushed back
against such structural exclusion during her career, her essay also remembers the labor involved
in demanding inclusion as a deeply and problematically racially marked exercise. An indefatigable
spirit, Dixon-Gottschild demonstrates clear institutional fatigue. She closes her call for structural
reform with a question, “Do we care?” and challenges future generations to take collective care,
in a coalitional sense, of the necessary project of dismantling policies of silence and nonaction
that stall the advancement of antiracist work in US academic dance.

Moving from memoir to manifesto in format, M. Cynthia Oliver’s offerings in “Epiphanic

Moments: Dancing Politics” sound a different battle cry, asking artists and scholars to consider
the contradictory hierarchies that form the infrastructural inheritance of US concert dance makers.
Writing from her perspective as an artist researcher-practitioner, Oliver’s second person address
unfolds a list of “do’s and don’ts” in an attempt to chronicle the vexed exercise of navigating
the contingent support mechanisms that artists confront in the field in practice. Her performative
text summons dance’s white matriarchies, gay patriarchies, and double-sided compliments as
gatekeeping mechanisms that demand further historical and ethnographic attention. While her
text does not do that work, Oliver’s important voice reminds scholars that working artists are
a vital and often untapped resource for debates on dance’s culturally contingent politics of
production.

Readers invested in the reenactment of mass movement in dance and protest will be interested in
Kai Van Eikels’s philosophical claim, in the closing essay, “Performing Collectively”: namely, that
dance’s political promise lies not in its resultant product but in its function as a collective promise to
continue moving within the unknowable and irreducible social phenomenology of the group. To
promote a politics of process through dance as central to dance’s power to (re)make the world,
Van Eikels resuscitates Aristotle’s notion of prattein—the carrying out of political action—versus
the initiation an act (archein) or an action-product ( poein) as a less product-focused framework.
In an edited collection that queries how dance functions as a site of convening power, this shift
from dance’s ontological “what” to its processual “when” and choreographic “how” is significant.

DRJ 50/2 • AUGUST 2018 79

 Section 2, “The Politics of Choreography,” weighs the political limits and affordances of “choreog-
raphy” and the “choreographic” as conceptual containers to unpack how power circulates within
and, importantly, without dance. Gabrielle Klein’s “Urban Choreographies: Artistic Interventions
and the Politics of Urban Space” opens this cluster of texts by suggesting an interdependent—
not oppositional—relationship between aesthetics and politics. Refusing the partitioning of
dance and protest performances as distinct historical and/or political formations (articulated, for
example, in Foster 2003), Klein isolates performances that intervene as both dance and protest
at once. What results is a brief genealogy of dance protests that connects early movement choirs
to politically engaged twenty-first-century arts collectives (the Berlin ensemble LINGA is her exam-
ple) to highlight the theatricality inherent in these stagings and to theorize their symbiotic relation-
ship as domains of collective will in action.

One of the few offerings to radically reject embodied legibility and representation as evidence of
dance’s political ontology, André Lepecki’s piece, “The Politics of Speculative Imagination in
Contemporary Choreography,” situates power in conceptual dance works that refuse to represen-
tationally abide by dance’s preoccupation with embodied discipline, training, and representation.
Through detailed readings of pieces by Brazilian Gustavo Ciríco, American Trajal Harrell, and
Danish dance artist Mette Ingvartsen, Lepecki claims that such “speculative” choreographies
depend on a vanished body and rely on the movement of narratives, ideas, and thought to render
their political potential. Echoing a claim made fervently in radical Black and Black feminist dis-
courses, Lepecki insists that speculative choreographies draw attention to the body’s absence and,
in so doing, enact a politically affirmative protest against dance’s “perceptual-semiotic-kinetic
regime” (160). A powerful assertion of the politically productive abstraction of the body as a strat-
egy of semiotic “mismanagement” in dance, Lepecki’s work commands critical consideration of the
body’s unintelligibility as a political stance among artists and a political strength of dance work.

Maintaining his ongoing refusal to assign ontological power to dance as a cultural product (2006),
Mark Franko’s “Toward a Choreo-Political Theory of Articulation” looks at dance reception as an
articulatory process that carries political potential in its ability to join heterogeneous people and
parts. To evidence this conjunctive relation, Franko invokes Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) assertion
that political democracy requires conflict internal to its interdependent relations. Such permanent
antagonisms, for him, hold power to articulate or disarticulate common understandings and, when
applied to dance historiography, can produce radical revisions that uproot canonical understand-
ings of dance (171). Ultimately an argument for articulation as a means of reanimating and ream-
bulating historical moves made on dance’s behalf, Franko challenges future researchers to revisit
homogeneous understandings of dance production and reception as reductive areas of dance
historiography.

In an essay strikingly devoid political economic commentary or metacommentary on dance’s

internal politics of production, coeditor Gerald Siegmund’s “Rehearsing in-Difference: The politics
of Aesthetics in the Performances of Pina Bausch and Jérôme Bel” assigns power to the choreo-
graphic and aesthetic practices of two dominant choreographers through Rancierian orientations
that, in Siegmund’s view, “give dancers and mentally challenged people voice and agency” (188).
While his readings of representational strategies that repetitively engage and dislodge the stable
notion of a “self” in Bel and Bausch anchors power dance’s politics of representation, it seems
no longer permissible for dance scholars to answer structural oppressions with strictly representa-
tional arguments. If, as Siegmund suggests, dance’s capacity to produce power stems from dance’s
ability to make us “see and hear what we have already seen and heard but differently,” then Bausch’s
and Bel’s stage presentations of nonnormative bodies should be considered as a structural condition
of their practical complicity in neoliberalized structures of state and market recognition that prey
upon difference and seek every opportunity to fold its fetishized display into the institutional
brand (183).

80 DRJ 50/2 • AUGUST 2018

Another representational analysis follows by way of Bojana Cvejić’s “Problem as a Choreographic
and Philosophical Kind of Thought.” The piece searches for political critique in conceptual dance
works that dispense with modern/postmodern binaries and representational politics by posing
problems. Following recent work from the veritable darlings of the EU conceptual art festival
and biennial circuit, Cvejić maintains that the “problem-posing’” compositional approaches of
Xavier Le Roy, Jérôme Bel, Mette Ingvartsen, Tino Sehgal, and Jonathan Burrows collectively chal-
lenge the lure of legibility and unified connection (associated with modernism) and resist staging
movement as a strictly objective burden (associated with postmodernism) to which the body is
physically and historically tied (203). She pinpoints these artists’ deployment of disjunctive move-
ment inventions, erratic temporal unfoldings, and disjointed audience-performer relations as a
nascent compositional paradigm in its own right, one that resists the traps and tropes of represen-
tation by casting audiences in an apprenticeship relation to the unconscious and unseen.

The five contributors offering ideas in section 3, “The Politics of Embodiment,” revise understand-
ings of the political phenomenology of dance and nondance repertoires of embodied action and
(re)production. Ann Cooper Albright’s “The Politics of Perception” invokes the writings of
queer phenomenologist Sarah Ahmed (2004) to argue that somatic dance practices like
Body-Mind Centering, contact improvisation, and release techniques effectively cultivate individual
and shared conditions of perception. Experientially these forms, in Cooper-Albright’s view, engen-
der a level of shared responsiveness that can assuage the deep polarization around race and socio-
cultural difference that prevails in US culture. Rather than accept apolitical understandings of
somatic-informed dance training systems,3 she unpacks the institutional “whitewashing” of somatic
practice as a power move among field builders that, she insists, negates the power of somatic training
to bridge cultural difference (see also George 2014).

A parallel effort to place political agency with dance practitioners, Ramsay Burt’s “The Politics of
Speaking About the Body” revisits his past discussions of Judson Dance Theatre choreographers
Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, and Deborah Hay with special attention to the spoken commentary
surrounding their work. Situating historical connections between the lifestyles led by these artists
and an inoperable community (following Jean-Luc Nancy 1991), Burt argues for the performative
force of their agentic utterances as antimainstream rhetorics that forged nothing short of a coun-
tercultural consciousness (252). In a volume coedited and overseen by one of dance’s most com-
mitted materialists (Martin), Burt’s avoidance of in-depth discussion of the material privileges
that many of Judsonites subscribed to seems startling and retrograde.

Petra Kuppers’ contribution, “Dancing Disabled: Phenomenology and Embodied Politics,” locates
disability dance performances as politically insurgent domains of cultural production. While
dance’s historic assumptions of able-ism and physical dexterity merit a far more multivocal account
than Kuppers has space to fill, she sustains awareness of this problematic gap by considering how
destabilizing choreographies by German disability dance group DINA 13 and US dance artist Bill
Shannon upend “the everyday knowledge of disabled people’s physicality and embodiment that
audiences might hold” (278). Kuppers closes with the salient point that advancements in spatial
and material access by disabled artists and spectators masks the slow and unsteady development
of disability aesthetics in twenty-first-century dance research.

Rounding out the large number of essays in this volume that attend to structural exclusions that
render dance production and research complicit with race-based dispossession, violence, and colo-
nial conquest, Ananya Chatterjea’s contribution, “Of Corporeal Rewritings, Translations and the
Politics of Difference in Dancing,” promotes the merits of intersectional dance analysis as a nascent
and long overdue contribution to critical dance discourse. Keeping nonnegotiable faith in dance as
a method of political articulation, Chatterjea analyzes dance practices and performances from polit-
ically asymmetrical standpoints to show how artists of color negotiate neocolonial racisms and cap-
italisms using a politics of “constant translation” (295). She stages multivalent readings of concert
DRJ 50/2 • AUGUST 2018 81
 dance works by dance artists of color that “re-write” colonialist narratives and produce political
friction. She also turns important attention to the stultifying logics embedded in dance training sys-
tems by detailing how white repurposing of classical movement forms enacts sticky translations of
movement traditions from the European West and Global South (ballet and yoga). The dexterity
with which Chatterjea translates the micropractical details of technical achievement in dance and
revisionist representational strategies of artists of color make hers an essential essay for academics
seeking traction for practice as a decolonial mode of resistance.

If death is a problem for dance, as Peggy Phelan suggests in her smartly crafted essay, “Planning for
Death’s Surprise: Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham,” it is a problem inextricably linked to
time. Phelan situates the unanticipated passing of Bausch and Cunningham in 2009 as an occasion
to speculate about how each choreographer planned for ending both in their dances and their com-
pany legacy plans. A vital contribution of the piece is its effort to draw dance’s representational and
organizational practices together and then show how they work at political odds. Phelan does this
by construing Bausch’s aesthetic aversions to endings as an anxiety that also informed her lack of
legacy preparation after her swift cancer diagnosis. Interestingly and in contrast, Cunningham’s
deployment of aleatory time in his choreography stands diametrically opposed to the hypervigilant
preservation practices that surround his work, implemented by the Cunningham Trust. Phelan’s
account of the temporal and countertemporal maneuvers of these canonized artists reveals how
the prospect of death haunts dance; the legacies of Bausch and Cunningham suggest that posthu-
mous embodiment in dance remains an always ideological prospect.

Section 4, “The Politics of Histories,” includes five chapters that deepen understanding of previ-
ously invisibilized or reductive aspects of global dance production. Unwilling to neatly equate
dance with “freedom” in an aesthetic or political sense, Felicia McCarren’s vital essay, “Dancing
D-Day” connects histories of state dance funding in France and the United States to a 2014 inter-
pretive performance of the 1944 landing of US allied forces at Normandy (a project funded, fasci-
natingly, by the French Ministry of Defense). McCarren takes up the unique occasion of this highly
publicized dance and the government declarations that surrounded it to weigh contrasting national
attitudes toward art as a market (or market-free) project in the US and French bureaucratic models
of arts funding, respectively. She refuses to abide reductive characterizations of France’s “central-
ized” infrastructure as more or less artist-enabling than the “market-driven” US model of public-
private leveraged funds to argue, instead, that dance is never “free” in any economic sense.
McCarren’s piece makes a convincing case for more rigorous materialist analyses of artists’ complex
enmeshment in state cultural policy regimes.

The shadowed status of dance scholarship on China informs Alexandra Kolb’s chapter, “Dance and
Politics in China: Interculturalism, Hybridity and the ArtsCross Project,” which contextualizes the
Chinese government’s shifting role in the slow and steady political project of dance institutionali-
zation. Kolb’s investment in revising reductive understandings of Maoist and post-Maoist state pol-
icies and attitudes toward dance forms the backdrop for her account of the hybrid choreographic
practices at play in Chinese Western European and US dance in the twenty-first century. What
results is an essay that exposes and expels Western postmodernist claims to hybridity and fragmen-
tation as attitudes that, while still prevalent in dance research, do not neatly adhere in a Chinese
production context.

Another account dedicated to decolonizing dance historical and ethnographic research is Victoria
Fortuna’s “Between the Cultural Center and the Villa: Dance, Neoliberalism and Silent Borders in
Buenos Aires.” Fortuna’s work introduces re-transitando, or “movement otherwise” as a conceptual
framework through which politically engaged choreographers organize and enact counterhege-
monic production curricula (373). In addition to offering a vivid account of Argentine urban his-
tory, social movement, and political art making in Buenos Aires, Fortuna’s work multiplies the
number of achieved standpoints that authorize dance while casting politically engaged

82 DRJ 50/2 • AUGUST 2018

choreographers as institutional critics capable of rerouting social connections between estranged
local publics. Analyzing the performance flows of neoliberal economic development, embodied
protest, dance performances, workshops, and political organizing, Fortuna’s work shows how
Argentinean collectives poner el cuerpo (“put bodies on the line”) and confront the ongoing eco-
nomic decimation of low income neighborhoods in Argentina’s governmental and cultural epicen-
ter. In so doing, she makes a compelling case for how people who occupy deeply asymmetrical
power relations manage to dance in a political economic crisis.

Joining McCarren and Kolb in provoking a more complex study of nationalist agendas in dance
production is Susan Manning’s piece, “Modern Dance in the Third Reich, Redux.” Manning’s anal-
ysis shows how Weimar-era dance history “moves” toward and away from state power. She revisits
her own and others’ historic accounts of German canonical dance figures during the Weimar years
to conclude that any purported consensus among US and EU dance historians on the political sig-
nificance of Weimar choreographers inscribes a false distance between artists and their political sur-
roundings. Providing closer scrutiny of connections between past and present German art dance
works, she hypothesizes: “If contemporary choreographers and scholars in Berlin are so interested
in the complexities of memory and history, the archive and the body, the synchronicity of past and
present, then why had(s) all discussion of modern dance in the Third Reich seemingly vanished?”
(411). Reviewing extant literature while reflexively interrogating her own unstable archive, Manning
makes a strong case for the complex contours of German dance history, asking how Nazi state
bureaucrats promoted both Tanzkunst (dance as art) and Tanz-Gymnastik (dance as physical cul-
ture) to essentially remake “modernism” using newly available forms of state support.

Kate Elswit’s piece, “The Micropolitics of Exchange: Exile and Otherness after the Nation” tracks
the migratory experiences of exiled artists—their hybrid encounters, contingent social positions,
and assimilationist tactics—to theorize dispossession in dance as a situational, multidirectional,
and underrecognized aspect of dance history. Rather than accept the historical victimization and
estrangement of exiled artists like Kurt Joss and Valeska Gert, Elswit revisits these artists’ itinerant
career trajectories to flag the political losses and cross-cultural affordances that their travels engen-
dered. She is careful to acknowledge the egregious circumstances that Jooss and Gert weathered
under the Weimar regime while she strongly rejects the tendency among dance historians to
stage political deficits and defeats in instances of exile. This historiographical reorientation toward
migration and hypermobility as a fugitive and complicit form of political locomotion on the part of
dance artists builds momentum around exile as a generative area of future dance study.

Section 5, “The Politics of Re-Signification,” invokes the important prefix re- to convey a return to
danced representation that departs from new or alternative orientations. The four essays highlighted
here undertake critical examinations of dance’s productively illegible and minor meanings and sit-
uate power in dance’s capacity to signify many ideas at once. Asking readers to consider how ballet
de-ethnicizes, desexualizes, and assimilates Otherness and deviant sexual identities, Hannah
Schwadron’s “Black Swan, White Nose” offers a “queer Jewish reading” of Darren Aronofsky’s
major motion picture Black Swan (2010). To show how repressed identities enter into classical bal-
let representation via “ballet’s monsters,” Schwadron’s analysis depends on the intrusion of lead
actor Natalie Portman’s nose, a corporeal attribute that, she claims, betrays the closeted Jewish
identities of the film’s four female protagonists. This nasal protrusion into ballet’s hegemonic
“whiteness,” in Schwadron’s view, perforates perceived boundaries between the performance of
the hegemonic, white, feminine ideal of “swan femininity” that ballet historically upholds.
Schwadron’s creative form of critical cross-reading leverages the “deviled” representation of lesbian
sexual experimentation in Black Swan to locate queer representation in dance as an exciting and yet
still undertheorized area of research.4

Writing about a challenging canonical figure in US modern dance history, James Moreno’s “Brown
in Black and White: José Limón Dances The Emperor Jones” looks at Limon’s representational
DRJ 50/2 • AUGUST 2018 83
 strategies in his 1956 danced interpretation of Eugene O’Neill’s racist play The Emperor as a “fault-
line narrative,” a staging of homosocial bonding, heterosexual desire, and failed whiteness that rein-
forces Limón’s tenuous negotiation of modern dance’s black/white binary and closeted homosex-
uality. Moreno follows Susan Manning’s (2004) work on the artist to argue that Limón’s stylized
deployment of blackface and depictions of violence productively mismanage race and homoerotic
anxiety to produce antiresolution in Limón’s multivalent dances. Analyzing what it might have
meant for Limón to negotiate his status as a brown dancer in the black/white world of modern
dance, Moreno maintains that Limón’s choreography perpetuated and resisted conventional tropes
of femininity, homosociality, and modern dance pan-ethnicism, at the same time.

Thomas F. DeFrantz’s essay, “SWITCH: Queer Social Dance, Political Leadership, and Black
Popular Culture” maps the movement of queer African American social dance forms from margins
to mainstream. De Frantz rehearses the embodied details at play in voguing, J-setting, and hand
dancing as in-demand practices through the analytical trope of “the switch,” toggling reader atten-
tion between the large-scale magnetism of these movement forms and the agentic capacity of queer
dance makers that mainstream absorption and appropriation violently endangers. The back and
forth movement of De Frantz’s discussion via this trope generates blurriness by design. In fact, it
is this textual relay that powerfully sustains DeFrantz’s conclusion that fugitive queer hauntings
abound when queer black dance crosses from marginal to mainstream performance. Alongside
Chatterjea’s work in this volume, DeFrantz’s deeply convincing model of seeing both the power
and violence at play in black dance potently updates his ongoing arguments for corporeal orature
(2004, 2016) by showing how danced meanings may visually dissipate in black performance, but
they never fully disappear.

A more parodic but also productively blurry authorial offering in this volume takes the form of an
interview-essay by Slovenian performance artist Janez Janša (arguably Davide Grassi), a move-
ment artist who coadopted the name of the Slovenian prime minister and joined the
Democratic Socialist Party in 2007 in an act of political recognition and defiance.5 Using an epon-
ymous interview to unpack one of his own political choreographies (he interviews himself so it is
hard to tell who is “doing the talking”), Janša reflects on how his 2007 piece Fake It throws issues
of authority in dance representation into relief. Janša’s dialogue unpacks the historic lag in insti-
tutionalization of contemporary dance in Eastern Europe as central to the political potential of
works that enact “choreographic counterfeit,” a representational strategy that involves borrowing
and reproducing movement by Western postmodernists in performance. The editorial inclusion
of Janša’s reflexive essay is a refreshing move that reinforces the function of politically engaged
dance making as “speculative historiography” (like Lepecki) and provides a platform for artists
(like Oliver) to articulate alternatives to hegemonic understandings of dance’s national and insti-
tutional borders.

In the final section of the anthology, “The Politics of Re-Negotiation,” Nadine George-Graves’s
“Identity Politics and Political Will: Jeni LeGon Living in a Great Big Way,” argues for identity
as a potent lens to revisit how historical contradictions and oppressive structures have been weath-
ered by dance artists of color throughout US history. Her “between the lines” reading of African
American tap dance artist Jeni LeGon’s experiences of race-based discrimination (lost employment,
subordinate casting, micro- and macro-aggressions) details the overt and creative ways that LeGon
worked within the political institution of Hollywood to expose and deidentify with stultifying insti-
tutional norms. Her conceptualization of this artist’s onstage and covert offstage maneuvers as
instances of “black will” reclaims will as a container for revisionist histories of dance production.
In doing so, George-Graves offers a crowning example of theory’s power to enable researchers to
imagine something different. Risking speculation, she locates knowing confidence in LeGon’s aes-
thetic and extra-artistic efforts. This reorientation draws much-needed historical attention to field
literacies and dexterities that shift the fate of artists at the historical margins (529).

84 DRJ 50/2 • AUGUST 2018

Jacqueline Shea Murphy’s essay, “Dancing in the Here and Now: Indigenous Presence and the
Choreography of Emily Johnson/Catalyst and DANCING EARTH,” investigates how two contem-
porary indigenous dance groups negotiate settler colonial strategies of confinement, assimilation,
and contingent recognition in their productions. Arguing against indigenous dance as a fixed
identitarian attribute, Shea Murphy maintains that a level of marginal legibility abounds in dances
by Elizabeth Johnson and DANCING EARTH and insists that such muddiness resuscitates and
repairs narrow understandings of movement, land, and indigenous history. She cites Johnson’s
choreographic combination of Yup’ik cosmological images and Chicago Bulls iconography and
DANCING EARTH’s commitment to hiring inter-indigenous production teams, to present contem-
porary indigenous dance as a counterbalancing act that harbors both the vitality of indigenous life and
resists the continuing violence of settler colonial policies on lands where artists live and work.

Pressuring dance artists and critics to reconsider narrow and ahistorical assumptions of cultural
backwardness on the part of choreographers in Eastern Europe, Bojana Kunst’s piece, “Dance
and Eastern Europe Contemporary dance in the Time of Transition,” examines the postcommunist
transition of Slavic states as an infantilizing process that has generated narrow and deleterious
understandings of Eastern European contemporary dance performance. With Janša and Cvejič,
Kunst highlights the anachronistic development of conceptual dance in formerly socialist states
as a project of a distinct geopolitical history and uses this context to critique the scholarly tendency
in dance research to forklift Western democratic ideals onto Eastern European aesthetic and orga-
nizational logics. Invoking the tropes of transition and perpetual “catching up” as gatekeeping
devices that problematically relegate Eastern European artists to the proverbial wings of dance
research, Kunst protests the reification of the Western European dance vanguard and argues for
close geopolitical scrutiny of “transitional” countries after the fall of the Wall. She connects com-
munist and socialist rule to artists’ engagement in solidarity movements and diverse articulations of
experimentation and collaboration (567) and the resulting study spotlights transitional epistemol-
ogies in dance as an urgent frontier of future dance study.

In “Domesticating Dance: South Asian Filmic Bodies Negotiating New Moves in Neoliberalism,”
Priya Srinivasan identifies neoliberal pressures on women’s labor and subjectivity in filmic repre-
sentation of female dance in South Asia. She follows the specific trope of female spirit (dis)posses-
sion across three “minor” dance media texts (a Tamil film, documentary film, and a Hindi TV
serial) to expose the damaging and, she argues, haunting corporeal impacts of Indian neoliberal
policies on women. Citing instances of bodily possession and haunting as representational strategies
articulated through danced and nondanced forms of kinetic mobility, Srinivasan locates a resistant
“body” in the figure of the absent woman present across these texts. This woman’s absent presence,
she insists, serves as a powerful spirit-source that circumvents the enduring effects of neoliberal-
ism’s enforced stillnesses on women in India and the Global South. While the text offers much
more than a representational analysis, Srinivasan’s purposefully Orientalist reading of devadasi
female representation reinforces how nuanced textual analyses can serve as critical fictions to high-
light the deleterious and toxic effects of institutional forces.

Closing this collection of insurgent essays is Jens Richard Giersdorf’s essay “Is it OK to Dance on
Graves?”—a text that reopens his past queries into representational and contextual frames of East
German dance to theorize the coimbrication of modernist representational strategies across socialist
realist dance theater and architecture. Departing from East German artist Boris Charmatz’s 2014
efforts to stage a modernist dance work at the Soviet War Memorial, a gravesite of 5,178 Soviet sol-
diers, Giersdorf revisits works by Tom Schilling that challenge readers to think backward into the
political condemnation of modernist aesthetic principles in East Germany as an ideological project
that, he maintains, clouds understanding of the absorption of modernist ideologies across registers
of East German art. Analyzing monumental architectures and dance choreographies together,
Giersdorf’s chapter exposes the polarizing fiction of modernism/social realism as a feigned political
choreography that masks artists’ imbrication in state warfare and wartime remembering.
DRJ 50/2 • AUGUST 2018 85
 The voices assembled through the Oxford Handbook on Dance and Politics reveal a forceful effort
within dance research to interrogate its own disciplinary boundaries with regard to topics, theories,
and methods. Although body-focused analysis continues to stand the test of time as a dominant
tool for dance study, the “minor,” “intersectional,” and “alternative” analytical strategies modeled
here brilliantly reinforce the capacity of critical dance research to walk a reader through the body’s
action in words. This distinctive collection reorients past thinking, provokes future debates, and
offers invaluable resources for those whose study and practice of dance hinge on the body’s capacity
to produce a politics.

Sarah Wilbur
Duke University

Notes

1. Earlier projects that undertake a critique of power and embodiment through dance as topic,
theory, and method include the following edited collections: Jane Desmond’s Meaning in Motion:
New Cultural Studies of Dance (1997); Susan Leigh Foster’s Choreographing History (1995),
Corporealities (1996), and Worlding Dance (2004); André Lepecki’s Of the Presence of the Body
(2004); Ellen W. Goellner’s and Jacqueline Shea Murphy’s (1995) Bodies of the Text: Dance as
Theory, Literature as Dance (1995); and Jenn Joy’s and André Lepecki’s Planes of Composition:
Dance, Theory and the Global (2009).
2. For more from Foster and others on the topic of dance and competition see: Dodds, Sherril.
ed. The Oxford Handbook on Dance and Politics, New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming
2018.
3. Doran George’s important study on somatic discourse vivifies these ideas using historical
versus personal experience as evidence. See: “A Conceit of the Natural Body: The Universal
Individual in Somatic Dance Training.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2014.
4. In addition to Thomas F. De Frantz’s important work in this volume, Ramón Rivera-
Servera, Kareem Kubchandani and Clare Croft are among the US dance researchers to make the
most robust strides toward repairing queer disconnects by exposing queer discomforts in dance
scholarship.
5. For a detailed explanation of the conditions of Janša’s name change see: http://
[Link]/janez_jansa/. Accessed February 25, 2018.

Works Cited

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