Dance and Politics Moving Beyond Boundaries [Hardcover]

Dance has always been a method of self- expression for human beings. This book examines the political power of dance and especially on its transgressive potential. Focusing on readings of dance pioneers Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, Gumboots dancers in the gold mines of South Africa, the One Billion Rising movement using dance to protest against gendered violence, dabke in Palestine and dance as protest against human rights abuse in Israel, the Sun Dance within the Native American Crow tribe, the book focuses on moments in which dance transgresses politics articulated in words. Thus the book seeks ways in which reading political dance as interruption unsettles conceptions of politics and dance. The book combines close readings, drawing on the sensibility of the experience of dance and dance spectatorship, and critical analysis grounded in radical democratic theory.
Introduction

1 Moving beyond boundaries: writing on the body

2 'I dreamed of a different dance': Isadora Duncan's danced revolution

3 'The body says what words cannot': Martha Graham, dance and politics

4 'I want to tell them how I feel and how black people feel': Gumboots dance in South Africa

5 Dancing the ruptured body: One Billion Rising, dance and gendered violence

6 Dancing human rights

Conclusions: the dancer of the future dancing radical hope

Index

Dana Mills is a Lecturer at Hertford College, University of Oxford