Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance: South-South Choreographies [1st ed.] 9783030439118, 9783030439125

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxii
Introduction (Ananya Chatterjea)....Pages 1-37
States of Contemporary Dance (Ananya Chatterjea)....Pages 39-88
Choreographies of Difference-Making (Ananya Chatterjea)....Pages 89-132
Germaine Acogny: Convective Heat and Ground-Shift in Contemporary African Dance (Ananya Chatterjea)....Pages 133-155
Sardono Kusumo: Vibratory Heat, Juxtapositional Disruptions, and Danced Rupture (Ananya Chatterjea)....Pages 157-183
Nora Chipaumire: Rewriting as Decolonizing Heat (Ananya Chatterjea)....Pages 185-210
Rulan Tangen: Entangling Memory, Relationality, and Repetition to Heat up Contemporary Indigenous Dance (Ananya Chatterjea)....Pages 211-233
Lemi Ponifasio, Camille Brown, Prumsodun Ok, Alice Sheppard: Constellatory Heat and Light on Alterity (Ananya Chatterjea)....Pages 235-254
Heat: An Entropic Practice of Contemporary Dancing (Ananya Chatterjea)....Pages 255-273
Back Matter ....Pages 275-289

Citation preview

NEW WORLD CHOREOGRAPHIES

Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance South-South Choreographies

a n a n ya c h at t e r j e a

New World Choreographies Series Editors Rachel Fensham School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne Parkville, Australia Kate Elswit The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, UK

This award-winning series presents studies of choreographic projects embedded in the intermedial and transcultural circulation of dance. Through advanced yet accessible scholarship, it introduces the artists, practices, platforms, and scholars who are rethinking what constitutes movement, and in the process, blurring boundaries between dance, theatre and performance. Engaged with the aesthetics and contexts of global production and presentation, this book series invites discussion of the multi-sensory, collaborative, and transformative potential of these new world choreographies. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14729

Ananya Chatterjea

Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance South-South Choreographies

Ananya Chatterjea University of Minnesota Minneapolis, USA

New World Choreographies ISBN 978-3-030-43911-8    ISBN 978-3-030-43912-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43912-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Toan Thanh Doan, Hui Wilcox, Alexandra Eady, Orlando Hunter, Julia Gay, Kealoha Ferreira, Magnolia Yang Sao Yia, Laichee Yang (I to r) in the final moments of Ananya Dance Theatre’s 2019 premiere of Sutrajāl. Photo by V. Paul Virtucio, courtesy of Ananya Dance Theatre This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editors’ Preface

Choreography in the global context of the twenty-first century involves performance practices that are often fluid, intermedial, interdisciplinary, collaborative, and interactive. Choreographic projects and choreographic thinking circulate within the transnational flows of contemporary performance, prompting new aesthetics that in turn stretch the boundaries of ‘dance studies’. Moving across disciplines, histories, and cultures, these ‘new world choreographies’ utilise dance techniques and methods to imaginative and critical ends in understanding the body’s interaction with the senses, technology, audiences, communities, and the environment under present-day conditions of political and social transformation. Rethinking what constitutes movement means turning an eye to the multiple modes of collective creation across artists, practices, and platforms in ways that challenge established (Western) notions of subjectivity, of the artist as creator, or which unsettle the ‘objective distance’ between the critic and the work. The post-national, intermedial, and interdisciplinary contexts of digital and social media, festival circuits, and rapidly changing political economies also call for further critical attention to their choreographic implications. With an openness to the many spaces in which dance so adeptly manoeuvres, this book series aims to provide critical and historicised perspectives on the artists, concepts, and cultures shaping this creative landscape of ‘new world choreographies’. The series provides a platform for fresh ways to reflect upon and understand what choreography means to its v

vi 

Series Editors’ Preface

various audiences, and to the wider field of international dance and performance studies. It is a forum for emerging and established scholars to map out new knowledge paradigms that can introduce the diverse and exciting field of choreographic practices to dance, theatre, performance studies, and beyond.

Preface

Trajectories of Desire This book arises from the depths of my practice and my experiences as a dancer and choreographer. I have lived and worked in India and the US, and I have traveled quite widely with my own dancing, and to witness the dancing of others. Each journey has brought home to me the weight of categorizations, with all of their unexplored, and perhaps unintended, associations. Of this, I have become certain: even when we, those of us working in dance, have not fully teased out what we mean by the descriptor “contemporary,” we understand that it carries weight and desire. I have inhabited the genre of “contemporary dance” with longing for exploring choreographic craft, for relating to my cultural context in ways that seem most meaningful and relevant, and for challenging the boundaries of my imagination. Yet, mostly, it has felt like looking into a field bounding with exciting possibilities, where belonging is always contested. With full disclosure about my fascination with the field of contemporary dance, I enter the conversation by re-tracing my journey in dance. I grew up in Kolkata, India, and like most Bengali middle-class girls in the 1970s, was sent off by my mother several days a week, to dance class, my ghungroos in a bag hanging from my hands.1 I went to a performing arts school for the first decade of studying dance, where I studied the classical dance styles Manipuri, Bharatanatyam, some Kathakali, and performed in a lot of concerts of Rabindranritya, a particular style of dancing to Rabindranath Tagore’s songs and dance dramas that was all wrapped in expressions of Bengali cultural identity. In my early teens, I became a vii

viii 

PREFACE

disciple of noted exponent of Odissi, Sanjukta Panigrahi, and even as I became more and more immersed inside the worldview of “classical dance,” I mostly found myself pushed to the fringes of that world of dance. There were two reasons for that. While the “classical” dance world was taken over by middle- and upper-class women in post-independence India, certainly by the time I was studying it, I found advanced study of classical dance to be guarded by gatekeepers who checked wallets and contact lists. I understood later that they also checked caste hierarchies, though this was tucked deep, hidden under the rhetoric of Socialist equity that dominated the Kolkata of my growing years. At any rate, my family did not have the means to bolster my study with all the other attendant elements of a successful classical career—the ability to self-­produce a solo concert at a prominent venue with a star-studded invitee list, for instance. My middle-class Bengali upbringing, fired with Leftist ideologies, ensured that I rationalized my personal situation by critiquing the way art was being ensnared in an economy of purchase. I prided myself for not participating in such a system, and convinced myself that surely, my talent was enough. But I harbored secret jealousies of the children of Non-Resident Indian parents, who would blaze into our classes every summer and always seemed to get preferential treatment, and I struggled with the incestuous relationship between class privilege and visibility. I understood, to some extent, that given the lack of government support, artists had to monetize their teaching in different ways to survive. But it was painful to acknowledge the deep linkages between informal systems of patronage and the transactional nature of “success.” Moreover, my fascination with the beauty of classical dance, specifically Odissi, with its rhythmic complexities and spinal curvilinearities, its poeticisms and sculpturesque balances, the richness of its embodied philosophies, was constantly troubled by what I witnessed around me daily in Kolkata. By the 1980s, the Left Front government, elected by a huge margin in 1977, was entrenched in political power in Bengal. Yet the “people’s government” soon failed its promises to the popular electorate. Urban youth communities, disillusioned by increasing corruption and governmental nepotism, struggled with the failure of political idealism. The huge number of factory closures and attendant deindustrialization were real, and discontent roamed the streets. Women’s groups and community organizers found in street theater a powerful forum to share their ideas with the broader populace. And I found myself torn between the beautiful and harmoniously organized world that was conjured inside the classical dance center where I worked with my guru, and the world of street theater artists, whose insistent calls for justice always greeted me at

 PREFACE 

ix

the bus stop right outside that building. Gradually, these collisions crept into the center of my dance experience, striating my attraction to embodied expressivity. Shortly after, I began dancing with an ensemble of artists deeply committed to Bengali folk inspirations, class struggles, and resistance to political inequities. The choreographer Shambhu Bhattacharya and songwriter Hemanga Biswas were leading figures in the Indian People’s Theater Association (IPTA), incisive thinkers, and deeply respected for their political integrity. Together, they created pieces such as Shankhacheel (seagull), which works through the metaphor of a seagull’s song to critique the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Ajadi hoyni ajo tor (we haven’t yet found freedom), calling for a determined moving forward of the legacy of the progressive Left. Dancing these works inspired my footwork and pushed me to understand rhythm as the drumbeat of a people’s art movement. I was also part of dance dramas that these artists created about Bengali folk lore that enabled us to find a way into the hearts of working class and rural audiences. When I danced to Hemanga-da’s singing of Nām tār chhilo John Henry, inspired by Harry Belafonte’s rendition of the Ballad of John Henry, I learned to engage local with global struggles in a way that was unknown in the world of classical dance, albeit that the link was forged in the name of working class struggle and a critique of imperialism, and less in terms of racial difference. And, without realizing it, I learned to perform Bengali folk dances in the same evening as a piece such as Shankhacheel that called for a global anti-imperial, anti-­nuclear movement. We performed in small schoolhouses with broken floors, on rickety makeshift wooden stages, sometimes for an august group of thinkers known as the International Radical Humanists, sometimes as cultural ambassadors representing the Bengal government in the national state-tostate Cultural Exchange Program, and usually for very little or no money. Yet, this work activated my political consciousness, primarily around class struggle, making me bristle at the ways in which classical dance was being slowly consumed by forces of commercialization. And then, there was the women’s movement, the second reason for my increasingly strained relationship with the world of classical dance. The Indian women’s movement in the 1970s and 1980s was gathering steam, and in Kolkata, was organized around issues in women’s lives such as rising prices, literacy, and domestic violence. Their marches, demonstrations, street theater events, and gherāos inevitably reminded me of the daily life issues that needed attention.2 They also made me painfully aware of the

x 

PREFACE

distance between the call to empower ourselves and intervene in the political process and the unwavering belief in divine management in which classical dance seemed to be enshrined. They were on the streets, where I waited for the bus after leaving training sessions and rehearsals for classical dance; they were in the commons square in my college; it was impossible to turn my eyes away. And as I came into my own as a young adult, I found myself constantly swinging between the idealized beauty of form and the strength of line in classical dance, and the lived experiences of women around me and the multiple violences that dogged our lives constantly. And so I came to yearn for dance that could bring the distinctive linear shaping of the body, the conviction that spirituality is embodied, the search for shared vibration that characterized the classical world, together with the energy, the urgency, and the real-life connection in the world of embodied protest and street theater. My desire for a contemporary dance was forged in the fire of wanting a meaningful dance embedded in the “now” that acknowledged the realities of my life and location. Chandralekha, in Chennai, and Manjusri Chaki-Sircar, in Kolkata, were emerging as powerful choreographic voices in the Indian dance scene, challenging the classical hold over our imaginations. Their choreographies and words ignited in me an imaginative spark that haunted my consciousness and my dancing till I made a decision to make a formal break with my trajectory as a classical dancer and leave Kolkata, with a scholarship to study dance and dance education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. When I arrived in New York in search of a “contemporary dance” in 1989, I discovered the other side of these issues. I was accepted into and began dancing for a company based in Manhattan’s Chinatown, Asian American Dance Theater. As I built relationships, I was also often invited to perform as an independent artist. But everywhere, I realized that in order to show even a small segment of my contemporary choreography, I needed to first establish myself as a “traditional” dancer that would locate me culturally and aesthetically. So, for every performance, I began by dancing some pieces from the classical repertoire and then tucked in my choreography, in a “contemporary” voice, at the end. I often wondered about the rhetoric of personal expression that my colleagues in modern and postmodern dance talked about, versus the pressure that some of us felt to “represent” our “cultural tradition,” and what “tradition” even meant in this context.

 PREFACE 

xi

It took me time to realize that I had stepped into the multiculturalism debates of the 1980s and 1990s, which paved the way for greater representation of diversity, but had little official space for nuanced ideas of difference. The success of the multicultural mandate depended on staging distinct cultural practices as artefacts, while absolutely containing cultural difference within the proclaimed generosity of governmental policy. Celebrations of discrete and easily identifiable aesthetic criteria and material signifiers such as colorful costumes, rhythmic footwork, percussive accompaniment, did not create automatic access to resources. I had encountered something like this before, in the Indian government’s limited celebration of diverse “folk” and regional performance traditions to demonstrate the nation’s cultural directive of “Unity in Diversity,” congealing and covering over unreconciled lacunae. As everywhere, this strategy of masking long-standing political and economic inequities through an appearance of equalizing cultural opportunities perpetuated its own set of silences. What I witnessed in New York was how this locked artists and practices into sweeping, un-nuanced categories such as “Native American dance” or “West African dance,” which were immediately associated with “Tradition,” leaving no space for reimagining relationships within these broad organizing labels. At the same time, a great universalism was at play, reducing diasporic otherness into the container of shared suffering. My colleagues at Asian American Dance Theatre and I would grumble about the numerous times we had brought up the issues of Asian/Asian American Pacific Islander dancers being pigeon-holed into representations of “tradition” and being told by benevolent grant-makers and presenters, primarily white, that of course all artists hated labels and that our struggle was nothing new or different. Some diasporic artists talked about having to re-nativize themselves in order to get gigs, because their participation in “American dance” was dependent on their presentation of an absolute, but non-threatening, difference. Other artists talked about having to navigate between the binarized representations of romantic love, flowers, spiritual connectivity, and the portrayal of oppressive gender roles, arranged marriages, and poverty. The Artistic Director of the company, Eleanor Yung, trained in American modern dance, found it difficult to get purchase for her choreographic work about the Silk Route, for instance, or other issues that traced Asian American histories, beyond her immediate community in New York City’s Chinatown and a few other progressive fora in Lowertown Manhattan.

xii 

PREFACE

These histories are poignant because, in fact, while so much has changed in this context, so many of the paradigms shaping the field of dance and performance have not. These experiences lined my trajectory into the field of contemporary dance and the questions of access, definition, contextual specificity, cultural hierarchies, and resources that are intimately linked with it. My desire to dance in ways that are “contemporary,” in response to the issues of the day, concerns I felt in my skin, was forged through connections with histories shared by many Indigenous and Black artists, artists of color, and from the global South, Dalit, queer, trans, non-binary, working class artists, and artists fighting occupation of their homelands: these are histories that assured contested belonging. A couple of decades later, I am still in the fold of that struggle. Much of this book emerges from experiencing and witnessing the hierarchies that continue to beleaguer contemporary dance, primary among them, the legacies of Eurocentric and nationalist dominance on the world stage. Indeed, when I try to connect the dots between my path into contemporary dance and the ways in which this category is articulated in the global North, where I now live and work, the lines inevitably miss each other. These moments of un-meeting, the subtly played exclusions, crackle with electric charge and tension and flush my body with heat. In my unbelonging is my different empowerment. This project stems from my intention—spurred by my struggles no doubt—to parse out the choreographies of power that structure the economies of “success” and “belonging” in this field. It is also pushed by my commitment to bring voices of alterity to this field, so we can begin to ask how this category, apparently shared globally across cultural and geopolitical differences, might look when reimagined and reinvigorated by difference. It is inspired by the work of contemporary artists from different contexts whose choreographies move audiences and gesture toward worlds where expansive notions of humanity and justice are possible. From our un-belonging rise our voices. Our dancing quickens knowing, differently; generates heat (Image 1). Heat functions as an important reminder of the kinetic map I am conjuring, along with many of the artists in this book. Heat, produced by desire and the jostlings of difference, pushes away the cold breath that so often seems to envelop us when we seek to engage gatekeepers in the field, whose insistence on old infrastructures of validating artists holds dancing hostage. Heat also permeates my personal history as an artist in contemporary dance. Over the last several decades, I have worked in partnership and

 PREFACE 

xiii

Image 1  Ananya Chatterjea in Mohona, Estuaries of Desire (2013), at The O’Shaughnessy Theatre, St. Paul. ©Ananya Dance Theatre. (Photo credit: Paul Virtucio)

collaboration with artists from global Black, Indigenous, and communities of color, particularly as Artistic Director of a contemporary dance company of Black and brown women and femmes committed to social justice choreography. Moreover, I have built relationships and solidarities with artists from BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) communities working in intersectional ways, through shared performances, grant panels, protests, community events, and roundtable discussions.3 Learning about shared and disrinct struggles has amplified the heat of our joint frustration as much as it has drawn us together and strengthened my resolve to identify and think through the hidden indices that render the field of contemporary dance inequitable. With a commitment to transform the heat of anger into generative heat, emerging from centering alterity, I jump into the landscape of contemporary dance. Minneapolis, MN, USA

Ananya Chatterjea

xiv 

Preface

Notes 1. Ghungroos are the rows of small bells that Indian dancers typically tie around their ankles to emphasize rhythms and footwork patterns. 2. A gherāo is a strategy often used during protest in India, where a large group of protesters surround somebody in power in order to force an engagement, refusing passage till some questions are answered. 3. The BIPOC acronym has gained political currency across North America in recent years, suggesting both the prioritization of Black and Indigenous peoples in the political solidarity movement across different communities and the need to indicate different histories, experiences, and relationships to land, territory, and official government culture, than the blanket term “people of color” allowed. It also recognizes the distinct histories of struggle and resistance in diverse Black and brown communities. Though it has been criticized for not recognizing the specificity of Native American experience and different kinds of Indigeneities, it offers the best framework for my book. I am, however, re-situating it in a transnational context, where Blackness, Indigeneity, and of color are understood in multiplicity and along different ancestral lines, creating a complex “South-South” axis. More about this framing in the Introduction. Also, I have chosen BIPOC over the later formation ALANA, the acronym for African, Latino, Asian, Native Americans, because, among other issues, I locate my argument in a global, not specifically American context.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my spiritual sisters who have reminded me time and again to look at the world from down under: Janice BadMoccasin, my Dakota relative, whose blessing supports me as I live and work on the Native land of Minnesota; and Sharon Day, my Ojibwe sister, healer, and organizer, who taught me the value of holding every footstep sacred. Gratitude to my forever mentor, Dr. Brenda Dixon Gottschild, who taught me care in writing and analytical rigor. To all my teachers in movement and thinking who insisted on attention to detail and nuance, and to all the fierce intergenerational BIPOC women and femmes who have opened my mind to the multiple possibilities of ground-up argumentation and dreaming: I am grateful to stand in your lineage and offer my deepest pranams. Thank you to the amazing series editor for Palgrave, Rachel Fensham, whose encouragement is directly responsible for my getting this project completed. The feedback I have received on the drafts have been vital for its improvement. Thank you Jack Heeney, Editorial Assistant at Palgrave, for your support. This book has emerged from conversations with artists with whom I have danced, struggled, and organized for years. To them, my colleagues at Ananya Dance Theatre across time, my endless thanks: for the solidarity in rage, tears, fierce determination, and relentless search for articulating our different stories. You have been crucial in the many discussions about the “contemporaneity” of the work we do. Special thanks to Gary Peterson who demonstrated what rock-steady means through all of my rants about inequities in the field. xv

xvi 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sincere thanks to friends and colleagues: Jigna Desai, for infusing critical discursivities into dailiness; Hari Krishnan, for endless conversations about the dancing we desire; Thomas DeFrantz, whose encouragement, love, and reminders of joy are so dear to my heart; Arshiya Sethi, for your unwavering support; Meena Natarajan, for the commitment to positivity; Dipankar Mukherjee, for the pleasure of argument and artistic search; Marcus Young, for collaboration and curiosity. Gratitude to the amazing artists who enliven the pages of this book, whose friendship and artistry have offered solace, determination, and inspiration. I am especially thankful for Mama Germaine and Papa Helmut, Mas Don, Nora (thank you for the endless co-rantings), Rulan, and Rosy, without whose support this book would not have been possible. I thank my students and colleagues at the University of Minnesota, whose questions have offered opportunities to think through the questions at the heart of this project, and the many colleagues in the field at large, practitioners and theorists, too many to name individually here, conversations with whom have provoked sharpenings of my articulation. Lastly, my gratitude and humble thanks to my loving family who put up with the endless deferrals of what they would describe as “fun,” while I trudged on through the manuscript. Raji, your paws on my keyboard while I typed reminded me of the many walks awaiting us as soon as I finished. Thanks to my partner Darren Johnson for patiently supporting me throughout my arduous journeys. To my parents, who will not see the materialization of this manuscript, but who instilled the value of labor and ethical practice in me, my humble gratitude and always love.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 States of Contemporary Dance 39 3 Choreographies of Difference-Making 89 4 Germaine Acogny: Convective Heat and Ground-Shift in Contemporary African Dance133 5 Sardono Kusumo: Vibratory Heat, Juxtapositional Disruptions, and Danced Rupture157 6 Nora Chipaumire: Rewriting as Decolonizing Heat185 7 Rulan Tangen: Entangling Memory, Relationality, and Repetition to Heat up Contemporary Indigenous Dance211 8 Lemi Ponifasio, Camille Brown, Prumsodun Ok, Alice Sheppard: Constellatory Heat and Light on Alterity235 9 Heat: An Entropic Practice of Contemporary Dancing255 Index275 xvii

List of Figures

Fig. 7.1 Rulan Tangen, in Land Dance explorations (2015) for SEEDS RE-GENERATION. Aesthetic design with Kalika Tallou. (Photo credit Paulo Rocha-Tavares and Dancing Earth, courtesy of ©pauloT for Dancing Earth) 220 Fig. 7.2 Rulan Tangen and DANCING EARTH in outdoor Land Dance for SEEDS RE-GENERATION (2015), with re-purposed parachute for the scene of “Renewal” on Abaachi lands. Dancers (from left to right): Shane Montoya, Rulan Tangen, Anne Pesata, and Trey Pickett. (Photo credit Paulo Rocha-Tavares and Dancing Earth, courtesy of ©pauloT for Dancing Earth) 222 Fig. 7.3 Rulan Tangen in collaboration with branches and antlers for “Seeds Beneath Snow” (2015), a winter movement study for SEEDS RE-GENERATION. Aesthetic design with Kalika Tallou. (Photo credit Paulo Rocha-Tavares and Dancing Earth, courtesy of ©pauloT for Dancing Earth) 226

xix

List of Images

Image 4.1 Germaine Acogny in À un Endroit du Début, 2015. (© Ecole de Sables, courtesy of Germaine Acogny and Helmut Vogt) 134 Image 4.2 Germaine Acogny on the grounds of her beloved Ecole des Sables, located in Toubab Dialaw, Senegal. (© Hyun Kim) Much of the particularities of the Technique Acogny are inspired by this topography 144 Image 5.1 Sardono Kusumo, Rehearsal for Fabriek Fikr, November 2016, performed in an abandoned sugar mill in Colomadu, Solo, Central Java, Indonesia. (© Pandji Vasco da Gama) 166 Image 5.2 Sardono Kusumo in The Family of Man and the Sea (2019), a site-­specific performance at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venezia. This performance brought together thematic strains from his exploration on the tsunami-struck beach in Lhoknga (seen in the projected image behind him) and the arduous journeys of migrant workers that is the focus of later works such as Nobody’s Body and Black Sun. (© IISMC of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. Photo credit: Constantino Vecchi) 170 Image 5.3 Premiere of Kusumo’s Black Sun, August 2016. Venue: TheatreWorks, Singapore. Dancers (foreground, right to left): Dorothea Quinn, Supartono Tony Bruer; (background, right to left): Danny, Ivan, Jefrey, Ronny, Ebeyx, Boogie. (©Ari Dina Krestiawan) 178 Image 6.1 Nora Chipaumire in Poems / Dark Swan, inside a school in Chimoio, Mozambique. Still from Nora, a film by Alla Kovgan and David Hinton. (© 2008, photo credit: Mko Malkhasyan)189

xxi

xxii 

List of Images

Image 6.2 Nora Chipaumire in her research on running, in Chimoio, Mozambique. Still from Nora, a film by Alla Kovgan and David Hinton. (© 2008, photo credit: Mko Malkhasyan) Image 6.3 Nora Chipaumire, portrait of myself as my father, 2016. Dancers: (right to left) Shamar Watt, Nora Chipaumire and Pape Ibrahima N’diaye. (Photo courtesy of © Peak Performances at Montclair State University. Photo credit: Gennadi Novash)

195

204

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

What Is Contemporary Dance? For many years now, I have followed the phenomenon of “contemporary dance” as it circulates within the North American and European artistic contexts, and the ways in which associations of “cutting-edge” and “innovative” have accrued to it. Simultaneously, I have paid attention to dance artists from Indigenous, Black, and brown communities in the global South and North who describe their work as “contemporary,” and the different ways in which they trace the lineage of their experimentations. Inevitably, their work is gridded with lines of power that must be navigated for the sake of survival, but these contestations, contradictions, unresolved differences seldom get air to breathe out their lives. Very often, the complex dynamics in the global field of Contemporary Dance are all but flattened out in the discourse about it. Moreover, despite the assertions of many stakeholders in the field about what constitutes contemporaneity in dance, there are many different, sometimes antithetical, ways in which this category is constructed, even across Europe and North America, which comprises the largest, most prestigious and resourced fora as the global stage for contemporary dance. Let me trace some of the primary modes of identifying contemporary dance in the global North, which fall along geopolitical and historical, and often, philosophical, fault-lines. Across much of Europe, the contemporary quite staunchly arrives through a rejection of classical ballet (though © The Author(s) 2020 A. Chatterjea, Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance, New World Choreographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43912-5_1

1

2 

A. CHATTERJEA

contemporary ballet is very much its own genre) and a move toward disciplinary border-crossing. Within this, regional and national histories make for particular foci: the development of dance in Germany through Ausdruckstanz and Tanztheater generates a different creative pathway than the intense post-ballet contemporary dance in France or Belgium, for instance. In these latter contexts, the avant-garde edge within contemporary dance becomes further specialized into the worlds of “conceptual dance,” “minimal dance,” and “collaborative dance.” The central questions within this mode of dance-making are about dance itself and the dancing body, resulting in dance that is minimalistic and resonant with American postmodern dance’s investment in pedestrian movement. Celebrated artists within this genre include Jérôme Bel, Meg Stuart, Xavier Le Roy, Vera Mantero, among others. It is significant that the evolution and naming of Contemporary Dance in the global North in the 1980s and 1990s happens in the context of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the ending of the Cold War, and the subsequent swell of globalization, multinational corporations, and booming free-market economies. Several European dance scholars have identified the self-reflexive turn in contemporary dance as its defining moment, and experimental ways of looking at itself as constituting its avant-garde. Noémie Solomon describes the terrain of an anthology about European contemporary dance as a field that examines “the definition and imperatives of ‘a work’, its recasting within the conditions of labor and cultural production in late capitalist societies” (2014, p.  16). Dance scholar Rudi Laermans writes similarly about the way in which dance itself, and its modus operandi, the body, become the preoccupation of contemporary dance. He marks Contemporary Dance’s assertion that “choreography could be a genuine medium for reflection and … bring to the fore, in a stimulating way, ongoing key issues, such as the status of the body within ‘the society of the spectacle’ as depicted by Guy Debord” (Laermans 2015, pp.  18–19). Both Solomon and Laermans’ analyses suggest that a critique of capital’s penetration into art is inherent in European contemporary dance contexts. This makes sense for many choreographers’ choices of minimal aesthetic and low production effects and their focus on the work of dance.1 But it does not necessarily develop a critique of how class hierarchies, intersected with race, nationality, gender, and other forms of cultural capital, remain intact within the economy of global contemporary concert dance.

1 INTRODUCTION 

3

Laermans goes on to trace the continuous evolution of Flemish contemporary dance, with the shifting emphasis on conceptual dance, and then on collaborative dance, pointing to the field’s seemingly self-­conscious reorganization of itself, and what constitutes value: “Besides a definitive emancipation from the ballet tradition, this multi-layered process was roughly synonymous with the development of a specialized production and distribution circuit … a restricted cultural market on which various actors primarily vie for symbolic recognition” (2015, pp. 18–19). In this world, then, it is an inward gaze, reimagining the body’s relationship to dance, inquiring what constitutes dance, and how dance indexes the current social order, that invites innovation and legitimizes particular kinds of risk-taking. Also of note is the way in which, in much of the European, as also the North American, dance field, contemporary dance produced its own infrastructure, ensuring particular modes of dissemination. Different ways of making, producing, and circulating dance mark the work of artists such as Hofesh Shechter, Marie Chouinard, Angelin Preljocaj, Maguy Marin (specifically her earlier works), Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Sasha Waltz, and Akram Khan, dance-makers working in France, UK, Canada, Germany, and Belgium, whose investigations are as much about dance as about other issues, and who generally work with larger companies and high production values. Most of these choreographers have reclaimed virtuosity and theatricality, but do not remain within the confines of one pre-established movement aesthetic. Even as there is seldom the articulation of technique for the sake of spectacular presentation, technical nuance and movement expertise reappear in idiosyncratic ways, often shaped through the collaboration of choreographer and dancers. This kind of contemporary work distinguishes itself through a series of strategies to negotiate its theatricality, often capturing our imaginations through a heightened, vivid, imagistic scale, refashioning the space of the theater, and weaving in surreal provocations through uncanny juxtapositions that refuse a linear narrative and aesthetic flow. Such highly produced, polished, and skillful contemporary dance manifests itself somewhat differently in the US, where the movement influences are different, and might be seen, for instance, in the work of Sidra Bell, Lee Sher and Saar Harari, Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer, Andrea Miller, Kyle Abraham, and others. However, despite the strong periodizing impulse in the US, where ballet is narrativized as being followed by the revolution of modern dance, and then postmodern dance, studying the works and artists archived under the “Contemporary” category of the

4 

A. CHATTERJEA

Jacob’s Pillow Interactive dance web library raises many questions ( h t t p s : / / d a n c e i n t e r a c t i v e . j a c o b s p i l l o w. o r g / b r o w s e / genre/#genre=contemporary). This archive includes the work of artists such as Reggie Wilson, Kyle Abraham, Wendy Whelan, Camille Brown, as well as of Paul Taylor (whom many would consider as representative of classic modern dance) and Pilobolus (also part of the later canon of American modern dance), Steve Paxton and Trisha Brown (whose work might be described as characterizing the first wave of American postmodern dance), and even includes a nod to contemporary aesthetics in ballet (Dance Theater of Harlem, performing The Lark Ascending by Alvin Ailey, and Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet). The best way I can read the structure of this listing is as suggesting that: (a) “contemporary” be understood in a quasi-chronological way (Paul Taylor’s work Airs seemed to be “of the times”, contemporary, in the 1980s, regardless of its aesthetic) and (b) we consider individual pieces as inviting analysis as “contemporary” because of the aesthetic decisions they embody even if other works by the same choreographer/company do not. Interestingly, in this self-consciously “international” archive, though companies such as Salia Nı̄ Seydou (Burkina Faso) and Compagnie Jant-Bi (Senegal) receive double listing under “contemporary” and “cultural” categories, Chandralekha (India) and Pichet Klunchun (Thailand) are mentioned only in the “cultural” category. This reminder that artists from global Black and brown  communities are racialized differently, often in keeping with larger cultural stereotypes and the aesthetic lineages they claim, indicates the complex power map that suffuses the world of contemporary dance. Moreover, how are we to understand a category named “cultural” nearly a quarter century after Joanne Kealiinohomoku’s classic essay resituated ballet within the world of “ethnic dance”?2 We might ask: in what contexts is “culture” imagined as synonymous with “tradition?” When does it become a proxy for aesthetic difference? As I conversed with colleagues about their understanding of contemporary dance, some suggested that the descriptor contemporary is sometimes deployed in a temporal sense, so that performances by traditional modern dance companies such as Paul Taylor Dance Company and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Company, the butoh company Sankai Juku, the Indian classical dance company Nrityagram, Ballet Hispánico, performing their founder-created repertoire or newer works, and the reconstruction of Deborah Hay’s works, in the year 2019 for instance, can all be seen within the same frame, as co-existing in current time. Yet, more

1 INTRODUCTION 

5

often than not, contemporary dance operates as a category that is primarily aesthetically defined, with strong considerations of chronological, historic, and political urgencies. Let me pause momentarily to emphasize that the focus of my investigation is on theatrical or concert dance, even as I recognize that these descriptors are flawed. However, while such dance may or may not happen in theaters, it is almost always theatrical in intention, framed as an artistic experience. While the distinctions are not absolute, there are indeed clear differences between the kind of dance-making that self-consciously locates itself in the artistic, non-commercial realm that gestures toward the field of professional dance, and that which happens in the world of overt competitions, often routed via studio dance. However, because of the way commercial or competition dance, often mediated by the screen, is fast becoming a vehicle for the global cultural display, and how influences from here sometimes feed into the world of concert dance, I offer a brief look at how contemporary dance is understood in quite different ways in this context. Of the many videos that come up in a search for “Contemporary dance” on YouTube and Vimeo, most are from the world of competition dance, though varied in setting—rehearsal footage, instructional videos, and performance clips. Most often set to pop songs, dancers are generally dressed to suggest a “casual” look, and almost always wear socks. Most of them share an aesthetic and technical orientation, with differences built in, depending on trends where they are based, North America, Europe, or Australia. There is usually a base of ballet, mixed in with movements from postmodern release technique, inspirations from gaga, and from theatrical jazz, jazz funk, and hip hop particularly in the case of the US, all mixed in with stylistic choices, fast transitions, and extravagant ending flourishes. Camera-worthy moments, capturing moments of high skill, remind us that competition dance lives widely within filmic and virtual circulation, making for particular modes of discussion and dissemination. This is distinct from most theatrical contemporary dance, which tends to insist on circulation through live performance. Mediation through the screen changes the barometer of access and conditions of “success”: often, these videos are intended for mass consumption and instant entertainment. Inevitably, this raises questions for how we imagine the global stage, the affordability of fiber optic technology versus how audiences arrive at theaters, and the economies of danced labor. Yet, questions about access remain one of the most vexed issues in contemporary dance.

6 

A. CHATTERJEA

I watched Robert Hoffman’s three-minute instructional video “How to do Contemporary Dance” (2013) make its rounds on social media with interest. Filmed in a living room and edited with a low-budget feel, this is a spoof of contemporary dance where Hoffman, presenting himself as “Contemporary Eric,” demonstrates 15 moves that “are in every contemporary dance.” He assures us that if we learn these moves and put them together in any combination, we too can become “contemporary choreographers.” The words “as seen in So You Think You Can Dance” play out in colorful letters across the screen as he begins his demonstration. These moves, which include the “Zombie with Emotion,” the “I just came out of a well,” and the “why is your head in my hand,” are demonstrated by themselves, and then as choreographed movement in a sequence that is performed “with emotion.” Eric’s straight-faced, self-assured performance, his instructions, his witty irreverence as he explains why he has named some of these moves so, and his occasional digs at the world of professional dance are hilarious. But we have to be able to endure the misogyny, however sarcastic, when Eric’s dance partner, named Bich in this incarnation, is stepped over, in a move named “Go to sleep Bich.” Shockingly, this move resonates with some incarnations of contemporary theatrical dance. More discussions about continuing gender hierarchies within contemporary dance later. Eric’s video, which went viral on social media, indicated to me the broader discussion about contemporary dance in the public imaginary, and stakeholders in the field who cared little for what they viewed as the snobbery of the art dance world. What was also clear is how, in this context, the genre of contemporary dance was immediately associated with “moves.” But is there something in Eric’s tongue-in-cheek assurance that, given this strategy, anyone could claim to be doing contemporary dance? Of course, this video references the field of commercial dance, and locates dance squarely within the world of transactional relationships. Yet the overt reminder about the purchase of dance and visibility, through a freely circulating video, garnering Eric important recognition and capital, reminds us about the desire to belong in a coveted field. In a strange double function, almost as shocking anathema, it both echoes some words by leaders in the world of contemporary conceptual dance and presents its absolute divergence from it. The cheeky scenario of Eric’s living-room dance studio echoes the kind of breakdown of hierarchies, between dancer and dance-maker, between dance as object and a system of signification, lineages of expertise and everyday possibilities, championed by conceptual

1 INTRODUCTION 

7

choreographers. But the context in which he invokes “contemporary dance” recalls the diametrically opposed perspective of dance critic Franz Anton Cramer, who, in conversation with Boyan Manchev and Xavier Le Roy, reminds us of European contemporary dance’s total philosophical rejection of the commercial aspects of dance-making: “today the interest in contemporary dance is so great precisely because it is about producing things that, in today’s global capitalist context, cannot be owned” (2014, p. 127). Eric’s populist contemporary dance is not from the same world. Ironically, there are traces of his self-affirming relationship to dance in the pronouncements of key figures in the concert dance world. His self-­ aggrandizing performance of choreographic strategies to the reflective surface of the screen which delivers his renown is at least a little bit like the inward-looking and insular infrastructure of conceptual dance, where an inner circle of gatekeepers makes and breaks artists through the continuous play of age-old hierarchies.

Genealogies of Innovation Despite differences, there is a consistent identification of Contemporary Dance with notions of experimentation and cutting-edge across different sectors of the dance field which sparks the excitement around it. But where is innovation located? What constitutes experimentation? As in competition and commercial sectors, so for many artists in concert dance, contemporary dance is identified as a “look,” resulting from a particular, even idiosyncratic, use of movement vocabulary usually drawn from several genres. The emphasis on the generation and arrangement of movement drawn from different aesthetics and their performance with a particular fast-paced attack dominates popular understandings of contemporary dance. Seldom are questions raised about the purchase of this easy crossing over across genres and styles, of the significance of this admittedly hybrid aesthetic, or about the hierarchies that remain at its core. The broader constituencies who flocked to Eric’s video frequently share their perspectives about this genre on blog posts, specifically in North America, and often enjoy significant readerships. Charlotte Foster Williamson, owner and director of a dance studio in Atlanta, offers a shorthand description of contemporary dance as a “combination of ballet, modern, and jazz” in a blog post for her students (2011). But she also asks them to look for the range of influences: “The real strength of contemporary dance comes from dance teachers and choreographers who have

8 

A. CHATTERJEA

processed many ways of movement through their body to come up with the most interesting possible choices for them” (Foster Williamson 2011). Foster Williamson emphasizes that it is in fact the kind of movement and the way it is embodied that marks contemporary dance, not, for instance, emotional expressivity, which is popular in “commercial contemporary” but not always present in “concert contemporary.” For her, the movement distinguishes contemporary from “lyrical” dance, which is “almost exclusively concerned with expressivity and musicality, and is firmly grounded in ballet, often with jazz infusions. In my opinion, lyrical and contemporary are completely different categories of dance because lyrical does not include elements of modern or other movement techniques” (Foster Williamson 2011). I wondered about the many branchings and classifications she named: Do they function as much as levels of differentiation and organization, as modernity’s simulacra and the fetishization of choice in late capitalism? The primacy of ballet, jazz and modern movement in contemporary dance, and the presence of influences from a range of other movement aesthetics are also highlighted by dancer and dance instructor Nichelle Suzanne, on her blog post “What Do They Mean By ‘Contemporary’ On SYTYCD?” (2011). Her emphasis on the eclectic movement possibilities within contemporary dance underlines a focus on virtuosity, enabling dancers “to move between and bend genres with ease” and the facile genre-crossing such that, though there is a hierarchy of preference, all movement can be accessed for experimentation, reflecting a “fast-paced and interconnected world” (Suzanne 2011). For her, these cross currents of influence and citation signal “an open acknowledgement of relationships” between different dance forms, though there is no discussion of how power flows between and through such borrowings (Suzanne 2011). Suzanne moves back and forth between commercial and concert arenas and remarks on how these fields cross-pollinate each other. I note how the flow of “influences” across forms, justified by the notion of “an interconnected world” affects both competitive and art dance worlds, albeit in very different ways. In the former there is little or no discussion about issues of appropriation, such that young white women can compete with each other in group dances categorized as “Bollywood” (with a few mudras, bindis, and forehead jewelry to deliver “Indianness”) or “Tribal Council” (replete with face paint, fake feather head-dresses, and a drum) on the television show “Dance Moms,” with no impunity.3 There is a much deeper level of investigation of cultural specificity in theatrical contemporary dance, yet

1 INTRODUCTION 

9

the cross-flows of urban cosmopolitanism sometimes result in under-­ investigated borrowings and juxtapositions of power differences that are reminders of competition dance. In the next chapter, I will expand on this discussion of borrowings that constitute a culture of “hipster cool” in contemporary concert dance. Indeed, statements from the world of concert dance echoed sentiments similar to Suzanne’s. In the several essays published in the well-known American monthly publication, Dance Magazine, exploring contemporary dance, this genre is almost always positioned in relation to either modern dance or classical ballet, and identified through technical skills or performative emphases. Dance writer Wendy Perron, exploring contemporary ballet, describes this genre as “anchored in the old, hungry for the new … ambiguous” (2014b, p. 34). Of the five artists she curates to share their impressions, most talk about new vocabularies, inserting movements from outside the field of ballet, which require dancers to remain open and flexible. For New York-based choreographer Helen Pickett, the emphasis for a dancer in such work is on mastery of “complex coordination” such that the classical technique can become the anchor for choreographic riffs (In Perron, 2014b, p.  34). Differently, Colombian-Belgian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa talks about still using the classical vocabulary but focuses on the relationships between the dancers. We see in these statements, both the renewal of ballet by influences from other genres and aesthetics, and the rhetoric of the “new” delivered by such contemporaneity. Like the artists interviewed in Perron’s essay, most of the ten “professionals” interviewed for arts journalist Victoria Looseleaf’s 2012 essay “Modern vs. Contemporary” talk about this genre as a “look,” and the ways in which ballet courts movements and attitudes from jazz, modern, and, for some, postmodern dance (2012, p.  53, 57). Like Perron, her interviews suggest that, more often than not, dance-makers emphasize the technical innovations in contemporary dance while retaining the primacy of ballet, simultaneously espousing a “new,” and rejecting the movements of preceding times. “It’s all an extension of classical ballet,” says Glenn Edgerton, Artistic Director of Chicago-based Hubbard Street Dance, while Jennifer Archibald, founder and director of New York-based company, Arch Dance Company, believes “It’s also a cycle of shedding techniques we’ve learned in favor of personal expression of movement. Where modern dance moved against the grain of ballet, contemporary moves against the grain of classical modern techniques” (Looseleaf 2012, p. 57).

10 

A. CHATTERJEA

The celebration of “personal expression” also resonates with the thread of individualism that characterized early American modern dance. As the above conversations make clear, Western concert dance in the US has long histories that it must contend with and relate to in identifying the “new” site of innovation. A core question at the root of my inquiry is how contemporary dance—often associated with discourse that questions the workings of major forces within modernity, such as consumer capitalism and systemic racism—figures its relationship to regimes of power and cultural hierarchies in which concert dance forms such as ballet and modern dance are implicated. How much does the affect of these legacies peel away through the repeated invocations of the “new?” Or do they endure, with power’s typical stickiness, despite calls for renewal? What is the ethical valence of such aesthetic renewal? Somewhat differently, the studied rejection of inherited dance legacies and contexts is clearly marked in the European dance context where contemporaneity seems to locate itself in theatrical dance through experimentation in choreographic structure and organizing philosophy. One of the crucial moments in the trajectory of concert dance in contemporary Europe is the emergence of the phenomenon of “non-danse” and its subsequent critique. Sicilian actor-director-multidisciplinary artist, Orazio Massaro, is generally credited with sparking the non-danse movement with his piece Volare at the 1990 Montpellier Dance Festival. This ultimately inspired the work of a generation of artists who might be considered to be the leaders of European contemporary dance, such as Boris Charmatz, Jérôme Bel, Xavier LeRoy, Hervé Robbe, and others. The non-­ danse movement, predecessor of the conceptual dance movement, decidedly located choreography as the locus of contemporary innovation and marked the distillation of dance to the staged articulation of ideas. This move away from dance as necessarily identified with stylized corporeal practice, a revolution against the traditional high virtuosity of the ballet-­ dominated concert dance, and a turn to dance as embodied intellectual practice, aligned conceptual dance more closely with methodologies of performance art and American postmodern dance. The descriptor “non-danse” emerged from a critique written by arts journalist and dance critic Dominique Frétard, entitled “La fin annoncée de la non-danse” (the end of non-dance is announced). Published in the French newspaper Le Monde on May 6, 2003, this article raised broader questions about how audiences relate to current trends in aesthetic experimentation. Criticizing conceptual dance-makers as a “self-proclaimed

1 INTRODUCTION 

11

community” of choreographers who “keep dancing at a distance,” Frétard called for “a return to the beautiful movement” (p. 25). The article generated substantial and important discussion about this particular iteration of French contemporary dance, ultimately consolidating the place of conceptual dance within the broader field of contemporary dance. If Frétard was speaking from popular taste and demand, as he claimed to do, he certainly did not get to cast the determining vote. Reflecting on this debate a decade later, Noémie Solomon writes, “if what has been described as a “non-dance” poses a threat to dance’s integrity, one could argue it is not so much because of the absence of the dance supposedly at stake, but rather because of what these experiments do to dance. And indeed … recent choreographic works have profoundly transformed the scene of theatrical dance by challenging our experience and understanding of movement, embodiment, and time” (2014, pp.  11–12). Certainly, it is indubitable that conceptual  choreography, with its philosophical skepticism about dance as rigorous bodily engagement, has come to be regarded as one of the key innovations in contemporary dance. A more general shared understanding of experimentation appears to operate across that powerful group of gatekeepers whose transnational reach often holds the key to the global contemporary dance stage: curators, funders, and presenters. These individuals, most often the face of prestigious institutions or platforms, often make decisions in identifying what passes as “innovation” and anoint artists as contemporary choreographers, which then propels dance-makers onto a global circuit of touring and making work. How do these stakeholders come to agree on how “experimentation” is manifested? If contemporary dance is a global category, and artists from all over the map embrace the mandate of experimentation from the standpoint of their histories, then the questions that run through their investigations and the ways in which innovation unfolds are bound to be very different. Is there scope to learn about different histories and assess “choreography” inside these contexts, or do we default to the imperative that we must all follow the modes of innovation that have been identified by Euro-American artists? Unfortunately, my many conversations with experts in this field did not yield clarity about what they considered recognizable characteristics of successful experimentation and innovation shared across different dance contexts. Typically  however, presenters talk about audience “taste” as a ruling consideration in their decision-making process because, in a market economy, the ability to continue the operations of presenting venues depend

12 

A. CHATTERJEA

on success measured through filled houses. This indicates an assessment of what kinds of artistic risks their audiences might be ready to support. Yet, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has demonstrated, taste is a social construction where multiple hierarchies cross, and, in the artistic and cultural field, taste often operates as double-edged: both consolidating race and class differences and distinguishing the savant consumer of cultural production (1984). This becomes especially pertinent for Contemporary Dance, to all extents a relatively new genre that had to be introduced to audiences. We have to ask, then, what has been the role of arts presenting organizations, cultural policy makers, and funding agencies historically in moving away from reproducing the dominant taste and inviting audiences toward experiencing difference, and in particular, different modes of experimentation? How does taste come to be structured in the context of dance and what is its relation to intersecting cultural hegemonies? If innovation is understood through the frame of Eurocentric legacies, whether marked through the art-house phenomenon of conceptual dance offering minimalist provocations or more populist concert dance marked by high-virtuosic, fast-­ moving, hybrid-genre movement sequences, both of which might occlude considerations of cultural difference, how does such “taste” impact the bedrock of social judgment? Who is allowed to claim innovation and on their own terms? Is it possible that some choreographic experimentations do not read as interventions at all because their contextual and aesthetic particularity is often scripted as Tradition? Indeed, global audiences seldom have the expertise to mark the different kinds of shifts within forms circulated as traditional and ancient. Despite mischaracterizations of “unmoving tradition,” however, changes within long-existing cultural practices and repertoires, and choreographies that are sometimes described as “compositions,” have always been part of the cultural fabric of non-white, non-Western contexts. These changes and variations might be more internal to the aesthetic, and less reflective of radical shifts in worldview and in notions of how dance moves through our worlds as cultural articulation.4 Such compositions are distinct from contemporary interventions that, still emerging from that aesthetic, signify their sharply divergent worldview and political-aesthetic difference in relation to their self-conscious claiming of individual authorship and the role of the choreographer. However, because cultural specificity in non-­ white non-Western contexts has been wrapped inevitably into tradition, there seems to be little scope to decipher such contrasts inside these aesthetics, unless presenters and curators are consistently offering mindfully

1 INTRODUCTION 

13

designed experiences to develop nuanced understandings of cultural difference. Yet, though presenters, funders, and other cultural influencers act as tastemakers and play a significant role in the ability of artists to continue making and sharing their work, it would be simplistic to read the implicit agreements they reach as aesthetic decisions only. Their curatorial choices are often overdetermined by broader forces at work and some logistical considerations: power-brokering in the field of cultural production is often harnessed to pressures of economic and political management, relations of trade and human rights violations, and larger, more abstract holding patterns of white supremacy and cultural dominance, legacies of patronage, and traditions of discovery and white/Western saviorism. Presenting an artist at a major concert venue, particularly artists working from different, non-white, aesthetics and contexts, often signals the convergence of several factors: advocacy by one or more gatekeepers about the value of this work, national and transnational relationships, the current state of economic and political crises, philosophies of development, alignment with the funding priorities of major foundations, and the agreement on the part of several presenters that they will create a tour for this artist, which then substantially reduces the risk for any one of them, and rallies resources and attention around that particular artist. In this context, taste, as much as what reads as experimental, and unarticulated frames of discovery, inclusion, and saviorism, seems to be shaped and reshaped by a triangulation of how the arts diplomacies manage political tensions, the economic realities of a head-count notion of success, and existing cultural hierarchies. Urgently, this networked system is geared toward facilitating individual success, not necessarily fostering communities of innovation, and sometimes skews the choreographer’s artistic freedom. The self-reflexivity that characterizes contemporary experimental dance-making in the Euro-North, then, is limited: it does not investigate all positionalities and governing practices affiliated with its circuitry. The adoption of language about globality and difference in curation and taste-­ making is certainly an intervention, and in many instances, an innovation. But the willingness to trace “innovation” within diverse aesthetics, distinguish it from traditional practice, and understand the dialogue between them, is an entirely different matter. Thus, even when curating, funding, and presenting philosophies suggest an embrace of plurality, global access, and a democratic re-drawing of the world cultural map, the failure to investigate what difference entails, results in

14 

A. CHATTERJEA

“un-meetings”—irreconcilable divergences, where some kinds of innovations and artistic choices are not recognized. The constitution of “contemporary dance” ultimately presents an obstacle course designed as aesthetic conditions, deflecting away certain kinds of dance-making, and veering away from points of irreducible difference. The kind of cross-­ hatching of curatorial preferences and institutional validations that creates a network of production, marketing, and transmission, constituting the global stage, thus often becomes the by-product of economic and corporate globalization, and duplicates its structural failings. The appearance of this field as multiplicity, disseminated centers of curation and assessment of innovative artistic work, in fact masks a singularity, organizing what is often thought of as a transnational forum through a limited set of consolidating ideologies. This way of working has resulted in accruals of resources and energies around certain kinds of aesthetics, processes, and preferences. Further, the circulation of dance within capitalist circuitries inevitably presses in at the edges of curating and presenting, and the terms of “success” might often feel at odds with the desire to support different kinds of innovation. The drive to measure success through quantitative data, without consistently practiced strategies of inviting in audiences to grapple with difference, sometimes means that large presenting houses cannot invite in large enough audiences to experience artists who bring different aesthetics and atypical concepts of artmaking to the table. Taking a chance on some kinds of difference, then, could alienate audiences, or result in financial failure. Yet, we must question such numerical notions of success and the use of this data to track audience desire. In some global contexts, urban and cosmopolitan, certain kinds of diversity, Bollywood dance concerts for instance, might bring in big audiences, but seldom shift the status quo of gendered, racial, and sexual inequities. To elaborate, in today’s hyper-capitalized global dance context, Western models of dance competition have capitalized on “diversity” and replicated themselves in many countries of the global South, where they appear as experimentations in the dance field. The television reality show So You Think You Can Dance? (SYTYCD) has exported its franchise of reality dance competitions globally and been adapted and presented in 39 different countries. Further, platforms like SYTYCD have often highlighted dancers of color and made room for forms such as Bollywood and Dancehall. And this global system of dance competition passes in contemporary cultural production as making room for many kinds of dance that are revitalizing tradition, albeit through shortened dance sequences,

1 INTRODUCTION 

15

commercialized lighting, sound, and costume design, and spectacularized displays that are upheld as “new.” But, in this domesticated model of diversity, contemporary dance culture—where everything is fair game for competition and social media virality—becomes a container that flattens out worries about the implications of difference. Everyone is happy to belong, and understandably so, given the cynosure and attendant resources that accompany such citizenship, momentary though it is. The paradigm, meanwhile, is successfully reorganizing much of the global dance field through structures of late capitalism, pitting bodies and dance forms against each other, and materializing profit from the inalienable labor of dancing. And dancing, in ways often synonymous with entertaining only, becomes a mode of looking at diversity in our living rooms, from behind the safe barrier of a screen, with no worries about its management. It is against this background that I posit my questions about how difference enters and intervenes in contemporary dance: What are the implications when very particularly defined dance-making modes in the global North seize the leading edge of innovation in contemporary choreography, and define this genre in ways that delegitimize other modes of experimentation and contemporaneity? How are cultural edginess, innovation, and experimentation monetized or translated into capital and manifested as structures of support within contemporary dance? Can we trace the accumulation of associations such as disruption, rebellion, newness, and innovation through the lineage of Western history? And note how other ways of dancing and dance-making seem to be framed in “lack” of such attributes?

Narratives of Time and “Newness” I have suggested that contemporaneity in dance is certainly an aesthetic, and somewhat of a temporal, category. Yet, the way time and choreographic preferences entangle to gather affective value is core to how contemporary dance has come to be understood in the global imaginary. The roiling of Western modernity in the modes of capital inevitably leads to a narrativization of Cultural History through a stagist model, characterized by a constant search for a “new.” This anchoring of chronology to a linear developmental path where temporality and pioneership are interwoven has led to a rhetoric of rejection of the past, though, in action, this might not be the case entirely. For instance, in the US, the history of concert dance moves through continuous reinventions of its own image, though

16 

A. CHATTERJEA

aesthetic innovations did not necessarily begin from entirely new ground. Modern and postmodern dance, despite their rejection of ballet, still used classical terminologies, such as plié, relevé, and elevation, and referred to that history. Generally speaking, however, if modern dance choreographers espoused a “freedom” that they could not find within ballet, and postmodern dance choreographers were searching to discard the artifice and structures that they felt had come to dominate modern dance, contemporary dance might be said to move beyond the questions of postmodern and post-postmodern dance where, perhaps, virtuosity is reimagined and re-embraced and technical markers from different genres of dance come together. In this genealogy, conceptual dance and its variants mark yet another frontier of innovation, reminding us of the intellectual dimensions of dance. Stagist histories, which repeatedly rehearse moments of overcoming the past, generate their own disquiets. Wendy Perron, who has been following contemporary dance both in Europe and in the US for a while now, has written about the experimentation and visceral dancing that characterized early modern dance, but now seems to characterize contemporary dance. Her writings offer some indication of the questions that seem to trouble the world of contemporary concert dance in the US. She asks: “Where has American modern dance gone? Has it been subsumed or consumed or bumped off by contemporary dance?” (Perron 2014a). Earlier, Perron had defended the contributions of New  York dance-makers when New York Times dance critic Gia Kourlas announced that “New York is no longer the capital of the contemporary dance world” (2005, p. E5), by pointing out how New York had functioned as “the seedbed” for many of the innovative European contemporary dance companies, and noting the continuing links between the broader world of contemporary dance and American modern dance innovators (Perron 2005, p. 10). These conversations testify both to the anxieties around cultural leadership—Does contemporary dance indicate Europe as the preeminent site of experimentation? Does it effectively replace modern and postmodern dance, which positioned the US as the marquee player in breaking new dance ground globally?—and to the excitement at what contemporary dance brings to audiences. The periodizing drive is also part of European dance history. The rejection of the past in the process of creating a new avant-garde rings through the words of philosopher Michel Bernard, who assigns the renown earned by Boris Charmatz, Jérôme Bel, and Xavier Le Roy as “contemporary

1 INTRODUCTION 

17

choreographers,” to their refusal to “conform to a compositional and representational system accredited by and inherited from dance tradition” (2014, p. 74). It also resonates in dance scholar Isabel Ginot’s description of the transatlantically connected, “new dance community” of contemporary dance that shares “a common project in which one of the major issues is the notion of the work. In fact, all of those characteristics of what constituted ‘good choreography’ in the 1980s seem inapplicable to these recent productions: choreographic composition gives way to the ‘dispositif’ (Bord by Emmanuel Hunyh, 2001), and gesture gives way to improvisation constraints (Algo Sera by Nathalie Collantes, 2001). The nature of what delimits a ‘work’ has changed just like it changed with the aleatoric compositions of Merce Cunningham, the gravity-inspired adventures of Trisha Brown, and so on” (2014, p. 163). Introducing her book about contemporary dance in Europe, performance theorist Bojana Cvejić describes it as being characterized by “experiment and by the conceptualization of working methods and the medium of the dancing body, as well as a proximity to performance art,” and the descriptor as being “more evaluative than classificatory, where the attribute ‘contemporary’ synthesizes the characteristics of the modern as bearing a disruptive relation with the past, and the avant-garde as a novelty ahead of its time, and it is used in masterly judgements of ‘contemporary’ vs. old-fashioned, outdated, passé, déjà vu” (2015, pp.  1, 5). Cvejić’s astute analysis points to the particular ways in which such artistic descriptors deploy chronology to cement cultural hierarchies. Matching this literature to much of what is programmed as “contemporary dance” in prestigious venues such as Sadler’s Wells Theater (London), Ufer Theater (Berlin), and Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis) helps us to recognize how conceptual dance, the inheritance from European dance-making, has tacitly come to be acclaimed as the model for what is seen as avant-garde. Capitalizing on moments of new makes for dance historical structures that are visualized as a series of forward movements generated by individuals, who, all on their own, generate momentum by breaking with the past and foster new artistic modes. This story of continuous reinvention of self imbues concert dance and dance-makers in the Euro-American context with the genius of innovation and aligns them with the project of Western modernity, with its attendant gifts of individualism and freedom. This kind of thematizing fetishizes experimentation, masking the ways in which some ideas are continued, while others morph, and so many others are appropriated from others, even as they are refreshed by this new context.

18 

A. CHATTERJEA

Often, and this seems to be more generally true of the Euro-American dance scene, this new seems to be recognizable because of the way it shocks audience sensibilities and fulfills a desire to recalibrate our sense of beauty, movement, and aesthetic conventions. I am reminded of the words of New York Times dance critic, Gia Kourlas, bemoaning the lack of innovation in the New  York contemporary dance: “Forty years have passed since the Judson Dance movement. It’s time for the next revolution, and the more shocking the better” (2005, p. E5). And indeed, concerts of contemporary dance often deliver irreverence to convention: Angelin Preljocaj’s And Then, One Thousand Years of Peace, an impressionistic response to the Book of Revelations, which the New York Times described as “a soft-porn rendering of rough sex,” where scenographic elements include flags, heavy metal chains, and lambs (Seibert 2013, p. C5 N); Hofesh Shechter’s Political Mother, where audience members are given ear plugs as protection against loud, heavy-metal rock score, and where the dance unfolds and then retrogrades in a world of bright strobe lights that flash on and off; Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Babel, where dancers manipulate and weave in and out, with extreme precision, of towering metal frames, to a multilingual score that rises and falls in intensity; Trajal Harrell’s Mimosa, admittedly a space where the queer “realness” of Paris Is Burning meets the postmodern histories from Judson Church, and where the performers crash and convolute conventions of gender, sexuality, performative failure, nudity, and glow-in-the-dark makeup; Larry Keigwin’s Runway, where women dressed in neon-colored suits and huge bouffant wigs, strip down to their brightly colored underwear, often freeze in the midst of their fierce viscerality like mannikins, and are manipulated, lifted off, with cool detachment by the male dancers, who are in suits or stripped down to their briefs; Miguel Gutierrez’s Heavens What Have I Done, where the artist pulls up audiences onto the stage, performs a monologue of scattered memories set against an operatic score, puts on greasy clown makeup, a Marie Antoinette-style wig, and rainbow paneled costume pieces onstage, and falls repeatedly as if out of control. All of these moments jolt our senses in different ways: they are dramatic and impactful, conjuring spectacular images that impinge on our imaginations, commenting on our world in hard-hitting ways. They also reverse our expectations of beauty and entertainment and are not shy about pushing corporeality—through technical virtuosity, movement at lightning speed, designing the body in what might seem outrageous ways, refusing certain kinds of virtuosities, sometimes upending binary notions

1 INTRODUCTION 

19

of gender and sexual presentations—to extremes that defy the boundaries of past aesthetic conventions. But sometimes such artistic rebellions cover an aporia that often distracts us from questioning the necessary relationship of this artistic rule-­ breaking to a progressive politics. Sometimes there is an active delinking of the political from the aesthetic in contemporary dance, where claims of risk-taking artistry in fact contradict the innate political silences in the work. At other times, the political is circumscribed as personal choice, or the focus on the political condition of the individual subject of modernity elides differences of race, culture, gender, and sexuality. For instance, let us look for a moment at Ballet Preljocaj’s acclaimed 2008 production, Blanche Neige, a reimagining of the Grimms brothers’ tale of Snow White. Angelin Preljocaj’s choreography of the Evil Queen, in knee-high heeled boots, holding an apple to Snow White’s mouth, whirling her around and around, while the latter remains unable to move away from her own poisoning; and of the seven “dwarfs” moving vertically up and down a rock climbing wall, rappelling, produces stunning imagery. Unfortunately, the choreography of the encounter of Prince Charming with the dormant Sleeping Beauty (often performed by artists of color) intensifies traditional gender hierarchies in which the story is inscribed: the Prince approaches Snow White, who lies motionless, eyes closed, on a slanting transparent surface. In his attempts to awaken her, he tugs on her limbs, causing her body to roll through space; manipulates her torso, which rotates across levels as her arms fly around, hurling her across space; kisses her unresponding lips, with no possibility of consent. Typical partnering vocabulary is reset here as the woman works fluidly through lifts and rolls with her eyes closed, and as Preljocaj finds innovative ways to work through airborne moments and phrases that glide through space while masking the agency of the woman and suggesting that her pliable, “sleeping” body is almost entirely moved by the labor of her partner, the Prince. The choreography contemporarizes the old story, sets it in an urban world defined by high fashion, retools strategies of partnering, but reinforces, rather than reorders, gender relationships within that world. Of course, artists must have freedom of choice, but do audiences really need to experience, yet again, a classic story ridden with elements of women’s competitiveness, misogyny, and male saviorism? Contemporaneity imagined only in relationship to movement vocabulary, choreographic structure, and design elements, even incorporating the “look” of diversity, but disengaged from current progressive social understandings of gender,

20 

A. CHATTERJEA

race, sexual difference—the result of waves of grass-roots anti-racist, feminist, gender-queering, decolonial organizing—disorient me and chill my excitement about dance. Despite the many artistic ways in which it signals its difference, many prominent sectors of contemporary dance often remain invested in age-old power grids.5 Continued entanglements in reproducing and heightening the cultural capital of the new, aesthetic and methodological innovations that do not investigate underlying politics of power, and notions of freedom that remain abstract concepts relatively unmoored to the material conditions of subjectivity problematize the contemporaneity of these choreographies.

Global Desire and Slippages of “Inclusion” My survey of the contemporary dance field so far deliberately traversed through global North contexts, which continues to be the foremost platform and model for the curation and presentation of contemporary dance. These contexts are dominated by white artists, artists working with aesthetics and choreographic models originating in the global North, and curators and presenters who prioritize modes of experimentation that emerge from white/global North experiences. Moreover, my study convinces me that the management of contemporary dance by decision-­ makers in the global North in fact undercuts its global reach, not by excluding others totally, but by including them in circumscribed ways that carefully retain the cultural hegemony of the North. And that, gatekeeping in contemporary dance has deployed curation, funding, awards, and other recognitions as conditions of “legibility” for particular kinds of innovation. Sometimes this means that inclusion comes at the cost of remaining entrenched in the role of upholding diversity, while white Euro-­ American artists are allowed space to explore, to risk failure, to chart the ongoing trajectory of the ever-evolving, ever-progressive West. At other times, it means that particular kinds of risk-taking and experimentation are unreadable as such and can only be understood as variations on the theme of Northern expectation. The fine print of these categories, implying that belonging is possible only under certain pre-approved conditions, leaves little room for curiosity about how alternative ways of imagining contemporaneity might complicate the field, and about the complex assemblages of power, access, and cultural supremacy tied to the distribution of resources.

1 INTRODUCTION 

21

Yet, it would be naïve to imagine these long-standing cultural hierarchies as operating through simple or predictable lines of top-down oppression. The power of whiteness within contemporary dance is characterized by the slipperiness of its manifestations, so it shows up differently, depending on the context. Sometimes, there is little give on what contemporary risk-taking looks like, such that the same key players and similar modalities might recur across geographical difference, at festivals in Paris and Bangkok, for instance. At other times, inclusion of diverse aesthetics appears to align with old legacies of multiculturalism that ultimately re-­ centered whiteness. Most pervasively, such Euro-whiteness passes as the recognizable fulcrum in the currencies of left-field, ground-breaking artistry that results in “un-meetings,” inevitably failing to identify the paradigm shifts in the choreographies of artists working differently. Despite this, stemming from various circumstances, Contemporary Dance has come to be associated with the possibility of worldly citizenship. It is widely imagined as responding to and emerging alongside globalizing societies, characterized by diverse transnational mobilities, unlikely and far-flung connectivities, and fast-moving cosmopolitanisms. Inevitably, it connotes relevant and exciting artmaking. This is how contemporary dance comes to be laced with the desire of artists from so many parts of the world engaging in very different art-making practices. For many dance-makers from across the globe who vie to be recognized as contemporary choreographers, this belonging is as much about making dance from their experience, as about becoming part of a larger world community, access to resources, and aspirations to the touring circuitry of the global stage. Yet trends in funding, curation, presenting—primary pathways for artists seeking to share their work—indicate that contemporary dance’s presentation as universal signifier falls short of its promise, all the more insidious because of its rhetoric of access. All of this is typical of the operations of a putative globalization where suggestions of the wide-­ spread reach of a particular category, in fact, mask its particular constitution and membership. The mainstreaming of multiculturalist philosophies means that imperatives of diversity and inclusion are found in the mission statements of many cultural organizations across the world. But the inclusion of individuals does not necessarily shift power. In such situations, we must note the structures within and the conditions under which, difference enters the stage and how it is then circumscribed: Does representational value come at the risk of narrow spaces for self-definition and reflect primarily on the

22 

A. CHATTERJEA

discoverer’s generosity? Essayist and commentator Teju Cole has reminded us that “The White Savior Industrial Complex is a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build on a system developed on pillage” (2016, p. 349). I join Cole in questioning the modes of “discovery” of artists who might otherwise languish without global “exposure,” of white saviorism which always comes with a set of tacit expectations and clauses, and in asking key decision-makers what is at stake for notions of self in the push to “make a difference?” What is our shared but unequal implication in transnational grids of historically entrenched resource differentials, complex power relations, and commitment to intersectional cultural politics? How, and to what far-reaching effects, can light be directed toward artists working from transnational Indigenous, Black, and of color communities, not as extraordinary moments that will reflect the genius of the curatorial frame, but in sustained and holistic ways? The conundrums in this field are complex. Isolation can be crushing, and the desire for belonging to spaces already associated with cutting-edge artistic work, coupled with the struggle to survive as an artist, strong. Such triangulation, painfully recurrent for artists at the nexus of many marginalizations, sometimes traps us in awkward inclusions. It might be helpful here to recall Teju Cole’s pointed list of provocations. Let me cite his fifth entry in a series of tweets, which urges us to interrogate the conditions of entering a valued place: “5. The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege” (Cole 2012). Without reducing all inclusion to tokenism, I take Cole’s words as a cautionary reminder, because, as he points out, good intentions do not always encourage us “to think constellationally” (2016, p. 344). Diversity-with-delimitations, inclusion-through-translation, and the generous hand-outs of multiculturalism have had their day but want to linger on. Indeed, late capitalism and neoliberal cultural markets regularly court and co-opt optics of diversity; this obscures their rejection of difference, which would mobilize a concatenation of formal reorganizations and paradigmatic shifts in relations of power. The presenting of classical Kuchipudi in a festival of global dance, where South Asia/India remains consigned to the realm of Tradition only (for instance, programming Shantala Sivalingappa’s Shiva Tarangam in New York City Center’s 2016 Fall For Dance Festival as the only instance of South Asian dance, alongside choreographers/companies celebrated for their experimental contemporary work such as Elizabeth Streb, Wayne McGregor, and Nederlands

1 INTRODUCTION 

23

Dans Theater), or the premiering of work by important European contemporary choreographers in the global South, where the location gives no evidence of a pause in the understanding of experimentation (such as the commissioning of Jérôme Bel’s Pichet Klunchun and myself to premiere at the 2004 Bangkok Fringe festival by Singaporean curator Tang Fu Kuen), is important in terms of diversifying audiences and fora. But I would argue that neither of these instances significantly rearrange the relations of power in which mainstream cultural production is inscribed, mobilize the visualities in which difference is framed, or shake up audience expectations vis-à-vis the range of contemporary dance-making in non-­ white contexts. However, even as I critique unexamined rhetoric about diversity and inclusion, I understand that it serves to wedge open some opportunities. I note that many of the acclaimed contemporary choreographers across continental Europe are white men, nominally more diverse in particular metropolitan centers like London, Paris, and New York. But my argument is not just that choreographers recognized as making contemporary dance in Europe or the US are primarily white, or all working in aesthetics that are markedly Western. The distinction I note is not just a crude exclusion of “otherness,” one that would be particularly obscene in a field that claims a philosophy of experimentation, veering away from dominant cultural trends, and global participation. Rather, my inquiry is about what might make embodied, aesthetic, and structural contemporaneity identifiable on global stages for choreographers located in multiple souths, and/ or grounded in racial/cultural difference, and centered in questions of justice. Under what sanctions does such legibility labor? How can we dodge the shadow of stagist histories, whose flip side is the necessarily contrasting narrative about cultural histories scripted through official genealogies of ancient “Tradition” and “Culture”? My own claiming of the descriptor contemporary is no neoliberal desire to belong to a category that has been imagined with reference to very different histories and structures, though admittedly a share of resources that are associated with such belonging would be attractive to many artists. The descriptor, as I have suggested already, is valuable for other reasons. Pushing aside the tired model of “inclusion” that has often been used as a safety-valve measure to make concessions to “diversity” (issues I further investigate in the next chapter), I seek to center irreducible difference and just artistry in contemporary dance, necessitating a dismantling of existing power relations.

24 

A. CHATTERJEA

South-South Axis as Analytical Frame Having worked through a series of negations, not-this not-that, of principles, practices, and priorities that currently crowd the field of contemporary dance, I arrive at the central intervention of this book. My investigation focuses on different choreographies of Contemporary Dance created by artists from South-South communities whose contexts and artistic preoccupations make for very different modes of dance-making, laced with a politics of justice, intersectionality, and reimagining ways of embodying marginalized bodies and aesthetics. My positionality, theoretical and artistic, emerges from my history of working within local and global, progressive, Black, Indigenous, and of color (BIPOC) communities, whose work critiques violences of empire, race, gender, sexuality, nation, caste, class, illegal occupation and other forces of domination. In constructing the South-South axis, I follow current debates around racial and cultural differences and intersect the BIPOC model with that of global Indigenous, Black, and women and femmes of color, and transnational feminisms and posit a politics of difference and justice as the basis for solidarity. Imagined as a political and material formation, dissociated from biological determinism, it refuses essentialized identities even as it upholds cultural and locational specificities such that historic oppressions and hierarchies are understood in context. This South-South paradigm recognizes, for instance, that the British colonization of India is politically, economically, and culturally very different from the settler colonization imposed on the Native American communities in the US and from the Indian state’s occupation of Kashmir, and that legacies of these different histories situate us unequally in relation to centralized power. This necessitates complex and thoughtful conversations about borders, immigration, choreographies of power, the land on which we dance, and the resources we access, for instance. Moreover, the South-South framework is formulated, not through geo-spatial literalities, but through the prismatic politics of critiquing interlocking oppressive hierarchies. Historian of Native/First Nations art, Elizabeth Kalbfleisch, points out that, “Geographic location—homeland—situates Aboriginal people in the heart of the developed world, although they continue to struggle with processes of decolonization that, in many ways, situate them as so-called third world peoples” (2010, p. 291). This means that location must be imagined through overlapping frames, global histories, and the complex routes of migration that defy singular identity and cultural formations. Moreover, the critique of white cultural supremacy within the South-South frame must be chiseled

1 INTRODUCTION 

25

assiduously: tracking its replication through intersections with gender and sexual differences to deepen disempowerment, through connivings with caste and class hierarchies to double marginalization, through collusions with nationalistic policies across the world map to reproduce major hierarchical power-formations, and through infusions of global capitalist reorganizations of the world, crucially scaffolds my analytical frame. The convergence proposed by my construction of the South-South axis is not entirely new but has had to be reimagined several times because of the ways in which power consolidates and duplicates models of exclusion. Let me identify certain historical landmarks along my path of delineating the community in which I locate my voice. I remain inspired by the 1955 Bandung Conference, where the leaders of the 29 recently decolonized nations from Asia and Africa met and took a stand against colonization and imperialism, and in support of multilateral cooperation. The reconvening of these, and many other—52 African and 54 Asian—nations, in 2005, again rehearsed strategies of cooperation and policy. These historic meetings point to a recognition of resonance across different struggles and a desire to connect against Euro-American dominance, yet they operated from the perspectives of national elites and reiterated certain kinds of exclusions. More central to my analytical frame are two key events of 1977 in the US: the formulation of the descriptor “women of color” and the writing of the Combahee River Collective Statement. African-American feminist scholar, organizer, and Reproductive Justice advocate Loretta Ross has spoken about how the term “women of color” was born when a group of Black feminists created a “Black Women’s Agenda” in response to the National Women’s Conference to be held in Houston in 1977. Other women of color at the conference, inspired by that plan of action, requested to be included. Ross describes how the term “women of color” came into circulation through the negotiations and commitment to solidarity arrived at in 1977 (Western States Center 2011). In the same year, the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black lesbian feminists led by Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier signaled their difference with the National Black Feminist Organization and their commitment to a multi-­ layered notion of oppression through their joint statement, critiquing the racism within broader women’s movement and the sexism within Black organizing movements (1983). The weaving together of centrifugal and centripetal forces in organizing and knowledge production by these Black and brown feminists resonates with my proposition of difference within

26 

A. CHATTERJEA

contemporary dance: oppositional movements that produce internal heat, creating electromotive force and accelerative possibility. From the complex force field of the South-South axis, and its centered principle of alterity, I derive the central trope of this book: Heat. The crucial histories referred to above, identifying the particular values and priorities of an intersectional Black, Indigenous, feminist of color platform as an organizing strategy, have drawn generations of activists, scholars, and artists over the years and have broadened what began as a national conversation within the US to a broader, transnational frame. The urgency of such solidarities is marked through the publications of ground-breaking anthologies such as This Bridge Called My Back edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (1981); All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, edited by Gloria T.  Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith (1982); Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa (1990); Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, edited by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Anne Russo, and Lourdes M.  Torres (1991); and Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, edited by Chandra Talpade Mohanty and M. Jacqui Alexander (1996). These scholarly materializations of solidarity recognize the polyphonic and multi-­layered immediacy that I am reaching for within the South-South platform. They demand a tactic of nimble listening to Black, Indigenous, Native, brown, of color, refugee, immigrant, diasporic, Dalit, queer, trans, and non-binary voices articulating their different experiences and ideas, while simultaneously insisting on remaining grounded in a politics of alliance-building; they emphasize specificities of place and local cultural context in their theoretical and organizing work, even as they imagine the gathering fora as defying the boundaries of nation-state. These feminist legacies, along with the popular organizing BIPOC model which prioritizes and distinguishes Indigeneity and Blackness from of color experiences, enable me to push the South-South model in a somewhat different direction from its original usage. In his well-known essay, “Global South: Predicament and Promise,” historian Arif Dirlik traces the changing significance of the South-South axis since its popularization in the 1970s in language about trade and models of decentralized cooperation. He discusses its possible alignment with the anti-colonial national liberation movements emerging from the Third World at an earlier time, and the current need to rethink its valence in the context of globalization and neoliberalism, marked

1 INTRODUCTION 

27

by the proliferation of global institutions and communication modes: “The global South has its roots in earlier Third World visions of liberation, and those visions still have an important role to play in restoring human ends to development, so long as they do not become blinders against recognition of a changed world situation” (Dirlik 2007, p. 22). I take Dirlik’s nuancing of terms such as the “global South” and “Third World,” and his urging to resituate such terms in the context of contemporary currencies, to heart. I mobilize the South-South model via the strategy of feminist Chandra Talpade Mohanty, who, in 2003, courageously re-articulated her position within the transnational feminist movement, in relationship to her 1984 ground-breaking essay “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” and in reconsideration of a changed context. In the concluding chapter of her book Feminism Without Borders, entitled “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles,” Talpade Mohanty discusses the grounds of her feminism in dialogue with her own shifting understanding of Third World Feminisms, to invite in and foreground Indigenous Feminisms, the particular urgencies of rapid economic globalization, the mainstreaming of feminism through the rhetoric of middle-class “women’s rights,” and her own changed position within American academia. She urges us to notice how both the “Eurocentric and cultural relativist (postmodernist) models … are easily assimilated within the logic of late capitalism because this is fundamentally a logic of seeming decentralization and accumulation of difference” (2003, p. 244). In contrast, she foregrounds the feminist solidarity model which sets up “a paradigm of historically and culturally specific ‘common differences’ as the basis for analysis and solidarity … tell stories of difference, culture, power, and agency” (Talpade Mohanty 2003, p. 244). My centering of difference in the juxtaposition of several different artists without any comparative intent also draws on the work of feminist Maria Lugones, who urges us to hold on to multiplicity in coalition-­ building and the particular geo-politics of knowledge as she “moves methodologically from women of color feminisms to a decolonial feminism” (2010, p. 746). While her particular perspective emerges from non-binary gender and sexual identities obscured by colonial epistemologies, her emphasis on the intentional adjacence of differences on a shared platform resonates with the South-South model that structures this book: “The emphasis is on maintaining multiplicity at the point of reduction—not in maintaining a hybrid ‘product,’ which hides the colonial difference—in

28 

A. CHATTERJEA

the tense workings of more than one logic, not to be synthesized but transcended. Among the logics at work are the many logics meeting the logic of oppression: many colonial differences, but one logic of oppression… The logic of coalition is defiant of the logic of dichotomies; differences are never seen in dichotomous terms, but the logic has as its opposition the logic of power” (Lugones 2010, p. 755). Following Lugones, the South-­ South model urges us to think carefully about the different understandings of freedom and self-determination as well, and how we might be implicated within their particular manifestations in different communities, even as we coalesce in a politics of “other” contemporary dance-makings. In reimagining the contemporary through a series of parallel studies, I echo critical theorist and Black Studies scholar Alexander Weheliye’s call for “habeas viscus, you shall have the flesh … the flesh … represents racializing assemblages of subjection that can never annihilate the lines of flight, freedom dreams, practices of liberation, and possibilities of other worlds” (2014, p.  2). Weheliye upholds the tremendous work of Black feminist scholars such as Sylvia Wynters and Hortense Spillers in qualifying arguments of biopower and “bare life” made by celebrated scholars such as Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. I join him, in alignment with the intellectual project of Black feminists, in clustering intersectional differences of racial, cultural, gendered, sexual location, to investigate categories that would masquerade as neutral, as if it were possible to operate outside of such location: “Habeas viscus, as an idea, networks bodies, forces, velocities, intensities, institutions, interests, ideologies, and desires in racializing assemblages, which are simultaneously territorializing and deterritorializing” (Weheliye 2014, p. 12). For me, this is inherent in the call to reimagine and embody contemporary dance in ways that reckon with specificity of location and bodily materialities, making for defiance of pre-defined racial/cultural stereotypes and expectations, making space for multivocality, heating up, expanding, jostling and pushing open the borders of the field, and irrevocably undoing the centers of power within it. It is a reminder of how emotional logics, experienced as cellular resonances, often shape the physical manifestations of innovation. It is also an alignment with the multiple pathways into dance as a practice of liberation. The South-South axis that undergirds my curation of different artists into this project, then, is simultaneously geopolitical, metaphoric, and material, weaving together multiple lines of connection. It recognizes the possibility of resonance among artists from Indigenous communities across the world, those living and working in the geographic Third World/global

1 INTRODUCTION 

29

South, and Black and brown artists living in First World/global North diasporas, working from their own local cultural contexts and aesthetic particularities toward self-determined narratives of justice. This framing allows for recognition of specific politics: while racial and cultural differences are non-fungible, the claiming of a resistant aesthetics within each context and the particular formation of and stakes in such resistance are matters of artistic and political choice. This, in turn, energizes the hyphen across multiple Souths to trace ideological and physical resonances among choreographers whose work demonstrates how historically different life conditions provoke vastly different creative choices as innovation in response to contemporary life conditions and in keeping with particularly delineated materializations of freedom. This South-South location directs me toward an-other formation of Contemporary Dance whose aesthetics and politics are in a very different register than described at the beginning of this chapter. Difference, justice, and multiplicity, ruffle neat flow, raise temperatures. Crossing, sometimes clashing, lines produced by the alterity that South-­ South artists bring into Contemporary Dance, cause friction. From my own experience I know that this heat, generated by contestation, is palpable in theaters, on grant panels, in conversations between presenters and artists. Physics teaches us that heat is a form of energy, and thermal elevation causes faster movement of molecules and atoms, the constituent parts of any entity. In dance, the generation of heat by movement eases muscular activity, opens the pores of the skin, and produces flow as sweat pours out. Heat inevitably produces a change of state, it expands, promises transformation. Its tropic significance suffuses the book to suggest the way different formulations of Contemporary Dance are shifting the field powerfully.

Contemporary Alterities In parsing the construction of the genre through a different geospatial-­ political lens, I have traced the entanglement of contemporary dance with North-centric histories of avant-garde artmaking and the legibility of embodied experimentation to ask what is at stake in this coupling for dancers, curators, audiences, and scholars today. In highlighting the contradictions and “un-meetings” within the global circuitries of this contemporaneity, my goal has been to indicate other pathways into experiments with the form and function of dance, laced with a politics of resistance,

30 

A. CHATTERJEA

intersectional beauty and poetics, and liberatory world-making practices. The space of this book, undergirded by the South-South axis, amplifies the ideological and physical resonances among choreographers along these pathways, whose different creative choices articulate other contemporaries. At the core of my project is the investigation of the work of choreographers whose arrival at contemporaneity is marked by double refusals: remaining rooted in cultural specificity, they refuse stereotypical aesthetic conventions and expectations that attach to dance-making in South-South contexts. They simultaneously chafe against containment by valorized notions of Culture, revivalist histories that often characterize postcolonial conditions, and the “modern” and “contemporary” creative pathways etched in Euro-American contexts. In challenging the facile optics of performances of their “ethnicity,” their dances bust myths of unchanging Tradition and Heritage and state-sponsored cultural essentialisms. Yet, instead of adopting innovative formulae from Euro-North choreographers often upheld as the only pathways to contemporary experimentation, they insist on carving pathways that emerge from their location as they have defined it. Defying prescriptive pathways, these artists assertively reshape the discourse about contemporary dance as they decolonize notions of innovation, risk-taking, and excellence, ask questions about dancing’s function in the world today, imagine interventions in local aesthetic values, and rework organizations of space and time in different ways. Refusing binaries, they claim multiplicity: not this, not that, but both, and yet they sometimes miss recognition for this path-forging work. This failure or “un-meeting” is often the bequest of hegemonic legacies that characterize the complicated relationships between histories and cultural contexts. An unqualified rejection of the past might not be useful for post/de/colonial South-South artists, who are fighting to reweave historical threads even as they make their way back to the “world” map somewhat more on their own terms, or for those pushing back at various kinds of occupation. This does not indicate a facile relationship with traditional practices. But the complexities of such cultural location, spiraling movements of time, and the failures of “progress” marked through a trajectory of “development,” are often lost in the capitulation to modernity’s temporal capital. Moreover, because of how Western cultural historicizing has claimed and consolidated particular modes of working as avant-garde, artists working from other contexts often need to navigate choreographic explorations with sensitivity so they are able to retain cultural specificity

1 INTRODUCTION 

31

even as they resist stereotypical notions of Tradition, such that they are not swallowed up in an unquestioning acceptance of Western-style experiments. Their relationships to existing cultural practices are multitiered, simultaneously referential and fraught, intertextual, and always signifying internal dynamics. Their dances, often claiming spaces of empowerment and healing, stage intersectional critiques of power. My argument for re-framing the contemporary is nourished by analyses of embodied aesthetics, the generation of movement, choreographic methodology, creative process, imagery, design elements, the politics of beauty, meaning, and value, and conceptual frame. In theorizing alternative paradigms of experimentation in the work of these choreographers, I ask: What strategies do these choreographers employ to resist and subvert expectations? What choreographic tools do they use to stage boisterous difference and instigate a resistant aesthetics? What is at stake for these choreographers in claiming the descriptor contemporary for their work? How do they dismantle and reimagine practices marked as “tradition” and “convention”? In what ways do these acts of dance embody commentary on current local-global conditions? What are the particular alchemies of postcolonial/decolonizing, feminist, difference-marking that fuel experimentation? What kinds of conversations are provoked by the nuanced embodiments of cultural location they stage? Can we track the granular retentions of embodied cultural specificity amidst the dismantling of grand narratives of Tradition and Heritage? The resonances, intersections, and dissimilitudes among the works of these artists, investigated through these different questions, ultimately illustrate the major theoretical stakes of this project. In identifying the other “contemporary” as an affirmation welded in the fire of double negatives—the not-this, not-that, of dominant expectations—I traverse the worlds of contemporary art, critical race/ethnicity studies, and transnational Black, Indigenous, and feminisms of color, via powerful voices from the margins calling for the reorganization of artistic and cultural formations.6 To arrive at an affirmation of practice via a series of refusals is to recognize and grapple with the power of a North-dominated and/or state-­ organized marketplace and, in the words of literary and cultural critic, Sarah Nuttal, “the hermeneutic machine of the West” which relies on “otherness to stage its grandest and most exclusive theatres of the self” (2006, p. 8).7 Thus, it is urgent to match these refusals with articulations of the practice and craft in terms of their own ecosystem, to indicate inherent difference while refusing relegation to non-negotiable, unreadable lacunae. This is often tricky navigation, what visual art scholar Olu Oguibe

32 

A. CHATTERJEA

describes as the “terrain of difficulty,” riddled with constant struggles by South-South artists working in alternative ways, to push “beyond the preferred narrative and that specified rhetoric that reiterates palpable constructs of Otherness” which would otherwise render their intentional alterity undecipherable (2004, p.  11). The next chapter is dedicated to close analyses of the workings of the global North and narrativizations of white supremacy that double down to hold old formations of power in place. The following chapter discusses the ways in which South-South choreographers work intentionally to insist on their aesthetic and cultural particularity. Together, they articulate the state of generative alterity that produces heated contemporaneities. In studying the work of artists from vastly different contexts in the remaining chapters of this book, I also suggest a different mode of spatial organization. Crossing the transnational feminism model with cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai’s theorizing of scapes, cartographies that allow us to see connections across apparent ruptures and discontinuities, and recognize flashpoints of resonance and tension, I propose a reimagining of the global stage, shored by political resonances, aesthetic distinctions, and a commitment to difference (1990).8 Unlike the conventional global stage, which is actualized through international touring circuits, and surrounded by gatekeepers and allegiances to value-systems often staked in colonial histories, this alternative global stage might be imagined as one we thread together as different artists share their work differently, via a range of fora. We might imagine this global stage as comprising a series of constantly materializing and dissolving platforms: spaces of nuanced visibility in our own terms, of community and plurality, refusing the perpetuation of oppressive legacies in dance and culture broadly. Perhaps strapped for resources, but always materialized by the inventive resourcefulness of South-South artists determined to challenge the status quo, these global stages are spaces, sometimes virtual and dialogic, always rhizomatic, where artists make very different dances that provoke questions about our world and possibilities of justice and healing; where core concepts in dance-making, such as beauty, line, composition, structure, are dynamized through particularity and difference; where intersectional understandings of identity reflect a complex world map; where Indigenous, Black, and brown bodies play central roles in relentlessly questioning performance conventions, power relations, inequities, and pathways of desire. These are decolonizing spaces, where dance is a practice of reworking our relationship to history, convention, tradition, reflecting on our experience of space and time

1 INTRODUCTION 

33

through ruptures, erasures, hidden continuities, and re-mappings, and desiring and visioning different and just ways of contemporary dance-­ making. Here, the double refusals dent hegemonized values and make space for stories sprouting from under, and choreographies of healing, beauty, mourning, and magic come to be valued as vital cultural-political paradigm-shifting work. These are spaces of contemporary dance-making. To embrace such heterodoxy is to consent to diverge from organizations of evenness and symmetry. My chapters are not organized in parallel, equally weighted, modules, but rather written from my analysis of the field and my experience of the work of these artists. The second chapter presents an analysis of whiteness’ thrall on contemporary dance, and the limitations of categories such as conceptual dance. The third chapter analyzes the different ways in which South-South bodies and aesthetics enter into contemporary dance and weighs the affective value of different entries. The fourth and seventh chapters study different training methodologies in contemporary dance and delineate the deliberate aesthetic shaping of bodies through the articulation of a specific movement form and style in the work of Germaine Acogny (Toubab Dialaw, Senegal) and through Indigenous pedagogies in the community-embedded practices of Rulan Tangen (Santa Fe, USA). Moving my lens to choreographic strategies, I examine the oeuvre of Sardono Kusumo (Jakarta, Indonesia) in the fifth chapter and Nora Chipaumire (Harare, Zimbabwe/Brooklyn, USA) in the sixth chapter. The penultimate chapter presents a constellation of artists who figure their contemporaneity in very different ways: Lemi Ponifasio (Auckland, New Zealand), Camille Brown (Brooklyn, USA), Prumsodun Ok (Phnom Penh, Cambodia), and Alice Sheppard (San Francisco, USA). In the concluding chapter, I circle back to some of the foundational questions of this project and reflect briefly on my own artistic practice to indicate the complicated and arduous considerations that have arisen in this twinned discursive and creative process. My long histories with many of the choreographers I write about in the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters, including shared performances, participation in their training sessions, workshops, and rehearsals, and other interactions, have been crucial in offering an insight into their work, making for a quasi-ethnographic methodology. Most often, I work through close readings of their movement, pedagogy, and choreographic strategies as I was trained by Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, whose work has been instrumental in rearticulating the field of Dance Studies by drawing visibility to the Black presence suffused in all of American cultural

34 

A. CHATTERJEA

production. The constellation of artists in the eighth chapter has emerged from my process of coming to know these artists through conversations, interviews, and witnessing their work while sharing my own. Throughout the book, I attempt to match the contestation of the early chapters, where I engage in arguments of not-this, not-that to articulate the particularity of this alterity, with the heat generated by justice-oriented notions of dancing and dance-making. These artists remind me, in different ways, that we can change the frames of our visuality, and that certain spaces can be ours should we choose, only we have to move boldly to redefine them. The conviction at the heart of my project—about the brilliance and value of such Contemporary Dance—energizes a raucous difference and heats up this genre, opening up its pores, rejuvenating the field.

Notes 1. See, for instance, André Lepecki’s description of dominant trends in European contemporary dance since the 1990s as the “reduction of the expansive, of the spectacular, of the inessential,” in his essay “Concept and Presence: The Contemporary European Dance Scene” (2004, p. 179). 2. In her essay “An anthropologist looks at ballet as a form of ethnic dance,” Joann Kealiinohomoku famously disrupted the mainstream and universal-­ passing of ballet by reminding Dance Studies scholars that the all dance is “ethnic,” that is, located in specific cultural contexts. 3. See Dance Moms competition (group dance category), Lifetime, 2014. 4. For instance, the formal particularities and repertoire of the classical dance form Odissi, that I studied with my guru Sanjukta Panigrahi, have changed quite a bit over the years. The dimensions of the basic body position, the chauk, have shifted from the turned-out heels being directly under the shoulders to being separated by only one fist’s distance between them. Again, the highly successful Odissi dance company, Nrityagram, located just outside of Bangalore and represented by New York-based agency, Pentacle, presents a style of Odissi that is quite different from how the form is traditionally practiced. Choreographer Surupa Sen has collaborated with dancer and researcher Bijayini Satpathy to extend the form via interpretations of old texts and elaborations of basic movement principles. However, the choreography still remains thematically within the classical framework. While I have worked similarly to extend core movement principles in my contemporary choreography, I have embraced a feminist politics of justice, which has resulted in a substantially different aesthetic frame. 5. Interestingly, dance scholar Bojana Kunst discusses the struggles of artists from Eastern European contexts to break into the field of contemporary

1 INTRODUCTION 

35

dance in similar terms. She writes: “The contemporary dance that is not part of the Western institutionalization of ‘physicality’ is not recognized as the same legitimate and original searching for the modes in-between, but rather is understood as something that is ‘not being of the moment,’ that is somehow ‘doubtfully late,’ and that demands professionalism to be worthy of the moment” (2017, p.  571). Her analysis echoes my argument about the shackling of cultural categories to narrations of History to manipulate notions of cultural supremacy. 6. For instance, I am inspired by visual arts scholar Wu Hung’s articulation of the “contemporary turn” in the work of a group of visual artists in post-­ Cultural Revolution China, who rejected the modernist movement in Chinese art based on a Western Enlightenment model. Hung describes this “contemporary turn” as being marked by an acute sense of departure from the previous positionality where the avant-garde was identified with the modern, and a pattern of socio-political ruptures, such as the traumatic Tiananmen Square massacre, underscoring a shifting relationship to history. Hung describes how “each rupture forced artists and intellectuals to reevaluate and reorient themselves. Instead of returning to a prior time and space, the projects they developed after each rupture often testified to a different set of parameters and to a different temporality and spatiality” (2011, pp. 37–38). 7. Though Nuttal is referring specifically to the context of African visual art, her argument can be extended to the South-South formation. 8. Arjun Appadurai’s notion of five scapes that organize global flows of communication, recognizing the tensions between opposing forces of homogenization and heterogenization in economies of globalization, reflects the opposing forces that animate the South-South contemporary dance global stage: the desire to belong to a “global” trend of experimentation and the need to differentiate from existing, North-dominated frameworks.

References Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. Public Culture 2 (2): 1–24. Bernard, Michel. 2014. On the Use of the Concept of Modernity and Its Perverse Effects in Dance. In Danse: An Anthology, ed. Noémi Solomon, 69–79. New  York: Les Presses du Réel, co-published with Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the US. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cole, Teju. [@tejucole]. 2012. Twitter, March 8. https://twitter.com/tejucole. ———. 2016. Known and Strange Things. New York: Random House.

36 

A. CHATTERJEA

Combahee River Collective Statement. 1983. 1977, April. © 1978 by Zillah Eisenstein. In Home Girls, A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith, 264–274. New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press. Cramer, Franz Anton. 2014. Dance: The Metamorphosis of the Body: Boyan Manchev, Xavier Le Roy and Franz Anton Cramer. In Danse, An Anthology, ed. Noémi Solomon, 117–129. New York: Les Presses du Réel, Co-published with Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the US. Cvejić, Bojana. 2015. Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance and Performance. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Dirlik, Arif. 2007. Global South: Predicament and Promise. The Global South 1 (1): 12–23. Foster Williamson, Charlotte. 2011. What Is Contemporary Dance [Blog Post]. Atlanta Dance Central, March 10. http://atlantadancecentral.com/what-iscontemporary-dance/. Accessed May 15, 2015. Frétard, Dominique. 2003. La Fin Annoncée de la Non-Danse. Le Monde, May 6, 25. Ginot, Isabelle. 2014. A Common Place. In Danse: An Anthology, ed. Noémie Solomon, 15–174. New York: Les Presses du Réel, Co-published with Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the US. Hoffman, Robert. [PUNCHROBERT]. 2013. Contemporary Dance How To [Video]. YouTube, December 22. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qQyALIEydbc. Accessed May 17, 2015. Hung, Wu. 2011. From ‘Modern’ to ‘Contemporary:’ A Case in Post-Cultural Revolutionary Art. Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture 1: 35–40. https://doi.org/10.5195/contemp.2011.36. Kalbfleisch, Elizabeth. 2010. Bordering on Feminism: Space, Solidarity, and Transnationalism in Rebecca Belmore’s Vigil. In Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture, ed. Cheryl Suzack, Shari M. Hunhdorf, Jeanne Perreault, and Jean Barman, 278–297. Vancouver: UBC Press. Kealiinohomoku, Joann. 1983 [1970]. An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance. In What is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism, ed. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, 533–549. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kourlas, Gia. 2005. How New  York Lost Its Modern Dance Reign. New York Times, September 6, E5. Kunst, Bojana. 2017. Dance and Eastern Europe: Contemporary Dance in the Time of Transition. In Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, ed. Rebekah Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and Randy Martin, 559–574. New  York: Oxford University Press. Laermans, Rudi. 2015. Moving Together: Making and Theorizing Contemporary Dance. Amsterdam: Valiz.

1 INTRODUCTION 

37

Lepecki, André. 2004. Concept and Presence: The Contemporary European Dance Scene. In Rethinking Dance: A Reader, ed. Alexandra Carter, 170–181. London: Routledge. Looseleaf, Victoria. 2012. Modern vs. Contemporary: Which Is More Now? Dance Magazine 86 (12): 53–62. Lugones, Maria. 2010. Toward a Decolonial Feminism. Hypatia 25 (4): 742–759. Talpade Mohanty, Chandra. 1984. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses. boundary 2 12 (3/13, 1): 333–358. Nuttal, Sarah. 2006. Introduction: Rethinking Beauty. In Beautiful Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics, 6–29. Durham: Duke University Press. Oguibe, Olu. 2004. The Culture Game. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Perron, Wendy. 2005. Curtain Up: Has NYC Lost Its Leading Edge in Contemporary Dance? Dance Magazine 79 (12): 10. ———. 2014a. Where Has Modern Dance Gone? [Blog Post]. Wendy Perron, May 15. http://wendyperron.com/where-has-modern-dance-gone/ Accessed July 25, 2016. ———. 2014b. What Exactly Is Contemporary Ballet? Dance Magazine 88 (9): 34–36. Seibert, Brian. 2013. The Book of Revelation, With Some Teeth to It. New York Times, November 12, C:5 N. Solomon, Noémie. 2014. Introduction. In Danse: An Anthology, 6–23. New York: Les Presses du Réel, co-published with Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the US. Suzanne, Nichelle. 2011. What Do They Mean By ‘Contemporary’ On SYTYCD? [Blog Post]. Dance Advantage, July 19. http://www.danceadvantage.net/ contemporary-confusion/. Accessed May 15, 2015. Talpade Mohanty, Chandra. 2003. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practising Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press. Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press. Western States Center. 2011. The Origin of the Phrase ‘Women of Color’ [Video]. YouTube, February 15. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82vl34mi4Iw. Accessed June 20, 2017.

CHAPTER 2

States of Contemporary Dance

Investigating the “Radical” in Conceptual Dance Tracing the history of the avant-garde in Euro-American performance from the 1960s, Theater Studies scholar, Erika Fischer-Lichte points out how questions of meaning-constitution became a central conundrum. Shifting the agency to audiences in this regard meant upholding that “the aim of performance cannot be to transmit meaning generated by only one segment of its participants—be it the actors, the director, set designer, composer, or even the playwright—to another, that is, the audience” (Fischer-Lichte 2008, p. 139). This subsequently provoked an aesthetic “of effect” where theatricality was reduced to its “materiality”: “An aesthetics of effect thus required the actors to refrain from any sort of meaning constitution” (Fischer-Lichte 2008, p. 139). This distinction continues to hold value for conceptual dance choreographers who differentiate their work from representational dance, which suggests a kind of performance that reaches gesture and movement beyond their materialist immediacy. Fischer-Lichte extends her analysis to reflect on the historically oppositional categories “presence” and “representation.” She notes that it is impossible to sustain a rigid dichotomy between the two but offers a way to distinguish between these categories through embodied images: “the actor’s body, and particularly their naked body, was seen as the locus and epitome of presence. In contrast, the dramatic character incarnated representation” (Fischer-Lichte 2008, p. 147). While presence suggested “the © The Author(s) 2020 A. Chatterjea, Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance, New World Choreographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43912-5_2

39

40 

A. CHATTERJEA

experience of opulence and completeness…authenticity,” representation seemed to be aligned with “grand narratives…an authoritative controlling mechanism” (Fischer-Lichte 2008, p. 147). This lineage of ideas is helpful in understanding the particular sharpness with which conceptual dance and representational dance are positioned on two opposite ends of the spectrum of Western contemporary dance. However, because we experience constructs based on our histories, they signify differently across contexts. In some situations, representation might suggest a devaluation of art’s unmediated presence, while in others, it might usher in paradigmatic shifts in registers of value, making visible obscured genealogies of cultural hierarchies. We might question, then, how materiality is understood, particularly when we foreground the effective and affective ramifications of difference. Feminists such as Judith Butler and Elizabeth Grosz have long theorized corporeal difference as immediately constituted by and formative of discursive difference, and of the constantly differentiated materiality of the body as crucial to the understanding of the operations of power. Highlighting the distinction between material specificity, layered with cultural histories, and biological determinism, shuttered through a narrowed lens of identity politics, we might then examine the deliberate uncoupling of representational value from fleshly peoplehood and the evisceration of story in conceptual dance. In articulating an iterative yet non-linear, refractive yet fractally dimensioned, relationing between the materiality of being and subject-formation through dance practice, I am inspired by writer Adrienne Maree Brown, whose imagination imbues impersonal scientific data with connectivity and sentience: “Matter doesn’t disappear, it transforms. Energy is the same way. The Earth is layer upon layer of all that has existed, remembered by the dirt” (2017, p. 33). Fischer-Lichte’s analysis, however, enables us to see how representational dance came to be weighted as being part of status quo, devalued in contemporary dance-making, while conceptual dance, championing movement’s non-instrumental autotelicity, has to come to be associated with the height of innovation. This prioritization connects the work of dance with the reduction of formalized movement and an appearance of equality. Celebrated performance artist and essayist Mårten Spångberg connects contemporary choreography to “practicing contemporary life,” and abhors representation (2014, p. 203). But despite his avowed goal to critique capitalism and neoliberalism, he does not recognize the ways in which the circuitries of his work scoop up and flatten out embodied

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

41

difference. Talking about his six and a half-hour long piece, Natten (2016), which happens at night, Spångberg says, “For capitalism, the night and the dark is a difficult time because it is a time when we don’t differentiate. In the night we are all equal. There is no difference between class, or race, or sexual orientation for example…The night, the time of non-differentiation is a time where we can also flourish. Not flourish as we know we can, but flourish in ways that are still to be explored” (Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2016). The choreographic search for experiences of flourishing in ways that confound capitalism is important, as is the connecting of light and greater visibility with the opacity of consumer-based culture. But differences of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other vectors of identity always lurk just beneath the surface of seemingly equalizing experiences. Black Lives Matters protesters who have suffered assaults while marching on highways under cover of darkness, migrant workers who work night shifts in sweatshop factories around the world, would differ substantially from Spångberg in his assessment of the equalizing function of night. Investigations that begin with the assertion of equality, and the goal of defeating systems that are undergirded and perpetuated by those very differences, typically raise further questions. Spångberg’s intellectual inquiry cancels out the possibility of meaning-­ making and representation co-existing. “A dance whose starting point is signification and meaning production does certainly not imply a critique of anything at all, or if it does, such critique has turned into a “modest proposal”—not a full frontal assault…but a benevolent or even cheerful affirmation of the already possible. Dance understood as semiotics, or that wants to be understood as, necessarily sells out its specificity. It becomes one among others and no longer a No-Manifesto” (Spångberg 2014, p. 203). I disagree with his contention, but for the moment, let us focus on the cultural lineage he references to shore up his claim. Spångberg refers to postmodern choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s 1965 No Manifesto as a mode of refusing what has come to be entrenched. However, while the particular investigation he describes might be productive for artists in that context, it might have a very different impact on artists who have no allegiance to histories shaped or influenced by Yvonne Rainer’s No Manifesto and the particular traditions it revoked. And that, in itself, is significant: despite many overlapping histories, we are not all bound by shared narratives around cultural capital, and we do not come to dance-­ making with the same, or even similar, intentions.

42 

A. CHATTERJEA

So while I read Rainer’s document with great historic interest, and might even be provoked to reflect on how such a document might work in my own cultural context, it does not govern me in the same way as it might someone who has labored in the direct line of expansion of Western concert dance. And while I might chafe against the aesthetic boundaries ballet and modern dance impose on me within the global dance circuitry, I do not imagine the revolution of the American postmodern choreographers to be part of an equally shared global agenda, and am not driven to align my search with it in the same way as my global North contemporary dance colleagues might be. My concerns, simply speaking, are different, even though I am curious. I also understand that there are choreographers from Indigenous, Black  and communities of color whose investigations might resonate with those of the postmoderns. At any rate, upholding any one organizing narrative about/criteria for contemporary artmaking, a genre with global participation, is bound to be oppressive. Now let us pay attention to how Rainer herself has spoken about her manifesto subsequently, as written at a particular historical moment, and in response to a particular context: “It was never meant to be prescriptive for all time for all choreographers, but rather, to do what the time honored tradition of the manifesto always intended manifestos to do: clear the air at a particular cultural and historical moment. I hope that someday mine will be laid to rest” (2006, p. 264). If Spångberg was similarly making room for different inquiries and raising questions to push for a rethinking of the function of dance in current times, he certainly does not indicate that. His statements are categorical: “We must let dances have and enjoy their own existence, only then can they offer us interesting problems. The dance I want to experience is one that needs no anthropocentric back-up, that is not like anything else but simply itself and enjoying it, a dance whose starting point is not relations or negotiation” (Spångberg 2014, p. 205). How do we weigh the move to position dance in absolute independence when we can only know dance as dancing, as embodied practice, specific to bodies, and, for choreographers, almost always a crafting of relations with dancers and witnesses? This is not to contest that dancing needs no justification, no reason to exist other than itself. But there is also dancing which, if only by virtue of being in the world, makes its own commentary on lived conditions. Such dancing also offers interesting questions. And all of these manifestations of dance practice and the questions they provoke are culturally located.

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

43

The dismissal of referentiality and signification as the way to mark edgy dance-making echoes across the writing and assertions of cultural thought-­ leaders about conceptual dance across Europe. Bojana Cvejić upholds this rejection to be the “radical stance” of contemporary dance: “If dance tries to tell us something about the world it is bound to fail” (2014, p. 147). I contest her statement from the perspective of many South-South artists who have found in dancing a place to rehearse and thicken fragmented memories and histories, a space to stage located rebellions, and a mode of embodiment that enables them to claim the fullness of subjectivity often denied them in daily life experiences. For many of these artists, performance is metaphoric, surreal, and material, and a practice of transformation. Inevitably, in the process of witnessing or participating in such work, we learn something about their world. In a different context, Cvejić distinguishes the work of the conceptual dance-makers as expanding the notion of choreography to get us to think about problems that exist outside of the theater, different from “fetishizing the dancing body” as “vitalist object for contemplation” (2015, p. 230). Like Cvejić, I am fascinated by conceptual dance’s recasting of the relationship between dance, movement, and ideas, its critique of spectacular displays of technique, and its experiments with the apparatus of the stage. But I argue that these ideas signify differently in resistant South-South choreographies: the imperative to minimize the signifying reach of dancing bodies rehearses, yet again, the dangerous teeter-totter between invisibilization and hypervisibilization that has characterized the presence of marginalized communities in dance, as in life. Dancing particularly, signaling a specific aesthetic lineage, tracing transgressive and intentional joy, might not align with the preferred reductionism in conceptual dance, but it is not an inevitable surrender to “dancey dance.” Moreover, the experiments of South-South artists with space and time, emerging out of their historic experiences, gain particular relevance in relationship to the often-marginalized dancing bodies and choreographic modes in their work. It is not my intention to flip hierarchies and assign higher or lower value to dancing that self-consciously comments on broader lived experience, is representative so to speak, from dance that constitutes itself as the choreography of ideas, is conceptual. But in unearthing the stakes in the seemingly inevitable relationship between conceptual dance and the pinnacle of experimentation, and horizontalizing the multiple ways of disrupting structures of modernity, I argue for nuanced distinctions between conditions of possibility, the historic weight of embodied materialities, and

44 

A. CHATTERJEA

choreographic “representation.” South-South choreographers might not necessarily relate to the distinction between conceptual and representational dance, but it is incumbent on the broader field of dance to recognize how their interventions, operating through different circuitries of signification on local and global stages, can expand generally held notions of choreographic innovation. It can only enrich those of us invested in dance and Dance Studies to parse how, in the South-South frame, the commitment to choreographing references to story—non-linear, fragmented, and community-connected—and the inhabiting of dance as a practice of embodied meaning-making is no capitulation to spectacularized choreography. Rather, these strategies, often with the insistence on shaping a particular movement aesthetic, become modes of centering racial and cultural specificity in contemporary dance-making. This important difference also shows up the connection of the critique of representation to yet another central tenet at the heart of conceptual dance: the steadfast assertion of bodily freedom, and the tacit assumption that it might mean uniformly across different groups of people. This, in fact, becomes one of the pillars of conceptual dance’s rebuttal of capitalism. Performance theorist Bojana Kunst, writing about the strategies used by contemporary European dance-makers to subvert typical notions of a “dancing body,” upholds the idea of the “kernel of bodily autonomy” which “became one of the main philosophical and artistic innovations of the 20th century” (2014, p. 56). She describes this autonomy as “one of the main strategies employed by the body to enter the stage of modernity and disclose its contemporary flow” and as “a strong belief in the possibilities of different ways and subversions of representation” (Kunst 2014, pp. 58, 60). If bodily autonomy is itself the central innovation in contemporary dance and a mode of entry into contemporaneity, then knowledge about embodiment of freedom becomes the a priori condition for making conceptual contemporary dance. How then can we imagine the connection between such free performing bodies and marginalized bodies in our societies—unarmed African-­ American youth shot by police, Dalit women assaulted by Hindu fundamentalists, young girls from Chibok kidnapped and raped by Boko Haram, Native communities forced off their homelands to build gas pipelines, Syrian children poisoned by chemical gas—whose understanding of bodily autonomy has to be wrested daily, often with fatal results, from the jaws of systemic erasure? Is this autonomy contoured to the individualism that characterized Western modernity? How can we reconcile this

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

45

presumption of autonomy with our location within the tumult of large-­ scale community movements for social justice—Black Lives Matter, Fees Must Fall, Stand with Standing Rock, Azaadi, Bring Back Our Girls, Palestine to Ferguson, Me Too—whose innovative embodied interruption techniques have changed modalities of protest and knowledge production? How do we respond to this concept of bodily autonomy when we remember the resounding cry of Eric Garner dying in an illegal police chokehold, “I can’t breathe,” which has imprinted on our consciousness that freedom and autonomy are experienced differently, depending on our racial identity?1 How can contemporary dance acknowledge that, despite our shared phenomena of breathing, we do not have equal access to breath due to conditions of injustice? It is particularly urgent to think about the multiple dimensions of freedom in the current context of global capitalism, the dark underside of which is a long tradition of harnessing enslaved and indentured labor and stolen land and resources. In her interdisciplinary work, The Intimacies of Four Continents, Humanities scholar Lisa Lowe reminds us of the importance of understanding freedom through considerations of its materiality, and through the lens of multiple differences. She cautions against narrativizing freedom as an abstract concept, which might allow it to remain embedded within old legacies of power, obscuring conditions of difference: “The contemporary moment is so replete with assumptions that freedom is made universal through liberal political enfranchisement and the globalization of capitalism that it has become difficult to write or imagine alternative knowledges, or to act on behalf of alternative projects of ways of being. Within this context, it is necessary to…imagine a much more complicated set of stories about the emergence of the now” (Lowe 2015, p. 175). Lowe’s call for imagining intersecting narratives resonates with the many ways in which the contemporary dance artists I write about share stories, generate hope, and imagine reparation and freedom through their specific contextual conditions in their artistic practice. Her reminder to investigate the received genealogies of freedom and time is significant in charting different emergences and journeys for these categories that are vital to understanding contemporary innovation. Importantly, Lowe calls for this inquiry not just so that we can create different narratives, but for the purpose of returning the gaps, uncertainties, impasses, and elisions; … tracing those moments of eclipse when obscure, unknown, or unperceived elements are lost, those significant moments when transformations have begun to take place, but

46 

A. CHATTERJEA

have not yet been inserted into historical time. It is an attempt to give an account of the existence of alternatives and possibilities that lay within, but were later foreclosed by, the determinations of the narratives, orders, and paradigms to which they give rise. (2015, p. 175)

Such investigations reveal historically submerged possibilities for different meaning-making, knowledge formations, and subject figurations, veering away from fetishizations of “new.” Such caesurae, theorized differently, complicate conceptual dance’s not-quite-intersectional critique of capitalism and its absolute assertion that movement cannot be owned, by reminding us of many histories of appropriation and by raising questions about who has rights to our breath, our bodies, and the movements we generate. Concurrently, critiquing global capitalism from the perspective of historic colonial and racial hegemonizations, the South-South difference ushers in a vital distinction between the ownership of and access to movement, ideas, aesthetics, and resources. It reminds us of the difference between individuated freedom and communal liberation. If freedom, understood prismatically and through the varying algorithms of cultural difference, were ours: Indigenous Studies scholar from the Mohawk Nation, Gerald Taiaiake Alfred, offers the notion of Wasáse, traditionally a Rotinoshonni war ritual, which he reimagines as a spiritual-­ cultural resurgence. This original Thunder Dance becomes, in his re-­ articulation, a contemporary movement for Indigenous renewal symbolizing “the social and cultural force alive among Onkwehonwe dedicated to altering the balance of political and economic power to recreate some social and physical space for freedom to re-emerge” (Alfred 2005, p. 19). I am inspired by Alfred’s mobilizing of a traditional dance materially and conceptually for the purpose of contemporary Indigenous renewal and his activation of movement toward freedom through a politics of decolonization. What happens when contemporary choreographers from “other” genealogies of dance choose practices of alterity in determining the terms of their artmaking? How might dancing’s body-in-the-world methodologies touch our lives if it was pervaded by differential liberatory aesthetics? How might it loosen old hierarchies and unstick particular formations of “radical?” How might that allow us to realign resources? How can it remind us repeatedly that even as much dance within South-South communities is called upon to perform ethnicity and to preserve tradition, there is the complementary surge to embody resistance, imagine futurity, and provoke crucial questions through strategies of contemporary dance-­ making? Before embarking on discussions of contemporary dance

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

47

freedoms along South-South axes, it is crucial to examine the particular ways in which barriers work and to determine the grounds of alterity.

Racial Difference and the Fiction of Same Ground in Contemporary Dance The obfuscation of racial hierarchies, particularly in creating descriptors that pass as “neutral” but are conceived from specific mainstream criteria, is widespread across artistic fields. My conversations with many colleagues in dance suggest that, in the popular imaginary, contemporary dance is essentially post-race. Different from its predecessors in being cognizant of its place in today’s world brought closer by globalized communication systems, it affirms a kind of democratic citizenship. It is the possibility of a world where artists from different communities run into and work with each other often, creating greater openness to different ways of working, essentially reframing the field of dance. Moreover, such avowedly post-­ racial conditions, particularly in the “cosmopolitan” centers of the world, are often connected to articulations of radical innovations in contemporary artmaking. In an interview several years ago, Paris-based Kuchipudi artist Shanthala Shivalingappa, who has collaborated with celebrated contemporary choreographers such as Pina Bausch and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, shared with me that she did not feel marginalized among her generation of professional dancers. Because they take similar classes, apply for the same grants, she felt there was, in the world of contemporary dance, many opportunities for exchange, despite her very different training (Shivalingappa, personal communication, November 16, 2011). I fully believe Shivalingappa’s account of her experience, marked as it is by her tremendous acclaim across Europe. But of course, race is a social construction, and while it is individually and collectively experienced, the dismantling of race- and culture-­based inequities can only be witnessed through large-scale systemic change. So her personal experience is important but does not indicate a post-race condition in contemporary dance. Inclusion does not dismantle large-scale paradigms, certainly not when such inclusivity is so sparse and specific. I am reminded of Homi Bhabha’s 1988 formulations of the distinction between cultural diversity and cultural difference, between cultural production as object of knowledge and as a “process of enunciation…adequate to the construction of systems of cultural

48 

A. CHATTERJEA

identification” (p.  18). A post-race condition in dance, marked by the withering away of inequities, silencings, and violences rising from racial and cultural differences, would almost necessarily require a reorganization of the entire field. In my experience, post-race arguments, mostly institutionally driven, are implicit in artistic categories constituted as neutral and all-inclusive, claiming to work for “all” artists. They dissimulate systemic deployments of racialized power relations through reductive and facile culturalist explanations. An integral part of this post-race maneuver is the deployment of exceptionalism to single out a few talented artists from historically marginalized communities for recognition, the anomalies to the judgment of general non-competence. Thus, for some, the unprecedented financial and touring successes of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater or the acclaim won by American contemporary choreographer Trajal Harrell for his projects bringing together voguing, runway, and postmodern dance modalities might neutralize the huge imbalance of funding for Black,  Indigenous, and artists of color versus white artists in the US national index. These outstanding achievements are expected to silence questions about hierarchies, because in the post-race capitalist model of success, talent and hard work line the path to accomplishment, unconditionally. This is a mutation only of the cornerstone of multicultural policy—buoyed by the few diverse “others” who make it into the echelons of excellence—that simultaneously quells questions about infrastructural and conceptual change. I want to underscore the nuance of my argument here. I do not devalue the work of artists whose high-quality artistic work earns them the recognition they deserve. I am personally amazed and intrigued by Kyle Abraham’s choreography on his company dancers and with American ballerina Wendy Whelan (The Serpent and the Smoke, 2013), earning him several awards from prestigious foundations including the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation in 2015; Akram Khan’s choreographic projects with French ballerina Sylvie Guillem (Sacred Monsters, 2006), for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games (London, 2012), and with the English National Ballet (Dust, 2014); and the Walker Art Museum’s long-­ standing partnership with and support of Ralph Lemon (seen, for instance, in the innovative programming around Lemon’s Scaffold Room, 2014, described by the artist as a “lecture-performance-musical”) and their 2012 acquisition of his immersive installation, Meditation, as part of their permanent collection. I do notice the primacy of cisgender men among my

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

49

examples. Nevertheless, what is the impact of such strategies of exceptionalism, of anointing a few extra-ordinary “others,” without acknowledging how the currencies of “success” are brokered by racial hierarchies and cultural biases? The inclusion of a handful of Black, Indigneous, and artists of color in mainstream venues, seasons, and festivals, then, points both to the talent and skill of the artists themselves and to certain conditions of possibility. These might include the liberal policies of specific curators and producers, official mandates of diversity in cultural policy, demographic shifts among audiences, and the insistent push-back by marginalized artists reminding us of the still-white center in the organizing and management of contemporary dance. It is incumbent upon us, then, to track the ways in which intention and strategy unfold, so we can truly assess the purchase of this “inclusion.” Additionally, we must question the ways in which the rhetoric of exceptionalism jettisons community, and ultimately undercuts possibilities of equity. This kind of individualism, which singles out and generously rewards one talented artist as exceptional, is typically deployed to issue a pass on further considerations of difference. The embrace of a few extraordinary persons, standing in for entire communities, chokes questions about structural inequities and hierarchical legacies. This powerful collusion between exceptionalism and individualism quells the possibilities of freedom even as it creates the appearance of accommodation. In my own experience, I find tremendous pressure to submit to a consumable individual identity, to tell my “personal” story, as one way of being recognized as “contemporary.” Indeed, if there is scope for “story” in contemporary dance, it is less as an intersectional mosaic of juxtaposed stories, and more as a possible concession for non-dominant artistic voices through what feels like “confession porn.” Such strategies, where audiences come to know the “other” through a single story, which might or might not disclose questions of broader power relations, have often resulted in career successes.2 Individual stories are no doubt important, particularly when they indicate larger workings of power and historic shifts, but individualist narratives, unchallenging of the labyrinthine power-systems that complicate our worlds, are vitally different from the feminist commitment to the autobiographical mode as political commentary. Indeed, there is something troubling about the prompting of artists, Indigenous, Black, of color, from the global South, to make such personal story-based performance that shares first-hand struggles and triumphs,

50 

A. CHATTERJEA

fills us with inspiration, and ultimately puts us at ease. Often such pressures propel us toward fulfilling typical expectations in the liberal audience imaginary about “others,” and validate cannibalistic responses where difference can be morseled, displayed, and consumed while sustaining existing hierarchies and supporting Euro-American cultural expansionism. Here, contemporary performance can become recuperative, as if making up for the deadly violences of neo-colonial corporate globalization by witnessing a few people’s stories. Often in such personalized performance narratives, we are denied the space to investigate urgent issues that might present challenges to the ultimate goal of cultural management. In a genre where representation is already denigrated, such story-based dance-­ making functions only to deepen racial and cultural divides. The other side of such individualism is seen in how artists from Indigenous and global communities of color often find themselves commandeered to hold the place of official “Tradition,” to produce a difference that can be identified and consumed without shifting power positions substantially. It is important to remember that state-sanctioned narratives of “Tradition” take many forms, including contemporary suppressions of long-standing practices. Ecstatic Dhamal dancing at Sufi shrines, for instance, is traditional across South Asia, but seldom included in sanitized National accounts of “Traditional Culture” in these countries. In her research about the various modes of Sufi music and dancing in Pakistan, ethnomusicologist Hiromi Sakata has documented both their popularity across local communities as “traditions which enjoy a vibrant, historical continuity spanning a millennium” and their relegation by the government through “willful neglect and the lack of moral support and economic patronage” (1997, p.  172). In a different context, Humanities scholar Adria Imada shows how traditional Hula was re-constituted as “popular cultural phenomenon,” which subsequently “helped to broker th(e) process of incorporation and integration” of Hawaii as an American state (2012, p. 6). And dance scholar Jane Desmond points to the regular re-packaging of traditional Hula into “feminized, primitivized, and sexualized” versions suitable for the tourist industry in Hawaii (2017, p. 39). However, the contemporary resurgence of traditional Hula, as part of protest and cultural revival movements, seldom features in official narratives. Typically, artists invited to represent “Tradition” are nudged away from the political edges of contemporary dance and their presence in the current dance scene gains importance as contrast to the radical commentaries on current world situations that seem to be the domain of Euro-American

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

51

avant-garde. Instances like this demonstrate the grip of a neoliberal philosophy on currencies of cultural production and align policies of inclusion with a “free-market” version of equality. Here, language of untrammeled opportunity glosses over the multiple, co-invested hierarchies that position us differently and coats curation, resource-sharing, and institutional policy-making with a veneer of openness. This helps to re-­ constitute North-based institutions as the favored site of visibility for all artists, but disguises the older, still-at-work modes of “discovery,” appropriation, and exotification as diversity initiatives. Typically, such inclusion is expected to purchase containment and snuff out discontent with obligatory performances of gratitude. Manifestations of multiculturalism, frequently associated with traditional practice, and with expectations of color, rhythm, skill, and beauty, play an important role in opening up the cultural field, demonstrating different kinds of virtuosity and disorienting mainstream sensibilities of beauty. Such performances re-temporalize the descriptor “contemporary” as a signifier of time: existing at this moment. What is troublesome is when these modes of performance become mandatory for recognition as artistry for a certain community, or when artists are asked to heighten some aspects of their work to emphasize their relationship to opaque notions of “authenticity.” And, as the previously discussed examples of Dhamal and Hula demonstrate, in the tussle of cultural, political, and economic pressures, “Tradition” often comes to be reconstituted through an unbroken line of a select set of practices from the past. This privileging of a singular, dominant aesthetic and the obscuring of cultural pluralism is especially true of post/colonial contexts, where performances of “tradition” double as ethnographic accounts of that “culture.” For artists of contemporary practice in these contexts, articulating cultural specificity and a simultaneous inquiry into Tradition is a matter of constant negotiation and re-strategizing. A debate surrounding the performance of Forces of Nature Dance Company at the 2017 DanceAfrica Festival offers an interesting example of holding this complexity in the face of institutional refusal to recognize it, and the power of talking back. Dance critic for the New York Times, Gia Kourlas, appreciated the long history of this festival inaugurated by Baba Chuck Davis and its thematic focus for that year, “The Healing Light of Rhythm: Tradition and Beyond,” but took issue with the extension of tradition, which she found to be “tricky” (2017). She critiqued The Healing Sevens, choreographed by Artistic Director of Forces of Nature,

52 

A. CHATTERJEA

Abdel Salaam, as “propulsive, flashy, and more than a little contrived,” abhorring the juxtapositions of distinct dimensions and multiple narrative lines within it (Kourlas 2017). The title of the review drove her point home: “DanceAfrica Excels with Tradition. Why Go Beyond?” (Kourlas 2017).3 Charmian Wells, a dance scholar and dancer within the company, wrote an incisive response on Facebook, which was subsequently re-published on Critical Correspondence, the online blog site for Movement Research: “Strong and Wrong: On Ignorance, and Modes of White Spectatorship in Dance Criticism” (2017). In her brilliantly argued critique, Wells positions herself with a double gaze, speaking from subjective experience, as dancer inside the work, and with objective analysis, as a scholar, trained in analytical skills. This becomes part of her strategy to demonstrate what Kourlas does not do, that is, understand how her systemic privilege shapes her personal biases. She demonstrates how Kourlas’ thinking emerges from Western intellectual histories that have lineages to colonial projects, and how Kourlas, in 2017, lacks understanding of crucial elements of critical racial difference. Kourlas’ insistence that some ill-defined notion of “tradition” should limit the purview of DanceAfrica replicates the critical moves of primitivism. The title of her piece functions to police the cultural production of African derived people in time: Stay in your place, in the past… the pairing of “tradition and abandon” is a typical move in dance criticism that relies on primitivist frameworks…Her insistence on limiting DanceAfrica to staging “tradition” provokes further questions around her expectations of what “tradition” looks like, raising the specter of fraught anthropological displays and performances of Others’ ‘authentic traditions’ for European spectatorship and consumption…What deserves interrogation is not the question of whether or not to move beyond “tradition.” It is the rhetorical use of the term “tradition” and the presumption of an uninformed critic to police black choreographers’ prerogatives. (Wells 2017)

Wells concludes with a powerful indictment of the minefield within which Black choreographers find themselves, which resonates with my earlier readings of the multidirectional forces that jeopardize South-South artists creating contemporary dance. Wells’ argument resonates with multiple others, who, despite being racialized in particular and different ways, struggle similarly with being pushed out of “innovation” and “contemporary choreography.”

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

53

These are the double binds and double standards of racist criticism. On the one hand the demand is: Entertain me. Stay in your lane. Innovation and intellectual commentary is not your purview. On the other hand, when entertainment is invoked, through her demeaning reference to Broadway, it is degraded as void of intellectual or artistic content, labeled “flashy.” So what’s a black choreographer to do within these impossible critical terms? (Wells 2017)

Wells’ argument pushes recognition of yet another not this-not that in which South-South artists choreographing innovatively from their context find themselves in. Her question at the end of the above section powerfully articulates the sense of being besieged by judgments all around, the deeply damaging underside for artists who are in this struggle. Moreover, because they are racialized in specific ways, Indigenous, Black, and brown artists are often positioned along a pecking order in the hierarchy of preference and desirability among decision-makers. Cast in competition against each other, we are systemically pushed to ignore the specific histories that locate us on uneven ground, even when we stand adjacent, or close, to one another. As particularities of gender, sex, class, caste, ability, nationality, and aesthetic specificity are commoditized, we are delinked from an intersectional framework and pegged into a ladder of apparent meritocracy. The ensuing rivalry for resources and visibility, based on a non-viable assumption of the same starting line, limits our capacity to revitalize contemporary dance through the power of our differences, even as we champion broad classifications of diversity. Ultimately, this often results in identity-politics-on-steroids, where we are atomized and locked into prescriptive categories that, like multiculturalism, are intended as repair for the miscarried expectations of liberalism, but only accomplish an irresponsible flattening of difference in keeping with the sweeps of neo-liberal “openness.” Hence, my advocacy for multiplicity within contemporary dance emphasizes identity as a node of difference, but locates it within a matrix, rhizomatically connected to cultural and aesthetic particularities, relations of power, and a politics of resistance. In my daily practice of vinyasa yoga, I repeatedly find myself in the samasthiti position, accomplished by centering our weight on equally grounded feet. This same-weightedness requires that we regularly evaluate the ground on which we are standing and understand that the technique of placing our feet and adjusting our weight depends on that ground. It asks for a practice of sensitivity such that the toes, the ball mounds, and

54 

A. CHATTERJEA

the heels of the feet can distribute connection to the ground as needed, so that we can aspire toward equanimity. As I walk from the yoga studio onto the street outside, I ponder the application of this practice. I know that the ground under our feet, in terms of physical and metaphoric conditions, is rent with unevenness. Contextual inequities reproduce deep material and conditional disparities. Often, what feels like a descriptive or neutral logistical strategy to some has deep existential impact on others. In these moments, the struggle to establish our even ground so we can find dance, rhythm, and balance demonstrates the discrete kinds of labor demanded from different bodies and spaces. Racial and cultural differences, and our particular intersectional experiencings of situations from very different locations, make us very different artists and audiences, despite moments of shared consciousness. Yoga’s karmic practice encourages me to grapple with differences in reaching for samasthiti. But, as I explore values and prerogatives in dominant constructions of contemporary dance, I realize how equal ground is a fiction in this context. Whiteness, insistently performing neutrality, shows up repeatedly in aesthetic and structural choices. Aspirations toward samasthiti in this context instigate many distinct forms of struggle. These are the grounds of alterity.

Of Translation at Entrypoints South-South artists, then, find entry and survival in the highly contested terrain of contemporary dance through varied strategies around presencing as they respond to the shifting ways in which white/global North cultural hegemonies re-calibrate dominance. If some artists have been pushed to emphasize their “diversity,” others have been pushed to adapt to modalities of white artmaking. As the above discussion indicates, the tensions in this domain do not constitute even, logical, flows. Sometimes they run counter to each other, so that artists have to carefully navigate the multidirectional forces that lattice the field. Sometimes, we must pay attention to the language used to publicize our work because the descriptors that locate us and position our work for funding, racialize us in particular ways, tacitly consolidating existent power positions. At other times, we need to take on additional labor to support projects that, though not specifically related to our own work, address the skewed power relations that ensure Eurocentric hegemonies, and ultimately prevent our work from being seen in their fullness. Moreover, artists often have to make

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

55

tricky decisions in balancing systemic inequities, curatorial blind spots, and limited resources, with their own desires for success in creating, producing, and touring their work. On some occasions, entrances are strategies for re-aligning power, while on others, they are openings through which artists become absorbed into checklists. With full respect for the different choices made by artists, I now examine the ways in which racial and cultural differences enter the field of contemporary artmaking and the relationship between such gateways and the possibilities for paradigmatic shifts in the field. The remainder of this chapter, examining the various kinds of struggles South-South artists encounter in contemporary dance, is an almost-incantation, a parallel to the artistic double-refusals, marking the series of not this-not that, that line their claims of alterity, multiplicity, and justice. With every sequential term in this incantatory series, I hope to indicate yet another layer of infrastructural entanglement that holds hierarchies in place, and simultaneously argue for its dismantling. I animate this incantation through recountings and analyses of events, current and in the recent past, from the world of contemporary dance and art, to string together a rhizomatic map of difference-making. A recurrent struggle for South-South artists in contemporary dance is being seen through the lens of translation. I use the term “translation” here, less in the terms Desmond talks about it as being associated with “codification, commodification…and transferral,” and more as a mode of reception that understands difference primarily via conversion to a dominant system of established values (Desmond 2017, p. 29). One version of this can be seen in how we are applauded for our ability to “belong” within mainstream aesthetics, perhaps interpreting classical, mainstream dance forms perfectly, despite our difference, overcoming predictions of failure, and how such inclusion exemplifies contemporary break-throughs. An example of this might be celebrating Black excellence primarily or exclusively through Misty Copeland’s achievements as the first female African-American principal dancer in American Ballet Theater without acknowledging, at a similar level, the accomplishments of African-­ American artists within other genres of dance.4 Or without wondering, for instance, about signal differences between Black excellence in Dance Theater of Harlem and Copeland’s rise to principal dancer in a predominantly white ballet company, though both companies are known for their artistic merit. I will not invoke Anthony Appiah’s formulation of the “Naipaul fallacy” here—that Black/brown achievement must be seen through

56 

A. CHATTERJEA

European standards to be valuable—because we do not need to police borders and demand identity cards around dance forms, and because it is unproductive to essentialize ballet as “white.”5 But it is important to flag how mainstream forms associated with white legacies are often deployed as validators of accomplishment. And to notice, in parallel, the relative silence around Madame Mao’s “translation” of ballet vocabulary in the 1960s to create revolutionary operas for the people, such as The Red Detachment of Women, where ballet is reincarnated in opposition to the feudal structures that she saw as being enshrined in Peking Opera.6 And how such translation is almost entirely recuperated through the rhetoric of “freedom” and saviorism of the white ballet world in the 2009 film, Mao’s Last Dancer, based on the life of Chinese ballet dancer Li Cunxin. Another version of such translation might be in the acclaim we win when we adjust and repeat white canonical works in our own lexicon without intervening in the meaning-structure of the piece. This kind of apparently self-willed translation, most often mediated by post/colonial experiences, frequently reaffirms whiteness’ unchecked power to contain different kinds of bodies and semiotic structures. Examples include, for instance, Stravinsky’s 1918 libretto L’Histoire du Soldat, reimagined and choreographed by an ensemble of contemporary Indonesian choreographers in 2011, and then again by leading Javanese contemporary choreographer Martinus Miroto in 2013; and Kolkata-based choreographer Vikram Iyengar’s piece Crossings (2004), which explores the multiple facets of Lady Macbeth’s consciousness. Each instance, and there are many, is particular and impactful in its own way. But, in a field laboring under inequitable power relations and legacies of post-colonial hierarchies, such intercultural projects provoke questions about how we can navigate our way into a decolonized contemporaneity, dismantle canonical privilege, and make space for different stories. Such translations might be different from, for instance, South African choreographer Dada Masilo’s 2010 redux of Swan Lake, where balletic arabesques are juxtaposed with quick stepping feet and swinging arms, the dancers’ robust vocalizations fill the ensemble sections with the energy of township gatherings, and where queer Black love displaces the central heterosexual romance. Most translations, however, present the other side to the older projects of intercultural performance that dance scholar Royona Mitra describes as a “form of a premeditated and intellectual exercise undertaken from an outsider’s perspective” (2015, p. 14). Initiated from hegemonic cultural positions, these projects have typically created a “very particular kind of

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

57

mise en scène where diverse cultural traditions, texts, artefacts and people coexist within a predominantly Western dramaturgical framework” (Mitra 2015, p.  14). She critiques this kind of superficial contiguity which amounts to containment, and proposes instead a prioritizing of the noun interculturalism as a “conceptual, processual, embodied lived condition” driven by the particularities of our experience, over the adjective intercultural, which, in relation to performance, harkens back to the projects of Western theater-makers in the 1970s and 1980s (Mitra 2015, p. 15). In her study of the work of British contemporary choreographer Akram Khan, Mitra also argues that when artists from minoritized communities activate the multiple lines of their subject-positions to claim “simultaneous insider-outsider status,” they can interrupt typical power dynamics (2015, p. 14). Mitra analyzes Khan’s evolving articulation of his artistic philosophy and the body of his work to offer a reading of interculturalism that “becomes an interventionist aesthetic and an embodied, political and philosophical way of thinking and being” and a way of negotiating “multiple othernesses from the perspective of an other” (2015, p. 15). Yet, such endeavors are complex, and careful readings such as Mitra’s are invaluable in re-contextualizing interculturalism in contemporary dance and marking the operative shifts of difference. This is not always the case: sometimes projects end up, perhaps unintentionally, rehearsing grand moves of translation and inclusion. We might have questions, for instance, about the success of Thai contemporary choreographer Pichet Klunchun’s Nijinsky Siam (2010), where he reincarnates Nijinsky’s Danse Siamoise (1910).7 Klunchun navigates the complex history of the European encounters with classical Thai dance, specifically through records of the touring performances of the Nai But Mahin Dance Company in 1900, laced with Orientalizing fascination, and through archival research, to create this piece. In his program notes, he says: I say to Nijinsky: “You took what was not yours, but you made it yours.” I ask him: “Now let us come into each other’s sensation, right here on stage, so I can co-exist with you….” The more I work with Nijinsky’s choreography in Dance Siamoise, the more I have acknowledged and learned surprising facts from him. Nijinsky saw the beauty of Thai Classical Dance and developed that beauty to become his own perfect beauty. I believe that looking at Thai Classical Dance from the outsider’s point of view allowed him to see the side that was impossible to be seen for the insider. (Choreographer’s Note)

58 

A. CHATTERJEA

When Klunchun steps onstage in a red and gold costume, and ballet slippers—that recalls Nijinsky’s 1910 version—and works with detail and nuance through his movement investigation, there is no doubting the brilliance of his craft. Yet, there are questions about the affect of this work: Is this a dance of Klunchun speaking back to Nijinsky, and to a history of Western appropriation and Orientalism, even as it is a tribute to Nijinsky (and Fokine)? What does it mean to create a “contemporary” work which begins by rehearsing how one was imagined by the hegemonic Other? What do we learn about the placement of Thai Contemporary Dance in the shadow of the powerful Western ballet world when the New York Times titles a review of this work by Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop, “Walking in Nijinsky’s Footsteps” (2010)? We might think differently, for instance, about a project sponsored by the Goethe Institute in Cambodia in December 2010, where contemporary choreographers Eko Supriyanto (Indonesia) and Pichet Klunchun (Thailand) came together with neo-classical choreographer Sophiline Cheam Shapiro (Cambodia) in a four-day “work exchange.” Dance ethnographer Toni Shapiro-Phim witnessed the exchange and reflected on it as a valuable opportunity, not only for the choreographers, who seldom have the ability to engage in such focused dialogue with their counterparts in Asia, but also for their dancers, who are part of the next generation of contemporary dance artists from Asia. Shapiro-Phim reports that Franz Xavier Augustin of the Goethe Foundation thanked the artists in the closing ceremony by noting that this event, which brought together artists from across the region, was a departure from the organization’s typical programming, which comprised meetings between artists from Europe and Southeast Asia. Shapiro-Phim quotes from Augustin’s comments: “I was deeply impressed by these attempts to transform tradition. With your global perspectives on dance, all three of you are playing a leading role in the development of the new forms that are emerging in Southeast Asia” (2014). She also quotes extensively from the artists themselves, sharing their particular positionalities and working conditions, and what such an exchange meant for them. Perhaps then, despite the brokering of this important dialogue by a German organization reputed for its global cultural leadership, the artists were able to work in parallel ways and invest in a rare intra-Asian conversation about contemporary dance. Simultaneously, we might remain watchful and ask if the summit was the brainchild of the artists and merely supported by the Institute, about the investment of the

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

59

Goethe Institute in fostering “new” forms in Asia, and about the role of such cultural leadership in diplomatic relations. However, translations into registers of mainstream white recognizability happen not just via capitulations to sameness in the areas of thematic focus and narrative containment, but also through choreographic structure and in the details of dancing and articulation of movement. What I am tracing here is a slow and, to all external extents, self-willed, chiseling away of difference and adaptation to standards of beauty and line established by mainstream performance forms. This means that, cultural and aesthetic practices may be changed through unchecked desires to align with notions of structure and virtuosity unquestioningly marked as superior, so that non-Western, non-white practices enter contemporary dance through a kind of white-passing. At other times, in a global context characterized by social media-sponsored intense feedback loops, practices are translated during their circulation via transnational white contexts, and then re-infused back into their contexts of origin. In my travels, through conversations with artists in different parts of Asia and Africa, I recognize that contemporary dance in parts of the global South is strongly undergirded by the rhetoric of “freedom” and democracy associated with Western dance practices. In many of these communities, the possibility of contemporaneity arrives by Western soft diplomacy, delivered by embassies and “cultural exchange” programs. The promise of some kind of “individual expression” is encouraged through “fusion” styles, and typical tropes from Western dance aesthetics, such as pointed feet, and modern dance choreographic structures, become the markers of the “freedom” that artists were longing for. The incorporation of these hallmarks of Western concert dance often becomes signs of breaking from an “oppressive tradition.” This enhances and underscores how contemporary work crafted by emerging choreographers under the guidance of visiting artists from the US and Europe frequently receives more attention than local experimentation. Often, such work reminds us of compositional models emerging in the global North, swerving away from dance-making strategies that might emerge from the local context. For instance, postmodern task structures might be seen as replacing strategies of accumulating energy through repetition as a way to develop choreography. Another example: over the past two decades, tracking published images of South Asian dance companies, I have noticed a steadily increasing pattern where the traditionally flexed feet, or lengthened ankles (either suchipāda, needle-like foot position, or lolitapāda, relaxed foot position,

60 

A. CHATTERJEA

with toes hanging long) of Indian classical dance, are becoming, without commentary, the pointed feet of Western dance. This has neither been part of the lexicon of Indian dance, nor does it align with notions of line or beauty within the range of styles in that aesthetic. Strangely, the newly growing, but unmarked and almost naturalized, importation of pointed feet in Indian dance has not drawn critiques of violating “angashuddhi” from purists.8 My conversations with Toni Pierce-Sands, a renowned African-American colleague at the University of Minnesota celebrated for her rigorous teaching and transmission of the modern Horton technique, and her insistence on pointed feet as energetic line, helped me understand the widespread assumptions about balletic line being fundamental to all dance. My training in Indian classical dance had emphasized very different strategies for energizing the feet softly and remaining grounded and nimble simultaneously, ready to execute fast and complex rhythms. My colleague’s understanding of balletic pointed feet as a core quality of all good technique was confirmed strangely, during a trip to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 2012, where I was visiting with a Bharatanatyam class in the Temple of Fine Arts. I noticed that the teacher, Umesh Shetty, a South Asian man, demonstrated the unweighted foot as pointed and curled under, throughout footwork sequences. When I asked him about this very unusual use of the foot, he explained it as his interpretation of the kuncita pāda of Indian classical dance. Kuncita pāda literally means “curled foot,” and is typically interpreted as a “forced arch” position, where the heel of one foot is lifted, flexed down from the ball mound to press down on the ground with the toes, and the ankle lengthened. Later, he wondered aloud if he had come upon this idea of preferred line because of his ballet training. I understood more later, when talking to Weijun Loh, a Chinese Malaysian dancer specializing in Bharatanatyam, who asserted his belief that “ballet is the basis of all technique” (Loh, personal communication, April 22, 2012). These conversations that have bubbled up in my teaching and performing lives, in interaction with colleagues in different spheres of dance, have grown in frequency over the last several years. I see it in my classes, where students automatically fall back on pointed feet and the rounded port de bras arms of ballet in the midst of Chauk footwork, because they have internalized notions of “good” line, despite conversations about not translating different technical markers.9 I see it on social media videos of Chhau practitioners where the big circular leg movements with the lifted knee, morph, un-marked, into balletic attitudes.10 I have written elsewhere

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

61

about the deeply troubling trends in the yoga phenomenon in the age of late capitalism (Chatterjea 2017). Yoga is a significant part of training in contemporary dance across the world, yet this “inclusion” of difference has happened with a concomitant erasure of some of the material differences of that practice. I have urged vigilance to the “micropolitics of technique” in accomplishing certain movements over the ontology of the movement itself, as a way to understand cultural specificity (Chatterjea 2017, p. 292). I also see it in the call to break “form” and become “contemporary” by adopting pedestrian movements, which tends to lapse into Euro-American white urban norms presented as neutrality.11 The recurring motif of pointed feet, of choreographic methodologies such as pedestrian movement as interruption, across different forms of non-European dance, coupled with impassioned calls for respite from the heavy hand of “Tradition,” tyrannize my imagination. This unmarked penetration by the aesthetics and strategies of Euro-American dance-­ making routed through the rhetoric of artistic choice-making in contemporary dance makes me despair about viable spaces of difference across iterations of the global stage, as artists travel widely to perform and teach, or share their work digitally. I also recognize how intervention-via-­ individualism in late capitalism fabricates an aura of functional freedom and relegates difference to discrete personal choices. In this scenario, South-­South artists can become “contemporary” primarily through translation, mediated by markers identified by Euro/North leaders. Always late to the scene, we are perpetually in catch-up mode, having to insist on our own terms of rebellion. Tracking the multiple ways in which “difference” is translated in contemporary dance fills me with unquiet. Yet, charged by the power of many artists working in contemporary dance-making, I am energized to call for vigilance around the details of cultural specificity, to the “how” of movement and structuring of ideas. Such “micropolitics” become even more important as contemporary artists from different global communities investigate and deconstruct the formalized aesthetics of traditional practice in their context and choreograph dances from their particular daily experiences. We realize that some kinds of cultural difference, interwoven into a plethora of practices and a broad epistemic frame, are irreducible. Such intersectional differences are the particles of grounded worldviews and lodged in deep structures of cultural practices, and cannot be easily resolved into a relatable similarity, “translated,” or understood through a doctrine of individualism, as personal artistic choice only. Irresoluble

62 

A. CHATTERJEA

difference in embodiment—marked perhaps subtly, but unmistakably, in how a foot lifts off the floor—is the core of non-singular alterity, and locates bodies, ways of moving, choreographic tools, in urgent ways.12 I urge attention to such alterities as a recurring marker of the resistive South-­South contemporary dance-making I am writing about. Journeying through the interconnected constructions of radicalness, freedom, and access-through-translations, and pushing back repeatedly at the recurring power dynamic inherent in these triangulations, simultaneously inflames and enervates my nervous system. The heat from necessary contestation can be exhausting. I remind myself to walk slow: any participation within global stage circuitries, given previous histories, will demand vigilance and negotiation. Destabilizing centralized power systems that have consolidated through time and moving toward multi-centricity will never be a one-step process. Crucial preparation for this undertaking is examining the modes of belonging in contemporary dance and recognizing the nuances of power within visibility and inclusion, with specific attention to moments of border-crossings.

Of Entries in Ventriloquy Dancing with us, dancing for us. As hip irony and chic cross-cultural influences come to be established as primary modes of innovation and contemporary artmaking, Indegenous, Black, and brown modalities and histories are sometimes channeled into public stagings that seemingly honor them but, in the last analysis, betray that promise. This is often seen in projects that have overt intentions of critiquing white supremacy and other hegemonies, but ultimately re-center these very structures, prompting questions about how the cool irony of one perspective often shows up as the trauma of others. Sometimes these ventriloquies are easily recognizable as the old practice of cultural appropriation; sometimes they are savage, uncovering old wounds; sometimes they pass into acclaim, sheathed in beauty; often, they require Black, Indegenous, and brown emotional labor to address, and are bolstered by reverse charges of censorship. I remember seeing the Seán Curran Company perform his piece Dream’d in a Dream (2012) inspired by the company’s journey to Central Asia, supported by the State Department, in Northrop Auditorium in October 2015. In a pre-performance conversation, company representatives explained that Curran and his dancers had hoped to interact with dancers within the communities they visited in several Central Asian states

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

63

but were met with challenges. Consequently, Curran created the piece based on impressions of his interactions and in response to his collaborators, the Kyrgyz folk music ensemble, Ustatshakirt Plus. The piece is beautifully danced and the partnership with the electrifying music warrants applause, but the choreography presented startling moments. The collaboration ended up happening with a music, not dance, ensemble, yet Curran’s vocabulary incorporates hand gestures, a repeated head-­ nodding movement (often associated with stereotypes of “Asianness”), and open hands that flicker incessantly. Traditional Kyrgyz dance uses full arm and hand gestures, and head and neck gestures, but these movement elements are integrated into a specific aesthetic that combines flow and isolated flexions. In Curran’s choreography, despite the skill of the dancers, these gestures remain “quotations” only, and their placement in the midst of movement from American modern and postmodern dance, Irish step-dancing, and Western percussive forms positions them in excess. Because of the avowed intention of collaboration, a fascinating cross-­ cultural piece might have been possible in this case. But the violences of careless cultural association and stereotypical citation, mixed in with regular elements of Western concert dance, leaps, jumps, and partnering raise questions about Curran’s choices. I had come to the show appreciative of Curran’s original choreographic goal of creating a work based on the encounters of his journey, his attempt at exchange, and his partnership with the music ensemble, but I left wondering about the continuing legacy of Orientalism in contemporary dance. The ventriloquy in situations like this vitiates the potential of contemporary cross-cultural exchanges and reveals the power differentials among artists globally. A much harsher ventriloquy was highlighted in the objections raised by Palestinian-Americans to a piece created by acclaimed choreographer, Israeli-born Zvi Gotheiner, who now lives and works in New York City. In 2012, he premiered a piece entitled Dabke, which was described in program notes as “a contemporary dance inspired by this ancient Middle-­ Eastern folk dance. Arabic for ‘stomping the ground’” (Program Notes 2012). The program acknowledges that “Dabke is the national dance of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Palestine” but states that “Israelis have their own version” (Program Notes 2012). In his choreographer’s note, Gotheiner links the Israeli Dabke to the assertion of a strong Jewish identity, rooted to the land, invisibilizing the settler colonialist legacy in that equation.

64 

A. CHATTERJEA

A review for the New York Times by Alastair Macaulay was headlined as “The impulse at its purest, racing anew: The essence of Kibbutz, from Zvi Dance,” associating this contemporary choreography with some essential characteristics of the original dance, and of the Dabke with kibbutz community life (2013). Macaulay’s positive review described it as “thrilling in how it continually realizes the changing human impulse that prompts people to dance. We keep witnessing different reasons that people dance, different elements of humanity in dance” (2013). Indeed, Gotheiner takes the inspiration of the traditional Dabke and offers brilliant, abstract choreography. ZviDance’s diverse and talented artists dance beautifully, enlivening multiple rhythmic structures, and offering a culturally specific vocabulary inside of “contemporary dance.” But, in a context of violence and occupation, in light of a history when performances of the traditional Dabke have been banned several times in the Occupied West Bank by Israel, when the Palestinian dance company El Fanoun performs the Dabke primarily as a celebration of resistance and despite persecution, who has the right to invoke and dissolve national identities through abstract choreography in the name of all that is “human”?13 What does it mean to flatten the specific cultural resonances that are part of the Dabke’s strong connection to the soil on which it is danced, the choreographic structure with interlinked bodies, and the movement vocabulary of stepping strongly on the ground, into non-­ representational metaphors, in light of the steady seizure of Palestinian territories by Israeli settlers over 70 years? The Palestinian Dabke Dancers of NYC objected strongly to Gotheiner’s piece saying that his “cultural appropriation was (their) cultural loss…Our real problem is with the whitewashing of reality and ignoring the consequences it has on the people who live it” (Dabke Stomp 2013). Their recorded testimony, circulated on YouTube, ends with the statement “Our cultural heritage is not your natural resource…No cultural exchange without equality,” highlighting the uneven power relations at the heart of much cultural appropriation (Dabke Stomp 2013). Moreover, by entitling his piece Dabke, Gotheiner stages a direct line to this tradition, claims his right to re-create it in his imagination, and make it a celebration of his own creativity, without acknowledging the power play inherent in this move. Middle Eastern Studies scholar, Elke Kaschl, who has written extensively about how the Dabke became increasingly charged through the escalating conflict, argues that “Zionism not only functioned as an emancipatory movement of the European Jews, but simultaneously worked to establish new forms of

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

65

domination between Jewish immigrants/Israelis and the Indigenous Palestinian population that shaped the performance of both the Palestinian dabke and the Israeli debkah” (2003, p. xvii). I take issue with Kaschl’s casual mention of forms of domination “between” these two communities in the context of violent settler colonialism and her presentation of a parallel Israeli debkah practice, but her argument still points to the violence that laces contemporary dance in this context. How can we nuance our understanding of artistic freedom through considerations of genocide and cultural and political theft? The Palestinian Dabke dancers remind us that cultural specificity is encoded into the details of technique, and that contemporary dance’s dismissal of the practice of moving specifically is short-sighted. Moreover, they remind us that exchange—the act of giving and receiving in return— can happen between peoples on level ground. But the grounds on which people and communities meet are often rigged with inequities and contesting power relations. Yet, this discussion is not a call for xenophobic protectionisms or bio-deterministic lines of cultural ownership; rather, it is a provocation to investigate the relationship between concepts of freedom and innovation in contemporary dance, even as we celebrate global curiosities in a world where crossings are processed through new technologies of connection. The diverse societies in which we live ensure that influences from different cultural contexts are constantly impinging on our consciousness. How we hold these different, complex lines of force as we imagine and realize artistic projects is key to the transformative, healing experiences that creative processes can inaugurate. For some, unfortunately, working mindfully and interstitially through cultural influences translates as censorship. Ventriloquy: replacing the voice of another, who might be assumed to have no voice, with one’s own. Other, apparently more “benevolent” versions of this phenomenon recur in contemporary art and contemporary dance, where artists who are part of the upper echelon of recognition in the field, mark the sharpness of their critique, by “lending” their voice to others. And the boundaries between lending and usurping voice, between dancing with and dancing for, are rendered ever more slippery when the results are stolen and silenced voices, muffled footwork, in the name of creative brilliance. Yet, when the Indigenous, Black, and brown voices, who are already marginalized, refuse such ventriloquy, speak up, and protest, they are consequently charged with silencing and censoring mainstream organizations and elite artists.

66 

A. CHATTERJEA

In unknotting ventriloquy and censorship, and their attendant baggages of gaslighting and invisibilization of labor, let me work through two significant, parallel debates in the field of contemporary art and performance. In 2017, the Twin Cities experienced much turmoil over the Walker Art Center’s proposed installation of visual artist Sam Durant’s Scaffold, a two-story high structure made of gallows reminiscent of those used to execute the 38 Dakota men in 1862 in Mankato. Some years earlier, there had been much controversy over white South African performance artist Brett Bailey’s piece Exhibit B (2010). Here, in each of the 12 tableaux vivants, Black African performers demonstrate the brutality inflicted upon asylum seekers to the European Union and to subjects of colonial violence. This latter piece was hailed by the French newspaper Le Monde in 2013 as “a grand ceremony, between revelation and prayer” (as cited in Carvajal 2014). Community protests resulted in both these traveling pieces ultimately being shut down (Scaffold was dismantled after installation in Minneapolis, 2017; and Exhibit B was first canceled on opening night in London, 2014), but the labor of organizing against insult and pain to living subjects affected by the work is rarely accounted for. Moreover, in a deadly rhetorical twist, those who demand accountability find themselves positioned as voices of conservatism. The National Coalition Against Censorship issued a press release on June 9, 2017, on their website, condemning the Walker’s decision to destroy Scaffold, as setting “an ominous precedent” and sending “a chill over artists’—and other cultural institutions’—commitment to creating and exhibiting political, socially relevant work” (2017). Brett Bailey published an opinion piece in The Guardian in the aftermath of the shutdown of Exhibit B, on September 24, 2014, where his concluding questions hint at an oppressively silencing future: “Do any of us really want to live in a society in which expression is suppressed, banned, silenced, denied a platform? My work has been shut down today, whose will be closed down tomorrow?” (2014). Earlier, during its run at the Edinburgh Festival, The Guardian had published a set of responses by artists in the work, defending it against charges of racism. The title and subtitle for that op-ed: “Exhibit B: is the ‘human zoo’ racist? The performers respond: The show, which displays live black actors, has been targeted by protesters, but the actors say that it is a powerful depiction of racism past and present” (“Exhibit B” 2014). I searched, but did not find, analyses that reminded us that there can often be a substantial difference between the internal perspective of the work and its reception

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

67

by audiences, that art is not the same as biography, and that acts of performance are constituted by the circularity of performers and witnesses. I want to make a distinction here between the different kinds of witnessing I am suggesting here and the higher-positioned distance of the art critic whose supposedly impartial judgments might brush aside our visceral response to artistic events. I am privileging a dialectical understanding of the work, as experienced in our skin, our nerves, and our blood, and through a critical analysis of how the art functions in our world today. In such instances, Black, Indigenous, and brown bodies, histories, and modalities enter the space of mainstream contemporary art almost through the benevolence of celebrated artists who intend to critique white supremacy, but do not consider their own ventriloquy and usurpation of the voices of minoritized others. In contrast, there are others who enter the space as community, organizing, protesting, showing up, acting as an important force-field in correcting the direction of the field, but seldom acknowledged as such, and often drawing sharp criticism as censorship. Recall here my earlier meditation on freedom and Lisa Lowe’s warning against the hyper-individualization of this notion, often the purchase of the commodified diversity in the cultural markets of the global stage. To bolster my critique of the above interpretation of freedom of artistic choice and the confusion of accountability with censorship, I quote feminist Margo Okazawa-Rey who repeatedly braids the possibility of freedom with connection and solidarity. She encourages us to process freedom through difference, history, memory, erasure, violence, and through a “commitment and a practice…to work together to engage conflicts in very generative and creative ways” (Okazawa-Rey 2018, p. 29). Her words also resonate with the ways in which Indigenous, Black, and brown artists have organized and built collective power to resist: “The context of oppression necessarily means the appropriation of identity and agency and how to reclaim all of those things without having it be an individualist, self-absorbed kind of identity” (Okazawa-Rey 2018, p.  28). OkazawaRey’s words remind us that relationship is core to engaging difference, and that censorship is different from working in an artistic field delimited by concerns of justice and historic inequities. Without such core distinctions, we struggle with gaslighting. Gaslighting: second-guessing your intersectional experience and analysis of power relations as you are assailed by surrounding voices claiming harmlessness of the original intent/the possibility that you are contributing to the larger issues of censorship/the likelihood that this is simply a

68 

A. CHATTERJEA

difference of opinion, based on perspective. Such intentional manipulation of the context, frequent in the world of performance but rarely spoken about, has a spiraling descent. As we fail to hold separate threads of argument—the difference between critical analysis and personal opinion, between respectful dialogue and “political correctness,” between delimiting ourselves in the service of justice/holding silence in order to make space for different voices and censorship, between equity and equality— we witness the proliferation of reductionist arguments. And when we begin to question if indeed we are part of the larger oppressive forces shutting down important conversations, we begin to silence ourselves, or descend into that circle of negativity and self-doubt. Ultimately, questions about the effectiveness of irony and one-dimensional critique as effective tools for dismantling hierarchies in performance and art drop to the bottom. The fall-out from ventriloquism and gaslighting often necessitates that Black, Indigenous, and brown artists do double duty as artists and organizers as they enter the field of contemporary artmaking. We find that we must show up as cultural workers who name and protest the translations, violences, and erasures, and pry open the field so we might be able to create the kind of art we want to, even as we show up as artists. An important instance of this is the work taken on Twin Cities-based contemporary choreographer Rosy Simas, who is Haudenosaunee, Seneca, Heron Clan. Simas has again and again reminded the US and broader dance communities about the violence of cultural theft from and silencing of Native American communities. She has done this, not as a job, but as a self-­ imposed ethical and cultural imperative, something she could not not do. Her tireless advocacy has changed the field for the better, but it is vital to also recognize the labor and resources it has taken, and the impact on her well-being. In 2006, French Moroccan performance artist Latifa Laâbissi, who has won much acclaim in contemporary dance, created a full-length solo, SelfPortrait Camouflage. In this piece, often described as “highly personal” and “stark,” Laâbissi “uses tropes of caricature and the grotesque to conjure the silent aggressions and tensions at the heart of some immigrant experiences” (“Latifa Laâbissi” 2017). She performs mostly naked, wearing a faux-feathered headdress, imitating regalia held sacred by the Northern Plains Sioux Indians—the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Nations. Laâbissi was invited to bring this piece to New York, as part of the 2017 American Realness festival, and perform it at MoMA PS1. When Simas

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

69

saw the publicity images online, she was outraged and on December 12, 2016, she posted a public letter to the organizers and the artist on social media. Pointing to the appropriation of faux regalia by an artist who is not at all of Native origin, and the disregard for the sacred symbology of eagle feathers to Sioux Nations, she named the production an act of “white supremacy” (Simas 2016). In her Facebook post, she wrote: “In the eyes of the Native American community, this production is an aggressive act of hate speech, cultural appropriation, and sacrilege” (Simas 2016). Seeing Laâbissi’s images suggested to her “a mockery of who Native women are…on a stage reserved for whiteness excusing itself from responsibility because it is an international person of color performing this mockery…These images are traumatizing to Native people. Imagine what it triggers for Native women who have been raped and the families of those women who have been murdered and/or are still missing?” (Simas 2016). Simas’ directed and effective use of social media was largely responsible for generating critical attention to this issue, which might otherwise have gone unmarked as it had earlier, when the same piece had been presented by the Center for Performance Research in 2014. Her posts drove home how Native traditional practices have been appropriated by artists celebrated in the contemporary dance world, even when they are of color, even in projects aimed at critiquing hegemonic power, and the urgency of thinking about how Native presence is mediated in the arts. Importantly, Simas pushed through her outrage to suggest several steps that could be taken by the artist and the organizers to address this issue, including a public conversation with members of the Indigenous community. Her advocacy sparked a furious flurry of responses, and she took on the next task of organizing a group of Indigenous leaders from the Dakota community, raising money, and traveling to New York with them to facilitate a panel discussion on January 7, 2017. Prior to this, the organizers at PS1 had organized a Skype conversation between Simas and the artist. To Simas, it seemed that Laâbissi foregrounded her own struggles as a French Moroccan and thought that explaining that her work was critiquing European imperialism would be enough for the Native American community to understand the legitimacy of her use of the headdress. Somehow, it never occurred to Laâbissi that, even if a critique of Native genocide was implicit in her work, it was never appropriate to create yet another layer of “taking” by using a sacred symbol as a performative strategy of disjunction and/or irony.

70 

A. CHATTERJEA

While some meaningful exchanges, a greater awareness, and increased commitment to programming Native artists at fora such as American Realness resulted from these series of events, how do we account for the additional and uncompensated emotional, organizing, and physical labor that South-South artists often have to take on continually in order to make space for their work to be seen in their own terms? Simas found herself thrust into the fray of this difficult situation because she had no choice but to intervene in this ongoing erasure and appropriation of Native presence in contemporary performance. And despite all of the difficulty she endured, along with other members of the Native community, there was little direct response from Laâbissi except for the concession that the headdress was not worn, but placed at the downstage edge of the stage, in the New York performances. Sometime after the performance, an “Open Letter,” addressed to Simas, was published by Laâbissi on her website, where she apologizes, not for her use of the headdress but because Native communities “felt insulted by my work on the basis of a promotion photo, which could not convey the complexity and the questions at the heart of my work” (2017).14 Indeed, she goes on to justify her use of the regalia: The use of the indigenous headdress is not naïve; it is present in the piece as a primary symbol to evoke the importance of the people who underwent mass murders; it is not used as a grotesque costume; it is not intended as a tool to play on blasphemous exoticism, nor is it intended to legitimize a cause that I feel solidarity towards, but which is not historically mine. I in no way seek to embody a Native American in this piece and I believe that no spectator could mistake my performance for this. (Laâbissi 2017)

I have quoted from Laâbissi’s letter, directed at Simas, but never delivered to her, in order to demonstrate the complicated power relations that rent the field of contemporary dance. In this unfortunate situation, Laâbissi, a French contemporary dance artist of color, was invited to present this work in prestigious contemporary performance platforms in New York twice. The white curators of the two US festivals where she was invited—a context marked by the historic genocide of Native communities and ongoing settler colonialism on Native lands—thought nothing of her use of the headdress. The entire weight of instigating a critique fell on the shoulders of an independent Indigenous artist, who does not have institutional backing for the time and energy she spent on this.

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

71

Surplus Labor: The work South-South artists take on to reveal the veiled conceptual and infrastructural inequities inside the circuits of funding, curating, and producing contemporary dance. This kind of work extends the Marxist notion of surplus labor, where the intellectual and emotional labor of articulating a public analysis, and the additional physical labor of organizing a community of resistance, is beyond the labor of creating art, and uncompensated. Such labor is vital within the political economy of contemporary dance to support its claims of globality, radical politics, and institutional critique. Yet, its very necessity raises questions about the relationship of contemporary dance to the denunciation of capitalism and the avowal of community claimed by its Euro-American circuit, and the need for institutions to reflect on their implication in continuing silences. Space-Clearing: The effect of spending one’s own time and limited resources to build public critiques and civic dialogue about inequities in the field; the crucial, but generally uncompensated, labor of checking Whiteness/Eurocentrism’s unmarked privilege so that the justice-based work of racial/cultural others can be seen in their own terms. Space-­ clearing—so that we can make space for difference, equitably. I have dedicated this chapter to parsing out the complicated threads of power and privilege within contemporary dance, in order to clear space, such that we can begin to see how the layered significance of the South-South choreographies that are in fact transforming the field, in their own terms.

Unhiding Racial Markings Revealing the hidden circulations of race- and culture-based hierarchies is vital in space-making for South-South, non-singular, alterities (see note 12). I am thinking about the modality of what we refer to, among friends, as “white dance,” not to be reduced to dancing done by white bodies. Not all white artists do “white dance.” Some Indigenous, Black, and brown artists do “white dance.” The scare quotes around “white dance” are important, so we do not essentialize bodies and techniques to fit a carelessly deployed and narrowly understood category, nor simplify “culture” as discrete objects capable of commercial ownership. My writing about “white dance” is not on the same register as Zita Allen’s classic 1988 essay, “What is Black Dance?” which sought to break open the narrow category of “Black dance” that artists felt was being imposed on them. Differently, through this descriptor, I am trying to ask questions

72 

A. CHATTERJEA

of what it means to dance in a particular way, in terms of relationships to community, audience, and a broader philosophy about the place of art in life processes. My use of this term comes from observing the way in which whiteness functions in contemporary dance, as a privileged frame which offers access to power, visibility, and choice, which can touch everything without itself being touched or delimited. In my argumentation, “white dance” describes a particular way of inhabiting location in contemporary dance without ever having to mark its own cultural lineage. This modality of “white dance” always takes me by surprise because it always seems to be confident about its necessity in our world for its own sake, though it might manifest in several different aesthetic choices. Sometimes it might be seen in dance where formalism and virtuosity, variously imagined, are their own end; or where choreographic formations, gestures, and bodies seldom refer to materialities and force fields beyond themselves; or where experimentation and the abandon of abstract movement are their own end. Often, dancing is sought to be demystified and stripped down, so there is some dancing, some “pedestrian” movement, and movement in which skill, though indubitably present, is masked. Most often, such dancing and choreography, even as they impress me with lightness, beauty, and apparent daring in rule-breaking, leave me wondering: Why did everything dissolve away into the next thing without leaving behind any weight? What is the investment in the fiction that everything is equal? What is the residue of these interventions among different audiences? The crucial question is one about consequence, the emotional and material affect of artistic choice. Of course audiences interpret dances through their particularized viewing, shaped by their own life experiences. But surely the metaphoric viscerality of dancing invites us to connect, even if differently, to touch its core through our imagination and empathy? Surely, art that is different can still reach out and grab our imagination and confront us with new provocations? As I thought through all of the many dancings I have enjoyed, loved, and been shaken by, and appreciated the deep differences among them—aesthetic, cultural, thematic, formal—I arrived at the core of that irreducible difference that typically goes unmarked, but cleaves us apart. What I am naming as “white dance” typically passes, in its current incarnation, as simply “contemporary dance.” The name derives from the way whiteness functions in our daily lives, the privilege of mobility across spaces without being marked as culturally specific. Differently from

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

73

marginalized bodies riddled immediately with the opposing vectors of invisibility and hypervisibility, whiteness has access to choice-making without thinking through unavoidable complexities of representation, to experimentation as its own design, to choreography where visual “coolness” overrides political resonances, to weight or wish away the signification of gestures loaded with resonances to daily life events. The investment in the fiction that everything is equal: often these modalities of dancing-­ differently inhere in very different starting points, widely divergent understandings of what constitutes “freedom,” and of what it means to dance with risk and vulnerability. Moreover, white dance’s connection to artistic contemporaneity is not accidental: it follows the legacy of Western modernity, whose global domination positioned it pre-eminently to set the terms of its articulation. My efforts to mark “white dance” runs parallel to, but in a diametrically different direction from, “post-Black” dance, a concept that emerged in the visual arts in the late 1990s and then found its way into dance and performance art in the early 2000s. Somewhere in the course of that travel, the concept switched tracks, but still raises powerful questions about racialization in contemporary performance and how artistic and representative freedom might mean. However, if “post-Black art” began as a way to break out of narrow and older concepts of Blackness laboring under accumulated expectations, while still remaining rooted in historic Black experience, my move to constitute “white dance” is an effort at honing in, and revealing locations that pass as ubiquitous standard. A brief look at some of the key moments in that journey suggests the urgent differences between the typically unmarked space of whiteness and the ways in which Blackness has often been used to contain artistic expression within specifically marked genres, and how “post-Black” vitally distinguished itself from “post-race.” Thelma Golden, curator of the Harlem Museum, pushed the descriptor into high visibility when she used the term “post-Black” in the catalogue for the museum’s 2001 exhibition, Freestyle, to explain her curatorial practice of continuously encouraging and showcasing the work of young Black artists from a range of locations. She explained that she had in fact coined the term in discussion with her friend, the artist Glenn Ligon, in the late 1990s, as “a shorthand for a discourse that could fill volumes” about the tensions and cross-currents that brought together a range of contemporary artists under the umbrella of “black art” (Golden 2001, p. 14). She described the young, post-Civil Rights generation of artists in

74 

A. CHATTERJEA

search of a different vocabulary that could bear the complexity of their identifications with Blackness, as being “adamant about not being labeled ‘black’ artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness…. They are both post-Basquiat and post-Biggie. They embrace the dichotomies of high and low, inside and outside, tradition and innovation, with a great ease and facility” (Golden 2001, p. 14). In effect, Golden claimed, post-Black was “the new black” (2001, p. 15). This notion of  post-Black as a more expansive and mobile notion of Blackness provoked many simultaneously challenging and powerful dialogues about the continuing usefulness of identity statements as an introduction to an artist’s work. It also led to questions about whether Blackness is anchored in bodies marked as “Black” or whether it can be traced through artistic tendencies and modalities. In 2012, New  York-based postmodern choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones convened a curated series, Parallels in Black, in commemoration of a similar series he had curated in 1982 at Danspace Project. Houston-Jones described his inspiration for both series as investigations of Blackness, and the relationships between Black, experimental, and postmodern dance. In the original series, all the choreographers were Black, working through a range of dance-making approaches and aesthetics. In the 2012 reincarnation, one of the curators that Houston-Jones invited to shape the series, Dean Moss, pushed questions about the relationship of artistic expressions of Blackness to Black bodies, to an extreme. For his series, Moss invited Pedro Jiménez, Young Jean Lee, and Ann Liv Young, none of whom self-defined as “Black,” but whose work, in Moss’ estimation, was marked by Blackness. While the works presented by Lee and Jiménez referred to complex notions of identity, it was Young’s piece Sherry Show that sparked much debate. In blackface, an Afro wig, and a fuchsia dress, Young began her performance by telling the audience that she had been waiting her entire life for this night. Engaging the audience throughout her piece, she also told an audience member at some point, “Gay is like being black in some ways” and “I’m very white underneath” (as cited in Kourlas 2012). I understand Moss’ insistence that we understand race as a complex construction, as a phenomenon beyond epidermal essentialisms, and Blackness as a modality. But Blackness, unlike whiteness, has never gone unmarked. Long histories of racialization have gathered materiality and have ­coagulated around Black bodies in ways that reverberate through lives and experiences in powerful and inescapable ways. While Young’s

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

75

performance might have been about shocking audiences into dialogue, it seemed to be for the primary educational benefit of white audience members, and at the expense of Black subjects who were effectively sidelined. Is our cringing at her bold-faced simplification of complicated racialized histories meant to be the crux of a provocation? Does such drag expose the essentialisms that have encrusted themselves onto racialized bodies or does it in fact continue to usurp the voice of an “other” community with its particular history and experiences, in the name of blasting it open for discussion? If there is a freedom that was mobilized and a risk that was taken by Young, it was freedom and risk for whiteness, and its purchase was the re-­traumatization of Black and other communities of color. In this debate—a crucial one in contemporary artmaking—there is a tension and productive slippage between representative modalities and materialities, revealing the crucial relationship between Blackness and Black bodies and experiences, and the numerous possibilities of whiteness-­ in-­drag. It is one that recurs in contemporary art and dance. The 2014 Biennial of the Whitney Museum pushed the question into public debate again and accrued even greater personal and collective emotional friction. First of all, among the 103 artists and artist collectives curated to be part of this exhibition, only 9 were Black. It then turned out that one of these nine, Donelle Woolford, was in fact a fictional Black artist created by a white, male artist, Joe Scanlan, Professor of Art and Director of the Program in Visual Art at Princeton University. During the exhibition, Woolford’s character was embodied in performance works by two African-­ American artists, Jenn Kidwell and Abigail Ramsay. The museum website and catalogue did not list Scanlan, Kidwell, or Ramsay as artists. Scanlan justified his vision by referring to the long history of white writers creating Black characters, and imagined Woolford as a performance artist, born in Georgia in 1977, and living and working in New York. The theatricalization and performativity of race provoked powerful questions about artists who work imaginatively to understand otherness, about “authenticity,” and also about the role of institutions of contemporary art in making space for a range of voices (Lee 2014). Similar debates plagued the 2017 Biennial around Brooklyn-based white artist, Dana Schutz’s, painting, Open Casket, inspired by the murder of Emmet Till.15 These repeated stumbles reignite questions about race as epistemology, assumptions of representative freedom without investment in the labor and history of relationships, the pitfalls of conceptual understanding disanchored from corporeal materiality, and the limits of risk and

76 

A. CHATTERJEA

experimentation in contemporary artmaking. If this kind of investigation—where race is more conceptual than anchored in the materiality of lived experience—is a flashpoint in contemporary performance, then what might be the responsibility of artists, curators, and presenting organizations in facilitating conversations about different creative methodologies, different valences of “process”? What would we understand if we compared the registers of shock, risk, freedom of speech, and the right of all to experience art without constant reminders of painful histories? Is it an artist’s responsibility to consider communal well-being and to intentionally avoid triggers of historic trauma in their pursuit of risk in artmaking? Thinking through these debates is painful because these are not conflicts between an oppressive external force, a governmental executive body, for instance, and artists standing together, but rather internal betrayals, tearing apart the already marginalized worlds of contemporary art and dance. Returning to think about “white dance.” In fact, we do not stand on the same ground. Histories, circumstances of migration, political mappings, daily lived power relations, might arrive us at the same places sometimes, but our experiences are different. The consequences of such arrivals are different. Without the fiction of same ground, which might gesture toward a shared experiential matrix, “white dance” is primarily a way of choreographing and dancing that has unexamined whiteness, not necessarily white bodies, at center. I offer responses to works created by two celebrated American contemporary dance-makers below in an attempt to trace their genealogies. I saw contemporary choreographer Tere O’Connor’s piece Bleed at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in March 2015. This piece, beautifully constructed and danced, made me wonder again about the consequentiality of movement beyond itself. I will refer to two specific moments: first, a young dancer, lithe, blonde, and visibly gender non-binary, moving with grace and power through moments of balance and flow, often highlighted in the piece, lies down on the floor centerstage, a rectangular light box surrounding the prone body. Other dancers stop and look for a few seconds and then they all rise and start to dance again, the relationships among them unchanged by that moment. Next, the only two Black dancers on stage dance a short phrase together downstage left, most of the time turned in toward each other. The other dancers glance at them briefly, and then it all dissolves into the next sequence, and that moment of looking at these two bodies leave no imprint on what follows.

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

77

At a time when violences against marginalized communities are at the top of so many minds, I could not help but get stuck on these images. My mind hovered on the questions: what happens when a non-binary dancer amongst us, stops moving, lies down on the ground, their body highlighted by light lines on the floor? Is the reference to death escapable? How do we go on? What is the difference between looking at and actually seeing two Black bodies dancing together? Or does it not matter that they were Black? Did these people, their movements, not bleed, coloring the ground under our feet? Are we to believe that their presence never oozed out of the material limits of their bodies enough to create energy fields that changed the atmosphere that held us all? How do we receive the series of ebullient, balletic jumps that follow the moment of stillness when the dancer lays down on stage? Of the repeated motif of dancers coming face-to-face and linking limbs, when it dissolves without any necessary thematic accretion? What are we to understand that the first image I described seems to be one among other moments of lying on the floor, and that the second one is weighted equally with other duets, with no consequence of their difference? From program notes, I knew that O’Connor was exploring the “poetics of dance” and its “indeterminate qualities” (2015). Later, I read O’Connor’s blog post about the piece: “I work with a willfully convoluted palette where recognizable imagery and the anomalous enjoy equal value. I am not looking to shape hidden stories into dance but rather to understand how the sequencing of events accrues meaning in choreography” (2013). From this, I understood better the relationship between his aesthetic lineage and his choreographic impulse, and the space and considerations he had to make particular artistic choices. Differently, for many who work from locations in marginalization and alterity, dancing becomes a way to imprint life, to assert presence in the face of daily subjugations. For many such artists, the relationship to erasure is such that, even as they engage the ephemerality of dancing daily, they choose to invest in energetic touchings that continue to raise questions after their dancing bodies have moved on. Months later, I remember some of the beautiful moments from O’Connor’s choreography, the delightfully unpredictable culminations of movement phrases, the elegantly spun choreographic web that held together seemingly fragmented evolutions of different movement inspirations and constantly changing configurations of dancers in space. But, in juxtaposition with some of the other moments that I mentioned

78 

A. CHATTERJEA

previously, I begin to wonder about how such beauty travels through our world. I also watched Faye Driscoll’s 2014 piece Thank you for Coming: Attendance at the Walker Arts Center in 2016. Skillfully performed by six artists, this intriguing three-part piece, repeatedly changes the performance space and audience orientation, prompting us to think about states of entanglement and connection. Driscoll’s website describes the piece as building new bodies, new stories, and new ways of being around a constantly constructed and re-imagined group experience. Intimately staged in the round, Driscoll crafts a heightened reality of observation, invitation and interdependence. As the audience and performers increasingly find themselves becoming one, a beautiful and chaotic shared identity emerges, culminating in a dynamic ritual of action and transformation. (Driscoll, “Thank You for Coming,” 2014)

As I read about the piece, I was excited: how would this performance model new ways of being in society? The artists begin in the audience seats as audience members begin seated on the floor around the edges of the performance space, a slightly raised platform in the center of the stage. The piece begins with a song, where the performers ask for all of our attention, a witty and humorous substitute for staple announcements about putting our phones away. Dancers then make their way into the center of the audience and create continually moving sculptures through their stretched and interconnected limbs. The constantly morphing shapes of connectivity are highlighted through fleeting moments of stillness where we recognize the extended lines of balletic arabesques, for instance. This section comes to a close as Driscoll herself enters the space and begins to deconstruct the performance platform, reorganizing the space. Dancers begin to draw close to audience members, sometimes lying across their laps, asking for their help as they change into different clothes. This proposition of physical intimacy does not seem forced, perhaps because of the proximity at which audiences are set up from the very beginning and because of the “meta” frame of the piece, where audiences are also looked at, somewhat like the performers; where we are all drawn into the work as “co-creators”; and where the shifting-ness of the performance mode seems to promise a destabilization of performance conventions. There are several moments when audiences are inducted into the performance, as they hold props, move out of the way as dancers go in and out of the performance square, become part of the construction of a maypole, or respond to the call to join the maypole dance circle. There is also a section when audience’s names are

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

79

incorporated into a live sound-score, and for a moment we seem to believe that we can all share the same soundwave and be seen, in the performance space, as equal participants in a community. Thank you for Coming: Attendance is innovative in its dismantling of the typical structures that have contained Western concert dance sections, and in insisting on the postulation of community in and through performance. Yet, I returned with several questions about the “same ground” that the performance proposed, and which I could not experience. One of the sections, where dancers use extreme facial expressions coupled with a continuous series of freeze-frame moments in the choreography, reminded me of the different rules that remain in effect for different artists. Because the movements are not about flow, and they literally stop and start, and the gestural language is exaggerated, the use of the face becomes even more noticeable. This heightened use of the face and non-narrative expressivity remind me of the ways in which the facial mobility of the abhinaya tradition, and the otherwise presence of sincere emotion in performance in non-white contexts, have often been marked as “traditional,” self-­ referential, and therefore not part of “innovation” in contemporary performance. Driscoll’s work reminds me that this choreographic strategy can be recuperated if sheathed in the white modality of irony and nonchalant fracturing, to become part of “innovation.” My questions also concerned the repeated reconstruction of the space. Marginalized peoples know well the sleight of hand whereby institutional spaces, rules, expectations are changed up suddenly, generally to disadvantage or exclude them. So, when we experience the repeated reformulation of the space, depending on our histories and vantage points, we might respond with appreciation at the coolness of such bold strategies, or with hesitation, wondering what this might lead to. And in the end, I am left with questions about what is accomplished by the restructurings of the space. Is the intention to assure us that communities will regroup even when interrupted? (But are we following our internalized expectations of witnessing a performance when we regroup?) What does it mean to unsettle the space of performance? (For communities who grapple with destabilization daily, what does it mean to desire performance as a magical space that we hold together with imagination?) What did it mean to be invited to dance the maypole together? Personally, I was content to watch the performers navigate the strings and the space with so much clarity. I did not feel willing to join them. (Does the citation of my name in the score and my holding some of the props make me a co-creator? I felt

80 

A. CHATTERJEA

ornamental, and resentful for it.) Did the reshuffling of the space and of audiences shift our positionalities significantly and offer promise of change? The emphasis on co-creation often assumes that we share some ability to enter the space similarly. But in the end, I was left with the resounding realization that we enter with very different understandings of freedom and belonging as they operate within the realm of performance. Most of the time, only one of those viewpoints is upheld as “shared” experience. I searched but could not connect to the “shared identity” and “transformation” that the program notes promised: racial and cultural differences make for very different visions of shared space and safety. I have offered readings of performances that suggest a “white” modality of working, where aesthetic genealogies, working conditions, and certain artistic choices are chain-linked. While in each case, the work referred to and included a few “othered” bodies, it did not weave in an intersectional understanding of difference. Nor did it lace “risk” or improvisation with considerations of consequence for the hegemonized racial and cultural differences that locate us. I am not suggesting that every artist must grapple with these differences. It is our prerogative and our artistic choice to determine the ways in which we make work. And choices have ramifications and indicate location. I point to the unmarked whiteness in movement choices, choreographic structures, lighting preferences, and notions of excellence that pervades contemporary dance surreptitiously setting a “neutral” standard which the rest of us must follow. The absence of conversation around the cultural specificity of such work, about “white dance” generally, is a lacuna, which trips up “others,” repeatedly.

On Geolocating Whiteness and Particularities of Freedom “White dance” has built its own circuitry of affirmation and continuity within contemporary performance. I tasked myself with this naming and analysis because I want to excavate shorthand associations that eclipse a fuller understanding of what constitutes contemporaneity in dance-­ making. I also want to localize “contemporary dance” in its current formation even as I attempt to decenter the way it is immediately, but without acknowledgment, routed through whiteness. Given the historical forces that blaze contemporary dance into our lives, it is important to first recognize that in fact we do not stand on the same ground, and that inherent

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

81

preferences for “white dance” underscore contemporary dance’s location in power. Thereafter, we can resist this usurpation as we track different artistic lineages and journeys into radical innovation. I also charged myself with this difficult task because, increasingly, those of us working with “other” aesthetics are being described as creating “culturally specific” contemporary dance, and being asked, within grant applications and other platforms for resources, to demonstrate how we contemporize our traditional bases. This additional labor, with the concomitant lack of additional resources, contributes significantly to existing inequities in the contemporary dance world. Because, in fact, all artists work from cultural specificity and all artistic choices emerge from histories and contexts. If we can ask artists working in “white dance” to always articulate what their movement and creative lineages and socio-political contexts are, just like the rest of us, then we might be able to tilt conversations and resource-distribution toward greater equity and better grapple with the fertile crossings of difference. Naming the covert Euro/North/white legacies inside “contemporary dance” and the facile identification possible for some artists have also brought home to me the weight of having to repeatedly trace lines from existing practices and worldviews often marked as “tradition” to articulations of contemporaneity, and demonstrate their deconstruction and/or their hybrid reconstruction, in order to claim contemporaneity. And I have been reckoning with the impact of wrestling daily with inequitable namings where specificity is ascribed to non-white contemporary dance forms via geographical and/or ethno-national belonging—such as Contemporary African dance or Contemporary Indian dance—even as we chafe against such containment. I have continuously remembered Ngũgı ̃ wa Thiong’o’s analysis that in the standardization of History, “what is Western becomes universal and what is Third World becomes local” (1993, p. 25). I have urged attention to the “micropolitics” of movement to insist on the inevitable locatedness of all our bodies, especially when we are in the purportedly “neutral” realms of “deconstructed” or “pedestrian” movement and “experimental” structures. Attention to phenomenological detail in mapping different contemporary embodiments is the methodological mooring for my argument, further pinpointing the sedimented whiteness of apparently non-virtuosic movement in cosmopolitan contexts. My contention about “white dance” masquerading as generality, gesturing toward conditions that are vaguely “human” and code for a

82 

A. CHATTERJEA

“universal” quotidian corporeality in indistinct global metropolises, echoes dance scholar Rebecca Chaleff’s theorizing of the “racial biopolitics of radical ordinariness” in the American postmodern movement (2018, p. 73). This too is a history, repeating itself. Such markings of specificity might encourage us to re-examine Western experimental categories such as “pre-cultural” or “meta-cultural” performance, which, in the name of innovation, have reified Eurocentric privilege as the non-aligned arbiter that can contain and/or assess all difference. Finally, it has been my intention to make space so that difference can invigorate all kinds of embodiments of radical, experimental, and contemporary dance, and we are not forced to squeeze ourselves into given prisms evolved in contexts that are so different from ours: neither the cool, hip, ironic, non-story, non-dance model set up by Euro/North artists; nor the commitment to shock, notions of choreographic lightness marked through repeatedly shifting configurations, assumptions of equal standing-ness that characterize the work of so many of our American colleagues; nor the grandstanding performances of “Tradition” and “Heritage” on the global stage that we are often consigned to, in the service of Diversity, Nation, Multiculturalism, Culture, and Market. Like in this last series of negations, this chapter has been rife with contestation, and I have hoped that the critiques of translation, ventriloquy, gaslighting, surplus labor, and white-passing have heated up the grounds of alterity in contemporary dance significantly. I imagine that the heat generated by my incantatory argumentation has taken the form of controlled prairie burning used traditionally by Native communities in the American Midwest, where I now live and work. In this process, the methodical use of fire restores the fertility of the prairie and revitalizes the ground, even as it invokes fresh growth and keeps Native pollinators thriving. Perhaps, like this fire-based methodology of rejuvenation, my critique can generate heat that will, in turn, make space for difference and energize South-South artists who are working unwaveringly, despite the barriers put in their way, in creating their own pathways to radical, ground-­ breaking, contemporary dance.

Notes 1. Eric Garner, a 43-year old African-American man, was killed in Staten Island, on July 17, 2014, when a New York City police officer held him in an illegal chokehold for about 15–19  seconds while arresting him for a

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

83

minor offence. This unlawful death and the non-indictment of the police officer thereafter became yet another flashpoint for the Black Lives Matter movement. 2. Writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has spoken powerfully about “The Danger of a Single Story” in her July 2009 TED talk, where she reminds us that single stories create stereotypes and that cultural contexts are made up of many overlapping stories. https://www.ted.com/talks/ chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story. 3. Interestingly, the print title for this review, published on May 31, 2017, “Radiating Heart and Drumbeats, but Missing a Guiding Soul” continues to make the point (New York Times, C7 N). 4. On June 30, 2015, Black ballerina Misty Copeland made history by becoming the first African-American woman to be named a principal in the 75-year history of American Ballet Theatre. 5. This is a reference to Appiah’s critique of the post-colonial legacy that “requires us to show that African literature is worthy of study precisely (but only) because it is fundamentally the same as European literature” (1984, p. 146). 6. The Red Detachment of Women is a 1964 ballet, one of the Eight Model Operas to dominate the national stage in China during the years of the Cultural Revolution, part of the plan developed by Jiang Qing, wife of Chairman Mao Zedong. One of the extraordinary elements in this ballet is how the vocabulary showcases the tremendous strengths of ballerinas, as warriors with guns in their hands. This is quite different from the way in which ballet in the West has typically trended to conceal the strength of the ballerina through choreographies of flow and supported pas de deux. 7. Pichet Klunchun, originally trained as a classical Khon dancer, currently works as a contemporary dancer and choreographer based in Bangkok. Nijinsky Siam premiered at the Victoria Theater, during the Singapore Arts Festival, in May 2010. 8. Angashuddhi, typically understood as purity of line, is an important concept within Indian classical performance, and is typically distinguished from the “excess” that might accrue to “folk” performance. 9. Chauk, literally square, is the dominant body position in the Odissi classical dance style. Its embodiment typically emphasizes circularity within a squared position. The turned-out feet are placed underneath the shoulders and the arms held in straight lines from the shoulders to the elbows, then bent from the elbows to the fingertips. 10. The manifestation of Chhau, a martial art form from the eastern Indian states of Odisha, Jharkhand, and Paschim Banga, takes different forms depending on its site of origin. But all styles are characterized by high jumps, lifted-knee turns, and swift turns. However, the aesthetic, emerging

84 

A. CHATTERJEA

from the functionality of combining attack and defense, often while manipulating a sword and shield, is distinct from balletic articulations of line. 11. Here, conceptual dance’s lineage from American postmodern dance, and their shared emphasis on everyday movement as non-hierarchical, becomes important. Noting the “overwhelming whiteness” of the latter, Rebecca Chaleff has argued, similarly to me, that “the aesthetics of US American postmodern dance preserved and perpetuated the whiteness of high modernism by twisting the trope of racial exclusion from a focus on trained bodies to a focus on ordinary bodies. The ideological, corporeal, and affective formations of ordinariness afforded by the unmarked whiteness of postmodern artists in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s fundamentally excluded implicitly racialized “extraordinary” and “spectacular” bodies from their movement(s). Although the exclusion of people of color from the mainstream of postmodernism was likely not the intention of the white artists that populated this arena, the notable whiteness of this artistic movement nevertheless indicates the unconscious cultural and choreographic absorption of state racism normalized by the biopolitical regulation of bodies” (2018, p. 71). 12. I do not use the term singularity in the way Andre Lepecki deploys it to discuss the work of contemporary choreographers, as “essentially coextensive with strangeness,” pointing to dance’s “critical capacity to escape from forms, times, and procedures it is supposed to be confined to and identified with as aesthetic discipline” (2016, p.  6). I derive my use of singularity from my analysis of the field, to signal the reduction of difference to individuality. I push the notion of non-singular alterity to suggest the principle of difference, which might look different in different incarnations, but remains stubbornly outside of the reach of recuperation into modes of diversity. 13. Among other anecdotal evidence, this persecution is mentioned on the El-Funoun’s website under the section: “The Beginnings” (http://www. el-funoun.org/content/beginnings, accessed August 15, 2016). Also, Omar Barghouti, the company’s dance trainer and one of its choreographers, is cited in a New York Times interview, talking about the many challenges posed by the “occupation authorities”: “We were persecuted in many ways…There were travel bans, and some of our members were arrested and accused of belonging to a subversive dance company” (Kourlas 2005). In contrast, the following recording of Palestinian youth dancing the Dabke at the Gaza border as the “Great Dance of Return” on June 29, 2018, against the background of thick black plumes of smoke and scattering protesters, demonstrates the high stakes in this appropriation (https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcX4r-t_8fw, accessed November 3, 2018).

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

85

14. Currently, this letter exists only on Laâbissi’s company’s Facebook page, published on January 17, 2017 @Figure Project—Latifa Laâbissi. 15. Artist Parker Bright wore a t-shirt that said “Black Death Spectacle” and stood in quiet protest in front of Schutz’s painting when the exhibition opened. Artist and curator Hannah Black wrote an open letter to the Whitney curators and staff arguing that, even if Schutz’s intention was to “present white shame,” the painting exploited Black pain for profit. Black’s (2017) open letter can be found at https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/ hannah-blacks-letter-to-the-whitney-biennials-curators-dana-schutzpainting-must-go/6287. Another contextual reading can be found in Siddhartha Mitter’s article “After ‘Open Casket’: What Emmet Till Teaches Us Today,” in the Village Voice, March 12, 2018.

References Alfred, Gerald Taiaiake. 2005. Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom. Toronto: Broadview Press. Allen, Zita. 1988. What Is Black Dance? In Black Tradition in American Modern Dance, ed. Gerald E. Myers, 22–23. Durham: American Dance Festival. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1984. Strictures on Structures: The Prospects for a Structuralist Poetics of African Fiction. In Black Literature and Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr., 127–150. New York: Routledge. Bailey, Brett. 2014. Yes, Exhibit B Is Challenging—But I Never Sought to Alienate or Offend. The Guardian, September 2. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/24/exhibit-b-challenging-work-never-sought-alienateoffend-brett-bailey. Bhabha, Homi K. 1988. Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences. New Formations: The Commitment to Theory (5): 5–23. Black, Hannah. 2017, March 22. Open Letter. e-flux. [E-Journal Post]. https:// conversations.e-flux.com/t/hannah-blacks-letter-to-the-whitney-biennialscurators-dana-schutz-painting-must-go/6287. Brown, Adrienne Maree. 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chicago: AK Press. Carvajal, Doreen. 2014. On Display, and on a Hot Seat: ‘Exhibit B’ Mimics Colonial Human Zoos, Prompting Concerns of Racism in Europe. New York Times, November 26: C.1. Chaleff, Rebecca. 2018. Activating Whiteness: Racializing the Ordinary in US American Postmodern Dance. Dance Research Journal 50 (3): 71–84. Chatterjea, Ananya. 2017. Of Corporeal Rewritings, Translations, and the Politics of Difference in Dancing. In Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, ed. Rebekkah J. Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and Randy Martin, 283–302. New York: Oxford University Press.

86 

A. CHATTERJEA

Cvejić, Bojana. 2014. To End with Judgment by Way of Clarification. In Danse: An Anthology, ed. Noémie Solomon, 145–157. New York: Les Presses du Réel, Co-published with Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the US. ———. 2015. Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance and Performance. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Dabke Stomp. 2013, August 4. NYC Dabke Dancers Respond to ZviDance ‘Israeli Dabke.’ [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXSeNgsfzY. Accessed March 18, 2017. Desmond, Jane. 2017. Tracking the Political Economy of Dance. In Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, ed. Rebekah Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and Randy Martin, 29–51. New York: Oxford University Press. Driscoll, Faye. 2014. Thank You for Coming: Attendance. Faye Driscoll. http:// fayedriscoll.com/projects/thank-you-for-coming-attendance/. Accessed January 14, 2017. “Exhibit B: Is the ‘Human Zoo’ Racist? The Performers Respond.” 2014. The Guardian, September 5. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/ sep/05/exhibit-b-is-the-human-zoo-racist-the-performers-respond. Accessed March 22, 2018. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2008. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Oxon: Routledge. Golden, Thelma with Hamza Walker. 2001. Introduction. Freestyle, Museum Catalogue. New York: Studio Museum in Harlem. Imada, Adria. 2012. Aloha America: Hula Circuits Through the US. Durham: Duke University Press. Kaschl, Elke. 2003. Dance and Authenticity in Israel and Palestine: Performing the Nation. Leiden: Brill. Klunchun, Pichet. 2010. Nijinsky Siam: Choreographer’s Note. [Company Website]. PK Dance Company. http://pkdancecompany.com/WorkPages/ Nijinsky%20Siam.html. Accessed July 5, 2017. Kolesnikov-Jessop, Sonia. 2010. Walking in Nijinsky’s Footsteps. New York Times, June 23. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/24/arts/24iht-jessop.html. Kourlas, Gia. 2005. Palestinian Dreaming: Resistance and Joy. New York Times, December 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/02/arts/dance/palestinian-dreaming-resistance-and-joy.html. ———. 2012. Streaker with Purpose: Pondering Black Identity. New York Times, February 20. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/arts/dance/deanmoss-program-part-of-parallels-at-danspace-project.html. ———. 2017. DanceAfrica Excels with Tradition. Why Go Beyond? New York Times, May 30. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/30/arts/dance/ danceafrica-review-bam.html?_r=0.

2  STATES OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE 

87

Kunst, Bojana. 2014. Subversion of the Dancing Body: Autonomy on Display. In Danse: An Anthology, ed. Noémie Solomon, 55–67. New York: Les Presses du Réel, co-published with Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the US. Kunstenfestivaldesarts. 2016, May 17. Natten / Mårten Spångberg’s / Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2016. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=q8Kp73LEKZU. Accessed March 15, 2017. Laâbissi, Latifa. 2017, January 17. OPEN LETTER // answer from Latifa Laâbissi to Rosy Simas. [Facebook Post]. https://www.facebook.com/ FigureProjectLatifaLaabissi/posts/1201593006622352. Accessed March 27, 2017. “Latifa Laâbissi: Self Portrait Camouflage.” 2017. [Web Content]. Publicity on the Website of MoMa. https://www.moma.org/calendar/ events/2491?locale=en. Accessed March 27, 2017. Lee, Felicia R. 2014. Racially Themed Work Stirs Conflict at Whitney Biennial. New York Times, March 16. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/arts/ design/racially-themed-work-stirs-conflict-at-whitney-biennial.html. Lepecki, André. 2016. Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance. London & New York: Routledge. Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press. Macaulay, Alastair. 2013. The Impulse at Its Purest, Racing Anew: The Essence of Kibbutz, from Zvi Dance at Musa! New York Times, June 19: C8 NK. Mitra, Royona. 2015. Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mitter, Siddhartha. 2018. After ‘Open Casket’: What Emmet Till Teaches Us Today. Village Voice, March 12. https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/03/12/ after-open-casket-what-emmett-till-teaches-us-today/. National Coalition Against Censorship. 2017, June 9. The Walker Art Center’s Decision to Destroy Sam Durant’s Installation Raises Concerns About Responses to Critique and Controversy. [Web Post]. http://ncac.org/blog/ ncac-criticizes-walker-art-centers-decision-to-destroy-sam-durants-installation. Accessed December 2, 2017. O’Connor, Tere. 2013. Artist’s Notes. Tere O’Connor Dance. http://bleedtereoconnor.org/artists-notes/. Accessed March 21, 2015. ———. 2015. Program Notes. Minneapolis: Walker Arts Center. Okazawa-Rey, Margo. 2018. No Freedom Without Connection: Envisioning Sustainable Feminist Solidarities. In Feminist Freedom Warriors: Genealogies, Justice, Politics, and Hope, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Linda E. Carty, 15–33. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Rainer, Yvonne. 2006. Feelings are Facts: A Life. Cambridge: MIT Press. Sakata, Hiromi Lorraine. 1997. Spiritual Music and Dance in Pakistan. Ethnofoor 10 (1/2): 165–173.

88 

A. CHATTERJEA

Scott, Jane (Producer), and Bruce Beresford (Director). 2009. Mao’s Last Dancer. [Motion Picture]. Australia: Great Scott Productions Pty. Ltd. Shapiro-Phim, Toni. 2014. Making Dance in Response to Contemporary Realities: A Work Exchange Between Choreographers from Cambodia, Indonesia, and Thailand. [Blogpost on the Goethe Institute’s Website]. http://www.goethe. de/ins/id/lp/prj/tco/arc/ref/en12939951.htm. Accessed July 7, 2017. Simas, Rosy. 2016, December 12. Dear MoMA PS1, American Realness, and Latifa Laâbissi. [Facebook Post]. https://www.facebook.com/rosysimas/ posts/10153911139910213. Accessed March 27, 2017. Spångberg, Mårten. 2014. A Dance That Is. In Danse: An Anthology, ed. Noémie Solomon, 203–207. New  York: Les Presses du Réel, Co-published with Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the US. Thiong’o, Ngũgı ̃ wa. 1993. Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. Portsmouth: Heinemann. Wells, Charmian. 2017, June 9. Strong and Wrong: On Ignorance, and Modes of White Spectatorship in Dance Criticism. [Blogpost]. Critical Correspondence. https://movementresearch.org/publications/critical-correspondence/ strong-and-wrong-on-ignorance-and-modes-of-white-spectatorship-in-dancecriticism. Accessed August 10, 2017. “ZviDance: Dabke.” 2012. Program Notes. Published on the Website of New York Live Arts, New  York City. https://newyorklivearts.org/event/dabke/. Accessed September 26, 2016.

CHAPTER 3

Choreographies of Difference-Making

Dancing/Meaning-Making Moving forward from the controlled prairie burn of the previous chapter, I turn my gaze toward the dance field from a different perspective in this chapter: What choreographic blueprints are germinating through the work of South-South artists, in resistance to inequities and as affirmation of their values? Here, I want to reimagine the fire and heat of my earlier analysis and deploy them as shaping forces, much as in welding. I take courage in the words of feminist M.  Jacqui Alexander, who reminds us that “the difference between those of us who fear fire and the ‘welder’ is her knowledge that she has to become intimate with this danger zone in order to re-create, to create anew; to enter the fire not figuratively, or metaphorically, but actually, that is, in flesh and blood” (2005, p. 266). Admittedly, as a South Asian woman, the notion of a full-bodied entry into fire is a difficult concept, but I am choosing to grapple with the historic and cultural weight of this image, and look toward its many different connotations.1 This chapter, fueled by the ideological and discursive frames that support radically different imaginations of contemporary dance, asks: What questions can prepare us to understand the aesthetic codes in the work of justice-oriented South-South artists? What are some of the markers of the political-aesthetic difference signaled by these choreographies? What are some of the contextual contradictions that they must navigate? © The Author(s) 2020 A. Chatterjea, Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance, New World Choreographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43912-5_3

89

90 

A. CHATTERJEA

The creative processes of the South-South artists I write about are complex, rent with paradoxes, and demand nimble yet grounded maneuvers. They are generative of heat, sparked through innovative practices of dance-making and dancing that promise paradigm shifts in cultural production. In dislodging and bending the disproportionate expectations and weighted stereotypes that seek to hem them in from multiple vantage points, they literally reshape and weld the field of contemporary dance. As I work through some critical junctures of theoretical arguments, socio-­ political conundrums, and current debates that tilt the reading of their choreographies, I will point out how these sometimes articulate the other side of some paradigms discussed in the previous chapter. For instance, in this chapter I look at examples of organizing labor that are the reverse of the surplus labor I discussed in the previous chapter, labor as affirmation versus labor as addressing injustices. I deploy this “other-side” mode of argumentation specifically to suggest that so many of the conundrums that trouble contemporary dance are understood from entirely different perspectives by different communities and framed by historically divergent politics. In laying the foundation for my South-South framework in my introductory chapter, I argued that this is a political category, not an epidermal one. One becomes an artist along this axis through processes of walking through the “fire” of difficult negotiations, learning to discern power relations embedded in apparent neutrality and even benevolence, critically analyze received histories, decipher the cultural-political encodings of beauty, power, and meaning-making, and make considered artistic choices. I have sought to become an audience for a different contemporary dance by tracking what I desired and found pleasurable and inspiring to witness, investigating the relationship between aesthetic responses and cultural-­ political training, practicing fluency in difference, remaining vigilant to the impact of choreographies, and mindfully working through the discursive possibilities of dance. I begin this section, thus, with a meditation on becoming, in the sense of a transformation instigated by intention, connected to practices of signification and meaning-making. I grew into a belief in dancing’s fluid transformations by watching abhinaya performances by my guru, Sanjukta Panigrahi, celebrated exponent of the Odissi style of classical dance. Of the many pieces that were part of her repertoire, I was most fascinated by her dancing to the words of Salabeg, the 17th century Odia Muslim poet and devotee of Hindu deity, Lord Jagannath: “Ahe Nilo Saila.”2 Salabeg’s poetry articulates his troubled

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

91

desire to find closeness with Lord Jagannath, who he imagines as a blue-­ black mountain, and describes through many stories, some mythological, some from the natural world. Every time I watched her perform it, I would try to catch the moment when I would forget the logistics that it was my Nani dancing ekaharya abhinaya and instead get wrapped up in the dance-story itself.3 But I inevitably failed. As she spun around on the floor or took a series of fast turning steps, changing her subject-position within the narrative, her body seemed to change into every incarnation almost imperceptibly: becoming the raging elephant crushing a lotus under its feet; becoming Draupadi, dragged into the court, resisting, and then her body contracting in humiliation; becoming Prahlad, a young boy, steadfast in his faith under the wrathful opposition of his father, his breathing steady and calm.4 Despite my critique of religion and the history of violent conflict between Hindu and Muslim communities, my guru’s deeply spiritual embodiment of Salabeg’s prayer and of his metaphoric imagining of belonging in a world that did not accept him, her performance of sharply contrasting emotional landscapes that carried us through different being states, caught me off-guard each time. There was no change of costume or makeup, no scenographic shift, to accompany her kinesthetic and dynamic shifts within the piece. I had to believe in the space that performance allows to “become,” and in the technique and intention of that transformation that was embedded in her dancing. This complicated piece, more than other pieces in the repertoire, with its tense juxtapositions of religious (Muslim) and linguistic-cultural (Odia) identity, which refused to allow for single-narrative interpretations, also reminded me every time about the power of material and metaphoric articulations of interwoven desire, rejection, belonging, unbelonging, spirituality, pain, and heart-­opening. Today, amidst the horror of the Indian state’s violent pogrom against Muslim communities, this piece signifies differently and has become hard to relate to, but I must acknowledge both the power of Salabeg’s poetry and my Nani’s ability to find metamorphosis through dance. My subsequent journey away from the world of Odissi opened up to me many other contexts in which performance was a site for “becoming,” particularly for artists resisting the violences of racial, gendered, cultural, class, caste, and sexual oppression. I have also witnessed this in workshops, rehearsals, and contemporary stage and social performances, and every time, the transformation was wrested through choreography and intentional performance, supported by design elements, but seldom solely

92 

A. CHATTERJEA

through the intervention of spectacular, external, production elements. I mean to emphasize the internal, danced, labor of invoking and manifesting change, and of creating access to a shared imaginary, variously experienced. These processes of becoming take root in the materiality of being, in the particular location of identity, but are seldom essentialist. Rather, they are defiant in performing that identity as limitless and aspirational. I follow performance scholar E. Patrick Johnson as he works through artist and activist Marlon Riggs’ 1995 film Black Is … Black Ain’t, to refuse an oppositional relationship between being and becoming and arrive instead at a dialectical and prismatic relationship between them. Building on, but qualifying, Paul Gilroy’s association of being with “the transhistorical and transcendent subject” and becoming with “historical situatedness and contingency,” Johnson suggests that both being and becoming are “sites of performance and performativity” where homogeneous formations are discarded to make space for discursively and historically located subjectivities (2010, p.  16). It is this negotiation between being and becoming, marking embodied specificity yet refusing a linear narrative of singularity, seeking transcendence but rejecting existentialist abstraction with its possible side-effects of universalism, that energizes the contemporary performances that I write about. In a similar way, performance theorist Alison Reed talks about ritual/ jazz-based contemporary theater writer and artist, Sharon Bridgforth’s project love conjure/blues, as bringing together complex, and sometimes opposed, phenomena, signaling “dynamic forms of social life even, and especially, given conditions of abjection and exclusion from the violence of hegemonic ways of being and knowing—a violence into which assimilation equals not only certain protections, but also sacrifice” (2015, p. 123). Reed’s analysis demonstrates how, in Bridgforth’s work, the concrete space of performance makes room to imagine a world where racial, gendered, and sexual justice is possible, where it is possible to arrive at being in one’s own terms, particularly for marginalized subjects. In such shuttlings between being and becoming, transformation becomes material. Reed closes with an affirmation about the “cultural knowledge transmitted in the break, where shared histories of struggle call new collectives into being,” a testament to the way love conjure/blues, a radical, contemporary performance, insists on bending public understandings of Black femme bodies and different choreographies of signification (2015, p. 123). Processes of becoming and the negotiations of being and becoming are part of traditional and contemporary dance and performance in many

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

93

communities. They are connected to the production of meaning, imagining performance as epistemology, a mode of coming to know, and know differently, the world, self, and processes of relationing. This is distinct from the way in which performance might be theorized primarily as ontology, with no necessary condition of relationship, or of referring to anything beyond its own existence. The work of imaginative re-worlding and becoming is described beautifully by Black science fiction writers and organizers Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown on the website describing their book project, Octavia’s Brood: “Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in an exercise of speculative fiction” (“The Project”).5 They describe the science fiction stories in their anthology, all of which draw from real life social justice movements, as “visionary fiction,” pulling from “real life experience, inequalities and movement building to create innovative ways of understanding the world around us, paint visions of new worlds that could be, and teach us new ways of interacting with one another” (Brown and Imarisha n.d., “The Project”). This recasting of innovation, in the service of just-world-making, and connecting different temporal flows, traversing history and futurity, resonates through the kind of contemporary dance that inspires this book. I want to indicate a difference between such creative projects of visioning a futurity untrammeled by historic and systemic violences, and equipped with collective strategies for addressing them should they recur, what I am describing as just-world-making, and the kind of “place-­ making” where many contemporary performance projects have come to be critiqued as neo-colonial ventures. Even though originally intended to yield more equitable distributions of resources in neighborhoods, many place-making projects have ended up connecting to place as “property” to “be developed” through artist involvement, ultimately driving up property prices, gentrifying, and driving out the very communities the project might have been intended to benefit. In many such projects, the “cool” factor of place-making, nuanced explorations of access and equity, and questions about the particular creative processes of artists from marginalized communities are set at opposing angles to each other. This model often asks for a submerging of self in existing cultural frames of artistry-­ inside-­ capitalism, where creative success must yield monetizable and quantitative data. In contrast, the contemporary dances I am writing about are marked by mindful engagement with the local ecologies and the multiple scapes in

94 

A. CHATTERJEA

which they are embedded via equitable practices of intentional world-­ making. This sparks different processes of innovation and possibilities of transformation, reimagining contemporaneity as an articulation of justice. For some, like Germaine Acogny, the establishment of a space for contemporary dance in the small fishing village of Toubab Dialaw, in keeping with the ecosystem of that area, while nurturing integral relationships with and creating employment for the surrounding community, and the development of a movement vocabulary and pedagogy that are decidedly Africanist, reframes and enlarges what contemporary dance can be. For others, like Rulan Tangen, the centering of Indigenous values in creating a land-based movement aesthetic and modes of cultural transmission and reimagining access for communities are contemporaneous innovations. For Nora Chipaumire, the possibilities of contemporary dance lie in her retooling of choreographic strategies and creation of dances that intervene in historic power hierarchies and foreground African subjects and sensibilities. For Sardono Kusumo, interrupting state narratives of Tradition with a choreographic palette that brings together a rich mélange of influences from far-flung parts of the Indonesian archipelago and long-term relationships with tribal and rural communities, opens the way into contemporary dance. Just these few instances indicate the wide range of approaches that South-South artists bring to contemporary reimaginings of their world, yet they share an activation of becoming through dancing, moving toward an-other horizon from the particularity of their cultural location. Because of this, we see, in the choreographies of several South-South artists, an awareness of dancing’s role in healing from historic trauma. This might not be articulated as a conscious methodology, but healing is often inherent in the work, thematically, aesthetically, and energetically, and the work often produces healing, in the artists and among audiences. The body is the mode of spiritual/political/aesthetic crossings here and, as invoked by Jacqui Alexander, epistemological ground, the site where “knowledge comes to be embodied and made manifest through flesh, an embodiment of Spirit” (2005, p. 15). Recognizing such layered signification of embodied acts allows us to connect to healing possibilities in choreographic intention, and the sacred, life-affirming dimension of dancing bodies. Alexander also reminds us of the expansive domain of the Sacred, which always weaves individuals into a larger cosmology: “Taking the Sacred seriously would mean coming to wrestle with the dialectic of permanent impermanence” (2005, p.  327). We could argue that the

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

95

workings of dancing bodies—held in memory, labor, and sweat, but refusing inscriptions in alienable materiality—are always already caught in this “dialectic of permanent impermanence,” but it becomes particularly poignant for these choreographers working along a South-South axis, imagining justice, outside of the domain of dominant aesthetics. Because their work—pushing back against multiple long-standing hierarchies, rewriting oppressive histories, even as they are creating their own narratives— requires repeated efforts, this work is processual in perpetuity, circular in coming into being and in becoming undone. I understand Alexander’s paradigm very differently from the way dance’s essential ephemerality has been typically talked about in West-­ located Dance Studies as frustrating or mystical.6 Inspired by Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor’s notion of “survivance” (2008) in Native communities as active presencing inherently linked to liberation from colonial containment, I push back against the theorizing of dance’s uniform disappearance and suggest that each danced act along the South-South axis is historically significant and vibrates on multiple dimensions.7 Somewhere between the materiality of labor and the particular nature of liveness, dancing’s presence, mediated by the complex histories of decolonizing South-South artist communities, becomes entangled in memory, spirit, and cellular resonance. Here, the permanence of impermanence also affirms the individual’s relationship to the larger environment, of self to community, of human body to the body of earth, of present to history, activating connectivities across the nodes of experience that anchor creative processes. I am reminded of Acogny’s image of embracing the baobab tree in teaching about the shape the arms must hold; Tangen’s references to the “three sisters” agricultural model of Native American communities to develop her movement improvisations; Chipaumire’s placing of a “Black Power fist” between the feet to find placement in her Nhaka movement practice; Kusumo’s focus on vibration and breath as the core of his dance; Simas’ diligent space-making for conversations that center Native ecosystemic spiritualities.8 Here, dance is expansive, claiming materiality and embodiment as the substratum of becoming and presencing, even as it escapes consolidation. In writing about the crossings of memory, imagination, yearning, and ancestral connection, which stoke the fiery pathway of spiritual work, Alexander reminds of the urgency of embodied creative practices which weave together vision and practice. In identifying a core difference in South-South choreographies, I echo her words as she argues that

96 

A. CHATTERJEA

reversing the inherited hierarchical relationship between theory and practice “engages us at the deepest, most spiritual level of meaning” (Alexander 2005, p.  279). To claim this relationship between intentional choreographic acts, embodied knowledges, and spiritual meaning-making is to deliberately veer away from the official structures of organized religion and expectations of “safe” Traditions that are often imposed upon and stymie the choreographic journeys of South-South artists. It is also immediately allied with a politics of knowledge production from inside and under. We might recall feminist poet Audre Lorde who rejected the dichotomization of the spiritual, the political, and the erotic, and asserted that art-making from a multi-centered location is inevitably agential, integrally connected to liberation.9 This is mirrored in the lens through which I read these South-South contemporary choreographies, deliberately filtering movement analysis through intersectional readings of location and the embodied politics and spirit of their work. I ask: How do these dances move through our world? Are they refuge? Resistance? Desire? Re-history? An erotics of connection? I also mark aesthetic specificities, layered interpretive possibilities, and multiple significations at work. This discussion brings us to one of the central divergences between the political orientations of these artists and those of European conceptual dance artists. To recall, the latter often align themselves with anti-capitalist critiques of dance, preferring minimalism and apparent reduced virtuosity, and abstract choreographies of ideas as their own end. Dance scholar André Lepecki writes about the ways in which some of these choreographers refuse the notion of dance as constant agitation, or flow, and investigate modernity’s ontological drive toward motion. Referring to a series of performances, he theorizes their “dramaturgies of stillness” as a response to the “exhaustion of the notion of dance as a pure display of uninterrupted movement” (Lepecki 2006, pp. 16, 7). This leads to his commentary about dance’s constitutional ephemerality and the inevitable anxiety about the loss associated with that, and his critique of the dancing body’s subjection to linear constructions of time. Ultimately Lepecki theorizes stillness and the choreography of ideas as an urgent resistant choreographic strategy in contemporary European dance. Differently, many South-South artists, even as they deconstruct notions of packageable virtuosity, might be seen as insisting on the materiality of dancing as spiritual praxis, and as methodological imperative for radical projects of rewriting old scripts and accessing untextualized cultural

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

97

memories wired into cellular pathways. Having experienced modernity as violent rupture, dancing bodies in these contexts often seek motion as an assertion of life-force that was sought to be stilled. Here, motion, presence, breath, as much as stillness, become strategies to highlight the body as front-line resistance: movement channels memory, creating possibilities of reviving subterranean histories, interwoven with imagined narratives; rhythm becomes one strategy to expand, contract, and layer temporalities, defying the predictable organization of calendar and clock time. Moreover, the ontology of stillness rings differently in communities that are exhausted from resisting injustices daily but can seldom afford to stop. Dancing becomes, then, a methodology of claiming space, subjectivity, beauty, empowerment, history, healing, of knowing again, and becoming. This kind of danced becoming is not so much individuated, solo acts of virtuosity, as continuous acts of inviting community in. This is why the following chapters on Germaine Acogny and Rulan Tangen are focused on the evolution of “technique” and pedagogy: different entries into ways of moving, from Africanist and Indigenous epistemologies, invite in many others from their communities, causing significant shifts in the citizenship of contemporary dance. In different ways, but with similar intentions, all of the artists in this book have built critical communities through their work, mentored emerging artists, and fostered urgent dialogues about who can access contemporary dance and its attendant quality of experimentation. For them, these are methodologies of obfuscating capitalism’s mode of reinstalling class barriers and scrambling access, and of shifting the constituencies of the formalized contemporary dance world. It may be argued that dancing, in all its forms, builds community. In his book Ungoverning Dance, dance scholar Ramsay Burt has eloquently argued that, despite vying for financial and other opportunities, European professional dancers participate in a “commons”: although professional dance artists earn their living through the practice of their art, they share knowledge about dance techniques and approaches to movement research and about improvisation and choreographic processes … although there are costs and wages in the contemporary dance sector, a common pool of resources is shared through respect and through recognition of mutual benefits. It is in this way that the contemporary dance sector can be seen as a knowledge commons. (Burt 2017, pp. 234–235)

98 

A. CHATTERJEA

This argument is key to his idea of “ungoverning,” which unfolds throughout his book, as a process of moving out from authoritarian, capitalist, and hierarchical models of making and presenting dance. In principle, I value the commons inaugurated by dancing’s primarily non-material, inalienable labor. I appreciate Burt’s argument and the urgency of resisting capitalist structures that press in at the edges of the production and marketing of dance. And I fully support his postulation of a commons of information and resource-sharing in the European contemporary dance world where artists find common cause in resistance to the political economy of capitalism and to the kind of big-budget dance that circulates within its folds. Yet, I puzzle over his constitution of this commons without finely discerning the conditions of its formation, so it is difficult to sufficiently distinguish it from a dynamic of elite group survival. The historic phenomenon of Western capitalism’s simultaneous devaluation and capitalization of Black, Indigenous, and brown bodies feeds into all cultural formations, and impacts us all differently. Can we then inaugurate a new formation on the promise of communal resource-­ sharing, before explicitly dismantling the racial and cultural hierarchies and thefts that are integral to the edifice of Western capitalism? Imagining a commons of contemporary dance that can cultivate a sense of belonging despite difference, where sharing is not vitiated by appropriation, and resonance by ultimate dislocation, where deliberate informality provokes meetings and dialogues, intrigues me. But almost immediately, I sense the anxieties of so many communities: Is there a way to acknowledge that some artists had to put in three times as much labor as others, simply to be seen alongside each other? What might such acknowledgment accomplish in material terms? Will the desire for a commons ultimately mean the erosion of cultural specificity? How will we be able to parse out, with great sensitivity, shared approaches that grow from the commons, from modes of working that have the old smell of ventriloquy and saviorism? I am also pushed to parenthesize Burt’s assertion of knowledge, choreographic processes, and modes of choreographic research as equally valued by all dancers, and as constituting commensurate modes of exchange within contemporary dance. These values are local in scope, pertinent to artists working in specific sectors of contemporary dance, and might in fact be thrown in disarray in other contexts. For instance, the particular construction of “professional dancer” in the global North would exclude many artists who dance with professionalism and excellence in South-­ South communities but could barely survive solely through such work.

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

99

Often, this is the condition of broken economic systems, resulting from devastating historic wreckages, enslavement, colonialism, genocide, and current processes of neo-colonizing globalization. Sometimes, it is because of how dance is located as one among a range of life practices, continuous with other forms of cultural production. We might remember the discussion in the previous chapter about another ostensibly shared value that is in fact, understood very differently, in the commons: how many Euro/ North artists speak about “freedom” as breaking aesthetic conventions, while many South-South artists uphold practices of shared political and spiritual “liberation” as innovation. However, I have also proposed the South-South frame as holding the space of a kind of ideological “commons,” but one that has to be constructed carefully through an intentional politics of intersectionality, multi-centricity, and difference. This notion of an avowedly delimited “commons” is enlivened by those who choose to create and practice contemporary dance-making and dancing as processes of becoming, justice, and liberation. I imagine it as a gathering place for artists from South-­ South communities, arriving via different histories of struggle. Communally shared resources here are a politics of intersectional justice, the labor of organizing, dancing as space-making, aspirations of excellence, and the understanding that these are embodied very differently by every artist. Choreographers and dancers arrive at this quasi-commons via the values they embody through their work, rendering this formation a politics-and-­ practice-based category with lots of space for difference.10 The values of this different commons might also contradistinguish it from one sponsored by mainstream visibility and resources, where a broad diversity of South-South artists are curated into a field of vision, sometimes making for deeper paradigm shifts, but at other times, producing the effect of a blinkered equality that avoids investigation of systemic power and allocation of resources and recognition. Considering the importance of being seen and recognized for performing artists whose live practice is core to their work, this different commons might still shade visibility, which often fetishizes notions of transparency and universal humanity, with poet Edouard Glissant’s concept of opacity. Against the “reductive transparency” of a “lukewarm humanism, both colorless and reassuring” presented as an equalizing platform, Glissant pushes for an opacity “considerate of all the threatened and delicious things joining one another (without conjoining, that is, without merging) in the expanse of Relation” (1997, pp. 62, 111, 62). Such understanding of relationship, global and

100 

A. CHATTERJEA

insistently local, different yet resonant, refusing incorporation and carving spaces of political and creative mutuality, enlivens the space of this book, where artists’ work in Contemporary Dance might be regarded as comparable, but their histories and strategies are incommensurable: these choreographies need to be experienced in distinctive differentiation, and on their own terms. This particular delineation of a commons, emerging from the divergent contexts, histories, and life conditions, prioritizes relationship in producing knowledge. Creating connections, communicating thoughtfulness, respectfully observing the ways communities navigate life, finding ways to invite them into the work, become ways for these choreographers to shine light on untold histories through the work they are making without appropriating the voices of the communities. This ethic of care is palpable in the work: Sardono Kusumo, accompanying the rescue teams to Aceh after the tsunami, talking to residents, then offering his dance on the tsunami-­ wrecked shores; Nora Chipaumire, talking to the African security personnel in the high-end stores of Firenze’s shopping district and inviting them to join her investigation of the history of “Black-a-moors” in Italy, highlighting their stories; Rulan Tangen, inviting her dancers to find their own resonances with a thematic focus, within their own Indigenous context, to build an inter-tribal, latticed consciousness about Indigenous heritage and value systems, which are then held up in her choreography; Germaine Acogny, mentoring several generations of dancers from different regions across Africa and promoting a global awareness of African Contemporary Dance. Here, the focus on relationship and community refuses racialized typologies that push for narrow identity politics or literal or linear narratives of survival. Choreographies of story-as-materiality usher in variegated innovative stagings of presence in contemporary life conditions, sometimes opaque in their metaphoric specificities, but always resonant in the referential relationships they reach for.

Stakes of Decolonizing Dance-Making The promise of justice and healing in South-South choreographies is integrally connected to their reimaging of embodied beauty, relationship, desire, empowerment, and spirit, and to their stakes in decolonizing corporeality. Yet what decolonization entails and what it means differs vitally from context to context. I take space here to think through some of the implications of decolonization because of how hegemonic power

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

101

structures and colonial economies root themselves in our muscular and cellular systems, scramble the ground on which we dance, and slant our embodied articulations of beauty, joy, and community. And because re-­ colonizing projects often co-opt, then twist, the language of decolonizing work, percolating deadly nativist and fundamentalist regimes into our work in stealth. Dance as decolonizing practice, dance in postcolonial contexts: these are not commensurate scapes. For many Indigenous communities resisting settler colonization, the post- is yet to arrive, while for some global South communities, wrestling with postcolonial trauma, globalization and economic neo-liberalism manifest as neo-colonialism. The contemporary dance artists I study are constantly in the throes of these shifts and tensions. Some South-South contemporary dance-makers are working in postcolonial contexts, where the continuing work of cultural decolonization is crucial for survival and healing from the violence of historical experience. For others, where settler colonialism continues, cultural decolonization and self-determination become vital modes of defying an oppressive system. The work of cultural decolonization becomes particularly important in the context of Contemporary Dance, which is so often identified through Eurocentric values and global North practices, such that alignment with it can be read as cooptation for those who are at the other end of this power structure. Indigenous Studies scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes about transforming research methodologies, often developed within hegemonic academic systems, by centering decolonization. Connecting research and knowledge production to self-determination for Indigenous peoples “becomes a goal of social justice which is expressed through and across a wide range of psychological, social, cultural and economic terrains. It necessarily involves the processes of transformation, of decolonization, of healing and of mobilization as peoples” (Tuhiwai Smith 1999, p. 116). Her directive to decolonize research methodologies is a paradigm-shift toward uncovering subjugated knowledges, activating connectivities, and redirecting knowledge production toward the goal of holistic well-­ becoming. It also urges us to imagine knowledge and cultural production as involving the entirety of self-in-community. Following Tuhiwai Smith, I understand decolonization in the context of South-South choreographies as embodied epistemology, the mode of corporeal investigation of histories, violences, and pleasure and beauty in relation to subject-formation.

102 

A. CHATTERJEA

Tuhiwai Smith also urges a complex methodological approach by simultaneously recognizing that (a) the very concept and premises of research emerge from projects of colonization and imperialism, yet (b) rather than rejecting the idea of research outright, at this time when so much Indigenous knowledge has been pushed to the margins, research can be recast as “reconciling and reprioritizing what is really important about the past with what is important about the present” (1999, p. 39). This compels recognition of how South-South contemporary dance artists might participate in the structures of funding and presentation of contemporary dance, where resources are located, while resisting its cultural imperatives through the work they create. It also suggests how such artists reference cultural location and aesthetic lineage even as they dismantle and reorganize the hierarchical structures that have encrusted existing cultural practices. I draw on Tuhiwai Smith’s directive to emphasize the value of critically analyzing all aspects of dance-making and dancing so we may discern the multiple ways, subtle and overt, in which traditional lines of power and convention are being contested and altered. For instance, learning from her philosophy of centering Indigeneity while celebrating multiple ways of relating to it, we understand cultural decolonization in the work of South-­ South choreographers as proceeding through a series of strategies, responding to the multi-headed workings of hegemonic power. Germaine Acogny: not rejecting her training in Western ballet and modern dance forms, but changing it radically from inside, technically, and through the sand-floored studio of her École des Sables, which shifts the relationship to the ground. Nora Chipaumire: playing with extremes in lighting design in Miriam (2012) to stage the ways in which African women are alternately shrouded in darkness and thrown into the spotlight in keeping with an imperialist agenda. These artists seize dancing and the stage as sites of empowerment and scramble the power relations within it. Projects of cultural decolonizing are necessarily continuous and strategically striated, preceding and capacitating, running parallel to, and following, the official end of political colonization. I reference philosopher and political theorist Achille Mbembe’s analysis of the quicksands of postcoloniality to think through the fault-lines and deceits with which the work of cultural decolonization must grapple. Mbembe theorizes the failure of binary constructions of power to grasp the concrete fractures and shifting grounds of subjectivity, community, and voice in the postcolony: “The notion of a ‘postcolony’ identifies specifically a given historical

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

103

trajectory—that of societies recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the violence which the colonial relationship involves … But the postcolony is also made up of a series of corporate institutions and a political machinery that, once in place, constitute a distinctive regime of violence” (2001, p. 102). Decolonizing work in such contexts must be active in disrupting aesthetic and cultural categories that ostensibly oppose colonization and imperialism, but in fact reproduce their structures. As semiotic theorist Walter Mignolo has argued, these dismantlings and renarrativizations, must be “neither (or at least not only) revisionist narratives nor narratives that intend to tell a different truth but, rather, narratives geared toward the search of a different logic … changing the terms of the conversation as well as its content … to displace the ‘abstract universalism’ of modern epistemology and world history, while leaning toward an alternative to totality conceived as a network of local histories and multiple local hegemonies” (2000, p. 22). Thus, our work might include critiquing initiatives of “inclusion” that work through a head-count notion of diversity; challenging veiled retentions of power and resource control through apparently neutral processes of curation and arts management; storming artistic categories to repurpose them thoughtfully from inside; and simultaneously provoking reimaginations of how dance can circulate in our world and through the global stage, and offer agential, embodied imaginings of just futures. South African choreographer Jay Pather talks about the ways in which notions of recovery and tradition often overwhelm postcolonial contexts, directing cultural agendas toward archival work. He refers to the “claustrophobia of a broadly European agenda” which is countered with many projects that create yet another “claustrophobia of heritage and legacy” (Pather 2015, p. 324), resonating with Mignolo’s calls to be vigilant of “Eurocentric critiques of Eurocentrism” (Mignolo 2000, p. 37). Writing about his choreographic projects, Pather refers to his dance theater works dealing with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as a way to reflect on memory in a political-cultural context ridden with crossing lines of power, and about his efforts to both counter the looming bequeath of colonial cultural dominance, and to “break down the notion of heritage and destabilize the archive in the reach for a more fluid, self-reflexive and speculative matrix” (2015, p. 324). Pather’s reflections on his discursive and artistic processes bear testimony to the precariousness that characterizes the negotiations that contemporary South-South choreographers are

104 

A. CHATTERJEA

constantly working through. Here, from a different angle, I recall Performance Studies scholar Diana Taylor’s seminal argument about how performance can access cultural memory and stage, for public recollection, embodied repertoires that comment back on the violent erasures of official, textualized archives (2003). Pather, like Taylor, reminds us that embodied acts of performance, different from official historic documentation in their repeated dissolution and reconstitution, become modes of engendering knowledge and transmitting memory across generations. Reflecting on his complex impulse to dance-making and appreciating corporeality’s layered-ness, Pather writes how dance, with “the possibilities for a range of textured, expressive spatialities in composition, of multiple approaches to rhythm that resonate with discord, interruption, silence and defiance and ultimately the body itself, its flesh, skin and muscle as a site on which to write meanings beyond the linguistic” allows him to work with nuance and complexity in this context (2015, p.  317). Such embodied explorations of contestation, refusal, and articulation point to the world-reimagining possibilities of contemporary dance and the exciting promise emerging from the work of so many artists. Dancing’s embodied, dialectical aesthetics, its potential to call for epistemic multiplicity, invocations through different sensory channels, such that many layers of experience might coalesce, quicken its functional force in decolonizing projects. Achille Mbembe also reminds us of the complex ways in which time and history function in the “postcolony,” as he talks about age, which constitutes “not a simple category of time but a number of relationships and a configuration of events—often visible and perceptible, sometimes diffuse, ‘hydra-headed’ … As an age, the postcolony encloses multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelop one another: an entanglement” (2001, p.  14). To work within and through such criss-­ crossing forces might mean differently evolving relationships to existing cultural practices and to contemporary art-making. Recognizing such different relationships allows us to claim a complex historicity, particularly experienced, and refuse enclosure within fossilized narratives and stagist models of cultural development. Attention to the shifting currents of histories, in contexts postulated to be monolithic, opens up the polysemic possibilities of contemporary dance-making. In some contexts, we witness entanglements as different frames of time, cultural agendas, and varying decolonizing methodologies existing in

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

105

sometimes tense, sometimes facile, adjacence to each other. Sometimes older cultural forms, previously marginalized or pushed underground by colonial structures, are revived, reorganized, and restaged for currently ubiquitous proscenium theaters. Simultaneously, other resistant aesthetics, perhaps more characterized by deconstruction of these cultural practices, and intersection with current technologies, best described as contemporary dance, emerge. The work of Indigenous artists such as Rosy Simas, Rulan Tangen, and Lemi Ponifasio, all radical in choreographic impact, affirm relationship with and refer to, traditional cultural values, even as they reject simple linearities of recuperation and retrieval. In such examples, we also understand that contemporary art-making can relate in complex ways to the network of practices surrounding it, differently from stagist historicization of artistic movements where the avant-garde is supported by statements about spirited departures from the past. Moreover, the impact, scope, and direction of artistic decisions change as the socio-­ cultural-­political continuum around them changes. One such example might be seen in the shift from the early work of Germaine Acogny, which is more in line with a postcolonial, modernizing Africa, to her current championing of Contemporary African Dance in ways that respond to current crises in different sites of the continent. We are also called to recognize contexts where asserting continuity is deeply contentious: as in the case of Prumsodun Ok, who claims tradition and the preferred formal aesthetic of the modern nation-state, while immediately disturbing its internal holding patterns through queer and non-binary embodiment. This complex intersection of cultural timescapes and artistic genres is inherent in dance scholar Prarthana Purkayastha’s description of the context in which the two preeminent, feminist choreographers of postcolonial India, Manjusri Chaki-Sircar and Chandralekha, created their dances: “Chandralekha’s arrival in the dance world marks a crucial defining moment in the history of Indian theater dance, it also acts as a watershed that splits and disconnects the modern dance experience (1900s up until the 1970s) from the contemporary (1980s onwards). In the confident declaration of the contemporary present, something of the modern past was lost” (2014, p. 8). Indeed, the state of dance in India was shocked into an entirely new dawn with the boldly feminist artistry of Chandralekha, and in a different way, of Chaki-Sircar. Their work ruptured modes of postcolonial recuperation of traditional forms, now positioned as “classical” dance, and from “compositions” articulating a new modernity bathed in the spirit of postcolonial nationalism, as in the work of Uday Shankar.

106 

A. CHATTERJEA

Yet periodizing structures, marked by decades, such as the one Purkayastha proposes, do not live as water-tight compartments: they are always contingent upon an overlapping series of factors, including local cultural imperatives, general availability of resources and touring opportunities, and transnational markets for teaching and touring. We note, from the above examples, the various ways in which concurrently practicing artists respond to historic events and local circumstances, and how their choreographies disrupt neat narrativizations of cultural production and deploy specific strategies of decolonizing. Such active unlocking of History’s textualized stabilities proceeds via many kinds of articulations: through subversive performances that emphasize old global intimacies, where cultural thefts and losses of one community are inevitably woven into the prosperity and cultural innovations of another; through re-embodiments of stories that have been historic lacunae, changing our current relationship to our lineages; and through dynamic reorganizations of time-based aesthetic categories, making the contemporary stage an ideal platform to rehearse alternative futures. Choreographies that refuse relegation to static pasts and actively reshape and mobilize History, time and space, impinging on archival narratives through their embodied interventions, ultimately unsettle the gestalt of a global cultural map long employed to hold multiple colonial fixities. Moreover, genres, categories, and genealogies can be useful locationing devices in the decolonizing process, but only when imagined as flexible and rife with contesting forces. The decolonial project in Contemporary Dance prioritizes knowing and becoming as acts of relationship, such that we can both work through objects and modes of cognition and valuation and reimagine them as layered and multitudinous. Feminist writer Saidiya Hartman articulates her notion of “critical fabulation” that brings together scholarly, archival research with critical thinking and imaginative fiction writing, to remind us of the value of memory and imagination in weaving together genealogies where presence and absence are interwoven through indices of power (2008, p. 11). Speaking specifically about her process of writing her classic book, Lose Your Mother, she indicates the crossing lines of time, experience, and genre: My journey along the slave route is a device, a vehicle for posing a relation between our age and an age that many of us think of as the past, but which many of us live as the time of the present. The reverberations of slavery can be discerned in contemporary forms of dispossession that are so immediate and unceasing that you can’t even begin to think about memorialization,

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

107

because people are still living the dire effects of the disaster. All of these concerns about time, eventfulness, the life world of the human commodity required a hybrid form, a personal narrative, a historical meditation, and a metadiscourse on history. (2011, p. 111)

Such mindful crossings—of research methodologies, strategies of self-­ determination, genres, aesthetics, and chronologies—responding specifically to the questions at the heart of the process, are the crucial life of decolonizing projects. Here I return briefly to a call from the previous chapter, because it is an urgent piece within the process of dismantling colonial directives. Inside the plurality fostered by the decolonial ferment, still lies the urgency to call out the slippage of unmarked Euro-American cultural specificity into universalist and totalizing paradigms, to “provincialize” Western contemporary dance and limit its seemingly global implications.11 This means that we ask that it qualifies its scope through reference to its own specific history, just like “other” artists must talk about their work as Contemporary Senegalese dance or Indigenous Contemporary dance. Asking for aesthetic lineage and cultural context here allows us to attach accountability to power and uncover the scalar unidimensionality of what passes as universalized meta-categories. Working through the interwoven veins of power, memory, history, imagination, and decolonizing cultural production brings me to my questioning invocation of postcolonial studies scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty’s potent image of “the imaginary waiting-room of history” (2000, p. 8). The waiting rooms of Dance History feel real in my experience. Located in backstage dressing rooms with low light, they are whole spaces where artists from so many different locations are caught in permanent jet-lag, scheduled to appearances after-the-fact, in Chakrabarty’s succinct description, “first in Europe, then elsewhere” (2000, p.  7). Yet these waiting rooms are pluralized in my imagination, because in a different way, postcolonial and subaltern theories have also relegated feminist corporeal articulations and aesthetic politics to zones of inattention. Postcolonial theory’s decolonizing impulse sometimes stutters, in its widespread failure to understand the work done by embodied cultural producers, dance-­makers and dancers, whose choreographies impinge on the consciousnesses of various publics, provoking questions and instigating subterranean streams of shift. A different discursive path emerges from the diligent analysis and reorganization of the art world put forward by visual art scholar and curator Okwui Enwezor, who continually pushed for the restructuring of many of

108 

A. CHATTERJEA

contemporary art’s fora. Firstly, echoing Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s call to reclaim and redefine existing categories, he identifies how a resonating postcolonial drive shapes contemporary artistic production. He describes this emerging multi-nodal artistic map as “the postcolonial constellation,” which is “the site for the expansion of the definition of what constitutes contemporary cultures … it is the intersection of historical forces aligned against the hegemonic imperatives of imperial discourse … The postcolonial constellation seeks to interpret a particular world order, to show the relationships between political, social, and cultural realities, artistic spaces, and epistemological histories, highlighting not only their contestation, but also their continuous redefinition” (Enwezor 2008, p. 232). Enwezor’s articulation of this constellation places South-South artists at the edge of contemporary innovation and immediately identifies such work as projects of decolonization. Then, in his introduction to the catalogue for Documenta XI platform 5, Enwezor distinguishes postcoloniality’s double analytic: first, the “liberatory strategy of decolonization” and then, the complex way in which it “exceeds the borders of the former colonized world to lay claim to the modernized, metropolitan world of empire by making empire’s former “other” visible and present at all times” (2002, pp. 44, 45). These double moves are sometimes intertwined in the work of contemporary dance-­ makers like Nora Chipaumire, whose critical re-narrativizations of classic works of Western concert dance canon like Mikhail Fokine’s Dying Swan and Vaslav Nijinksy’s Rite of Spring shake up the originals, even as they shade the notion of an “original” and bring into light those who might have been hidden in the shadows of such canonized originals. Chipaumire’s double move is different from the more respectful invocation of Nijinksy that we see in Klunchun’s Nijinsky Siam that I referred to in the preceding chapter, which has the effect of asking for dialogue, highlighting blurred relationships, but not necessarily challenging coagulated power. It is also different from the intercultural work of Akram Khan, particularly as articulated through Mitra’s lens, where the work is in conversation with concepts of nation and citizenship, as difference within British-ness. Chipaumire, in contrast, questions the very constitution of nation, borders, and citizen-subject, even as she recognizes the historic injustices that African nation-states have had to struggle with in their emergence as postcolonial countries. Like her, the other artists whose work inspires this book, and many like them, burst through the walls of history’s waiting rooms, dancing

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

109

incarnations of their contemporary, and bringing materiality to critical analyses of empire, power relations, and a politics of reclamation and redefinition. They force “provincializings” of narrow notions of contemporary dance, as they kinetically and metaphorically interrogate fundamental understandings of bodies-in-space-and-time, self-in-culture, and located values and critiques. This then is another double-bind, leading to another strategy of double negatives: refusing both the distorted evolutionary logic of modernity and postmodernity organized by the logic of “Europe first,” and the ways in which postcolonial cultural projects often unwittingly re-­center colonization as the experience from which all change and historical difference flow, without subsequently weighting the neocolonial ruptures continuously wrought by globalization. In parallel, these artists posit an affirmation of bodily and visionary meaning-making that offer ways to make sense of our current lived experience through differing relationships to practices and ideas from different historical times. In their complicated and interstitial relationships with a range of practices from local and global contexts, in their double refusals and multiple claimings, these artists propose kaleidoscopic subjectivities, realities made up of many fragments rendered whole in their collaging and reimagination. Decolonizing Contemporary dance: the particular nature of embodied decolonizing practice means that we simultaneously create as we dismantle, because dance, performance, and choreography are predicated in an assertion of presence, and un-doing is always wrapped up with bodying forth. To decolonize dance is to strip away and simultaneously reimagine, re-create notions of beauty, empowerment, coherent structure, embodied epistemologies, and structures of meaning-making. And to reorganize and generate value is to shift paradigms of desire and vitally affect the circulating economies of demand and production. It is urgent, then, to witness these courageous acts of contemporary dance, to create fora that can highlight their impact, to ponder their interventionary signification within the current globalized schema. Enwezor writes about the importance of identifying the “‘spectacular difference’ … viewed from the refractory shards thrown up by the multiple artistic spaces and knowledge circuits that are the critical hallmarks of today’s artistic subjectivity and cultural climate,” of highlighting art-making’s relationship with “all domains of socio-political life” and creating fora that demand “critical independence” from institutional and academic conservatism (2002, p. 43). His own work, in his curatorial process, has been to call for investigations of the infrastructural machinery, artistic and academic, that allows for continued colonial

110 

A. CHATTERJEA

hegemonies and the concurrent marginalization of South-South artists refiguring what “experimental” looks like. He argues that “to understand what constitutes the avant-garde today, one must begin … in the field of culture and politics, as well as in the economic field governing all relations that have come under the overwhelming hegemony of capital” (Enwezor 2002, p. 44). I take his urging as inspiration in shaping the ground of this book as a differently valenced commons and global stage that necessitate thoughtful critical reflections on the work of these artists. And to recognize the strategies and labor that enable economies of possibility for South-South artists. Indeed, all of the artists in this book have found “success” in terms of transnational recognition, curated performances, community support, and grant awards. But the purchase of this success has often been twice the labor than it might have taken artists who work with the conditions of more hegemonic visibility, either aesthetically and in terms of choreographic structure, or in artistic focus on decolonization and justice. Additionally, it is crucial for us to recognize and name the labor that some artists have taken on in order to dis-anchor the field from older institutional forms of curation and audience development, and call other artists from their communities to the stage, materializing that “spectacular difference” that Enwezor speaks about. Rosy Simas, for instance, worked closely with the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, in St. Paul, Minnesota, to curate and produce the project Oyate Okodakiciyapi, a celebration of Native American and Indigenous music and dance. Along with several workshops, panel discussions, and classes at different sites in the Twin Cities, and an exhibition at the All My Relations Gallery, Oyate included a concert on March 4, 2017, that presented the work of Christopher Morgan (Pohaku), Santee Smith (NeoIndigenA), and Dancing Earth/Rulan Tangen (Seeds: Re Generation). Simas’ participation in the curation and production of this major project aligns with her commitment to highlight the contemporary performance work of Indigenous artists and to connect Native artists with Native and broader audiences. Her leadership and vision in this project were significant in creating a nexus of light and support around Indigenous contemporary dance and modeling the respectful and equitable presentation of artistic work created by Native artists. This kind of labor—physical, intellectual, and emotional, visible and behind-the-scenes, compensated and beyond—requires time, perseverance, and multi-directional skills.

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

111

I am also reminded of the tremendous work of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Urban Bush Women in establishing the Choreographic Center Initiative, investing in “the development of women of color choreographers, whose voices are not as prominent in the national arts ecology as they should be” (“The Choreographic Center Initiative” n.d.). Imagined, not as a physical space but as “activated through strategic alliances with individuals and institutions,” and as a meshing of resources, mentorship, and cohort-building, this Center is an organizational innovation, and a sustainable intervention that will resonate in the field (“The Choreographic Center Initiative” n.d.). I thank visionaries like Zollar who are taking on projects of remapping the field, so that more South-South artists feel welcome to reimagine contemporary dance and make their place in it.12 This kind of active field-shaping is related to, but marks the other-side of the surplus labor I had talked about earlier. I imagine my own work of theorizing re-visionings of contemporary dance as a parallel project. All of our simultaneous re-mappings and re-worldings connect us to the opening metaphor of this chapter: heating up a field to weld it anew into spaces that can welcome considerations of difference and justice and allow for the “spectacular difference” Enwezor talks about. Let me further refine the articulations of multitudinous and non-linear subjectivities, refractional aesthetics, double moves, and layered strategic approaches claimed by South-South choreographers as the irreducible difference of decolonizing projects. It is important to distinguish these from how postmodernism has typically theorized fragmentation and postulated the impossibility of unified subject positions. Even in 1991, Kwame Anthony Appiah had argued that though the “post” in “postcolonial,” like the “post” in “postmodern,” suggests a space-clearing gesture, the gaps between their discursive significance, temporal implications, and sphere of influence, mean that they circulate very differently. Okwui Enwezor’s more recent formulation of this difference is particularly instructive for art-making processes: postcoloniality must at all times be distinguished from postmodernism. While postmodernism was preoccupied with relativizing historical transformations and contesting the lapses and prejudices of epistemological grand narratives, postcoloniality does the obverse, seeking instead to sublate and replace all grand narratives through new ethical demands on modes of historical interpretation. (2002, p. 45)

My South-South based global stage is attentive to both Appiah’s and Enwezor’s theorizations of the differential constructions of the “post” in

112 

A. CHATTERJEA

these formations, and to the way temporal and spatial distance indicated by the “post” in “postmodern” often flattens alterity. Further, in justice-oriented South-South contexts, decolonizing dance-­ making practices might stage metaphoric journeys of rage, healing, and transformation, choreograph non-linearly imbricated, and multiply juxtaposed subjectivities that suggest active history- and meaning-making. In her 2014 evening-length solo We Wait in the Darkness, Rosy Simas imagines a journey of healing for her grandmother whose DNA she carries in her body and dances an assertion of Seneca cultural lineage despite interruptions and assimilations. Nora Chipaumire rehearses the complex linkages between memory, story-weaving, and personalized metaphors of historical events, in her portrait of myself as my father (2014), to create an irrecuperable portrait of her father, yet through which she locates herself. Absence and presence implicate each other in these dances, and visibility and disappearance become inseparable: this dialectical multiplicity, emerging from deep historic and cultural location, is no postmodern evacuation of subject. At the end of this section, I return to think about how representation might function as a mode of decolonial story-making, for instance, in a global context overdetermined by spectacularized images of Black suffering and pain. Despite critiques of representation’s failure, and acknowledging the limitations of linear narratives, I believe that the kind of soft Black intimacy we see in Camille Brown’s Ink makes a significant intervention in contemporary dance and US cultural production. Admittedly, this work, with its emphasis on heterosexual couplings, does not intervene in older formulations of gender and sexuality. But, because Black presence has been enveloped in different kinds of violent presentations, we seldom see the kind of gentle, daily, interaction mixed in with daring partnering moments that characterizes several sections of Ink. The affect of such performance is both representation and beyond: these are images of possibility, causing a break in the dense popular imagery of Black peoples in association with police brutality, in protests, in states of devastation and suffering, for instance. These are images that cycle from the stage to the audiences and back, humanizing each other. This too is contemporary dance, refusing to accept the diminishing of Black life and specifically, Black love. And when strategies of innovation and intervention are assessed in context, we make room for the layered interpretation of choreographies.

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

113

Acts of Contemporary Dancing Brown’s Ink, like many of the works created by South-South choreographers, embraces dancing as an act of decolonizing. Here virtuosity is redefined even as it is embraced, as snatches of West African movement, jazz, tap, and hip hop intersect with each other and with a rich series of gestures, many recognizable from daily usage, creating a layered movement tapestry. In a different context, in Descent, Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson find daringly offset and intimate balances, their wheelchairs tipping away from full contact with the ground. Such choreography, specific in its bodily articulations, grounds dancing in a politics of beauty, joy, connectivity, difference, and invitation to reimagine. How do we understand contemporaneity through such dancing? Can technique—the formalized vocabulary of a movement aesthetic and the methodology for delivering its particularity—facilitate the manifestation of intersectional difference? Can formalized movement resist hardening into a transactional unit and remain a vital epistemological modality? How can we come to understand training in this context, an intentional practice and shaping of embodied articulation? In Ungoverning Dance, Ramsay Burt presents an important argument against the way virtuosity and institutionalizations of technique have created dancers who are versatile, but become part of an industry-oriented, capitalist organization of the dance field. Echoing André Lepecki’s distrust for technical virtuosity of individual dancers and representational dance, Burt highlights the turn of much European contemporary dance toward performance art and conceptual dance-making and argues that such work embodies important critiques and does the work of ungoverning dance. He conceptualizes “ungoverning” as a “process through which those dance artists, who are relatively independent, defend their practices and resist the way the institutionalized dance world seeks to police or enclose common resources, reshaping it in line with neoliberal ideas about self-­ regulating markets” (Burt 2017, p. 7). Burt links such dance to a defense of the commons of dance, which are constantly under threat: “Ungoverning is continually engaging in the maintenance and protection of the commons through opening up spaces that are relatively free from the effects of control, regulation, or normalization” (2017, p. 23). One of the prime modes of ungoverning, Burt argues, is by reimagining virtuosity as different from technical brilliance and marketable skills, and as highlighting presence, improvisation, and working through

114 

A. CHATTERJEA

different kinds of bodily knowledges that might produce what French philosopher Jacques Ranciére has described as emancipation—a re-ordering of the relations between the active space of performance and the passive space of spectators.13 This is close to how Jérôme Bel has spoken elsewhere about his impatience with virtuosity in dance and his interest in investigating how dance is inhabited. In an essay with Boris Charmatz, Bel writes “virtuosity usually comes from the part of a dancer’s work that I regard as alienating—infinite repetition of the same movement, and competition— not mentioning the ideology that underpins that practice … I try to emancipate these dancers from what tends to reduce them to functions, and turn them into subjects, and I try to remove them from the status of dancing objects that prevails in the type of ‘artistic’ education they have received as well as in their practices” (2014, pp. 248–249). It also resonates with Lepecki’s notion of dance’s exhaustion from “the notion of dance as a pure display of uninterrupted movement” (2005, p. 7). These are important critiques of the way virtuosity in dance often becomes co-opted in current times to align with spectacularized presentation, and consequently distanced from its possibilities of moving vital ideas and questions. But I push back against the bundling of technique, virtuosity, competition, spectacularization, and objectification as a generally applicable argument. In the absence of contextual information, we might fail to understand how for instance, repetition might function as colonial mimicry, with a singular difference, or as a mode of building energy, or as a manifestation of endurance in the face of assured degeneration or attack. The single narrative of repetition and technical training as alienation renders practice inevitably into objectification. This then misses the possibilities of feminist and justice-based reimaginings, of accessing beauty, healing, and pleasure through accumulations of practice. In many South-­ South contexts, repetitions and incessant streams of dancing in a chosen aesthetic are affirmations of survival and life-force, generating energy, submerging oneself in parallel yet intersecting explorations, and emphasizing alterity. In the following section, I will think through some contexts of contemporary stage dance to investigate how technique and virtuosity might signify differently. In my first example, the intersection of ritualized, repetitive, dance with movements from several local cultural practices, unravels an emotional landscape in powerful ways. Working with Shiite mourning rituals, Lebanese choreographer Ali Chahrour created Leila’s Death (2015), an evening-length dramatic work that weaves together music,

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

115

movement, and dialogue. In a post-performance discussion at the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, Chahrour talked about wanting to not work with “professional dancers,” who might have preconceived notions of “contemporary dance,” referring to the popular notion that the category indicated training in Western movement/performative forms.14 In this case, he works with Leila, a family member who has traditionally fulfilled the role of mourner, and himself, to stage an endless cycle of death, that inevitably gestures toward the current situation in so many parts of the Arab world. Leila’s singing and the two live musicians are absolutely the stuff of epic virtuosity, but I will focus on the technique of the moving bodies on stage for the moment. The movement circles through overlapping loops; phrases repeat cyclically until some element changes, heightening the ritual structure of the work. For instance, in one section, lamenting the death of her “son” who lies in the center of the stage, Leila repeatedly scatters rose petals all around and over his prone body. She circumambulates his body with a turning step, her arms drawing half circles around her torso. Soon, the percussionist joins her, marking a line behind the body, stepping vigorously as he plays his frame drum. Her rhythm and pace change as she moves away, walking across the length of the floor with her arms raised above her head, waving from side to side. Her path loops around and her movement minimizes, bringing her to kneel by the body. Most of this is low-affect, non-­ spectacularized movement, embodied without any additional performative dramatic qualities. Yet its enduring through time, its reiteration both as movement and as arranged choreography, the powerful live score, and the heightened context of life and death imbue the movement with deep affective value. The curving lines of Leila’s movement intersect with the quick stepping movements of Chahrour, sometimes joined by the two musicians, that are inflected with a more vertical energy. Repetition, with small changes, deepens the intensity of emotion and the poignancy of death. In the post-show talk, both Chahrour and his dramaturge Junaid Sarieddine, emphasized that “cultural representation” was not their goal, they were not showcasing “Lebanese culture.” Rather, they were offering investigations of bodies in the crossings of ritual ceremonies and secular practices, from the perspective of their local context. Refusing an ambassadorship for a monolithic notion of their “culture,” choosing a certain kind of opacity over the typical demand for transparency in the transnational cultural market, their work still articulated location, worldview, and

116 

A. CHATTERJEA

a politics of artistic choice around “contemporary dance.” We might understand technique, in this context then, as culturally specific movement vocabulary, part of lived practices, perhaps not heightened stage convention, but indubitably the result of specific training. Moreover, here technique emerges through the pathway of ceremony—some cultural, some created—which always comes with structure. Nowhere did the movement become so “pedestrian” in execution or choreographic arrangement that we doubt its locational particularity. We come to understand technique here, not as choreographed display, but as the gritty, culturally specific affirmation of life-force. A very different use of technique to mark cultural identity and claim space might be seen in the work of Homer Hans Bryant, formerly principal ballet dancer with Dance Theatre of Harlem and other celebrated companies, and currently the founder and Artistic Director of Chicago Multicultural Dance Center. While I do not read this work within the resistive South-South paradigm of contemporary dance, I believe it indicates yet another way in which artists from marginalized communities are deploying dance, technique, and virtuosity, to create access and build community. Notwithstanding my own critiques of its capitalization on virtuosity-crossed-swagger, I will refer briefly to the controversies around this form because it is indicative of some of the questions around race, class, and gender that are part of our shared consciousness in dance currently. In keeping with his mission to create more entrypoints into dance training, Bryant created the form Hiplet, which can be described in shorthand, as a crossing of ballet and hip hop. Performers of this form, mostly young Black women between 12 and 18 years of age, have typically trained in ballet, and are skilled enough to dance en pointe. Their training in hip hop complements this core strength and footwork skills with the groundedness and big torso movements of urban and street  dance  styles. The dancers move with sharp percussive beats, bending and extending their knees, turning them in and out to the rhythm, as much as they mobilize flow, allowing the sweeping rotations of the torso and circling hips to create expansive rolling movements. Gia Kourlas, who did a feature on this form, described it in the New York Times thus: “Dancers master movements like the hiplet strut—walking on pointe with hips that sway from side to side—or bend their knees until their buttocks nearly brush the floor while hopping on pointe and swishing their arms back and forth” (2016).

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

117

Interestingly, despite the popularity of hiplet among young urban, particularly Black, women, the dancers have often been criticized, in language that often smacks of respectability politics, as lacking “proper” ballet technique. For instance, renowned dancer and dance educator Theresa Ruth Howard says that “most of the hiplet dancers can’t hit those ballet lines, and as a result, the technique is more akin to a toe tapping in a vaudevillian sideshow,” immediately hierarchizing the forms and re-establishing ballet as the form with the most value (2017). She continues, “Just when we can proudly and enthusiastically hashtag #blackballerinas, #blackelegance, #browngirlsdoballet and mean it, when we feel like we are the Jeffersons, movin’ on up, hiplet is the ghettoization of blacks doing ‘ballet.’ Not because it blends African American urban dance and a European court social dance, but because it does it crudely, without sophistication and hence becomes a mockery of our honest efforts to excel at the latter while not honoring the brilliance of the former” (Howard 2017). There are others who find the technique unsafe and argue that the dancers need more preparation. There are still others, like dancer and dance educator, Jamal Story, who disagree with the point of it all: “To do disservice to pointe shoe mechanics for the sake of a groove doesn’t make us better or imaginative or new. It makes us irreverent” (2016). And there are those who say that pointe shoes are the only thing ballet in this form. I do not have the expertise to assess the safety of the dancers en pointe, but Bryant’s insistence on dancers having three years of pointe work before they can train in hiplet is well-documented in several interviews. However, I am interested that similar questions, about safety and the exploitation of women’s bodies, have not come up about contemporary ballet choreographies where interpretations of the technique have been quite extreme, placing ballerinas in precarious balances, lifts, throws, over and over again. There is also little discussion about the virtuosity and challenge in the hiplet technique where the narrow base of balance on the pointe shoe must support the great mobility demanded of the remainder of the body, or of the polyrhythmic sophistication needed to execute the movement with clarity. I note the context in which this hybrid form evolves, how it creates access for young people who often find themselves outside of mainstream aesthetics, how it intentionally effects a “browning” of ballet, not through strategies of demanding “inclusion,” but by shifting the form itself and refiguring “technique.” While it has been sometimes presented in the news and on commercialized coverage as yet another iteration of a “new,” the current “in” mode of dance, it is indeed

118 

A. CHATTERJEA

a response to contemporary socio-political formations, to the needs of urban youth in Black communities, and a possible strategy to tumble long-­ standing hierarchies in dance techniques. Surveying the responses to hiplet reminds me how urgent it is to intersect considerations of cultural, racial, national, and aesthetic differences in contemporary dance with distinctions of class and the currency of “access.” Could we read young Black women dancers pushing open doors for visibility for themselves via an aesthetic that seemingly empowers them, breaks long-established rules of “technique,” and leads to exciting dance, as yet another mode of ungovernability? How might we assess the “innovation” in hiplet, given its focus on virtuosity, but considering how it jolts expectations in both concert and urban dance worlds? Can we broaden concerns around “safety” to concomitantly raise questions about how the imbricated violences of race and gender that trouble contemporary dance generally, creating conditions of mental and emotional unsafety, especially for young Black and brown women and femmes? Indeed, what might it be to imagine innovation in contemporary dance through a politics of just and equitable relationship? Aside from conceptual dance artists who generally reject spectacular movement, contemporary dance’s embrace of virtuosity often evidences its general failure to address the normalized gender violence that shows up repeatedly through partnering sequences. Partnering is a technique of tremendous skill, where lifts, weight-sharing, flow, line must all come together, and can flow inside several aesthetics. But it is often choreographed as mediator of violence, most often cis-gendered. In Chap. 1, I referred to the choreographic trickery and manipulation in Ballet Preljocaj’s Blanche Neige, and the “contemporizing” of partnering as processed through release techniques that deepen the violences of the choreography by invisibilizing the efforts of the woman dancer, who rolls through lifts and throws, with her eyes closed, her limbs embodying a soft languor. I am revisiting this issue here to think through the dialectical nature of technique, organized in choreography. Casually embodied gender violences that have been etched into the very modus operandi of partnering within Western concert dance have been critiqued for a while: from choreographer Mark Morris’ critique of the aestheticized violence in Twyla Tharp’s classic choreography to That’s Life in 1984,15 to dance writer Siobhan Burke’s review after witnessing the New  York City Ballet’s 2017 performance of choreographer Alexei Ratmansky’s work, Odessa.16 Yet such violences continue to resound through contemporary dance. Here, technique becomes complicit in

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

119

patriarchal, cis-gender, masculinity, hiding the constant reciprocity that must be part of such dancing. Virtuosity delivers the manipulation of bodies as “partnership” through effortless-looking lifts, supported balances, and choreographed narratives of relationship. I distinguish my critique of such and other virtuosities—proceeding from an analysis of socio-political relations of power and the perpetuation of social toxicities—from the argument that thinkers such as Burt and Bel make against virtuosity generally from an econo-aesthetic perspective and as alienable labor. To return to my questions: How can we reimagine performances of intimacy such that modes of air, balance, and weight-sharing do not re-­ inscribe broader gender and sexual inequities? Can a committed anti-­ violence stance be part of the commons of contemporary dance? The flipside of these questions, not as management of an established failure, but as an affirmation of contemporary progressive values: how can contemporary dance be generative of embodiments of gender, sexuality, race, and ability that are in dialogue with current discourses about these assemblages of identity and subjectivity? The possibility that contemporaneity in dance could aspire toward equity and well-being pushes us to investigate the dialectics of technique, what we come to understand as beautiful, meaningful, and efficient in movement. In this re-visioning, the formalized practice of movement together has the potential to empower communities through shared aesthetic and political interventions. This is very different from the current mainstream dance field, where, as in Burt’s critique, the institutionalization of technique serves the function of replicability and standardization. Often, in South-South contexts, a shared training system and technical base in fact allows a group of dancers to participate in a coherent philosophy of movement, articulate their politics through the specific aesthetic and cultural forms, and demonstrate standing-together-ness. In these situations, and particularly at a time of large-scale protest movements, notable for their mass mobilization of communities, where power resides in many bodies replicating similar movement or gestural language, the emphasis is not on sameness or standardization, but on amplifying the voices of a community base. This kind of constitution of community requires an understanding of shared politics and embodied solidarity of a group of artists brought together by resonant values and aesthetic, where dancing is as much survival, thriving, as a professional choice, and materializes from sharing space, sweat, and rhythm. The fierceness of this intention

120 

A. CHATTERJEA

sometimes shows up as virtuosity, but, developed from struggle and resistance, it is hardly alienable. The choreographers in this book emerge from different histories of protests and understand the value of “community” in many different ways. In solo works, the particularization of the aesthetic proposes a lineage and location, perhaps rhizomatically constructed. In ensemble works or in pedagogic practice, technique—a together-sharing of movement and notions of marking space and time—functions as a way of manifesting community in the face of violences. From this perspective, the welding of technique, how we prepare our bodies to do this work, how we dance, can be part of a movement toward decolonization. Lastly, the particularity of movement and notions of daring and refinement can also be strategies of articulating pleasure and joy, defying mainstream invisibilizations of these experiences for particular communities. In a recent article published in the New York Times, Alice Sheppard talks about the pleasure in dancing: “I have fallen in love with dancing: Its power and freedom are like nothing else I know” (2019). She refers to the specific technique of strapping herself to the chair as a deeply “cultural moment,” perhaps recalling “moments of intimacy” for those who love a wheelchair user (Sheppard 2019). Emphasizing the integral relationship of embodied desire and choreographic and danced specificity, Sheppard reminds us that she wants “more than access” and is not dancing as therapy (2019). She wants to dance beauty, pleasure, daring, in effect welding the scope of a decolonizing contemporary dance.

Footwork In closing this chapter, I reconnect to my earlier discussions about becoming by reflecting on code-making and transmission through dance practices, particularly in relation to how current social modalities come to be embedded in the ways in which we dance. Dance scholar Thomas DeFrantz theorizes the transmigrations of energetic inflections and formations as a modality of “switch.” He talks about how social dances originating in queer Black and brown communities flow into mainstream popular culture, and sometimes move further on to high-level political stages. In the process, their originary queer articulation and racial particularity may be covered over by heteronormative, white, power-full embodiments. Yet, DeFrantz argues that gestural hauntings remain, nudging open space for difference: “These hauntings demand our embodied attention even as

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

121

they dissipate through gesture … In that moment we switch, and the light comes on, fugitive or not, and queers-of-color make space for physical dissidence and creative expression” (2017, p.  491). The key trope in DeFrantz’s discursive structure—the switch—is the ability of morphing in survival, which assigns agency to marginalized communities and to the transformative possibility of retentions through migrations. DeFrantz reminds us that “the switch is powerful. The change it heralds underscores versatility and capacity” (2017, p. 478). I pull Defrantz’s reading of the switch and deploy it in the context of South-South choreographies that respond to the context of a larger community. I suggest that these modes of South-South contemporary experimentations are haunted by the gritty resilience and creative interventions of marginalized queer/women/femmes-of-color and other oppressed Black, Indigenous, and brown communities, such that dancing becomes a practice where we make palpable, resist, and heal from, traumas held in bodily memory. The switch might then be a mode of opaqued visibility: the communities we invoke in our work, and whose life interventions inspire our contemporary danced statements, might always be on our minds and in our cells as we dance, as memory, as a beat, codes for life modes. But we also conjure them metaphorically through our dancing. Sometimes, the switch flips and choreographies might render dancing bodies translucent such that we catch glimpses of the other lives shining through the dancers on stage. The switch is a powerful choreographic and performative tool in South-South contemporary dance. It conjures other presences, is a strategy of momentary becoming, distinct both from simple representation and from appropriating voice. I think of Sardono Kusumo’s dancers in Nobody’s Body, learning to balance on the narrow circumference of a large rice-frying bowl, rocking dangerously as they make their way across the stage. This particular mode of using the feet, wrapped around the narrow, curving edges of the bowl, this technical manifestation of precarity, emerges from Kusumo’s meditation on the condition of Indonesian migrant workers. The weight of the body denies the bowl any possibility of stability: traveling perched on it necessitates a constant act of negotiation and the repeated attempts at balance are doomed to failure. This image is heightened and expanded to more bodies in his later piece, Black Sun, Kusumo’s response to the global refugee crisis. The aestheticized image on stage marks a switch from the experiences of migrant communities struggling through tumultuous journeys for survival, but, if we hold onto DeFrantz’s rhetorical device, and

122 

A. CHATTERJEA

pay attention to Kusumo’s published choreographic intent, we can trace the ways in which their presence is invoked on stage, in international festivals, at celebrated sites of contemporary dance, even in their physical absence. They are the shadow bodies, spectral presences behind the transnational travels of dance-artists sharing their work with different audiences: they literally influence the way the dancers move. I also mark a switch in the way many South-South artists negotiate the play of different elements from their culturally specific practices as they embody and map notions of contemporaneity. I think, for instance, of Rulan Tangen’s focus on walking with soft feet as she trains dancers, which she has described as being inspired by the notion of “moccasin walking,” treading gently on the ground as if taking care not to hurt even one blade of grass (in Chatterjea 2017, p. 298). This is a retention of Indigenous values, of being in partnership with the earth, and it sensitizes the soles of the dancers’ feet and creates a distinctive mode of traversing space. It is a shift from the emphasis on pedestrian walking in different iterations of contemporary dance, and a way to mark presence and Indigeneity in intimate relationship to the ground. In this moment, the switch, marked through an internal accenting of the walk, subtly alters the contemporary emphasis on deconstructed “technique” via a mindfully practiced way of walking. In such contexts, attention to what I have described earlier as the “micropolitics of technique,” focusing more on the “how” rather than the “what” of movement, allows us to identify the switch, where Indigeneity contemporizes concert dance. The mode of the switch inspires me to reflect on my own use of footwork as choreographic device. Rhythmic footwork, done bare feet, has often been an aesthetic marker and identifier of Indian classical dance. It suggests a particular kind of virtuosity, a definite relationship to the ground, and a way of training the feet that connects the lines of force to work with gravity’s pull. This is the obverse of the trope of pointed feet: feet relaxed, deeply grounded, weighted, yet ready for nimble markings of rhythm. Traditionally done with bells around the ankles, footwork practice also teaches fine distinctions: marking rhythm with the whole foot, a heel strike, a strongly circling big toe, a landing from a jump, a brush with the ball mounds of the feet. For those of us training in several forms, the specific approach to footwork also taught us attention to details: the striking heel in Bharatanatyam often lands with an extended leg, creating a different relationship to weight than in Odissi, for instance, where it would land with both knees bent, or in Manipuri, where both the heel strike and

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

123

its landing must be accomplished with soft precision. Such “micropolitics of technique” are not just aesthetic preoccupations divorced from the lives of people who created the form. They reveal particular notions of beauty, regional cultural contexts, and are framed by the ground on which the dance happens. But footwork, and rhythm generally, can also suggest the primacy of temporality in the arrangement of movement. The many ways of subdividing an eight-count phrase, for instance, can be about pleasure, coaxing a series of smaller beats from a slightly longer time cycle, or about refusing to align with capital’s even clock time. In such moments, footwork becomes an experience of vibration, a palpable sense of the oscillations of a larger electro-magnetic force. This is how I learned about dancing as energetic resonance, a practice that reverberates, for me, with the ways in which Critical Race Studies scholars complicate the narrations of time and history as layered and entangled. Learning to mark moments of dance precisely and to expand and contract rhythm cycles is as much about careful listening as about identifying the silences. Sounded footwork is an integral part of my contemporary dance-­making toolkit: it is my modality of affirming presence and of articulating the shape of emotion that is at the core of my work. For instance, I might invoke the energy of urban street protest, which is the context for much of my choreography, through different ways of articulating a repeating nine-­beat cycle, where the various interpretations of that time signature indicate shifts within continuity. The difference-in-unison generates the energy of a South-South feminist movement built from the coming together of many women and femmes, arriving with all of their difference, to a shared platform. Sometimes, rhythmic patterns break under the pressure of stories of conflict and trauma that recur in my work. Sometimes, I juxtapose multiple time signatures and irregular rhythm patterns to suggest emotional ferment and jagged nervous states, the result of experiences of injustice. My sparing use of rhythmic synchronicity distinguishes my choreography of footwork from the kind of harmonious uniformity that is typical in traditional repertoire. These rare moments of unison then become about the gathering of momentum in invoking a future of justice. Here, repeated foot slaps, mine resounding with those performed by a community of dancers, become deeply pleasurable and empowering, if demanding. Even in the world of classical Indian dance, footwork offers a space of invention and creative play as dancers and musicians, particularly percussionists, engage in call-and-response. In a different way, in my

124 

A. CHATTERJEA

contemporary usage of footwork, dancers respond to each other’s call by performing different variations, but in the transnational South-South feminist world of the work, such play signifies political community. Alternatively, rhythm cycles might constantly evolve, expanding in waves, as more dancers join the ensemble choreography. In these and different ways, footwork is a way of building relationships, heat, velocity, and energy. It is an important marker of my location and aesthetic specificity. But, in popular imagination and, often, in the assessment of decision-makers, footwork is too deeply associated with “tradition” to allow for contemporary usage, or too narrowly classified as “virtuosic” only, to have experimental value. I choose to not muffle my footwork by wearing sneakers, use it as accent only, or “abstract” it as soundless, in order to claim contemporaneity in my choreography. My use of footwork to inflect time and indicate the labor of community-building, often as extended sections of odd-number beat cycles, is a switch from its traditional usage. Also, it is a way to switch up notions of innovation and deconstruction that seem to demand conformity in rejecting traditional practice. In this switch, I drag in a critical element of my culturally specific aesthetic into contemporary dance, and footwork shifts into a different register of signification. Slap, heel, forced arch, slide, vibrate: switch! I embrace the soles of my feet, sometimes overheated from hours of footwork-intensive rehearsal, and the fiery pleasure of rhythm. Contemporary use of footwork as dialectical technique, and its theorization via a re-negotiated extension of DeFrantz’s discursive device, brings me intimations of home-as-practice.

Belonging The above meditation on footwork allows me to remember an embodiment and practice that offers the possibility of grounding, even if momentarily. Is this home? It could be, as long as I remember that home might mean differently for others. So much of our contemporary global experience is shaped by the instability of how we came to understand home. Large-scale political, economic, and environmental crises and the unleashing of forces of hate and violence have resulted in big groups of people moving away from what they knew as “home” at some point of time: refugees, migrant workers, individuals seeking asylum. Their experience is sometimes different from, and often resonant with, the experience of South-South artists who, under different conditions of duress, live in diaspora, under occupation, or under difficult circumstances, as they make

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

125

and produce dance. The struggle to find home, community, and connection is intense across all these differences. Belonging and artistic citizenship constitute some of the vexed questions at the heart of this chapter. Dance artists work hard to train their bodies, chisel their choreographic craft, raise funds to produce their work, and repeatedly share their work with audiences who they are often meeting for the first time. This career path in itself is risky and demanding. And they seldom go on to make money. A few might make a living. But most dancers and choreographers work other jobs at some time of their lives in order that they might be able to materialize the dance visions they conjure. And this has nothing to do with their “professionalism”: they approach their work with as much detail, care, and thoughtfulness as their colleagues who have the good fortune to earn their living through their profession of choice. What most artists do long for, along with the resources to continue doing the work they care about, is recognition by peers and a community of support. Belonging: when we experience shared connections despite very different struggles, when we recognize that we all together constitute a field, however differently we inhabit it. Belonging emerges from and is qualified by how we identify ourselves, how we position our work, and how we imagine the tensions and affirmations between the work we create and the context in which we work. In a field of limited resources and high stakes, where public or external validation is inevitably a measure of success, and where keeping self-doubt at bay is an urgent preoccupation, a sense of belonging is crucial to halt the gaslighting of artists. If we imagined belonging in contemporary dance through the differentially connecting fractals comprising all the dancing bodies that give it materiality and the shadow bodies who haunt the artists, would we feel the heat of its raucous heterogeneity? I do not mean this as a feel-good folding into “inclusion.” I am aware that the work of looking at difference in the eye is substantial and difficult. Belonging without interpellation asks for an entirely different set of premises and ideological responses, but intention and commitment to relationality ignite change. In claiming space, not as passive recipients of inclusionary benevolence, but as activators of difference amidst our connectivities, I am visioning a contemporary dance field that is multitudinous and perhaps necessarily messy, held together as much through resonances and adjacencies as through incongruences and contestations. To support my passionate invocation of belonging-in-alterity in contemporary dance for a range of South-South artists, on our own terms, I invoke feminist scholar Sara

126 

A. CHATTERJEA

Ahmed. In particular, I follow her theorizations of diversity inside institutions of higher education and national governance. Ahmed calls for a “politics that is premised on closer encounters” that seeks not to assimilate all differences, but instead, comes to think of difference itself as a core organizing principle (2000, p.  180). She reminds us that figuring out “how we may inhabit the world with others, involves imagining a different form of political community, one that moves beyond the opposition between common and uncommon, between friends and strangers, or between sameness and difference” (Ahmed 2000, p. 180). Centering multiplicity within an imagined category is different from the ways in which official cultures have deployed multiculturalism only to insist on uniformity and absorption into one culture in the end, where unassimilable differences, those that “challenge the supposedly universal values upon which that culture is predicated,” must be seen as “a failure or betrayal, not just of the … nation, but of the discourse of multiculturalism itself” (Ahmed 2000, p. 110). Here again are un-meetings, embedded in the very premise of a multicultural meeting shored up by tacit universalisms. Differently, in incommensurable difference and belonging nonetheless to a shared practice, lie possibility and the promise of other kinds of meetings. Ahmed also calls for diversity work as “phenomenological practice” where “rather than suggesting that knowledge leads (or should lead) to transformation, I offer a reversal … transformation, as a form of practical labor, leads to knowledge” (2012, p. 173). She suggests that one form of such labor describes “the effects of inhabiting institutional spaces that do not give you residence” (Ahmed 2012, p.  176). It constitutes refusing what she calls “overing” arguments, which are often brought up when we insist on prioritizing intersectional difference. She describes “overing” arguments thus: “In assuming that we are over certain kinds of critique, they create the impression that we are over what is being critiqued” (Ahmed 2012, p. 179). Ahmed’s notion of diversity work as phenomenological practice is “an account of how racism is reproduced by receding from view, becoming an ordinary feature of institutional life” and she reminds us that “there is labor in attending to what recedes from view” (2012, pp. 182, 14). Attending to what has been recessed from view: I am reminded of Nora Chipaumire’s current work in articulating ways of being and moving in African experimental dance through a digital and published platform, Nhaka. In a recent class she taught at the University of Minnesota’s Dance Program, Chipaumire encouraged the students to move away from learned

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

127

notions of perfect technique and typical ways of warmup. Instead she asked them to stand upright around her, fist one hand in a “Black Power” gesture and place it in between their feet. Throughout the class, she insisted on their taking up just that much room between their feet and no more, describing it as “just” space, just as much as is needed, so we can all have space. She then began to build a practice of rooting the feet to the ground and finding small movements for torso, knees, and arms. From an experience of vibration, she moved into looking microscopically at walking and the swing inherent in cross-lateral locomotion, though the feet remained in one place for the most part. Gradually, she invited the dancers to expand the “swag” that was already seeded in the walk, and what she described as the “delight and drama of being Black-skinned.”17 The invitation to imagine the Black experience of navigating a world rife with capitalistic appropriations of the body and embodied labor then drew us into a physicality of running, looking around, the running ultimately becoming so fast, that it became aerodynamic, almost flying. This development from the moments of standing still and sensing rootedness and power to the moment of running carried us through a snapshot of Black life under imperialism encompassing empowerment, devastation, and resistance. Chipaumire switches up pedestrian movements of walking and running by making visible the performance of Black swag and tragedy inside them and creates an unambiguous embodied index of Black cultural life. The practice-­based metamorphosis of this walk, where its experiential extraordinariness is heightened and expanded, produces knowledge about urban Black experiences. In the previous chapter, I described the barriers that are experienced by South-South choreographers in contemporary dance. In this chapter, I have sought to extend Ahmed’s call for a phenomenological practice where transformative work produces knowledge, by reflecting on the particular kinds of labor, questions, practices, and debates with which the South-South artists, who enliven this book, are engaged. I have also offered detailed analyses of hold-overs of power games from older politics in dance-making that constitute grounds that refuse us, in Ahmed’s terms, “residence,” space to dance, and the complex unfoldings of decolonizing processes in contemporary dance. At the same time, I have traced affirmations of resistance, pleasure, joy, defiance in both movement generation and choreographic strategies. It is my hope that my articulation of the complicated, often difficult, field in which the artists in this book are working, the intersectional stakes they are navigating as they operate in the

128 

A. CHATTERJEA

global cultural field, demonstrates how their work creates vital ways of knowing about the world. And that my descriptions of their work of welding the aesthetic markers of their contemporaneity will ignite the reshaping of contemporary dance and a different global stage. The following chapters will offer even greater scope for reflecting on their choreographies.

Notes 1. The association of South Asian women with death-by-fire is old. Beginning with the heinous practice of sati among Brahminical Hindus, where patriarchal violence tangoed viciously with colonial saviorism, this phenomenon includes current versions of dowry deaths across South Asian communities. 2. In this song, the poet Salabeg calls out to Lord Jagannath, who is traditionally imagined as being dark of skin, blue black, as the “Blue Mountain.” 3. Ekaharya abhinaya is the tradition of expressive performance in Indian classical theater and dance where a single performer switches between several characters to articulate a story. Typically, the shift between characters is signaled with a spin, variously performed. 4. Draupadi is one of the central figures in the Indian epic, the Mahabharata, attributed to the sage Vyasa, somewhere between the eighth and ninth century BCE. It tells of the rivalry between the Kaurava and the Pandava families and the Kurukshetra war. Part of the extended hostility leads to Draupadi, who is married to the five Pandava brothers, being dragged into court and humiliated. Prahlad is a mythological figure from the treatise, the Bhagavad Purana (between eighth and tenth century CE), celebrated for his piety and steadfast dedication to Lord Vishnu, despite the pressure from his demonic father, Hiranyakashipu. 5. This description is from “The Project” section of the website for Octavia’s Brood. The book itself was published as Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements in 2015. 6. Cultural commentator Andy Horwitz traces some of the implications of dance’s ephemerality and its ensuing lack of financial return, sharply differentiating performing and visual arts, in his three-part essay, “The Economics of Ephemerality” on the online publication Culturebot, posted on November 8, 2012: https://www.culturebot.org/2012/11/14937/ the-economics-of-ephemerality/. Accessed December 2, 2017. 7. Gerald Vizenor talks about theories of survivance as “elusive, obscure, imprecise by definition … but survivance is unmistakably true and just in native practice and company … an active sense of presence over absence,

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

129

deracination, and oblivion … the continuance of stories” in his introductory essay, “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice,” in the collection of essays edited by him. Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (2008, p. 1). 8. These references are expanded in the individual chapters discussing the work of these artists. 9. See Audre Lorde’s classic essay, “Uses of the Erotic,” originally a paper presented at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women at Mount Holyoke College on August 25, 1978, and first published in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984). 10. It is perhaps important here to note that my emphasis, in these commons, is on justice, which takes into account different perspectives and entrances, and holds space for dialogue, but indicates an unambiguous ethical compass. This is different from neoliberal notions of diversity, where all voices are equally valid, a position that often circumvents accountability in situations of systemic injustice. 11. My citation of Chakrabarty comes with questions and doubts. I wrote this section much before Chakrabarty was called out by academic C. Christine Fair for sexual harassment on BuzzFeed (“#HimToo: A Reckoning,” October 25, 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/christinefair/himtoo-areckoning?utm_term=.xudY46VjDA#.ur1ryl78AK). Chakrabarty’s theoretical interventions in the unquestioned centrality that Europe is endowed with have been useful in my own framings of contemporary dance. Even so, I remain troubled about working with the academic contributions of intellectuals accused of predatory behavior. 12. I have personally gained tremendously from the way in which this Initiative created support and collegiality with several peers and partnered with the Maggie Allesee National Choreographic Center in Tallahassee, Florida, to create residencies that offered space and opportunity for deep creative investigations with collaborators and artists. 13. In his classic book, The Emancipated Spectator, Ranciére writes about emancipation as beginning when “we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting … we understand that viewing is also an action that confirms or transforms this distribution of positions” (2009, p. 13). 14. Ali Chahrour, choreographer, in post-performance discussion, Leila’s Death, Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, MN, November 12, 2017. 15. In 1984, watching Twyla Tharp’s classic choreography to That’s Life, part of the suite of dances choreographed for her 1982 Nine Sinatra Songs, Morris famously exclaimed loudly “No more rape!” and walked out of the theater. In that piece, the male dancer repeatedly throws the female dancer through his legs and up in the air, turns her precariously, drags her along, all with perfect technique of course, so the force is always performative,

130 

A. CHATTERJEA

and the artists are tracking each other’s safety. Morris’ outburst, drawing attention to stylized misogyny in dance, is well-documented. 16. In May 2017, New York Times dance writer Siobhan Burke responded to choreographer Alexei Ratmansky’s work, Odessa, on Instagram with the caption “no more gang rape scenes in ballet please.” (@sioburke, Instagram post, May 7, 2017, https://www.instagram.com/p/BTzzPekhDvd/.) It generated a vital discussion, with several viewers decrying her comments as hampering artistic freedom, while others agreed with her. Burke’s subsequent review of the piece, “No More Gang Rape Scenes in Ballet, Please,” described what she witnessed: “we had seen a portrayal of a woman being physically violated, with essentially no consequences, no resolution, no critique of the men’s actions or of their unresolved nature. Sound familiar? Moreover, it was never less than beautiful to look at: controlled, virtuosic, glamorous” (Burke 2017). She recognized that partnering is in “ballet’s DNA” but marked the trend toward “the kind of forceful partnering that’s become so ubiquitous, so gratuitous, so banal in ballet—the yanking, dragging, prying open of women’s bodies by men—both with and without a narrative pretext” (Burke 2017). 17. Nora Chipaumire, instruction during class, University of Minnesota Dance Program, March 19, 2018.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. New York: Routledge. ———. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Alexander, Jacqui M. 2005. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham: Duke University Press. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1991. Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial? Critical Inquiry 17 (2): 336–357. Bel, Jérôme, and Boris Charmatz. 2014. Emails 2009–2010. In Danse: An Anthology, ed. Noémie Solomon, 241–250. New  York: Les Presses du Réel, co-published with Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the US. Brown, Adrienne Maree, and Walidah Imarisha. n.d. The Project. Octavia’s Brood. http://octaviasbrood.com/index.php?page=the-project. Accessed March 17, 2017. ———. 2015. Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Oakland: AK Press. Burke, Siobhan. 2017. No More Gang Rape Scenes in Ballet, Please. New York Times, May 15. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/arts/dance/nomore-gang-rape-scenes-in-ballets-please.html.

3  CHOREOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE-MAKING 

131

Burt, Ramsay. 2017. Ungoverning Dance: Contemporary European Theatre Dance and the Commons. New York: Oxford University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chatterjea, Ananya. 2017. Of Corporeal Rewritings, Translations, and the Politics of Difference in Dancing. In Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, ed. Rebekkah J. Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and Randy Martin, 283–302. New York: Oxford University Press. “The Choreographic Center Initiative.” n.d. Urban Bush Women Website. https://www.urbanbushwomen.org/choreographic-center. Accessed March 16, 2019. DeFrantz, Thomas F. 2017. Switch: Queer Social Dance, Political Leadership, and Black Popular Culture. In Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, ed. Rebekah Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and Randy Martin, 477–495. New  York: Oxford University Press. Enwezor, Okwui. 2002. The Black Box. In Documenta XI_Platform 5, Exhibition Catalogue, 42–55. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers. ———. 2008. The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition. In Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, ed. Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee, 207–234. Durham: Duke University Press. Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe 12 (2): 1–14. Hartman, Saidiya, Eva Hoffman, Daniel Mendelsohn, and in conversation with Nancy Miller. 2011. Memoirs of Return. In Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller, 107–123. New York: Columbia University Press. Howard, Theresa Ruth. (2017, April 28). Why Some Dancers are Giving ‘Hiplet’ Serious Side Eye. Dance Magazine. https://www.dancemagazine.com/whyare-so-many-people-cringing-over-hiplet-2383346949.html?rebelltitem=1#re belltitem1. Accessed March 6, 2018. Johnson, E. Patrick. 2010. ‘Quare’ Studies or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother. Text and Performance Quarterly 21 (1): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462930128119. Kourlas, Gia. 2016. Hiplet: An Implausible Hybrid Plants Itself on Pointe. New York Times, September 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/arts/ dance/hiplet-an-implausible-hybrid-plants-itself-on-pointe.html. Lepecki, André. 2006. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. New York: Routledge. Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: Crossing Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press.

132 

A. CHATTERJEA

Mignolo, Walter D. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pather, Jay. 2015. Laws of Recall: Body, Memory and Site-Specific Performance in Contemporary South Africa. In New Territories: Theatre, Drama, and Performance in Post-Apartheid South Africa, ed. Greg Homann and Marc Maufort, 317–344. Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang. Purkayastha, Prarthana. 2014. Indian Modern Dance, Feminism, and Transnationalism. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Ranciére, Jacques. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso. Reed, Alison. 2015. Traumatic Utopias: Holding Hope in Bridgforth’s Love Conjure/Blues. Text and Performance Quarterly 35 (2–3): 119–141. https:// doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2015.1034762. Sheppard, Alice. 2019. I Dance Because I Can. New York Times, February 27. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/opinion/disability-dance-alicesheppard.html. Story, Jamal. (2016, June 3). Hiplet? [Blogpost on Jamal Story]. http://www. jamalstory.com/storysshorts/2016/6/3/hiplet. Accessed May 20, 2017. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press. Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Vizenor, Gerald. 2008. Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

CHAPTER 4

Germaine Acogny: Convective Heat and Ground-Shift in Contemporary African Dance

She stands tall and majestic, her profiled face tilting her chin slightly up. Her left arm reaches up diagonally as the right hand tugs on the edges of her long black dress. Her right arm reaches around to pull at the hem of her dress lying on her neck, a gesture that droops her head as if she is hanging from her own hand, and turns her around. She is standing against a series of white tasselled screens, which double as projection surfaces. Images—abstract shapes, a man driving a car along a dusty road, her grandmother’s face framed in a white head covering, a small boat full of African refugees rocking dangerously across the Mediterranean, Baobab trees—whirl around on the screens. As she talks and moves, sometimes through the screens, we encounter the many pieces of this story, the feminist revisiting of her life, inspirations from her grandmother, the backdrop of a postcolonial Senegal. She speaks as she moves, skillfully weaving dialogue with gesture, engaging audiences with a seemingly informal monologue. Bits of the archetypal Greek tragedy of Medea are remixed with imagined moments from a slave auction on Gorée island as the tension mounts with the layering of text and movement. Her fists pound in the air, her feet step vigorously on the ground, vibrating her entire body. Repeatedly, she flings a pillow to the floor and stamps on it till it bursts, causing an explosion of white feathers that hover in the air before softly drifting towards the ground. Heat rises from this prismatic story-dancing, energetically and choreographically, and through the image of the up-floating feathers. The sharp juxtaposition of hard and soft, of stories of violence and pain, personal ancestral memory and historic detail, of prophetic speech and © The Author(s) 2020 A. Chatterjea, Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance, New World Choreographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43912-5_4

133

134 

A. CHATTERJEA

silences, of pathways that go back and forth and movements that stay in place, shine light on the context of lives caught in a web of power relations. —Germaine Acogny, performing À un Endroit du Début, 2015

(Image 4.1) Germaine Acogny, well-known now as the “Mother of African Contemporary Dance,” was born in 1944 in Benin and moved to Senegal in her early childhood. Her relationship with her father, who worked as a civil servant in the French colonial government of Senegal, was combative. In À un Endroit du Début, she rails against his betrayals as she speaks to him in the voice of her grandmother, reminding him that she is the mother of his wife. We learn that Acogny’s ultimate repudiation of her father’s conversion into colonial ways was strengthened by her time with her grandmother Aloopho, who was a Yoruba priestess and a strong maternal figure for her. Acogny’s own mother had passed when she was only six. This mixture of different influences from her childhood was instrumental

Image 4.1  Germaine Acogny in À un Endroit du Début, 2015. (© Ecole de Sables, courtesy of Germaine Acogny and Helmut Vogt)

4  GERMAINE ACOGNY: CONVECTIVE HEAT AND GROUND-SHIFT… 

135

in encouraging her to form her own understanding of contemporaneity in cultural production. Acogny’s dance training comprised both West African traditional forms at home and then in ballet and modern dance forms in Paris where she went to study in her twenties.1 Her study of West African dance included, among other forms, the Sabar dances that she learned in Dakar as well as the dances of the Jola people in southern Senegal. After her return from France, noticing the gap in formal dance pedagogy in Senegal, she began to develop her skills in teaching dance. She taught both in the school system and privately, which gave her scope to articulate her own movement style. This work, and her own choreography, drew notice from the visionary poet-leader, President Leopold Senghor, the first president of independent Senegal. Yet it took him some time to recognize the epic potential of her vision. Over time, Acogny developed her signature movement style and pedagogy, imagining dancing bodies as signposting African modernity, and subsequently, contemporaneity. Indeed, it was her response to this historic time of Senegalese national independence and to the philosophy of Africanité that was resounding through the socio-cultural atmosphere of recently decolonized African countries, inevitably linked to African modernities, that lies at the root of her technique. The extraordinary circumstances of its inception and Acogny’s vision of African multi-­ tonal contemporaneity necessitate that we understand the technique—Technique Acogny—in the context of its development. Germaine Acogny’s determined evolution of a pedagogy for African dance happened initially in the tiny compound of her own house, and then with a group of young women who were part of the national marching band. In “Africanizing” the choreography for the drum majorettes, Acogny worked with the expert drummer Doudou N’diaye Rose, whose complex rhythm cycles inspired her to finesse details of movement, even as she learned to teach large groups of dancers moving as an ensemble. This first brought her to the attention of President Senghor, who referred her to his friend, the celebrated French ballet choreographer Maurice Béjart. She was then invited to teach a class in her technique in the latter’s Mudra school in Brussels, Belgium, in 1975. Both Béjart and Senghor were present at this class, and Acogny was eventually invited to collaborate with them in the establishment of the Mudra Afrique School in Dakar in 1977, with the support of UNESCO. Subsequently, Acogny was assigned directorship of Mudra and, under her leadership, this quickly became an important trans-African training center and gathering ground for many artists.

136 

A. CHATTERJEA

Teaching at Mudra Afrique gave Acogny space to chisel and codify her own technique which she had already begun to teach. An early film about the school shows students Black and white, from different parts of Africa and Europe, studying ballet, Graham technique, Technique Acogny, traditional African drumming, among other curricula. In one of the most striking moments of this documentary, we see Acogny standing in the center of the studio as students walk around her in a big circle. Raising her voice over the drums, Acogny instructs the dancers to walk: “Marchez, marchez!” (in Waksman & Lawaetz 1980). Almost immediately, she inflects the walk with rhythmic complexity, adding a small jump followed by steps in a syncopated five-beat cycle. The galloping quality of the elevation with the hip and torso inflections of steps indicates their origins in West African dance. These elements, later codified into particular exercises in her training system, show up here in the context of a traveling phrase, a repeated movement across the floor. The film also documents her work as administrator, planning different strategies with colleagues, and as choreographer, rehearsing with dancers. Despite her leadership and her unique contributions to this experiment, Acogny’s journey was riddled with struggle. Earlier, when she was Directrice of the Dance Section of L’Institut National des Arts in Senegal, she witnessed Senghor choose preeminent Haitians and African-Americans over local leaders to lead the initiative to develop the vision for dance in modern Senegal. Even now, she had to persist in consolidating her pedagogy despite the development of her “technique” being slighted by her colleagues. It was her tenacity, meeting with the President, and repeatedly articulating that he needed to choose local leaders for this task, that gradually consolidated her position as the person best suited for this project. Beset with financial troubles, Mudra Afrique closed in 1982. After traveling and working transnationally for several years, Acogny established her own institution, École des Sables, in the seaside town of Toubab Dialaw, Senegal, in 1998, and has continued to teach there, in her school in Toulouse, France, and globally. She also formed her company, Compagnie Jant-bi, with graduates from the school in the same year. École des Sables has become an important gathering ground for professional artists from across Africa. Villagers from the surrounding community are invited in, intersecting with performing artists from Dakar, from other African countries, and from around the world. It has become an important training ground for dancers in the Technique Acogny, which also teaches them to dance with great respect for the particular

4  GERMAINE ACOGNY: CONVECTIVE HEAT AND GROUND-SHIFT… 

137

topography and life modes that characterize the context in which the school is located. Tracing Acogny’s historic journey from Mudra Afrique through her development of École des Sables, and her current positionality as one of the most prominent figures in contemporary African dance, charts a move through postcolonial modernity to anticolonial globality and aesthetic contemporaneity. And, like convective currents, every incarnation of her work builds and then transfers its energetic heat to the next, transforming the possibilities of the field each time. Of course, the journey of Senegal from postcolonial independence to modern nation-state owes much to the leadership of President Senghor, and Acogny’s vision and philosophy about present-day Africa and the importance of cultural work in communicating this new vision of Africa, resonated with his. For both of them, culture was a way to represent Africa’s own modernity and shine light on its place in a global frame, in its own terms. And for both of them, the concepts of enracinement and ouverture, rootedness and openness, and their interplay with the concept of métissage, cultural crossings, were crucial in articulating the image of an Africa that looked at its encounter with the West in the eye, and moved forward from that history, without postulating a restoration of “origins.”2 Yet, Acogny’s work is distinct from what dance ethnographer Hélène Neveu Kringelbach has described as “neo-traditional performance” that “emerged from the circulation and codification of musical and choreographic school theater in Francophone Africa” in the early years of the postcolonial cultural ferment (2016, p. 69). The distinction of her project is best understood by remembering the continental context in which she was working. The second half of the twentieth century had seen the successful rise and international touring by Les Ballets Africains in the 1950s and subsequently Ballet Djoliba in the 1960s, both situated in newly independent Guinea. Under the political leadership of President Sékou Touré, Conakry, where both companies are located, became an important cultural center, visited by luminaries such as Miriam Makeba, Harry Belafonte, and Stokely Carmichael, and performance played an important role both in postcolonial cultural diplomacy and in nation-building. Art historian Joshua Cohen writes about the complex entanglements of performing for national and global audiences and the different resonances of decisions about repertoire and stagecraft in the early history of Ballets Africains: “What American audiences in 1960 could not have discerned in the Ballets’ performances were the means by which Indigenous ritual-related practices had been

138 

A. CHATTERJEA

converted into “art” for the stage. Those means—as well as the motivations behind them—were bound up in the politics and pragmatics of nation building” (2012, p. 19). Cohen explains how Touré’s goal to “secularize traditional practices … transforming them instead into instrumental and exchangeable forms of national cultural currency” (2012, p. 20) was reflected in founder Keïta Fodéba’s choreographies, earning the latter praise by Frantz Fanon as “reinterpreting all the rhythmic images of his country from a revolutionary standpoint” (1963, p. 227). The successful Ballets Africains model inspired the evolution of the company established by Maurice Sonar Senghor, the nephew of President Senghor, into the National Ballet of Senegal in 1961, and provided a template for other national dance companies across West and Central Africa. Yet, as Nevue Kringelbach and other scholars point out, this “neo-­ traditional” genre of dance, most often tightly woven into a national cultural agenda, emphasized the specificity of rural traditions, and of selected and codified elements of “material culture from the young nations’ perceived peripheries” (2016, p. 74). This presentation of embodied heritage on modern theater stages, national and global, fulfilled the mission of emphasizing Africa’s tremendous artistic richness and diversity, and also incorporated those on the margins of the nation into the state agenda, while fixing them inside the category of Tradition. Nevue Kringelbach critiques the way in which, in the National Ballet, “urban life was never represented since it was associated with the present (mistakenly, given the long-standing existence of cities in West Africa), and therefore in no need of cultural preservation” (2016, p. 73). Differently, Acogny was unwavering in her vision of bringing contemporary Africa to the stage and designed her interventions to both resonate with and depart from these initiatives. Drawing on Senghor’s conceptual frame of Africanité, while insisting on contemporaneity and refusing both an ethnographic showcasing of existing cultural practices and a recuperation of “Tradition,” allowed Acogny to root her work in a pan-African consciousness imagined differently from these above projects, avoid the confinements of a nationalistic project, and heighten the global profile of her work. No doubt Acogny also reckoned with the way in which “African dance” was received globally, particularly in the West. She knew the demands of the ethnographic lens, which meant that artists from multiple Souths were summoned to deliver some notion of “authenticity.” She also knew that the overwhelming emphasis on Tradition meant that acts of

4  GERMAINE ACOGNY: CONVECTIVE HEAT AND GROUND-SHIFT… 

139

choreography and intentional staging were rendered opaque, much in alignment with pre-existing racist hierarchies. For instance, the New York Times review of performances at the World Festival of Negro Arts in 1966 exotified the dances presented by the National Dance Troupe of Mali as “wearing ferocious symbolic masks, present(ing) a century-old ritual devil dance” (Associated Press 1966, p. 16). There is no indication that the reviewer considered that artists and cultural ambassadors might carefully curate and choreograph their offerings at this important and unique transnational platform. Similarly, the 1959–1960 tour of Ballets Africains to Europe and America won much acclaim, but the sophisticated choreography and stagecraft were often missed. The American news magazine Newsweek, for instance, described the artists of Ballets Africains as “out of the dark reaches of the Dark Continent … amateurs who intend to return home some three months from now and buy a farm or a herd of cattle with the money they have made in the world’s theaters” (“Witchery on Broadway” 1959, p.  7). Unfortunately, this approach had wide resonance, sometimes even within African countries. Nevue Kringelbach speaks about the vision of the curators of a major cultural festival organized in Dakar, in 1966: “The festival’s concern with traditionalism and authenticity also came across in the organizers’ and the media’s insistence that true African dance is spontaneous, rather than the outcome of lengthy training and choreographic work” (2016, p. 75). For Acogny, then, articulating an aesthetic for contemporary African dance meant balancing an embodied location in the deep structures of traditional practices, while staging a pan-African urban identity that asserted its difference, addressing global audiences, and insisting on an Africa that refused to remain in the clutches of stereotypes. She is an intentional crafter of movement and dance. Thus, Acogny’s construction of a pan-African aesthetic as part of a cartography for the constantly evolving future both echoed Senghor’s notion of Africanité and differed from it in interpretation. In a 1967 essay, Senghor speaks about Africanité as the cultural foundations of a “common destiny” shared by several African nations, and advocated for this to be a guiding philosophy for the newly formed Organization of African Unity: “to base solely on anti-colonialism the joint organization that we plan to build is to give it a very fragile foundation. For it is not the colonial past that characterizes us as Africans. We share it with all the other peoples of Asia and America. It belongs to the past—at any rate, it will belong to the past

140 

A. CHATTERJEA

t­ omorrow. It lies behind us now that our task is to build our future. This can rest firmly only on values common to all Africans and permanent at the same time. It is precisely the sum total of those values that I call Africanité. (2009, p. 166)

His plea to build a shared vision across the racial, religious, ethnic, and national differences among Africans emerges from this vision: “If we hope to build a united Africa, we must do it solidly and for that we must found it on points of cultural convergence, not on our political differences” (Senghor 2009, p. 168). His vision was demonstrated clearly in the global gathering he created: the First World Festival of Negro Arts held in Dakar from March 30 to April 24, 1966. Describing the range of African visual art exhibited at the festival, Thomas Cassirer writes that “no one could fail to be impressed by the astonishing diversity of African art” (1967, p. 177). Cassirer also remarks on the section showing Africa’s “Dialogue with the World,” where pieces from art from across Africa were displayed alongside art from Europe, which both “pointed to the impact of the discovery of African art on twentieth century European painting and sculpture” and “brought the traditional art of Africa out of its isolation into the mainstream of modern art” (1967, p. 178). Despite several critiques that the festival foregrounded elite artistic practices and continued Europeanist paradigms of excellence in presentation, this was a major event in postcolonial cultural production that foregrounded long-standing African artistic practices for global viewership. Acogny was only in her early twenties at the time of this festival but her artistic ideology was shaped in the context of the cultural legacy of this and other such high-profile cultural events. It was crucial for her to insert dance, and her imagination of it as an articulation of modern Africa, in a major way, in Senghor’s vision. She was deft in retaining conceptual inspirations from Senghorian philosophy but detaching herself from a nationalist agenda. In fact, her balancing of an Africa-centered and a global agenda ensured her survival through changing governments. Adroitly, Acogny made space for a dance aesthetic that emerges from an intense and specific training process, but is imagined as moving in communion with the natural world, while she refused notions of African dance as spontaneous: this is significant in shifting the paradigm of “African dance” that came to be established in the early postcolonial era. Moreover, for Acogny, the creation of a movement aesthetic and training system became the ground for shaping an embodied contemporary postcolonial Africanité, which

4  GERMAINE ACOGNY: CONVECTIVE HEAT AND GROUND-SHIFT… 

141

prominently featured inspirations from different parts of Benin and Senegal but called to all parts of the African continent. This context, and the struggle she had to endure to hold her own aesthetic and pedagogy up to the light, despite the initial lack of support from her colleagues and leaders like Senghor, casts her claiming of a “technique” very different in valence from, for instance, the Graham, Limon, or Horton techniques. And in the ways in which the training has evolved and come to be shared, where dancers are invited and given opportunities to locate their own voices, the Technique Acogny has indeed become more than a movement technique, a philosophy, less about replication and more about community, cultural location, and identity. This has also supported her expansive notion of Negritude and Africanité such that dancers from different parts of Africa come and train with Acogny and find a process and methodology for articulating their own choreographic voices. In these beginnings, with the clear consolidation of a movement aesthetic and pedagogic goals, Acogny’s work might be read as modernist, as the possibility of a postcolonial Senegal figuring out its particular cultural iterations of modernity. But in her continued responses to global issues through dance and her constant engagement with the world around her, she has come to be respected as a leader of a movement for contemporary artmaking. For instance, she responded sharply to French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s July 26, 2007, speech in Dakar where he declared that “The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history” and described “the African peasant” as living in harmony with nature and seasonal cycles, and for whom “there is no place for human adventure or for the idea of progress” (“Unofficial English Translation,” 2007, p. 3). She expressed her outrage both in talks and interviews, and in her piece Songook Yaakaar (Confronting Hope), which premiered at the Biennale de Danse á Lyon in 2010. The piece traces journeys of African bodies crossing tumultuous oceans, told from an African perspective. The piece inevitably layers historic journeys during African enslavement with current migrations and demands recognition of the vicissitudes and complexities of African histories and of shifting notions of adventure and progress. In solo pieces like this, and ensemble pieces like the 2004 Fagaala—co-­ choreographed with Kota Yamazaki on her company of male dancers, Compagnie Jant-Bi—which responds to the Rwandan genocide, Acogny extends the expressive limits of her technique to respond to current realities.

142 

A. CHATTERJEA

She sits on the floor, knees folded up and tilting to the right and then left as her torso sways in keeping with the rowing motions of her arms. Her head rolls forward in exhaustion. She continues. She rises slowly. Her arms move in big circular motions as she steps one foot behind her, pulling her torso back and up. The circling arms dip forward and she pulls her weight on to the other foot and looks ahead, we sense large swimming motions. This journey is intercut with a deeply ironic juxtaposition, where she puts on a red cap, picks up a microphone from a basket, and dances across the downstage edge where red and green lights flash garishly. She chants “Mondalization!” (globalization!) against a happy tune playing in the background, and turns the mic to the audience, exhorting them to repeat this tagline after her. This kind of contrast is highlighted throughout the piece. At one point, she comes close to the audience, and cupping her hands around her lips, looks up, and asks the universe for some support: “L’argent pour la prochaine création!” (some money for the next piece!). A series of turns brings her to a table that stands in the center of stage. Her fingertips run from one to another corner of the table’s surface as she enumerates the resources already there at Ecole des Sables: they have sand, and sun, and they dance! And she tips the table to stand it on its side, materializing another perspective for us. Immediately, we are directed to a slide show of images of Acogny interacting with Leopold Senghor, Maurice Bejart, and other historic moments that remind us of global interconnectedness. She begins to dance again, immersing us in the complex and contradictory politics inside cultural and economic globalization. —Germaine Acogny, dancing Songook Yaakaar (Confronting Hope), 2010

Acogny’s core statement, beautifully articulated at the 2014 World Dance Alliance Summit, resonates through the multiple temporalities within modernity and contemporaneity: “I have always dreamed that Africa must be given the opportunity to believe in its dance, and in spite of everything, and in the midst of an intrusive technology, keep its dance’s roots, as the deeply rooted Kapok tree.”3 The tensions of remaining rooted in some of the primary kinetic principles of “African dance” and aspiring toward conversations with global conversations about dance and cultural production become sensory when Acogny speaks about the Kapok tree, as the “symbol of her technique.” The kapokier is a majestic tree, particularly important in the Casamance region of southern Senegal. Acogny refers to its strong but light wood, the thorns that grow all around the trunk as protection, its branches that reach up to the sky, and its roots that grow deep and ramify far into the ground. Its combination of height, deep

4  GERMAINE ACOGNY: CONVECTIVE HEAT AND GROUND-SHIFT… 

143

roots, and thorny surface, is indicative of the mindful growth that Acogny envisions for her technique. However, Acogny’s repeated references to the natural world in the imagery to clarify her technique and pedagogy are never framed romantically. Rather they indicate the source inspiration for her improvisation and movement generation, and the sensibility pervading her engagement with the context her work emerges from. These references enable her to refuse an unproductive binary between urbanity and nature, at least within the African context. This is also the source of the “difference” in her movement aesthetic. For instance, she talks about creating a round shape with the arms, with the fingers touching in front of the chest, not at all as a balletic gestural language, but as putting one’s arms around the baobab tree, abundant in the landscape in and around the École des Sables, and sensing the texture of its trunk.4 This entry into a movement that might resonate with a final shape associated with a hegemonic form from an entirely different frame—a balletic port de bras—locates her dance in particularity and shifts the ways in which dancers come to inhabit movement. Once again, the details of how a movement is accomplished bring us into a different aesthetic and worldview (Image 4.2). The textures and attributes of the kapok tree—standing strong and reaching to the sun, while also needing to protect itself—also resonate with the particular ways in which Acogny has had to work transnationally to teach her technique and share her work. In speaking to a broader notion of Africanness, Acogny has worked with the Senghorian philosophy of métissage, with some shifts. As the values of verticality, complex rhythmicity, extensions, fast footwork, inspirations from the polyrhythmic Sabar dance, spinal articulation, contractions, and some balletic positions come together, each element is transformed by their juxtaposition and intersection with the others. Yet, she is clear that while she has experienced different Western movement styles, the Technique Acogny works through its own interpretation of those aesthetics. Because of the dominance of Western forms on the global stage, Acogny must always distinguish her work from them: for instance, there are spinal contractions in her work, but she is quick to remind students that the contraction of the Acogny technique differs from the Graham contraction, in how it might be accented with the arms, the intention, and the gaze, for instance. However, in studying her technique today, especially in the context of her widely accepted status as the “mother of contemporary African dance,” when students from all across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas come

144 

A. CHATTERJEA

Image 4.2  Germaine Acogny on the grounds of her beloved Ecole des Sables, located in Toubab Dialaw, Senegal. (© Hyun Kim) Much of the particularities of the Technique Acogny are inspired by this topography

to study at her École des Sables, I trace a somewhat different provocation. I argue that Acogny’s practice of referring to her Western dance training but immediately transforming it, and codifying a technique that trains the body to, one, mobilize the traditionally still torso and unmoving pelvis of ballet and modern dance, and, two, punctuate the movement of limbs by inserting sharp rhythmic isolations, is best read through the lens of what I describe as “generative pollution.” Different from a modernist embrace of métissage, Acogny’s “generative pollution” of categories of classical dance, ballet, (Western) contemporary dance, and of stereotypical notions of “African dance” might indicate a deliberate espousal of postcolonial hybridity, a grappling with the Western cultural modes that were thrust on colonized communities and an active redirecting of them; a defiance of

4  GERMAINE ACOGNY: CONVECTIVE HEAT AND GROUND-SHIFT… 

145

Western cultural purity and superiority on the way to crafting new contemporary aesthetics; and a celebration of difference. One of the key moments in Acogny’s articulation of her difference is her rendering of the grand plié Acogny, where the steady descent to raised heels with a long but undulating spine and the ascent are offset by the pulsating of the elbows and shoulders in sharp beats, pulling open the torso and elongating the spine. Moreover, upon reaching the depth of the grand plié Acogny, the dancer must circle the pelvis while remaining steady on the narrow base of the balls of the feet. Challenging in terms of balance, this grand plié exemplifies a brilliant trope in how inspirations from African dance practices upset some of the core principles of balletic classicism. The insistence on sharp spinal and pelvic movements in the grand plié is at once “improper” ballet technique and the source of Acogny’s “other” contemporary, ungovernable yet specific. In other instances, inspirations from what she saw in life modes around her in Dakar find their way into floor sections, where seated movements with open knees, initiated by core contraction and spinal elongation, recall the Graham contraction, but are significantly different. This is a pollution that speaks back and repositions subordinate knowledges and aesthetics; it generates new ways of dancing and understanding the body. Again, though the training system is organized in four series of “barres,” there is no actual use of a barre, and no ballet tendus and classical port de bras. Moreover, because her training system orients dancers’ understanding of their bodies in terms of a very specific ecology, the entire approach to dance becomes part of a worldview that celebrates the intersection of traditional and contemporary modes of Africa, reminding us that her technique traverses a mobile notion of Africanité. A vital beginning point in Acogny’s training system is the mapping of the torso as the sun, the butt as the moonshine, and the frontal surface of the pelvis as stars. Imagining such cosmological connectivity is important in identifying energetic centers for the body, recognizing its spiritual imbuement, and marking the initiation points of movement. This also accentuates the centrality of spinal movement in this technique. Acogny imagines the spine as “le serpent de la vie,” snake of life, a metaphor that brings together both the seamless concaving and convexing movement of the back and spinal initiation as the source of much of the Technique Acogny. It is possible that the snake image refers back to old spiritual practices of serpent worship in the Dahomey kingdom in Benin. But the internalizing of the snake image within the body could also suggest an upsetting of the popular pejorative

146 

A. CHATTERJEA

associations with snakes in Western and Christian cultures, even as the technique works through the first, third, and fourth positions of ballet technique. We can understand the full insurrectionary and creative weight of Acogny’s formulation and organizing of her movement into a repeatable “technique” when we remember that these have been shaped by the necessities of teaching her movement style to many different audiences. Indeed, her pedagogy, what elements she chooses to emphasize, and where she allows interpretation are shaped by her recognition that, without her insistence on certain particularities, students from other cultural backgrounds might more often than not translate a movement into what is familiar to them, thus missing the aesthetic difference in her technique. Exercises in the Technique Acogny are characterized by elongation of the entire spine and concomitant contraction of the core, articulation of the vertebrae at the base of the neck and at the back of the navel, and weighted exhalations to curve the vertebral line, open the sternum, and make the spine ready to respond to the shifting weight of the body. Ultimately, this supports what Acogny often describes as “freedom,” allowing for the contemporary aesthetic to emerge. This spinal fluidity, complemented by the deep groundedness, and cultivated by walking and dancing on sand, is a key characteristic of Acogny’s technique. École des Sables, literally School of Sands, is so named because much of the training happens in the open-air studio on sand, located close to the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. Dancing daily on sand demands that the feet adjust to the particular nature of that ground. The premises of stability, balance, nimbleness, footwork come to be rehabituated for dancers used to studio floors. Typically, training at École des Sables begins by walking on the sand and over the rocks that frame the compound of the organization, visiting the sacred Baobab trees that are important landmarks in that ecology. Walking is the first module of training, and dancers must figure out how to draw energy from the sand even as it shifts under their feet. The introduction to the technique thus happens through contact with the land where it was created. Looking across at the ocean and listening for the whispers among the leaves of the trees become part of this training, rooted in historical and topographical specificity. As the introductory walk comes to be formalized in warmup, a slight pullback of the scapula emphasizes the lengthening of the spine. The walk underlines the verticality of the body, which, for Acogny, is the signature difference between African danse contemporaine and danse traditionelle, where the knees remain bent and the torso leans forward.

4  GERMAINE ACOGNY: CONVECTIVE HEAT AND GROUND-SHIFT… 

147

The emphasis on the spine is practiced through three core concepts in the Acogny technique: undulation, contraction, and tremulation. This last was a descriptor given to Acogny by President Senghor after witnessing her technique. This emphasis on the vertebral flexibility and subtle spinal movement reflects, on the one hand, the energy of the Atlantic Ocean, which surrounds the École des Sables on one side, rooting the technique in geography. On the other hand, the wave-like movements of the torso negotiate the “verticality” of her technique and connect it to the embodiment of vibration. While traditionally, much of West African dance is characterized by polyrhythmicity and multiple centers of initiation, Acogny’s contemporary technique sometimes distills rhythm into spinal vibration, and at other times, layers fast-moving feet and arms with large torso swings. These three different articulations of spinal movement, differentiated by attack, quality, and pace, are often juxtaposed in exercises, emphasizing an infinite loop of energy. For instance, the Technique Acogny includes a floor section, where dancers begin by sitting on the floor, spine tall, legs turned out, knees lifted, and heels joined on the floor. With arms extended diagonally toward the floor, students learn the “pulsation de cocher”—a rocking on the coccygeal vertebrae and sitz bones with the spine responding—inspired by the movement of the driver of a horse-cart. Movements build in complexity, adding in the “piler-ecraser” series, inspired by the grinding and kneading movements used in preparing food. In the “piler” variation, the fisted arms come together in front of the sternum and the movement of grinding is first practiced with a slow contraction where the spine curves, and then on a fast beat with tremulation, where the spine vibrates. The “ecraser” variation deepens the contraction, concaving the spine even more, and creating a circular energetic pathway of the entire body emphasized by the arms that push out and down toward the heels and circle up. The next variation, “promenade de bras,” is a series of constant contractions, combined with a torsion of the torso, where Acogny emphasizes the extreme spiraling of the spine. In yet another variation, “le cerf dansant,” inspired by the movement of a deer that she interpreted as dancing, a slow contraction down, bringing the heels of the wrists in front of the lowered head, opens up the torso high. The spine then lowers in a series of rapid vibrations, almost bringing the back to the floor, and then rises up high, opening the sternum to the sky. Standing phrases also combine a series of different ways of articulating the spine. For instance, in “le miroir,” one arm wraps behind the body

148 

A. CHATTERJEA

while the other folds in front from the elbow, with that hand open to the side of the face. With the head tilted slightly toward the mirror gesture, the dancer steps side to side, undulating the spine sideways. This can immediately flow into a high contraction and release series, demanding that the entire torso be as ready to curve along a more sustained, elongated arc, respond in one sharp beat to a reverse shape, or pulse and turn with smaller movements in a series of beats. The constant readiness of the spine to initiate movement as well as to respond to movements of the legs are key to the Acogny technique’s transformation of movements that might remind us of balletic or Graham inspirations, but in fact become entirely different in execution, structurally shifted from inside. Acogny’s use of head movement is also a double strategy of insisting on Africanité and producing “generative pollution.” For instance, in the floor exercise named “le nénuphar,” the head metaphorizes the water lily flower, the arms suggest the leaves that spread on the water, and the legs stand in for the roots. It begins with the dancer seated with legs and arms extended forward. In the slowest speed, the ankles elongate the toes forward and the wrists extend the fingers down in eight counts and flex up in eight counts. Throughout this exercise, the head waves softly from side to side, like a water lily gently moved by water. At the end of the cycle, the legs open wide, as if to a second position, with knees bent up, and with arms extended out. The series repeats in this position. When the exercise builds to its last speed, every movement happens on one count, and the torso contracts and elongates sharply. This way of structuring this exercise takes out the possibility of rendering the elongation of the legs simply as a pointing of feet as in “danse classique.” Again, “la girafe” is a parallel walk on raised heels, with one arm extended forward and the other back. Here the torso waves forward and back with each step, and the head gently waves from side to side, changing up what might otherwise be thought of as a variation of a walk in demi-pointe. Acogny frequently clarifies that her insistence on the specificity of the details in delivering each exercise is the pathway to preparing dancers’ bodies to dance the entire series of movements that vary in speed and effort, with efficiency and appropriate energy. In fact, her entire technique works with an understanding of energy as the soul of the movement. For instance, in side-to-side steps, where the shoulders and elbows pull back and in repeatedly, it is the high energy with which the movement should be done that necessitates a soft and quick fold of the hips. The pathway of energetic flow within an exercise, however, is not predictable: though

4  GERMAINE ACOGNY: CONVECTIVE HEAT AND GROUND-SHIFT… 

149

most of the exercises are practiced in several speeds repeatedly subdividing the beat inside the phrase, the particular interpretation and energetic life inside a movement might shift between the slow and fast paces, from a slow undulation of the spine to a sharp contraction. Moreover, the principle of isolation, where the movement and the heat transfer quickly across movements initiated by different body parts, also supports the practice of “generative pollution,” where the difference added in by shifts made by body parts that remained “silent” in the mainstream articulation of the technique. Convective heat transfer is a constant working mode in this aesthetic. The energetic invigoration of movement is, in fact, set up from the very beginning of class and is intimately connected to the notion of community in which the training is embedded. Class begins with dancers, drummers, and teacher moving through space, meeting and greeting each other, then coming together in a big circle, rubbing the hands together to warm them, and often, placing the right hand on the back of the neck of the dancer to one side, and the left between the shoulder blades of the dancer to the other side, sharing heat and energy. In École des Sables, this beginning ritual often takes the form of some kind of engagement with natural elements, water or sand, materializing the circulation of energy among the dancers. This is Acogny’s practice of échauffement, the generation of heat, which is then heightened as the circle of dancers repeatedly moves in toward the center of the circle, then back out, in variations of “tremblement soleil-lune.” The “tremblement” is the active vibrating of the body, switching between the sternum and pelvis, where Acogny maps the sun and moon on the body, often offset with other steps and arm movements. Class also ends with dancers in a circle, giving each other a brief massage and brushing tired energies off of each other. This ritualized mobilization and passing of heat between different centers of the body and among dancers encapsulated in her échauffement practice are at the core of all of Acogny’s work, where energetic transfers bring different light and connectivity to contemporary dance. While she is constantly developing new strategies to share her dance, Acogny had begun to consolidate her technique even while she was teaching at Mudra Afrique. In 1980, her classic book African Dance was published with the text in three languages, English, French, and German. The book, currently in its third edition, articulates her technique through many pictures and descriptions, and contextualizes the work through introductory remarks by Acogny herself, President Senghor, and Maurice

150 

A. CHATTERJEA

Béjart. In her preface she locates her dancing in the scape of modern, urban, Africa: The artistic movement into which I insert my own work, even though it is deeply rooted in popular traditions, is not at all a return to the roots. On the contrary, we pursue a way that is altogether different and resolutely urban, reflecting the modern context within which so many of us, Africans of our time, must live and move and have our being. The Africa of skyscrapers, the Africa of international alliances. We do not want to see black dance constrained. We want it to flourish freely as a living ferment of modern civilization. And in the modern civilization of this world, we want black dance to establish the position of respect it deserves. Hence it shall play its animating and contradicting part. (Acogny 1980, p. 25)

Here again is the marked contrast to the earlier Senghorian particular vision of Negritude that shaped, for instance, the 1966 Festival. Hélène Nevue Kringelbach describes how dance was represented at the Festival: There were national troupes from a broad range of African nations (which included Senegal, of course, but also Mali, Chad, Ivory Coast, Niger, Sierra Leone, Togo, Cameroon, Gabon, Zaire, Congo, Zambia, Burundi and Ethiopia). Like much choreographic and musical production throughout Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, these troupes reimagined rural African life and performed ethnic identities while also projecting images of national unity … all of the African troupes programmed at the festival were viewed as restaging the folklore of particular ethnic groups. (2016, pp. 64–65)

Studying Acogny’s technique offers vital clues to her vision of the contemporizing African continent through its refusal of a rural-urban binary, distinguishing itself from particular notions of tradition, but also insisting on its cultural and aesthetic specificity, committed to continental connectivity, and separating itself from nationalist rhetoric. Interestingly, by the time of the publication of her book more than a decade later, Senghor was clearly convinced about the value of her perspective. In his preface, he writes: “I would like to call attention to Madame Acogny’s vocabulary, since it characterizes the négritude of her dance. The purpose of African Dance is to ensure that students correctly perform certain dance figures which Madame Acogny invented, based on black African folk dances” (Senghor, in Acogny 1980, p. 6). He suggests that her process of creating a technique might be similar to how Europeans

4  GERMAINE ACOGNY: CONVECTIVE HEAT AND GROUND-SHIFT… 

151

created ballet, but also to the methodologies of abstraction used by African artists in other disciplines. Especially, in the case of the latter, he says: “To express the highest degree of spirituality, she has availed herself of the visible world breaking through it, in order to capture the archetypical images lying deep within ancestral memory; the symbolic images which express spiritual surrealities” (Senghor, in Acogny 1980, p. 7). Senghor’s recognition of Acogny’s instilling of metaphoric richness into the creation of her technique is significant. However, he does not offer any indication of the tension that Acogny constantly navigates, between her insistence on cultural specificity and Tradition and the rolling transfer of heat in her work. Differently, Acogny’s own comments suggest her grappling with the project of postcolonial cultural revival, where notions of Tradition and Authenticity came to be yoked together. She reminds us that the Africanité and négritude of her dance are partly contextual, partly imagistic, almost always embodied, but seldom directly and exclusively adhere to a repertoire marked as Tradition. Her technique, which is demanding, requires attention to detail and a high degree of physical preparation. It delivers few of the stereotypical images of “African dance” that circulate in the non-African and global imagination and becomes her methodology to intervene in the expectation that her dance aligns with an “authentic” ethnographic account of Africa. Her expansive philosophy and a progressive notion of Africanité are also seen in the programming of her Danses Noire workshop series at the École des Sables, where she regularly offers workshop series led by choreographers from different African countries. Recently, for instance, she offered an intensive with the primary women innovators in African dance. Stage des Grandes Dames des danses d’Afrique was held in February and March 2018 and had more than 50 participants globally. The two-week intensive workshop was led by Acogny herself and Irène Tassémbedo (Burkina Faso), Flora Théfaine (Togo/France), and Elsa Wolliaston (Jamaica/France), who all have distinctive aesthetic and pedagogic methodologies. Another African Contemporary Dance Workshop was held in January and February 2019, taught by some of the leading artists in this field today, Chantal Loïal (Guadeloupe/France), Léna Blou (Guadeloupe), Nora Chipaumire (Zimbabwe/US), and Mamela Nyamza (South Africa). Shaping École des Sables as a platform where several different visions of African Dance in Contemporary Times (as in the 2018 Stage) and Contemporary African dance (as in the 2019 Stage) can be highlighted adjacently indicates Acogny’s comprehensive, complex, and flexible understanding of the field.

152 

A. CHATTERJEA

Visual art scholar Okwui Enwezor deplores what he calls the fiction of authenticity, which, he says, is “the handmaiden of an ethnocentric discourse blind to the complexity of the modern map of African social reality, and doubly blind to the multiplicity of identities forged in the crucible of colonization, globalization, diaspora, and the postcolonial social transformation of insular cultural worlds. Authenticity is … a code for fixity, absolutism, atrophy” (2003, p. 58). Enwezor’s words emphasize, for me, the socio-political implications of Acogny’s creation and of the trans-­ continental teaching of her technique, and the very different economic resonance of this dissemination from the possibility of capitalist replication. Her insistence on precision in the interpretation of her technique is never about inheriting tired and petrifying notions of authenticity, but about creating a field where there was none, and pushing back against limiting narratives of Tradition. In ways quite the opposite of an alienating “technique,” most of the young African dancers who have studied with her have been able to find in it a launching pad for their own voice as contemporary African artists. I end this chapter reflecting on the vibrating energy from Acogny’s recent performances of Mon Élue Noire (my chosen Black one), created by French choreographer Olivier Dubois and uniquely interpreted by her. The 37-minute solo piece premiered in January 2015 in the “Made in Potsdam” festival in Germany and was then presented, for its US premiere, by the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of its New Wave Festival in October 2017. Despite the overt choreographic shaping by Dubois, the performance leaves no viewer doubting the particular voice that Acogny brings to it. It is a piece that is specifically hers to dance, and it reminds us that the colonizer is inevitably implicated in their own dehumanization through their brutal acts of colonization. Dubois sets the piece to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, his second choreography to this piece of music. We see Acogny framed narrowly in a tall glass box set in a stage whose edges are swallowed in darkness. As she smokes her pipe, she laughs, sings, dances, convulses on her side on the floor, struggles to stand, changes her top, screams, vibrates her torso and spine, cites Aimé Césaire’s classic text “Discourse on Colonialism” (1950), smears white paint on the sides of the box, and stands resolutely as smoke fills the box, audiences sense clearly that she is in charge of her own representation. She may be confined to a box, which could suggest display and limitation, but there is no hesitation in the force with which she bends the terms of her visibility. Throughout the piece, Acogny slips in and out of

4  GERMAINE ACOGNY: CONVECTIVE HEAT AND GROUND-SHIFT… 

153

view, as the lighting flickers, as she turns her back to us, as smoke billows around her. She speaks Césaire’s text over Stravinsky’s score, and words like “otherness,” “bestiality,” and “colonization” fall inside and interrupt our experiencing of the music. Veering away from typical markers of “African dance,” her dancing switches energetic focus from one point to another, passing through groundedness, nimble movement of feet, pulsation, vocalizations, spinal undulations, initiating heat transfers across the floor to shifting points in the space. Heightened by the stark and throbbing lights, we witness her pain, her journey of survival, her resilience, and her reflectiveness catch emotional fire in no necessary logical sequence. She insists on her alterity but reminds us repeatedly that the terms of this difference refuse fixity, and that their fluctuation is hers to negotiate. What does it mean to reckon with the colonial legacies imposed on us, change its infrastructure form inside, and insert one’s difference, so the terms of engagement are always about reimagination? What are the implications of Mon Élue Noire being awarded New York’s prestigious Bessie Award (2018) for Outstanding Performance? The recognition in the wider field of dance is significant, but her current project is to transfer the heat from this personal recognition to the broader context of her work, to keep École des Sables running and to find resources for next artistic projects that will support contemporary dancers from many parts of Africa. Her legacy is one of reorganizing contemporary dance from a vital South-­ South, and specifically African, perspective, through her strategy of re-­ differentiation, creating channels of responsiveness to history and reinvigorating self-definition for so many artists across the African continent. In physics and meteorology, the principle of convection theorizes the cycling of hot air to cause the transfer of heat and the transport of atmospheric properties. Acogny’s dancing might offer a dance equivalent of this phenomenon where we experience the heat rising up from the sand dance floor, energizing and bringing light to the broader phenomenon of African Contemporary Dance.

Notes 1. The biographical information in this chapter is gathered from a combination of anecdotal and oral historical documented sources, all of which corroborate each other.

154 

A. CHATTERJEA

2. Senghor’s political and cultural philosophies are well documented through the five volumes of Liberté, collections of his speeches, lectures, essays, reports, and other writings, published in 1964, 1971, 1977, 1983, and 1993. 3. This speech is captured in the film Iya Tunde: The Mother Came Back directed by Laura Malécot (Nidouga Bâ and Malécot 2017). 4. Much of my analysis is based on my personal study of the Technique Acogny in the Stage held at Ecole des Sables in the Winter of 2011–2012, and in consequent workshops.

References Acogny, Germaine. 1980. African Dance. Frankfurt: Dieter Fricke. Associated Press. 1966. Tribal Dance Opens Festival in Dakar. New York Times, April 2, 16. Cassirer, Thomas. 1967. Africa’s Olympiad of the Arts: Some Observations on the Dakar Festival. The Massachusetts Review 8 (1): 177–184. Cohen, Joshua. 2012. Stages in Transition: Les Ballets Africains and Independence, 1959 to 1960. Journal of Black Studies 43 (1): 11–48. Enwezor, Okwui. 2003. The Production of Social Space as Artwork. In Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad, ed. Orlando Britto Jinorio, Ery Camara, Gilane Tawadros, Paul Ha, Salah Hassan, Tumelo Mosaka, Okwui Enwezor, and Shannon Fitzgerald, 53–68. St. Louis: Contemporary Art Museum. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Neveu Kringelbach, Hélène. 2016. Dance at the 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts: Of ‘Fabulous Dancers’ and Negritude Undermined. In First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies, ed. David Murphy, 64–82. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Nidouga Bâ, Moctar (Producer), and Laura Malécot (Director). 2017. Iya Tunde: The Mother Came Back. [Movie]. Senegal: Mediatik Communication. Senghor, Léopold Sédar. 1980. Preface. In African Dance, Germaine Acogny. Frankfurt: Dieter Fricke. ———. 2009 [1967]. The Foundations of ‘Africanité,’ or ‘Négritude’ and ‘Arabité’. Critical Interventions 3 (1): 166–169. https://doi.org/10.108 0/19301944.2009.10781367. The Unofficial English Translation of Sarkozy’s Speech. 2007. Africa Resource, October 13. [Online News]. https://www.africaresource.com/essays-areviews/essays-a-discussions/437-the-unofficial-english-translation-of-sarkozys-speech. Accessed October 27, 2016.

4  GERMAINE ACOGNY: CONVECTIVE HEAT AND GROUND-SHIFT… 

155

Waksman, André (Producer) & Gudie Lawaetz (Director). 1980. Mudra-Afrique. [Documentary Film]. London: Associates Film Production, in Association with WTVS Detroit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxve_emdopQ. Accessed January 8, 2018. Witchery on Broadway. 1959. Newsweek, February 23, 7.

CHAPTER 5

Sardono Kusumo: Vibratory Heat, Juxtapositional Disruptions, and Danced Rupture

Six bodies against a brick wall, caked in mud, move slowly, in response to the directions given by Sardono Kusumo, who watches them from a slight distance. The site is the Ratu Boko temple grounds, near the historic archaeological site Prambanan in Jogjakarta, Java. Kusumo encourages them to move away from the external forms of their training and instead investigate movement in the context of the ecosystem in which they find themselves: feet on the grass-covered ground under their feet, the support of the brick wall on one side, the mud drying on their bodies, coloring them in hues similar to their surroundings. Around them are audiences who have gathered from nearby villages, curious about dancing that looks familiar, yet different. As the leaves blow gently in the breeze, their movements of slow rising, supported one leg balances, gentle spiraling turns against the wall, meditative arm raisings and descents to the ground, seem to be in harmony with their surroundings. As they move to another part of the complex, to a stone sculpted floor, two other women join the dance. Untouched as yet by the mud, their white sarongs with a layer of red fabric stand out against the rest. Vibration rises from the core of the bodies of the mud-covered dancers, moving their entire frames. Their movements carry them through different levels, but the vibrations come to be punctuated with sharp, staccato moments that change their direction. The two women in white sarongs move differently, slowly at first, unraveling the long pieces of fabric extending from their sarong, and then faster, in response to the other dancers. We catch hints of resonance with classical Javanese court © The Author(s) 2020 A. Chatterjea, Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance, New World Choreographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43912-5_5

157

158 

A. CHATTERJEA

dance as they turn their chins or rotate their wrists to flick the fabric. But those resonances sit amidst quick-moving feet, deep-seated horizontal steps that carry them across space, torsos extending to either side, reaching away from the other dancers. Over the footage of this improvisation rehearsal, we hear Sardono Kusumo’s voice-over, talking about creating movement inspired by life, looking for what is alive, yet not being forced to look for something new. —Observations from Dancing: The Individual and Tradition (Grauer 1993)

Sardono Waluyo Kusumo, one of the pioneering contemporary choreographers from Indonesia, is also a multi-disciplinary artist, a film-maker, arts educator, and environmental activist, currently living and working in Jakarta. Born in 1945, the year of Indonesian independence from colonial rule, Kusumo grew up at a time of political unrest and regime change. His upbringing in a well-respected, elite, or priyayi family created access to study the rich traditions of performance in Indonesia and also gave him space for critical assessment of received traditions.1 Kusumo trained in Pencak Silat, a traditional martial art practice and in Javanese court dance forms early on, specializing in the alus or refined movement style of courtly dance, typically reserved for male heroic characters. Yet, when he began his career as a performer in the traditional Wayang Wong performances of the Ramayana at the Prambanan Temple complex, he had to deviate from his training because he was assigned the role of the monkey-god Hanoman. Kusumo worked improvisationally to layer the traditional performativity of that role, chisel his movement vocabulary, and enhance the character. But, moved by curiosity, he soon began to investigate more intentional dance-making along several lines. In his search for the roots of his movement vocabulary, he moved away from his training in classical Javanese court dance and began to investigate the source of movement. Seeking to make dance that responded to contemporary life, he began exploring alternative choreographic structures and playing with unlikely juxtapositions. He also began to question dance’s role, its traditionally revered place in Indonesian ritual, ceremony, and folk culture, and to imagine his practice as provocation and commentary, prioritizing process over product. And all of his innovation has emerged from his deep observations of and immersions in the different cultural practices from across the Indonesian archipelago. His multi-directional interventions, inspired by

5  SARDONO KUSUMO: VIBRATORY HEAT, JUXTAPOSITIONAL DISRUPTIONS… 

159

going deep inside his local context, then moving outward from inside, raise the heat index in Indonesian and global contemporary dance contexts as they clash with expectations, local and global, often spilling over energetically as controversies. Some of his early experiments in choreography emphasized the strategy of improbable adjacencies and interventions in traditional form. For instance, in 1972, he created Cak Tarian Rina in Teges, Bali, bending the shape of the Kecak as it was performed at that time. Interestingly, Kusumo’s re-choreography in fact followed a history of changes in the structure of the Kecak, which was originally more of a chanted accompaniment for trance dance, created through many revolutions of the repeated syllable, cak. It was related to the traditional Balinese ritual dance Sanghyang Dedari, typically performed by young women. But the Kecak itself is typically performed by a group of male artists. In 1930, the Kecak was choreographed as an interpretation of the epic, the Ramayana, by German ethnomusicologist, Walter Spies. In his version, the Kecak became a circle dance, and the host of young men who perform the syllabic repetition symbolized the mythological monkeys in the epic.2 Since then, the Kecak has been reimagined, and performed as “tradition,” especially in tourist sites. However, Kusumo found the existing versions to be ornamental, and their performativity directed much more to concert-like presentation. He invited members of 60 different families from the village of Teges to participate in his re-choreography of it, organized the dancers in separate groups, and assigned them particular spatial orientations, creating multi-­ directional entrances. Inspired by what he saw around him, he incorporated the carrying of torches, adding the energy of the open flames to the piece. Living and working among the villagers, Kusumo developed relationships with them. He also noticed the young boys who were drawn to his work and invited some of them to join the dance. Later to become his collaborator, the celebrated performer, I Ketut Rina, was then a child, and was featured in this work, hence the reference to his name in the title of the piece. Because Kusumo is committed to the principle of improvisation, he encouraged Rina, who emerged as the primary artist in the piece, to keep performing and developing it. In keeping with that spirit, the dancers, after seeing the World Cup football games on television, decided to incorporate a “ball of fire,” made from dry coconuts that are plentiful on the island, being kicked around, in Cak Tarian Rina. In the currently

160 

A. CHATTERJEA

performed version, Rina and some other adult male dancers move through the groups of dancers performing the Kecak chant at certain points, syncopating the soundscape through their dance movements. Sometimes, as the energy ebbs, they all move together reaching their torsos forward and to the sides, stepping deliberately and slowly. At other times, when the piece is in high energetic flow, the entire group moves in different formations and levels. When they sit, they heighten the circularity of their torso movements. Sometimes they build a human pyramid, creating different levels among the dancers. Kusumo’s and I Ketut Rina’s versions of the Kecak create dynamic flowcharts, where the continuity of breath and communal energy become the organizing principles of this dance. While this piece continues to be performed now and has gathered its own momentum outside of Kusumo’s initiation, it was highly controversial at the time of its creation. A report in the Kompas, Indonesia’s largest national newspaper, described Cak Tarian Rina as including several ritual and meditation-based elements typically considered sacred in Balinese communities, and a temple priest as dancer (“Sardono’s adventure in Bali” 1973).3 Moreover, the two young boys aged eight and nine whom Kusumo invited to be part of the performance were naked, and this provoked harsh criticism of the piece. Even at its premiere in November 1972, the daily newspaper, Angkatan Bersenjata, carried a sensational headline, “Naked Experimental Kecak Dance,” followed by a report (1972). Of course, not the entire ensemble, but only two of the youngest dancers were naked. Due to all of these factors, the “experimentation” pushed the boundaries of tradition too much for the local authorities, and the government issued an injunction against the work from being performed outside of Bali in 1972. This meant that Kusumo could not honor the invitation of the Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM) National Art Center in Jakarta as part of the Experimental Arts Week that year. Kusumo worked hard to alleviate the disappointment of the performers, the villagers of Teges Kanginan, Bali, at this last minute denial, but he had to wait till 1974 to regroup, gather his dancers, and invite them to perform his new work Dongeng Dari Dirah at TIM, Jakarta, and then at the Festival Mondial at Théâtre de Nancy, France. This was not the first time Kusumo’s work had been greeted with controversy. In 1969, audiences in his hometown of Surakarta threw rotten eggs at the stage during performances of his piece Samgita Pancasona. Samgita was a non-traditional exploration of excerpts of the Ramayana, the first of several investigations of different aspects of the epic that lies at

5  SARDONO KUSUMO: VIBRATORY HEAT, JUXTAPOSITIONAL DISRUPTIONS… 

161

the center of so much traditional performance and puppetry in Java and Bali, as across much of South and Southeast Asia. Edi Sedyawati, reviewing another incarnation of this piece, Samgita II, at a performance in December 1970 at the Arena Theatre of the TIM complex, remarked on the way Kusumo emphasizes group choreography over the linear development of the narrative, and develops movement by mobilizing inspirations from the Prambanan temple reliefs. Moreover, Sedyawati complimented Kusumo on his particular mode of character development: “He does not concentrate on the surface of the character but goes much deeper and searches in all directions” (1970). This depth of his inquiry was also emphasized in the metaphoric elements of the scenic design. Basuki D.  N. writing about an October 1971 performance of the same piece describes this: “A pair of women’s legs spread wide apart is the backdrop for the stage. It challenges the public in a provocative way. Between the two giant thighs there is a circle…Some people in the audience begin to grow uneasy. Sounds ranging from whispers to rowdy shouts can be heard here and there” (1971). Yet, all of the reviews indicate that the work raised questions about contemporary life, about the human condition in modernity’s wake, perhaps about Indonesia’s encounter with Western modernity. Though his work has often enraged traditionalists and authorities in his local context, Kusumo never sets out to court controversy. For instance, it was not the specific goal of reimagining a traditional dance that led to Cak Tarian Rina, but rather an investigation of the source of the movement, which is at the root of much of Kusumo’s work. He was intrigued with the simple gestural language of arms raised, the palms vibrating in the air: it suggested, for him, an encounter of human beings with themselves. The group structure of the Kecak prompted him to think about collective memory, about social cohesion, and survival. Kusumo speaks about the gestures as primal, deeply rooted in questions about existence, and recalling, for him, ancient rock paintings, where early humans etched their handprints. His reimagining of the traditional dance is primarily about investigating how an ensemble of dancers could sustain this gestural language in different configurations and levels and explore vibration in an entirely different way from both concertized performativity and ritualized trance. Similarly, Samgita was inspired by questions about contemporary life, and the characters of the Ramayana became, for him, pathways into the depths of his search. Budiman Hartojo, writing a profile of Samgita XI,

162 

A. CHATTERJEA

refers to the program notes to discuss how Kusumo’s questions became departure points for his contemporary choreography: Samgita is a dance composition which describes the creative situation in the field of dance in Indonesia today. Its theme describes the situation of the soul found in the story of Rama. But to Sardono, the story of Rama is no more than a medium for raising questions…In traditional dance, there is emphasis on achieving a perfection of form, detailed by idealistic values, whereas Sardono’s emphasis is on the complete understanding and immersion of the dancers in their roles, creating the seeds of emotion, which form the essence of the theme of the dance. The tools he uses include movement, form, quality of movement, feeling of movement, and the power of suggestion in combining all the different elements, as well as spatial interpretation. The creativity of expression of the dancers is therefore more important than the ability to create a form…If we compare Sardono’s work with traditional dance-drama, there is much more freedom. However, this freedom actually requires a heavier precondition, the readiness of the dancers to develop unlimited possibilities from their tools of expression—their bodies. (1971)

I draw attention to Hartojo’s astute observations of “freedom” in this context, connecting to my earlier meditations about the conditional freedoms in South-South choreographies, negotiating pathways to contemporaneity through several sets of binarized choices. Once again, Kusumo’s interrogation, however metaphoric, of current life issues via characters of epic mythology, created substantial controversy, perhaps because of his willingness to open up spaces marked as Tradition. Interestingly, his Cak Tarian Rina is performed even now on full moon and new moon nights on the open stage of Museum Arma in Ubud, Bali, and elsewhere. All the performers—the men and the boys—wear saput poleng, the black and white sarongs, and the kamben, the long narrow red sashes wrapped around the waist. There are other choreographic shifts as well, in keeping with Kusumo’s intention with everything he creates, but the spirit of the original inspiration remains. In his project of reimagining and resituating dance, Kusumo was simultaneously committed to innovating on choreographic structure and to investigating movement itself. His deep investment in the body and his search for the source of dance led him to peel back the layers of formal shaping that were part of his Javanese court dance training. While similar questions about the root of motion had been at the core of the American modern dance, with pioneers like Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham,

5  SARDONO KUSUMO: VIBRATORY HEAT, JUXTAPOSITIONAL DISRUPTIONS… 

163

Kusumo’s questions do not reflect a modernist search for “origins.” For him the dilemma lay in identifying a movement language that emerged from his cultural context, yet allowed for exploration of contemporary life issues, very often the result of Indonesia’s grappling with the violence of Western colonialism and postcolonial power plays. What can be strategies of contemporary choreography in the context of Indonesian dance, where the cultural fabric is saturated with ritual, classical, and folk dance and dance drama forms, many of which—like Wayang Wong, Serimpi, Legong, Rangda, and Barong—have represented the nation on the world cultural map? From the latter half of the 1970s, for more than a decade, Kusumo began to spend long stretches of time living among the Dayak, Nias, Batak, and Asmat tribes of east Kalimantan and Irian Jaya. Observing their daily practices, he came to appreciate their intentional development of immediate embodied vital forces. He recounts how one night, unable to sleep, he was lying among the sleeping men from the Dayak community. Suddenly, one of them sat up and vocalized a loud, echoing sound from deep in his throat, and then lay down and returned to sleep. Amazed, Kusumo stayed awake to witness this phenomenon with individual men repeating the sound by themselves, for several hours. Ultimately, he realized that the men were in fact asleep and had developed this instinctive practice of sounding to ward off animals and snakes who might wander in from the jungles. He was fascinated by the muscular readiness needed for this practice and the immediate access to breath. From trying to reproduce the sound himself, he realized that this vocal articulation, produced from the depths of the stomach resonator, and breath, manifested some of the first movements of the body as the traveling of the sound causes an internal quivering and external vibrational resonances in other body parts. He also learned more about the ways the tribal communities used sound as a communication technique, moving between low and sudden high pitches to gather people. Kusumo ultimately developed his own theatrical training practice inspired by this: dancers sit with their knees folded under them, and practice breathing, which ultimately leads into producing vibratory sound and movement from the depths of the stomach. The sound comes to be shaped as vocal circles, exploring the highs and lows of different registers. Because the breath must be controlled to sustain the circular shape of sound, it cannot be expelled quickly. This requires a great deal of practice, but also a particular internal use of muscular force. Much of his work begins at this place of breath and the vibrating body, generating heat

164 

A. CHATTERJEA

in preparation for dancing that expands those principles via larger circuitries. His time among village and tribal communities taught Kusumo many things, which ultimately became the foundation for his choreographic palette as well. He refers to his time spent living with the tribal communities as an important part of his training. This is where he came to realize the limits of individual energy and became fascinated instead with the swirling energies of a large group of people moving together. As he watched the communities dance in large groups, he realized that their movements were relatively simple and their close proximity to each other, instead of slowing them down, was enabling them to move faster, creating a magnetic energy field. This observation inspired many of his dance experiments, which involve large groups of people moving together, where the choreography heightens the navigation of their relationships in space. His time with these communities also reinforced his interest in the juxtaposition of difference. Observing the difference among the Dayak and Asmat tribes, he began to pay detailed attention to the contextual shaping of aesthetics and the effective use of contrast. In an interview with the Jakarta Post, he reminisced about encountering his different experiences of Indonesian tribal lifestyles: “The Dayak people have to move every two years in order to find more fertile soil to cultivate…because they move a lot, their lives are very lonely. Therefore, their dance movements also depict solitude and tranquility…The music is also very quiet, played with a two-stringed instrument. It is so quiet that you can hear when a single leaf falls” (Partogi 2015). In contrast, he speaks about the high energy dancing of the Asmat people, who often live close to water sources: “They’re circling each other when they dance. They party, eat and dance together” (Partogi 2015). Much of Kusumo’s “contemporary” approach to dance-making developed from this acute awareness of context and the understanding of dance as part of an ecology. This, in turn, fuels his minimalist approach to movement, while insisting on its locatedness. These artistic strategies, developed from contextual research, gave him permission to play with contrast and unlikely juxtapositions, a characteristic of his longer works, instead of adhering to notions of a superficially unified aesthetic throughout a work. In the program notes for a piece he premiered in 2006, Kusumo explicitly connects this research with his choreographic and movement aesthetic: “It now seems important to consider a procession made up of myriads of cultural forms found throughout the Indonesian

5  SARDONO KUSUMO: VIBRATORY HEAT, JUXTAPOSITIONAL DISRUPTIONS… 

165

archipelago as an important expression of local wisdoms to reading the dynamic signs of nature” (2006). Further, working with the village and tribal communities enabled him to witness the environmental damage that was wreaking havoc in their lives, and the consideration of the body’s location in the midst of broader ecologies became an important focus in his work. He talks about receiving a letter from a tribal leader sharing the devastation they were witnessing: the inexplicable deaths of many forest pigs, hornbills who suddenly fell from the sky, and huge forest fires (Kusumo, personal communication, 2003, July 4). His time with the tribal communities resulted in four pieces specifically exploring issues of environmental injustice—Meta Ekologi (1979), Hutan Plastik / Plastic Jungle (1983), Hutan Terbakar / Burned Forest (1986) and Hutan Merintih / Lamenting Forest (1987)—but environmental issues remain underlying thematic concern for later pieces as well. Kusumo’s questioning of the structures of Western modernity, notions of “progress” associated with it, complex class stratifications, and the violences caused by their proliferation in tribal and rural communities of Indonesia has often pushed his choreographic investigation beyond the theater: Meta Ekologi was performed in a mud pit in the TIM complex. It has provoked collaborations with scenic designers and interdisciplinary projects: the huge plastic drops in Hutan Plastic, blowing forward, conjure a world divorced from connections to nature. The seven-minute slide-­ show of images of the Kalimantan forest before the fires, photographed by ecologist Herwasono Soedjito, that begins Hutan Merintih, underlines his conviction that the destruction of the environment is integrally linked to the further marginalization of Indigenous communities in Indonesia (Image 5.1). Kusumo’s investigations have shaped his artistic methodology such that the creative process flows into the performance, and the performance is a continuation of the investigation. This porosity of artistic exploration repeatedly pushes back at the notion of performance as predictable concertized product and as closed-ended item in a touristic economy. When Kusumo created Sunken Seas in 2006, his process began with his own explorations on the beach in Lhoknga, in the Aceh province at the northern tip of the island of Sumatra. The town was ravaged by the 2004 tsunami, when waves reportedly as high as 15 meters struck the town and killed around 7000 people. Frustrated by the less-than-considered ways in which foreign aid was coming in without sufficient direction or strategy, and in solidarity with the grieving and devastated local communities,

166 

A. CHATTERJEA

Image 5.1  Sardono Kusumo, Rehearsal for Fabriek Fikr, November 2016, performed in an abandoned sugar mill in Colomadu, Solo, Central Java, Indonesia. (© Pandji Vasco da Gama)

Kusumo chose to go to the region to understand for himself the human quotient of this natural disaster. The camera follows Kusumo from behind as he walks along the beach, tying his sarong around his waist, a lone figure along the devastated beach. We notice rubbles of sticks and stones along the way. He pauses for a moment and the camera turns in a loop around him. We take in the overturned, damaged boat, the broken branches, the piles of debris in the background. We notice the stumps of trees close to the shore, their tops broken off by the force of the tsunami. At some point, he breaks into a run towards the ocean. He reaches his torso, bending towards the waves, before stepping into the water. His arms rise towards the sky, the fingers lengthen up, then carve down in front of the chest, opening out onto the sides, the torso swaying gently in response. His upper body rounds forward as he looks into the waves that crash around his ankles. The ocean seems to move him back and around with every break, with quick skittering footsteps. He lifts the edges of his sarong to wrap it around his shoulders, rounds his spine forward again. These foldings forward, which recur through the

5  SARDONO KUSUMO: VIBRATORY HEAT, JUXTAPOSITIONAL DISRUPTIONS… 

167

first part of this exploration, while he remains standing, suggest surrender, acknowledgement of oceanic power, a listening to the waves. With the sarong wrapped around his torso, he walks stumblingly, and comes to kneel on the sand. He reaches for the edges of the sarong, and this time, loops it over his head, as he walks, then runs, arms extending out and forward. We hear the sharp winds through the camera and see them whipping the loose ends of the sarong around his body. Without any big dramatic move, Kusumo slides his torso to lay down on the beach, pulling the sarong up to cover his torso and face. The wind agitates the fabric in a series of small waves on his chest. From that elongated position, he begins to roll towards the ocean, his legs entangling and unraveling, his arms curled into his torso. He rolls the other way, then back in the same direction. It is as if, even when he is outside of the waves, he is buffeted along by their motions. We see him, lying still on his side as the waves recede, his sarong and skin lined with sand. His body falls open to position him face up and we witness the transformation of his person. The humble agency of his body seems to have melted into the water and he seems to move only in response to natural forces. With the ebb and flow of waves, the extremities of his body curl in towards each other, then open out, splaying out the limbs, the arms and legs reaching in different directions in the air. Every splash of water nudges his sand-encrusted body to roll over. We cannot but imagine, watching his body being moved so with the waves of this relatively calm ocean, how so many bodies must have been tossed helplessly during the tsunami. His surrendering body seems to be exploring the edges of lifelessness, what it might mean to be overpowered by raging waters. Some waves send him on a series of rolls planting him face down. He swings his face up and around as if to catch his breath, then slowly lowers to the seabed again. Sometimes he catches the impulse of his convexing torso to sit up momentarily, his spine rounded over his legs. At one point, his knees flex up and he reaches upwards, as his toes lift off the sand. But soon, that effort dissolves, he is tossed and turned by the waves, lying motionless on the sandy floor as the water rushes back towards the ocean. In the following ten-minute meditation, where Kusumo seems to concede to the ocean’s power to move his body, there are no dramatic highs and lows as there was in the news coverage of the tsunami. There is a continuous study of the body in surrender, the mud-beplastered body’s fragility in the face of oceanic power: a tremendous contrast to the images of these beaches, generally marketed as surfing and sunning locations to Western tourists. Reminded so strongly of the water inside and surrounding our bodies, we recognize loss, and the depths of the tragedy. —Observations from Documentation of process, 2004 (Video documentation by Hadi Artomo)

168 

A. CHATTERJEA

This movement meditation led to the creation of Sunken Seas which was performed in collaboration with an installation by sculptor and visual artist Sunaryo, The Mountain of the Wind. Witnessing the premiere performance at Selasar Sunaryo Art Space (SSAS), Sunaryo’s open-air gallery space in Bandung, on July 18, 2006, I was overwhelmed by the emotional intensity of this choreographically minimalist piece. Like the meditation where the ocean is integral to and the occasion for the embodied exploration, the installation shapes the performance. A rectangular white sculpture, 15  meters long, 6  meters high, and 4  meters wide, sloping down from the upstage periphery of the amphitheater performance space, the installation constitutes the primary space on which the artists move. Concentric circles of cement are engraved into its plywood surface. A deep crack erupts amidst this relentlessly white flow and breaks open the surface. It surges into a fault line, which deepens as it runs along the downward flow of the structure, disrupting it all the way. This powerful scenographic element immediately conjures up the earth’s floors, seismic activity, and the churning ocean waters during the tsunami. Kusumo’s choreography works synergistically with Sunaryo’s arresting sculpture, yet the scale of the scenic element inevitably provokes nuanced discussions about human agency. SSAS curator, Agung Hujatnikajennong, writes in the program notes about how the collaborative process emerged from shared concerns “particularly on the discourses of local tradition and wisdom as well as ecological problems resulted from an imbalanced modernization…Within the context of the performance and installation by Sardono and Sunaryo, this is a moment to reflect back on (the) local wisdom that has taught us to keep aware and receptive to interpreting the erratic sign of nature” (2006). It is important that we note the contiguity of “tradition” and “wisdom” with “local” in this statement: both artists are invested in dismantling master narratives of Tradition, particularly as state-sponsored, hierarchical, and fixed practices. Their commitment is to local and Indigenous ways of knowing and living, particularly in figuring out human complementarity within and relationship to the ecosystem, something that has been eroded with Western modernity’s casting of nature as a “resource” to be capitalized for bettering human conditions. Dancers roll down the slanting surface in intervals and slowly disappear into the cracks. We see their bodies appear again at the top of the structure as they begin their descent again. Different bodies, rolling in different ways, exploring what it might have been to be swept along in the gigantic waves, powerless to resist. Yet, to explore this with so much slowness and

5  SARDONO KUSUMO: VIBRATORY HEAT, JUXTAPOSITIONAL DISRUPTIONS… 

169

intention on that sloping structure meant that dancers had to work hard to control their momentum, their connection to the floor, their breath, and the unfolding and curving in of their limbs. In juxtaposition to the dancers’ insistent repetition of the rolling, being swallowed up by the fissure, Kusumo moves in a solo, introspective and meditative, standing on the ground in front of the structure. His eyes do not come up. His knees and elbows remain soft as his limbs open, reach, and close. His aloneness, in contrast to the bodies that are caught up in a seemingly endless rehearsal of rolling and disappearing, strikes us intensely. There are no dramatic shifts inside this non-narrative exploration, but this extended exploration of human desolation comes alive through the contrast of human scale against the epic scenography inspired by the tsunami, the juxtaposition of rolling bodies with one soloist, and invokes a sense of profound grieving. Sunken Seas recalls Kusumo’s earlier environmental pieces that centered on forest communities and reminds us of his valuing of the ecosystem. But it is definitive in its spatial organization and choreographic difference. While there was a sense of urging audiences to take action in the previous pieces, Sunken Seas invites audiences to first recognize the scale of death and loss, sit with the impact of a disrupted environmental system, and our individual powerlessness in the face of it. In the silence, questions filter into our consciousness: What could we have done differently? What can we do now? These questions vibrate within us, generate heat as they expand in scope, asking us to reflect on sustained paradigmatic changes (Image 5.2). Kusumo’s engagement of the past, history, and the passage of time is non-linear, veering away from working with chronology or narrative as structuring devices. In pieces that refer directly to history, such as Passage Through the Gong (1993) and Opera Diponegoro (1995), as well as in many of his other works, Kusumo plays with the choreographic strategy of what I name “juxtapositional disruption” as a mode of commentary. It is also typical of his work in the way it develops, not as a neatly flowing narrative, but through unexpected shifts of mood and quality, or, as in Sunken Seas, through internal oppositions between choreographic and design elements, disallowing facile interpretations and drawing attention to tensions underneath the surface of the work. These high contrast moments throb with signification as they reveal their alterity, and as they gather thematic heat throughout the work, we catch the multiple layers in the choreographic accretion.

170 

A. CHATTERJEA

Image 5.2  Sardono Kusumo in The Family of Man and the Sea (2019), a site-­ specific performance at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venezia. This performance brought together thematic strains from his exploration on the tsunami-struck beach in Lhoknga (seen in the projected image behind him) and the arduous journeys of migrant workers that is the focus of later works such as Nobody’s Body and Black Sun. (© IISMC of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. Photo credit: Constantino Vecchi)

An evening-length piece, Passage premiered at the Gedung Kesenian in Jakarta, and then toured to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and other venues in the US in 1993. The performance begins with a meditative solo by Sardono Kusumo. In the dim lights, we detect movement even as we clearly hear his voice, emerging from deep inside his chest, and recognize his mode of beginning with vibrational sound. Wearing a simple white loin-cloth, he stands midstage, his legs turned out, his knees bent: small movements of his feet shifting weight, little waves of his torso rippling through his shoulders and arms. We sense his breath expanding his arms, his fingers tracing lines across the air. His movements get bigger, he changes levels: descending slowly to sit on knees folded forward, rising to balance on one leg, the other knee raised hip high, the foot flexed down. Suddenly, he turns around to face upstage and, with arms extended

5  SARDONO KUSUMO: VIBRATORY HEAT, JUXTAPOSITIONAL DISRUPTIONS… 

171

overhead, marks his fists in the air, as if beating on something. Then, still facing back, he goes into a deep backbend and the lights shift to reveal a small wooden table center stage, and the gamelan on stage right. A group of dancers enter from upstage right, some masked and costumed as Dutch soldiers, others in sarongs. The latter group, costumed in gray textures that suggest stone sculptures coming to life, carry ceremonial objects. To the soundscape of the gamelan, a group of women dancers weave through the group, carrying small candles on their palms. Kusumo sits on his knees as they fill the stage, then moves through them to exit, and the scene shifts dramatically. Four women dancers remain on stage, sitting on the ground around the table. Slowly, ceremoniously, they begin to dance the Serimpi Sangupati, a traditional dance from the court of Sultan Pakubuwono IV of the Solo royalty in the late eighteenth century. Interestingly, this dance is a reflection of the history of Dutch intervention and colonial influence in Java, and thus, is as much court “entertainment” as it is political statement. Beginning with a salutation, the dancers rise. Small weight shifts, wrist turns that manipulate the sash that hangs loose from the waist, series of small steps that open and close the space among them, and ankle lifts that flick the other end of the sash back mark their performance of the royal alus or elegant dance style of the Javanese court. Like most variations of the Serimpi, the Sangupati is characterized by gentle and slow movements, stylized hand gestures, floor patterns marked by small steps. But two moments surprise audiences who do not know the history of this dance. In the middle of the piece, two of the dancers pick up the glass decanters filled with red wine from the table and fill the wine glasses held by the other two dancers, who sip the wine ceremoniously even as they dance. Then, they all bend down to pick up revolvers from around the legs of the table. Slowly circling their arms and torso, swishing the loose ends of their sash, the dancers raise their arms and fire the revolvers in the air, then put them down, and continue their dance. Both of these moments emerged as a result of Dutch colonial presence at Sultan Pakubuwono’s court and are unique to this version of the dance. The original Serimpi Sangupati is said to have been two hours long, but current popular versions are shorter, about 15  minutes. The Serimpi performed in Passage is about 30  minutes long, allowing for a substantial journey for audiences: we are first wrapped in its gentle beauty, then startled out of it by the unpredictability of the wine-drinking, and even more sharply, by the ritualistic firing of the revolvers. Then the dancers assert the

172 

A. CHATTERJEA

unruffled harmonious flow of movement again, except that audience members are now aware of the tensions that lie underneath the surface. For most audiences at the BAM performance, who have come to associate Indonesian dance with constructed notions of sacred, ancient, and Tradition, these elements seemed decidedly Western, and were difficult to integrate. Kusumo’s decision to stage the traditional Serimpi Sangupati, in the middle of his contemporary choreography thus immediately challenges audiences and demonstrates the impact of historical events on cultural production. By placing his own experimental choreography adjacent to this classical court piece, which itself shows the mark of historical developments, he further implies the movement inside of “tradition,” and the perhaps uneasy co-terminousness between his contemporary choreography and dance marked as “tradition.” If the Serimpi Sangupati gestures toward the colonial gaze which was present in the Indonesian court at that time, what does its placement inside Passage, the first big commission of an Indonesian contemporary choreographer at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, indicate? The performers playing Dutch soldiers file back onto stage and gather around the table. They pour themselves wine in the stem glasses, clink, and drink. Simultaneously, a disparate theatrical tableau takes shape on stage left. A group of “Dutch soldiers” stand talking to each other. Their postures are relaxed, their tone jovial, and their tangled words suggest they are slightly drunk, introducing a very different, comic note into the work. Just in front of them, a tall figure dances, wearing a dress and a hat. This figure, later revealed to be Kusumo himself, moves with expansive arm gestures intercut with moments of stillness when he holds one-legged balances with a tilted torso. As he turns in circular pathways, we realize that his dress is one-dimensional and we catch Kusumo’s frame behind it. The playful doubleness of this moment is heightened as the “Dutch soldiers” start to tumble on each other and rip off their costumes and masks, and they are revealed as “locals,” male dancers in sarongs. They draw out whips and crack them in the air as they move around each other, low to the ground, sometimes jumping up, covering ground. The use of the whips could be a reference to the Kuda Kepang Javanese dance which is associated with stories about people power, local uprisings, and ritual reenactment of battles. This reference to the whips, but not the rattan horses that are the main prop for the traditional dance, suggests Kusumo’s intentionally light-touch referentiality to a dance that has also come to be associated with debates around cultural ownership, even as it testifies to

5  SARDONO KUSUMO: VIBRATORY HEAT, JUXTAPOSITIONAL DISRUPTIONS… 

173

diasporic globalities: while the Kuda Kepang originated in Java, it is currently practiced in Malaysia, Singapore, and other countries, and there have been arguments around appropriation. Kusumo’s choreographic choice also allows the dancers to get closer to each other and raises the implication of danger in the piece as the whips fly in close vicinity of the dancing bodies. Thus, almost every section reveals itself as harboring another dimension—energetically, through shifts of costume, through significantly different staging, tonally, and dramaturgically. This heightens the edges of Kusumo’s choreographic strategy of juxtapositional disruption, particularly in this piece, unsettling orientalizing notions about the smooth flow of culture. From upstage right, behind the male dancers wielding their whips in figure eight patterns through the air, a procession enters, carrying a woman dancer, Eko Kadarsih, sitting in a sedan chair. When they pause at center stage, she sits up, her long loose black hair contrasting sharply with the white sarong wrapping around her body. She unwinds her sarong, layer after layer, but she is never unclothed. She is handed a comb by one of the dancers who stand surrounding her, and she begins to comb her hair. She rises and dances with softly swaying, sensuous, movements, her comb in one hand, a mirror in the other. Is she the mythological figure, Queen of the Seven Seas, Ratu Kidul, who is invoked in several of Kusumo’s works? Typically, in keeping with Kusumo’s choreographic convention of oblique citation, archetypal figures are referenced but also immediately abstracted, so they are seldom situated inside of the stories or mythologies they are generally associated with. In this usage, they assume a tropic significance, mobilizing affective suggestions even as they dismantle conventional narrative functionalities. Also, because of the way they then cross different eras and time frames, they are able to indicate both cultural specificity and contemporary relevance. Passage moves into a more energetic and chaotic section where a dancer who refers to the popular character of Wayang Kulit/shadow puppet theater, Semar, enters the stage. He is a sacred yet trickster figure, and he shifts the register of the piece as he jumps onstage and in front of Kadarsih, as if threatening her. Quickly Kusumo appears, in a different role, to diffuse that possibility and redirect the piece: the Semar-based character moves away and strikes the large gongs that are hanging high on the stage. This is the moment when all of the gongs are activated by the performers and the sonorous reverberations heighten the energy of the performance, contrasting sharply with the previous section dominated by ritualistic

174 

A. CHATTERJEA

imagery. A solo by Kusumo, paralleling the exploratory mood of his first solo, with small bursts of energy bubbling up through the surface of flowing movement, brings Passage to an end. Like so many of his pieces, Passage courted controversy because of Kusumo’s use of the traditional Serimpi inside this piece described as contemporary choreography. Moreover, among the dancers of this piece was Gusti Ayu Murtiyah, granddaughter of King Pakubuwono IX, the creator of the dance, and Kusumo was critiqued for crossing high tradition with his experimentation. Kusumo argued strenuously that his choices had nothing to do with tired notions of authenticity. In keeping with the entire range of Kusumo’s work, I would argue that his staging of the Serimpi in Passage refutes the tradition-innovation binary and instead embodies history through the paradoxes of continuity and rupture. Particularly in this epic piece, which invites us to look in at moments in Indonesian history, it is significant that he places his experimental choreography, references to Dayak tribal dances, and the courtly Serimpi within the flow of the same work, even as they are significantly different, and linked neither causally nor linearly, but woven dramatically and choreographically together. Like most of his works, Passage also draws to a close without ever building up to a climactic moment. It exemplifies Kusumo’s abstract contemporary choreographic blueprint, where radically different sections are developed, dissolved, and placed adjacent to others: the sections are neither symmetrical, nor suggest a narrative that is the sum of its parts. But the dialectical relationship among the sections, the tension of their differences, the sudden moments of resonance among them, in fact produce heat and non-­ continuous coherence, provoking questions about our assumptions about history and culture. The effective use of disruptive juxtapositions can sometimes create misreadings for audiences unfamiliar with the cultural context, unready to let go of narratives framed as Heritage, or in situations replete with stereotypical expectations about “others.” For instance, dance writer for the LA Times, Lewis Segal, described the piece as “intensely culture-specific in its orientation,” thus not so “accessible,” preferring Kusumo’s 1990 piece Ramayama-Ku instead (1993). Of course, while cultural specificity is a defining characteristic of all dance, did the better-known narrative line of the epic Ramayana aid the understanding of the 1990 piece as opposed to the non-narrative kaleidoscopic look at history that Passage offers? Yet, Ramayana-Ku also interrupted expectations by moving away from any narrative and exploring the natural world instead, but it was not explicitly

5  SARDONO KUSUMO: VIBRATORY HEAT, JUXTAPOSITIONAL DISRUPTIONS… 

175

political, and did not refer to a history of colonization. At any rate, some of the biggest puzzlements came from the embedding of the Serimpi Sangupati, which had not been performed outside of Java before that, in a “contemporary” piece, perplexing glib and binarized notions of tradition and innovation. In a preview published in the same paper a few days before the Royce Hall performances, David Gere commented on the bewilderment shared by many American viewers upon learning the Serimpi Sangupati is a “traditional” court dance: “Listening to one American viewer’s startled response to this collision of ancient and modern imagery, Sardono…throws his head back…and laughs with uncontrolled glee” (1993). Jack Anderson, writing for the New York Times, loved the piece, but admitted that “It was difficult for Western audiences to guess what aspects of “Passage Through the Gong” derived from tradition and what were Mr. Kusumo’s inventions” (1993, p. A30). Can contemporaneity be marked via staging and startling placement? Can contemporary choreography be in explicit dialogue with tradition? We might look at such moments of misreading through the lens of Alfian Sa’at, Singaporean playwright and poet, who reflected after a workshop on translation in/of/as performance. “Bad and ineffective translation is a strategy with the potential to empower the audience member into examining cultural incompatibilities and political incongruities” (2006, p. 283). When I witnessed Passage Through the Gong at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1993, I recognized that audiences around me, like dance critics, appreciated the piece but were confused about the alchemy of tradition and choreographic intervention. What might be gained if we asked ourselves instead what expectations were dismantled and what binaries muddied, after experiencing this contemporary Indonesian dance piece, with a “traditional” (marked as such in the program notes) piece in its center? Might we understand “tradition” as a living practice, responding to the fracas with colonial and globalizing forces, instead of one that stands in stark opposition to contemporary choreography? Such moments of effective non-translation, that defy overdetermining cultural metanarratives, create profound encounters with difference for diverse audiences, generate heat, and trouble what Indonesian dance scholar Diyah Larasati has called “the global diversity project,” undergirded by neoliberal schemes of political management (2013, p. 17). They help rethink the particular possibilities for complicated restaging of local flows on the global stage, and to recognize the transnational nature of local histories, changed by colonial contact.

176 

A. CHATTERJEA

Kusumo’s juxtapositions also animate his mode of dance theater, so that different kinds of dancers and dancing can be on stage within the same piece. This means that the dancers within any one piece often signal distinctly different locations and aesthetics, but do not necessarily show up as “dramatic characters.” The princesses dancing the courtly Serimpi adjacent to his company artists, who work experimentally and are also trained in specific cultural traditions, in Passage, is only one example of this. In Hutan Merintih, Dayak performers share the stage with professional dancers, and their songs and movements interweave with Kusumo’s own choreography. Partly, this is his commitment, to insist on the difference within the fabric of Indonesian culture, refusing both the national and international projections of cultural uniformity and hierarchies within dance. Importantly, it is also a way to force recognition, for instance, of the contemporary living cultures of the Dayaks, who are occupying the same stage as professional artists. Moreover, because of the way in which Kusumo credits the artists, I also read the affect of this choreographic mode as identifying performers as agential, bringing their expertise to a mosaic of different yet related aesthetics, and a recasting of the role of the choreographer, sometimes as sole creator, and sometimes as director. The strategy of radical juxtaposition is also part of his historical commentary: In Opera Diponegoro (originally created in 1995), inspired by the resistance of the Javanese prince Diponegoro to Dutch colonization and the Java War (1825–1830), there is a reference to the foreign policies of George Bush, the US President at the time of the remounting of the piece in 2002. Eko Supriyanto, riding the effigy of a straw horse, a cowboy hat, and wrap-around sunglasses, bursts into this piece set in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and talks stridently about eliminating “terrorists” as he receives a call on his cell phone. Repeatedly, Kusumo choreographs history as rupture, rejects linear organizations of time and space, and insists on staging rhizomatically connected, aesthetically contesting, sections which invite audiences to be actively drawing connections among them. Here, the juxtaposition also provokes questions about the possible relationship between past colonial violence and a current, severely imbalanced, discourse of the “global war on terror.” At the same time, his choreographic strategy of juxtapositional disruption refuses modernist teleology and pushes critiques of what Syrian historian Aziz Al-Azmeh, writing about the historic narrativization of Islam, has described as culturalism: “the presumption that human collectivities operate according to a sort of spiritualized genetic code called culture” yielding “a kind of a

5  SARDONO KUSUMO: VIBRATORY HEAT, JUXTAPOSITIONAL DISRUPTIONS… 

177

natural history of congenital predispositions and incapacities” and producing “a predestinarian grid” (2012, p. 507). Kusumo’s choreographic strategies disallow his work from being instrumentalized to prop up culturalist, nationalist, or exoticized narratives that inevitably undergird reified models of historic and cultural difference. The contemporaneity of his work emerges from the deft and heated staging of political and cultural fissures and the invitation to locate dance in the web of incommensurate and contested references that constitute our experience of globality. It is because of the centralizing of rupture and dissonance in the juxtaposition of local and global references and of autochthonous cultural difference in the context of Indonesian dance-making that I disagree somewhat with Matthew Cohen’s assessment of Kusumo’s work. Discussing Opera Diponegoro, Cohen writes, “Sardono can be considered, in the terms of the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud (2009), as an ‘altermodern’ artist who draws deeply on an intimate knowledge of Javanese tradition while producing contemporary work that resonates with diverse global art forms he has encountered in his constant traveling” (2016, p. 251). Of course Javanese practices, broader Indonesian thematics, and a contemporary consciousness intersect in Kusumo’s work, yet the heterogeneity of his choreography, defined by the refusal of chronological linearity and his use of internal difference as an organizing strategy, is of a different order than theorized by Bourriaud.4 And, while his work also refuses standardization, other factors that characterize Bourriaud’s global altermodern—translatabilities, passings between cultural contexts, “universal subtitling” and “generalized dubbing”—distance Sardono’s work in significant ways (2009). Ultimately, the culturally rooted, but rhizomatic modalities in Kusumo’s work invite reception more as un-conventionally resonant pluralities, and less as Bourriaudian singularities. In ending this chapter, I want to think through a performance that, once again insisted on its intense locality, even as it indicated the hierarchical Euro-American center inherent in globalization. Kusumo created Nobody’s Body in 2002 and premiered it at the Esplanade Theater in Singapore. But he re-created it significantly when he presented it at his own studio theater in 2003. Tucked in between two narrow alleys, Solo LongHouse was the result of much of Kusumo’s own labor. He has personally painstakingly redesigned and restructured a large space which was initially a small artists’ colony, to create three juxtaposed performance spaces, a unique theater in the round. Moreover, because he is not invested in fixed “masterpieces” and is constantly rewriting his work to draw in

178 

A. CHATTERJEA

current relevancies, he re-created this piece as Black Sun for the 2016 Singapore International Arts Festival (Image 5.3). When I witnessed it in 2003 in Solo Long House, which is no longer in existence, I realized how Kusumo was insisting that we, as audiences, remain active, looking at dance around us, in different framings, and imagining the resonance between them. Nobody’s body is amazing in the way the political and the aesthetic suggest each other and are articulated through each other. Kusumo creates images that are strongly political, yet metaphoric and multi-layered. The juxtapositions refuse facile continuities but the tension within the sections and the tonal resonance among them indicate their traction within a shared political frame. There is Didik who, as he rocks back and forth, balancing his feet on the edges of a large circular rice frying pan, tears the body parts off a doll, sometimes with his teeth, sometimes with his hands; there is the journey of Dorothea Quinn across the center space, rocking

Image 5.3  Premiere of Kusumo’s Black Sun, August 2016. Venue: TheatreWorks, Singapore. Dancers (foreground, right to left): Dorothea Quinn, Supartono Tony Bruer; (background, right to left): Danny, Ivan, Jefrey, Ronny, Ebeyx, Boogie. (©Ari Dina Krestiawan)

5  SARDONO KUSUMO: VIBRATORY HEAT, JUXTAPOSITIONAL DISRUPTIONS… 

179

precariously on the edges of the metal frying pan, her voice in a constant high-pitched ululation, her continually negotiated balance enhanced by the movement of the voluminous fabric that swathes her, a string of baby dolls hanging from her waist; there is I Ketut Rina who innovates upon an archetypical figure of Balinese performance tradition as he gorges himself on noodles and water, an image of unquenchable consumption; there is also Hanny Herlina, who moves with slow deliberation in the style of the Indramayu masked performance to rise from her prone position on the bed adjacent to the center space and glide slowly to the center, tremors continually coursing through her body, until she is virtually edged out by Rina’s intense devouring. And there is also, in the middle of the piece, an improvised section where Mugiyono Kasido is on stage, a large rice frying bowl over his back, as if a turtle. Kusumo now casually walks on stage, pulling on a mask, and begins to interact with the “turtle,” asking him to produce eggs, “telor” in Bahasa Indonesian. There had been some earlier references in Kusumo’s monologue about the tourism industry, to the parody of a song, “Denpasar Moon,” that had become very popular with tourists from America and Europe, and constant jokes about mishearings that cause the tourists alarm. Here, in the interaction with Mugi, Kusumo seemingly presses down with his foot onto Mugi’s “shell” repeatedly, as if to force the eggs out of him. But this conversation about eggs is apparently overheard by some tourists, who mishear “terror” for “telor,” and are thrown into panic. As Kusumo performs his narrative, all in Indonesian, the local audiences are in splits, and some who are not local, like me, still pick up on the irony and mistranslation from the way gesture and tonality are mobilized, as well as from the bits of spoken English. Meanwhile, the poor turtle, who does not really want to emerge from his shell, just keeps on producing as many eggs as he can from under his shell. Ultimately, when he can produce no more, he is trapped by Kusumo under a heavy fishing net, from which he fruitlessly struggles to free himself, and finally succumbs to that entrapment. Working through powerful and layered movement metaphors, humor and wit, story-telling, improvised dramatic interactions, references to performance traditions and contemporary politics, and non-linear structuring, Kusumo creates a richly imaginative and powerful landscape which invites many levels of interpretation and offers many points of entrance for audiences from different parts of the world. In this rich mélange of images unformatted into a causal narrative, the audience is also left with questions and shifting realizations: Is the turtle-man, enduring endless pressures and

180 

A. CHATTERJEA

caught in a vicious net of immobility, Kusumo’s imagining of ordinary Indonesian citizens, trapped in bureaucracy and the demands of capitalist productivity? Is the audience laughter at the parody of tourist behaviors bitter-sweet, a furtive diaspora of imagination in a context where the economy is heavily dependent upon the tourist industry but often resentful of the constant intrusions and growing external control? Does Quinn’s journey across the stage recall the arduous journeys taken by the Indonesian migrant workers expelled from Australia in recent years? Does Didik’s slow dismemberment of the doll remind of the dehumanizing processes at work in globalization given all the references at work in the piece? Does it also resonate with the image of Rina’s excess, double performances of consumption as a disease of contemporary life? Ultimately, the performing bodies in this work indeed belong to no one organizing aesthetic category or identity slot assigned by metanarratives of Nation and Culture, but seem to be negotiating their way through an emergent critical space that they are forging through their dancing. The constantly present large rice frying bowls, on the edges of which the performers find their only grounding, completely unsteady, amplify the trope of unbelonging: they remind us of migrant workers who travel across countries under the mandate of globalization and late capitalism, unprotected by national or international codes, and dislodged from any sense of lasting stability. Simultaneously, they mark location unmistakably, layering the choreography with references to the labor of street-side food production and the informal warung economy in Indonesia. For me, the web of images resonate strongly with Larasati’s cautions about the global stage, its varying ability to “provide for the local needs that exist,” and how the “interconnection of policy among states, especially within the sphere of foreign affairs and economic development” affects artists and communities and their access to globality, in very different ways (2013, p. 19). The re-creation of this piece as Black Sun is inspired by Kusumo’s realization that forced dislocation and precarious migrancy, which had been part of the commentary in Nobody’s Body, have become huge issues more than a decade later, with no resolution in sight. The image of bodies balancing on the edge of frying pans, suggesting the domestic and everyday nature of the boats that refugees often board, unready to brave tumultuous oceans, is the central metaphor in the 2017 piece. The exploration of rocky ground and turbulence and the architecture of constantly off-­ balance bodies gesture toward the violence that sparks both pieces. Ultimately, Nobody’s Body, making space for many distinct voices, building

5  SARDONO KUSUMO: VIBRATORY HEAT, JUXTAPOSITIONAL DISRUPTIONS… 

181

heat through the confrontational subsequence of wide swathes of time and cultural practice, critique, tragedy, and assurance of survival, reminds me of Geeta Kapur’s invocation of Edward Said, as she reminds us of his formulation of an “underlying world map” where resistances are brewing, and from which an “internationalist counter-articulation” will emerge (1998, p.  192). I take heart in recalling her prophecy that these resistances, which will ultimately change transnational relations, find a strong articulation, among other channels, through “the forceful heterogeneity of cultural practice” (Kapur 1998, p.  192). Kusumo’s choreography, among others, is an urgent part of this impending re-mapping, where cultural production heats up our world through imaginations of multiplicity and justice. This generative heat of his work—where internal vibratory travel keeps us moving even as we grapple with the directional shifts of choreographically charged disruptions, always reconnecting and re-­ organizing spaces of bodies-in-ecologies—is a direct response to the static-­ laden heat produced by clashing dichotomized categories of national tradition and Western modernity, and a forceful claiming of the kinds of “spectacular difference” that lies beyond them (Enwezor 2002, p. 43).

Notes 1. For more on this, see Sal Murgiyanto’s essay “Moving Between Unity and Diversity: Indonesian Dance in a Changing Perspective.” 2. Performance Studies scholar Eng-Beng Lim has written about the “tropic spells” and queer colonial dyads that are encoded into the choreographic choices of Spies in his book Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performances in the Asias. 3. I retrieved most of these newspaper articles and reviews from Kusumo’s personal hard copy archives and had them translated into English. 4. Nicholas Bourriaud, who was curator of contemporary art at the Tate Museum from 2007–2010, explained his theory of the Altermodern, particularly as distinct from the postmodern, at the opening of the Tate Triennial, held from February 3–April 26, 2009.

References Al-Azmeh, Aziz. 2012. Civilization as a Political Disposition. Economy and Society 41 (4): 501–512. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2012.718633. Anderson, Jack. 1993. Embarking on a Grand Tour of International Dance. New York Times, December 12: A30.

182 

A. CHATTERJEA

Basuki, D.  N. 1971. Gua Garba-Samgita Makes the Public Uneasy. Kompas, October 14. Translated into English by Janet Purwanto. Bourriaud, Nicholas. 2009. Altermodern Manifesto. [Blogpost on the Website of the Tate Museum]. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/altermodern/altermodern-explain-altermodern/altermodern-explained. Accessed October 20, 2018. Cohen, Matthew Isaac. 2016. Inventing the Performing Arts: Modernity and Tradition in Colonial Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Enwezor, Okwui. 2002. The Black Box. In Documenta XI_Platform 5, Exhibition Catalogue, 42–55. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers. Gere, David. 1993. ‘Passage’: Moving Through a Clash of Cultures: Dance: Sardono, Indonesia’s Leader of Modern Choreography, Uses the Melding of Old and New as an Ongoing Theme. His Company Wraps Up Its Inaugural Tour of the U.S. in L.A. Los Angeles Times, November 10. http://articles.latimes.com/1993-11-10/entertainment/ca-55356_1_modern-dance. Grauer, Rhoda (Executive Producer), Ellen Hovde, and Muffie Meyer (Producer and Director). 1993. Dancing: The Individual and Tradition. [Documentary Film]. New York: Thirteen/WNET in Association with RM Arts and BBC-TV. Hartojo, Budiman S. 1971. Samgita XI: Our Profile Now. Kompas, October 1. Translated into English by Janet Purwanto. Hujatnikajennong, Agung. 2006, July 18. Foreword. In Program for Sunken Sea: Sardono W. Kusumo in Collaboration with Sunaryo. Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Bandung, Indonesia. Kapur, Geeta. 1998. Globalization and Culture: Navigating the Void. In Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, 191–217. Durham: Duke University Press. Kusumo, Sardono. 2006, July 18. The Tsunami Quest. In Program for Sunken Sea: Sardono W.  Kusumo in Collaboration with Sunaryo. Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Bandung, Indonesia. Larasati, Diyah. 2013. The Dances That Make You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lim, Eng-Beng. 2014. Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performances in the Asias. New York: New York University Press. Murgiyanto, Sal. 1993. Moving Between Unity and Diversity: Indonesian Dance in a Changing Perspective. TDR 37 (2): 131–160. “Naked Experimental Kecak Dance.” 1972. Angkatan Bersenjata, November 20. Translated into English by Janet Purwanto. Partogi, Sebastian. 2015. Portrait of the Artist: Sardono W. Kusumo Readies for a Major Retrospective. Jakarta Post, November 15. https://www.pressreader. com/indonesia/the-jakarta-post-jplus/20151115/281913067005204. Accessed January 3, 2017.

5  SARDONO KUSUMO: VIBRATORY HEAT, JUXTAPOSITIONAL DISRUPTIONS… 

183

Sa’at, Alfian. 2006. Out of Sync: On Bad Translation as Performance. In Between Tongues: Translation and/of/in Performance in Asia, ed. Jennifer Lindsay, 272–283. Singapore: NUS Press. “Sardono’s Adventure in Bali Causes a Stir.” 1973. Kompas, January 8. Translated into English by Janet Purwanto. Sedyawati, Edi. 1970. Dancer Sardono W.  Kusuma Is Making Steps. Kompas, December 23. Translated into English by Janet Purwanto. Segal, Lewis. 1993. Enigmatic Javanese ‘Passage’: Sardono W.  Kusumo’s Expressionistic Work Is Striking and Complex but Inaccessible at UCLA’s Royce Hall. Los Angeles Times, November 13. http://articles.latimes. com/1993-11-13/entertainment/ca-56212_1_javanese-gamelan.

CHAPTER 6

Nora Chipaumire: Rewriting as Decolonizing Heat

The lights come up on her standing upstage left, facing the downstage diagonal. She stands on one leg, the lifted leg bent at hip and knee, ending in a flexed foot. One arm reaches high, the other reaching down, pulling the spine into a long spiral. As the music of Camille Saint-­ Saëns’ “Le Cygne” begins, the standing leg bends, lowering the body to ground both legs in a wide parallel, feet planted firmly, torso leaning forward. The arms begin to swing in fast, whipping circles, one after another, blazing through the air, pulling the torso up. The fast-moving arms sometimes force her to arch back and look up, and almost immediately, pull her down from her hip. The gesture is desperate, gasping, and suggests a tremendous search for survival. She sweeps her arms into a jump forward and begins to whip her arms around again. This time, when she stops, her legs parallel, knees bent, the back heel lifted, she looks up, her hand in a loose fist, the index finger extended, raised above her head. Slowly, her legs straighten, the hand travels down in front of her, the extended finger still pointing up as if marking a thought, a warning, across space, and then the whipping begins all over. —Nora Chipaumire, Dark Swan, solo for self, 2005. The dancer is costumed only in a brown “tutu,” a skirt 9 men, standing, in a spaced-out clump, upstage left corner. What begins as a small pattering of the feet on the ground grows to a big and fast stepping, arms swinging, and pulls them onto their heels, pulling their bodies back in space. This builds momentum for a signature © The Author(s) 2020 A. Chatterjea, Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance, New World Choreographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43912-5_6

185

186 

A. CHATTERJEA

movement in the piece, where the elbows circle in the air on either side, one at a time, one foot steps to extend the other leg out, hip high. They jump forward, leap and leap, moving back diagonally to arrive at the one-legged balance, where one arm pulls to the ground, while the other reaches up, the hand flexed down. Lowering down, they begin to whip the arms around, walking forward and back while doing it. The furious circularity of the arms pushes the body forward into a jump, landing in a deep lunge, torso bending back to turn the face to the sky, one hand with only the pointer finger open reaching above the head. So far, we have only heard the dancers’ breath and their footsteps. —Nora Chipaumire, Dark Swan, choreography for 9 men, 2010. The dancers are costumed in shorts of different colors 23 women stand facing the downstage left corner, taking up almost the entire stage. They have been filling the space with their fierce presence from the beginning of the piece, staring continuously and unabashedly at the audience for long periods of time, circling their butts, with their hands on their hips, sticking up their middle fingers and fisted hands, slapping their vaginas, flicking their chins, exclaiming loudly. A big rush of movement ensues: from standing still, they push the hands forward from the shoulders with a torso hit, bend down to slap the ground, circle their arms around to extend one leg forward and bring it around, jump forward, jump back. They repeat this facing back, then come to stand still. Now, as the music of the classic Swan Lake begins, the women look to the ground, vulnerable for the first time, but committed to the struggle. The right leg grounds down while the left leg lifts up, the foot flexed. One arm reaches high, the other reaching down, pulling the spine into a long spiral. The standing leg bends, lowering the body to place the legs in a wide parallel, feet planted firmly in the ground, torso leaning forward. The arms begin to swing in fast, whipping circles, one after another, blazing through the air, pulling the torso up. We see their different bodies interpreting the movement differently, but the continuous endeavor resonates across the bodies. —Nora Chipaumire, Dark Swan, choreography for 23 women, 2013. The dancers are costumed in shorts and bra tops The lights come up to reveal the silhouettes of eight dancers, facing upstage right. Their bodies are vibrating, their limbs are soft. As the vibrations get bigger and their chests open to the sky, their weight moves back. They begin a pattern of stepping the feet on the ground quickly, one after the after, and this begins to move them around each other. Sometimes this movement pulls them up to the balls of their feet, sometimes it draws them back to their heels, their torsos leaning forward

6  NORA CHIPAUMIRE: REWRITING AS DECOLONIZING HEAT 

187

as they travel backwards. One by one they settle into standing. Slowly, they turn forward. One voice begins to sound percussively in the interstices of the familiar melody of the Dying Swan, creating a counterpoint to it. Her vocalizations are breathy, and mark time rhythmically as the dancers walk forward slowly, bending one knee deeply, extending one open palm slightly in front of the body. As the vocalization travels between high and low sounds, an orgasmic soundscape emerges. The dancers, their gaze directly at the audience, tug at the tops of their shorts, look down at themselves, and smile. They glide their hands into their shorts, and we see unmistakable references to self-pleasuring. Their hands then move to their butts, their torsos spiral in small diagonals, their chins lifted. Many audience members erupt in applause. —Nora Chipaumire, Dark Swan, choreography for 8 dancers, 2015. The dancers are costumed in shorts and threaded skirts and small tops

A leading choreographic voice of contemporary African dance, Nora Chipaumire was born in Zimbabwe in 1965, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.  Her dance-making evidences a prismatic vision that refracts and criss-crosses local and global, even as it always centers Africa as primary context. Questions about entangled lines of power and history are recurring themes in her work, engendering particular choreographic strategies. Re-imagining well-established classics of the Western world is only one part of this strategy. Chipaumire also often revisits her own choreography to reimagine it, an approach that insists on populating the space of a text with multiple rewritings, refusing to stabilize any one version as authoritative. Her choreographic mode of repetition-with-difference positions dance as a methodology of decolonial world-making, acknowledging our implications in shared histories of racial and cultural hierarchies, and re-narrativizing them through movement. Each rewriting disturbs the surface of the previous narratives, and the friction of crossing embodiments generates heat, inevitably energizing these encounters in multiple directions. In 2005, she created a solo, Poems, ostensibly as a tribute to Michel Fokine’s 1905 choreography of The Dying Swan, the signature piece danced by Anna Pavlova. Referencing a classical piece from the Western canon as the taking off point for her choreography but altering it from inside is one of Chipaumire’s ways of reminding us of the formations of empire, colonialism, and slavery, asserting their devastating effects, but

188 

A. CHATTERJEA

also refusing to be imprisoned by them. This solo, created for herself, and danced “bare-chested and in a tutu”—and it is significant that the “tutu” here is reimagined as a grass skirt—pushes us to investigate the edges of labor and survival in women’s stories, and their disjunction from the embodiments of femininity and beauty often articulated in the world of classical ballet through the romanticized imagery of swans (Chipaumire 2005). Later renamed Dark Swan, the program notes for the 2005 piece immediately heighten the chasm between Pavlova’s performance of frail beauty and the gritty endurance that subjects in Chipaumire’s world must commit to: “Poems is an imagined journey through dislocation/displacement/dislodgement from provenance into the unknown. The solo follows the despairing, rebellious, and courageous path of one woman as she loses her bearings/kin/country, watching her descent into the borderless world of survival” (2005). Indeed, Poems, marked by open-chested, wide-armed, turning jumps, scramblings on the floor, desperately swinging arms, effectively writes back to the narrative of its inspiration and the original’s particular articulation of femininity. Viewing this piece today, well over a decade after its premiere, audiences might be reminded of so many young women and girls, trafficked, abducted, torn from family and community by colonial and postcolonial violences, struggling, clawing their way back into their world, and very often falling out of public view. We might be reminded of the arduous journeys of the young women captured from their school in Chibok, Nigeria, by Boko Haram in 2014, some taken to Chad and Cameroon, held captive for a long time, and their tremendous struggles and astuteness in finding their way back to their families. Their travails mark an absolute contrast to those of the swans of classical ballet. Much of the critical response to Fokine’s original piece fêted the feminine frailty performed by Pavlova, characterized by liquid arm movements and a flowing torso, with the legs in a sequence of small steps, pas de bourrée suivi. Dance critic André Levinson described the tension between Pavlova’s dreamy movements on tiptoe, her gliding motions, her reaching for the horizon, and the pain that overcomes her as a statement about death generally: “Then faltering with irregular steps toward the edge of the stage— leg bones quiver like the strings of a harp—by one swift forward-gliding motion of the right foot to earth, she sinks on the left knee—the aerial creature struggling against earthly bonds; and there, transfixed by pain, she dies” (Balanchine and Mason 1975, p.  138). Chipaumire’s swans burst into this revered context with no comparative intent. Their

6  NORA CHIPAUMIRE: REWRITING AS DECOLONIZING HEAT 

189

Image 6.1  Nora Chipaumire in Poems / Dark Swan, inside a school in Chimoio, Mozambique. Still from Nora, a film by Alla Kovgan and David Hinton. (© 2008, photo credit: Mko Malkhasyan)

femininity is of a different order, and they refuse death robustly in order to strive for survival and thriving (Image 6.1). Since the premiere of Poems, Chipaumire has reimagined this piece several times. In 2010, she choreographed the piece for 9 men at the University of Minnesota’s Dance Program and worked with them intensively to facilitate their articulation of femininity. In 2013, she revisioned it yet again, at the University, as a piece on 23 women, where she focused on a refusal to acquiesce in any kind of conformity. Later the same year, she reset it on a professional cast, the dancers of Urban Bush Women, and the piece became an exploration and exultation in feminine sexuality and pleasure. In the process, every time, the heart of Mikhail Fokine’s The Dying Swan is revealed as only one part of the story of Dance, a synecdoche of a large range of possibilities. The decentering of the European classic, worn thin through jostling with rewritings, becomes one way of inscribing those very voices into a History that would keep them at the margins, and of insisting on the historic entanglements of Europe and Africa, the global North and South, white and non-white bodies generally, making visible obscured presences. It is also a mode of upsetting power relations, of

190 

A. CHATTERJEA

queering the original through its reimagination in difference, and of building decolonizing heat through the friction of written-over stories. This re-narrativization of History is also, simultaneously, a reclaiming of spaces and times marked by erasure or violent misrepresentation, a committed exploration of difference within, and a comment on the impossibility of consolidation in dance. Chipaumire’s reiterations reveal their subjects as entirely different from the ones that might feature in the 1905 “original.” The subjects of these pieces are implicated in each other’s stories, but whereas the Dying Swan lives primarily in its own world of classical performance, Dark Swan, in its many reimaginings, compels our gaze to those who are little seen and heard, yet whose battles are the stuff of history. The latter’s granular resoluteness and unblinking performance of rupture is a complete contrast to the fragile flow of the former. As the repeated dismantling of an “original” marked as a “classic” accumulates power, the subjects of Chipaumire’s pieces take hold of our imaginations. And as their journeys find light and stage center, they push open closed spaces, ask questions about authenticity, “masterpieces,” and “reconstructions”—and ultimately refigure dominant cultural tropes. The intertextuality between the different incarnations created by Chipaumire, the resonances, differences, and cross-references among the pieces reveal her insistence on foregrounding experiences and subjectivities from the margins, despite the very different bodies who feature in the re-choreographies of the piece. Repeatedly, the dance shuttles between extreme struggle, determined survival, and an almost reckless courage as Chipaumire manipulates some phrase material in different ways. A few of these movements might recall the image of the classical swan only to undercut that reference immediately. Arms swinging in figure-eight pathways, and then circling in the same direction with full rotation from the shoulder joints; the one-leg balance with the knee of the lifted leg raised high, punctuated by a flexed foot, which develops into a turn, which in turn propels the body to the floor, ending with a scrambling motion to rise; the full-body vibrations in parallel, the arched back, culminating in the jump forward, finishing in a lunge with one finger daringly raised up, a gesture that Chipaumire describes as “waking up the ancestors”; and a varying series of extended-arm “swan” gestures—lengthened behind, palm on palm; arcing up and to the side, the hands flicking down; and fluttering arm gestures on top of feet moving in bourrées made different by shifting the weight to the heels, toes flexed off the floor, and placing the feet in parallel. Another constant presence through all of the works is

6  NORA CHIPAUMIRE: REWRITING AS DECOLONIZING HEAT 

191

the sound of the breath, necessitated by the bursts of intense physicality, but always a reminder of life force. The recurring phrase materials signal differently in embodiment as they are written over by the contexts: Chipaumire’s solo performance, lit narrowly through a diagonal panel of light traveling from upstage right to downstage left, riles the air around her, as she jumps forward and shuffles backward, persistent despite her aloneness. Her dancing eases open space ahead, so she can step into eddying circles, where she sings, and slowly caresses her body. We see her labor of rising despite falling, her refusal of containment, and her carving out self-affirmation. In the 2010 version with the men, of whom four were of color and seven identified as queer, Chipaumire encouraged an exploration of fragility, so these same gestures, performed with just as much desperation, landed on audiences as deeply searching, laden with spiritual import. The move from a single dancer to multiple also allowed Chipaumire to craft a choreography of community, in this case, a group of men who knew marginality in some way. Together, they perform individual vulnerability: they touch their chests softly; they stand with the weight shifted to one side, hip out, knees bent, one arm overhead, the body open; they hold one hand like a mirror and brush the face with the other, as if they are applying make-up; they whip one arm around their backs repeatedly in gestures of self-flagellation. The 2013 version with the twenty-three young, college-age women, mostly white, moved the piece to a different radar, emphasizing gendered and sexual struggles. Here, the above movements live in the interstices of gestures of “talking back,” returning the gaze, and refusing silence: arms raised, middle fingers pointing up; torsos thrusting forward; hands crawling inside and through the sides of their shorts; one arm raised, the hand fisted and raised while the other hand slaps the forearm; menacing walks that take up space and break through the edges of the black box stage.1 The rage of the young women was transformed, in the 2015 version of Dark Swan performed by the mature artists of Urban Bush Women, into a full celebration of Black women’s sexuality and sense of self. Here, the same gestures fell beside hands that peeled forward the top edges of the shorts, as a downward gaze invited a smile, and the pelvis circled softly; a raised arm that cradled the head, while the other hand cupped a breast; wide-legged, flexed-feet jumps landing into pelvis circles; and a soundscape that grew from moans to vocalizations of orgasmic delight to exclamations of “BLACK! Watch me!” to a syncopated, rhythmic articulation.

192 

A. CHATTERJEA

The recycling of some of the movement through the pieces, choreographed to have different valences, underscores the repeated emergence of subjugated voices, against the background of Camille Saint Saens’ “Le Cygne” score and Sam Cooke’s soulful “Bring it on home to me.” Yet, the subjectivity that Chipaumire carves out from the piece is always particular and we are forced to reckon with difference inside of sharedness. It is not insignificant that in all but the last version, a performer sings Janis Joplin’s “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz / My friends all drive Porsches / I must make amends.” In her solo version, there is something incredibly moving about Chipaumire’s murmured rendition of the song. She walks slowly in circles, touching herself softly, sensuously, and this affirmation of her whole self, her struggles, her sexuality, her anger, and her desire is so powerful that she is able to draw all of our attention to her dancing body without ever allowing us to objectify her. In the 2010 version, Justin Reiter sings the first few lines in low and high registers, while the other men perform the core phrase—jumps, turns, arm circles, frantic floor crawls, over and over, exhausting themselves, running back and forth along diagonal corridors of space. Pushed to the limits of their exertion with this, they search for moments of softness when they stop, fingers tracing along their bodies, and different reachings for balance. Their arms and torsos extend into the swan gestures, the arms lengthen back, to wrap beyond the body or stretch forward to place palms on each other, above the head. Hannah Smith, the young artist who sings it in the 2013 piece, hardly moves with the others in the rest of the dance. She marks the edges of the space vigilantly, leaning against the back wall, or slowly sinking down to sit, almost always on the circumference of the community on stage, her gaze outward. As she begins to sing, the other dancers, who have collected loosely around upstage right by now, begin to move downstage, slowly, one by one, where they explore the vocabulary of arms curving into analogous, but different, lines of the “swan” gestures. The metaphor of the opulent Mercedes, always articulated by a single voice, seems to repeatedly stand in for an ask for some kind of validation, some moment of desired visibility. Chipaumire’s decision to neither use this song, nor elaborate this particular emotional strain, with the Urban Bush Women dancers, at this time, highlights her understanding of the particularity of the Black feminist community at the core of this piece. It speaks to her “differential consciousness” as Chicana feminist scholar Chela Sandoval theorizes it, assessing the topography of difference within feminist artmaking, and

6  NORA CHIPAUMIRE: REWRITING AS DECOLONIZING HEAT 

193

responding to the particular need of that context through re-centering particular subjectivities (1991, p. 14). Here, where individual voices are repeatedly embedded within a communal score, where Black women are dancing “seeing” each other, Chipaumire’s choreography marks itself as a tactical intervention into artistic canonization, choosing different instead of parallel structures in relation to the previous pieces. From a different perspective, the making and remaking of Dark Swan might be argued to be a postcolonial strategy of haunting, of refusing consolidation. Sociologist Avery Gordon has talked about haunting as a “sociopolitical psychological state” in which “abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly done and over with” (2008, p. xvi). Scholar of cinema and literature, Michael F. O’Riley describes the disruptive nature of postcolonial haunting as “the affective dimension of the unhomely of history” (2007, p. 1). In the context of Chipaumire’s choreographic strategy, I suggest that decolonial haunting becomes an intentional practice of rejecting different narrativizations of status quo, where specters of past injustices show up even as they are declared to be ended, party to the perpetration of new violences. Her methodology of repetition is part of the epistemology of the postcolony, grappling with the chaotic power relations, broken infrastructures, mass poverty, relentless shakiness of life conditions, and the ineffaceable betrayal of the promise of “national independence” that has so often failed to deliver justice to the most vulnerable communities in these societies. Chipaumire talks about her understanding of postcoloniality as the experience of constant shifts, redrawings of the map, and the necessity of adaptability as essential for survival. In this context, reimagining a story through the prism of difference is to seek to know again and again, the depths of pain, joy, and defiance, and modes of enduring despite the unhomely, quicksand-like, rapidly changing grounds under the feet. Additionally, Chipaumire’s insistence on rewriting her own work is her examination of a lived experience of “democracy” in the sense of broad participation in story-making. The signal differences among the pieces emerge from her practice of looking at subjects in context and identifying the emergent stories at that present moment. The distinctions in choreographic structure then come from refracting the piece through the stories carried by the specific bodies dancing the piece. Such creative practice places little value in “masterpieces” with fixed, notated choreographies that direct remountings. Instead, it prioritizes the fracturing of traditional

194 

A. CHATTERJEA

conceptualizations of temporality: the past remains in the present, even as the present marks its difference from the past and looks to the future. As a methodology, it always refuses the preoccupation with a “new” and instead chooses to reveal difference from within. Like Homi Bhabha’s notion of colonial hybridity, the works then become foils to each other and to the classical Dying Swan, “at once a mode of appropriation and of resistance” (1985, p. 162). At the same time, the recurring and intertextual swans in Chipaumire’s oeuvre, refusing to capitulate to a single narrative, also debunk essentialized notions of pure difference that are often wrapped into notions of “others” who come from “elsewhere.” As visual arts scholar Gilane Tawadros has reminded us, “the cultural institution privileges the authentic other from elsewhere—Africa, Asia, and South America—in fact, anywhere as long as it’s not here at home. Because, while difference from outside can be fixed, managed, controlled, and isolated, difference at home is altogether more slippery, evasive, and threatening” (2003, p. 50). Indeed, Chipaumire’s strategy of placing the absolute difference that is often associated with Africa, inside the heart of white European classical culture, along with her double location in Zimbabwe and the US, and her very successful touring career which ensures that her work is witnessed widely, belies the possibility of a distant “otherness.” As her choreographic rewriting muddies parcel-able difference, it invokes Homi Bhabha’s tropes of colonial mimicry and ambivalence: “The effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing…the reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double” (1994, p. 86). This mimicry, sometimes mockery, sometimes a reminder of inadequacy or unfinished stories, often a displacement of that which posed as an “original,” posits multiplicity as recalcitrance, self-­ affirmation, and alterity. And it is both, as in Bhabha’s articulation, a strategy of managing colonial discipline, and of postcolonial proliferation, ensuring the strategic failure of consolidated metanarratives and “masterpieces” (Image 6.2). In some instances, Chipaumire’s rewriting of dominant cultural tropes emphasizes the cheeky and sarcastic, when she reproduces some of the typical imagistic tropes of the colonial imagination and trappings of powerful display, only to subvert them from within, through the implication of an “other” narrative that develops through the performance. For instance, she reimagined Vaslav Nijinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, choreographed for the 1913 Ballets Russes season, in her 2013 piece, Rite/Riot. While

6  NORA CHIPAUMIRE: REWRITING AS DECOLONIZING HEAT 

195

Image 6.2  Nora Chipaumire in her research on running, in Chimoio, Mozambique. Still from Nora, a film by Alla Kovgan and David Hinton. (© 2008, photo credit: Mko Malkhasyan)

several choreographers have reimagined Sacre over time—Maurice Béjart in 1959, Pina Bausch in 1975, and Martha Graham in 1984, to name some of the prominent retellings—Chipaumire’s political intent and her strategy of re-choreography have particular potency as a kind of over-­ writing, powerfully re-scripting the women’s generally non-agential role with feminist staging, and compelling attention to lacunae about Europe’s colonial project. As in the Dark Swan, her Rite/Riot talks back to the original choreography, inserting other presences and aesthetics into the “classic” work, urging us to rethink some of the assumptions and hierarchies that underpin “master” narratives circulating in global culture. Set inside a floor-to-ceiling plexiglass cube, with a huge didactic on the wall beside it, featuring text by novelist and writer James Hannaham, Rite/Riot immediately confronts audiences with the history of “other” bodies museumized and displayed as spectacles of entertainment. Audiences are reminded right away about the not-too-distant history of Saartjie Baartman, the Khoikhoi woman, dehumanized as the “Hottentot Venus,” and exhibited across Europe in the early nineteenth century. Hannaham’s language identifies Chipaumire, enclosed in the cube, as the exhibit of a “Black African Body” from a private collection, and describes

196 

A. CHATTERJEA

the performance as an “exotic installation” (2013). It describes her, the exhibit, with deadly sarcasm as “a notoriously dangerous, savage personage…who frequently bares her teeth and other body parts” (Hannaham 2013). The text is tricky, slipping in and out of reality and racialized fantasy, switching perspectives and tones, deftly interweaving irony and sincerity, and ultimately pointing us toward the layered compositional strategies within the piece. This, for instance, is how the exhibit description closes: “Chipaumire might not have been born a woman but a kind of inter-sexed person, and black, so my god the struggles she must have endured, what a survivor, what courage, what beauty, what dignity, what a nice set of chocolate thighs, what a little re-cracker, what a shapely black dancer butt, watch her shake that thing—but with considerable pride in her heritage and ancestry, including the wide-spread cannibalism” (Hannaham 2013). References to neoliberal and colonial descriptions, sexualizing and objectifying her, sit alongside a very real statement about her pride in ancestry, which is immediately complicated by the colonial myth of cannibalism. This description is fair warning to audiences that they will be drawn into the circle of the performance as part of this exhibit, and that they will have to figure out how to respond to the array of references that they will be confronted with during the performance. Indeed, the irony of the curatorial note and the spatial design is redoubled through the choreography and other design elements. Inside the box, Chipaumire, dressed in neon-colored underwear, and bright lipstick, moves against a score that intersects her own reflections with snatches of rock, hip hop, Western classical, and traditional Zimbabwean music. Her chin tilts up sharply over one shoulder as she looks out at the audience. Her movement is minimalistic, slow, and intentional, her choreography a rite of defiance against a history that might have sought to contain her. Her spine curves in as she leans forward, looking closely as if at her own image in the glass; her head arches up elongating her neck and convexes her up-reaching torso; her arms reach out, one above her head, the other to the side, lengthening her body in an unapologetic, proud stance. As she moves seamlessly through different positions that invite a public gaze and suggest display, her arms framing her face and her body, we see her passing through many incarnations: Is she a body-builder, a model, a sex worker, a goddess, a warrior? Occasionally, even as the score rises to a huge applause and voices talking excitedly, she stops entirely, and stands, her back to the audience.

6  NORA CHIPAUMIRE: REWRITING AS DECOLONIZING HEAT 

197

Chipaumire’s performance inaugurates yet another dimension to this ironically re-imagined classic: the sarcasm that frames the first encounter of performer and audience quickly develops into a re-direction of history, an assertion of her own subjectivity, a contemporary artist’s exploration of tropes of sacrifice and ritual in the genealogies of empire and bodies. As the score foregrounds Chipaumire’s own voice going back and forth between the many ways she could create a manifesto, we understand that it is because her skin, overlaid by histories, threatens to entrap her inside histories of visual representation, that she takes on the choreographic strategy of “sacrificing” her body to multiple histories of consumption of Black women’s bodies, only to assert herself in the end. In the final analysis, the vulnerability of the virgin girls sacrificed in Nijinsky’s Rite is written over by Chipaumire’s self-defining feminist subject, who cannibalizes stereotypical representations that attach to bodies like hers, and metaphorically breaks the boundaries of the box/gaze in which she had consented to be seen in the beginning. What can the rewriting of a pre-existing work, a “classic,” through contemporary dance tell us about history’s unstable narrativizations? Re-tellings such as this become double-articulations in that they tell their own story as much as they disrupt the authority of the “master” narrative they invoked. Nora Chipaumire’s reimagination marks a deliberate strategy of insertion of bodies marked as “other” to indicate the long, convoluted, and entangled histories of Empire. In Rite/Riot, Chipaumire draws on the riotous reception that the Rite of Spring received at its premiere performance at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, to create a heated affective triangulation: she remarks on the Euro-American fascination with primitivism and human sacrifice in artistic representations of the “other,” choreographs a sarcastic commentary on African women’s bodies caught in the gaze of the global North, and reimagines the conventions of staging dance, crossing performance with installation practices. Such immediacy of critiquing hegemony and nudging open spaces for other stories indicates Chipaumire’s intention. She is not asking for a “separate” space which might not come to be commensurable with spaces already marked as valuable. Rather, she insists on the inevitability of relationship, and hence chooses to occupy the same place as the classic, in her own terms. This strategy of bringing several layers of commentary to ping each other, activating cross-referentialities and interjections, builds choreographic traction through friction. For instance, though there are no movements that emerge directly from the world of ballets blancs, or display

198 

A. CHATTERJEA

particularly balletic virtuosity, some of the swan gestures in Chipaumire’s Dark Swan pieces are inspired by the imagination of women in Picasso’s famous 1907 painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: angularly raised elbows; open armpits; hands resting on thighs. That it is Picasso, whose Cubist innovations were inspired by his interest in Africanist art, and facilitated by French colonial museological projects, to whose work Chipaumire responds in Dark Swan, makes its own commentary about her choreographic intention. And her glancing at this image—which caused much consternation at the time of its initial showing with its close-knit constellation of five naked sex-workers—in a piece that illuminates her celebration of women’s sexuality and acts of self-pleasuring, indicates a simultaneous questioning of long histories of male artists painting female nudes. Moreover, Chipaumire’s insistence on writing her own choreography over several times nudges us toward examining the overarching politics of naming and upholding “masterpieces” in the world of concert dance. Mindfully prying open reverences around choreographic score, she pushes us to wonder about the economy of reconstructions, taken on with great attention to the details of the “original” (as has been the case with numerous ballets such as Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring), without necessarily raising questions about the function of “authenticity” in the context of changing socio-cultural currencies. As she shifts her choreography, soundscape, and other design elements every time she works with different bodies and different contexts, she raises questions about the stakes in reigning in the mobility of dance through the monumentalizing of certain pieces and the schema of dominance at play here. The politics of representation and the various intertextualities among these works invite analysis through ethnographer Anna Tsing’s framing axes of cross-cultural, transnational connections laden with friction, which in fact provides the “grip” that locates such encounters. Negotiating in between the assumed universality of Western metatexts and mainstream genres of cultural production, and the reductive implications of culturally specific art, Chipaumire reimagines major narratives from European cultural imagination by “inserting (her) own genealogy of commitments and claims” (Tsing 2005, p. 1). The continued impact of her re-inscriptions resides in what Tsing describes as the possibilities within friction, which “reminds us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power” (2005, p. 5). Friction is the tension that is produced when a work from the classical canon of the global North

6  NORA CHIPAUMIRE: REWRITING AS DECOLONIZING HEAT 

199

is written over from perspectives of alterity. The politics of such rewriting are of positioning self as a signatory in these stories while highlighting ‘otherness’ in order to alienate the dominant from self: the canon is not explicitly canceled, but left questioning its own authority as it looks at an “other” presence lodged within itself, inextricably. The friction produced by the jagged edges of danced layers inevitably produces heat: it causes blood to rise to the surface of the skin as it empowers, causes discomfort, pleases, angers, insists in the face of denials, and slips away from enshrinement. Tsing’s formulation of friction reminds us that even as global forces and internet highways create greater access to cultural forms from different contexts, the practices will shift and morph as they travel. Yet not all rewritings and relocations have the same weight, and gestures signify differently within given contexts, as part of complex systems of signs. Black feminist sociologist Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 theorization of intersectionality—reminding us that multiple axes of identity intersect to create a grid, interlocking and supporting each other, adding power to systems of differentiation and oppression that are already in place—becomes particularly important in considering the political valence of particular contexts and strategies.2 Chipaumire often draws on popular cultural signifying gestures to flip meaning-making in contemporary dance, but the ways in which she mobilizes them, as an assemblage of signs—intersectionally, redirecting and mobilizing crucial junctures of race, class, gender, nationality, sexuality—make her usage of them completely different from many other artists who might deploy them as straight citation. Let me offer an example. Miley Cyrus’ performance at the 2013 VMA awards, where she reminded her viewers and fans that she had removed herself completely from her Disneyized “family-entertainment” image, raised a storm of controversy in public media. Yet, her rebellion is of an entirely different world than Chipaumire’s project of decolonial irreverence, even though, at some moments, there might be general coalescence between their choreographies of gestural citation. The ensuing debate is an important reminder of how the failure to engage in intersectional feminisms and anti-racist body politics can lead to reductive and hierarchical analyses of the power and implications of performing bodies. The accountability of Chipaumire’s postcolonial feminism insists that she complicates her narrativization of gender, nation, race, and self in ways that reveal a range of positionalities within her thematic exploration and reject capitalist pop-feminism’s individualist take-no-prisoners approach.

200 

A. CHATTERJEA

When many critiqued Cyrus’ blatantly sexualized choreography as inappropriate—she stripped down to a skin-colored bikini, pointed to her vagina with a giant foam finger, stuck her tongue out—feminists rushed to defend her from the onslaught of slut-shaming. And Cyrus’ rewriting of her own image and her reclaiming of herself and her sexuality were indeed important. But Cyrus’s self-fashioning was propped up through images of “otherness” that she used and then dismissed. What most of the white feminists who rushed to her support overlooked was Cyrus’ use of twerking vocabulary as a mode of self-definition, emphasizing sharp hip movements and low squatting positions. Her appropriation of this Black social dance form was coupled with the juxtaposition of her own sexualized body with that of a group of Black women back-up dancers and singers, dressed up in over-sized bear suits, some of whose butts she slapped during the performance, and who mostly constituted mobile mise-en-scène for her performance. For viewers, they appeared as faceless and bodyless legs for the giant bears who provided the backdrop for her reclamation. White feminist commentary missed the need for a nuanced analysis and re-ignited the age-old divide with Black and feminists of color, who repeatedly articulated that while Cyrus’ performance of her own sexuality was important, her appropriation of Black movement forms and her utilization of Black women’s bodies as “props,” against which she chiseled her sexually provocative performance, were racist and unacceptable. The hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen that had emerged on twitter some weeks ago was cited again and again as Black feminists and feminists of color, shared their outrage at the dismissal of Black bodies and cultural forms.3 For those of us thinking about dance, Cyrus’ performance and the response to it was a reminder about the potency of performing bodies to signify politically and to remember how choreography—the art of arranging movement vocabulary on specific bodies in intentional sequencing, in coordination with other elements of design such as costuming, scenography, and lighting—can highlight bodily histories; how some bodies have become simultaneously invisibilized and hypervisibilized; and how aggregated visualities have coded different bodies. Also, how cultural relativism is not a productive lens from which to analyze the politics of dance and the ways in which our bodies are always already positioned in relations of power not entirely of our own making, because they are systemic. Chipaumire’s invocation of Fokine and Cyrus’ taking on of twerking, existing in entirely different contexts, have very different valences.

6  NORA CHIPAUMIRE: REWRITING AS DECOLONIZING HEAT 

201

But my reference to Cyrus is not just about racial and cultural differences, it is also about the circulation of gestural language which has a particular recognizability from popular usage. Chipaumire used some of the same gestures as Cyrus in her third re-setting of Dark Swan, where 23 women stuck out their tongues, grabbed their crotches, swore, pointed their middle fingers at the audience, and held them in a long, silent, direct stare. From my work as rehearsal director for that piece, I know that the white women in the piece, a majority of the cast, had to work especially hard through dramaturgical strategies to access the root of Chipaumire’s choreography of rebellion. While the vocabulary emerged from Chipaumire’s own revolution against systems that have sought to simultaneously hypersexualize and de-sexualize African women’s bodies, her mindful creative process and careful pedagogic methods enabled the dancers to fully embody the gestural language of the piece in their own terms, but in service of the choreographic vision. I read Chipaumire’s taking on of classic well-known pieces within European mainstream concert dance repertoire as intentional generation of friction: she means to flip the narratives that have rendered the “other” opaque, she means to trouble History, and the fiction that dance produces stability. Thus, this rewriting is not exactly the kind of citation Jérôme Bel, for instance, has referred to as a “discursive strategy” that allows him to “to put modern/contemporary dance into perspective (historicisation) and to determine an ontology of performance” (2000). Like Bel, she intends to talk back to history, but differently, she weaves in conversations with multiple registers of power, with particular emphasis on racial and cultural differences. The swans of her choreography intend to survive and to dance their resistance despite the struggle. Her skillful use of this choreographic strategy interrupts and re-directs flows of power and imagines the dancers as empowered subjects in charge of their own representation. Finally, her contemporary works, referring back to History, only to scramble the latter’s power, and her commitment to shuttling us back and forth between contexts, expectations, and subjectivities refuse the singularity of time and narrative. Chipaumire’s looking back at her own previous choreographies, and her refusal to repeat them exactly, underscores her practice of rejecting overarching notions of authenticity while holding on to particularities of current location. In rejecting such stabilization, she doubles her role as creator and witness, both subject and object of her gaze. Dance ethnographer Priya Srinivasan offers the notion of the “unruly spectator” who

202 

A. CHATTERJEA

critically engages with the dancing body and the layered materialities of performance even while responding to the beauty and power of the dance (2009, p. 53). While Srinivasan’s theorizing is particular to the context of solo performances of Bharatanatyam, caught up within aesthetic registers marked through “classicism,” her conceptualization of the unruly spectator as noticing the intersecting vectors of power that saturate the dancer’s body onstage, and then connecting them “to account for multiple histories of capital flow and domination,” offers an interesting paradigm for reading the strategy of an artist like Chipaumire, who witnesses her own work and its placement within specific historical contexts and insists on mobilizing and re-mobilizing her choreography (Srinivasan 2009, p. 53). However, this is not the only mode of rewriting that Chipaumire engages with. Her exploration continues to dive deeper and uncover several pathways to redirect her choreographic rewriting of History, or what has come to be regarded as historic. One of her recent and deeply provocative pieces, portrait of myself as my father (2014), an unflinching investigation of Black masculinity, is produced in a simulated boxing ring, with audiences on three sides. In her program notes, Chipaumire says that the piece is less about her father, who she barely knew, and more about African male identities in late capitalism. Her thematic explorations shape the space and structure of the work: “I give him boxing gloves so that he can have a fighting chance. I have put him in a boxing ring to battle with himself, his shadow, his ancestors, the industrial gods and that merciless tyrant: progress. To be a Black male may be challenging in the twenty-first century. To be a Black, African father may be unattainable.” Brilliantly crafted, this work is performed by Chipaumire herself, Pape Ibrahima Ndiaye, popularly known as Kaolack, who embodies the emblematic Black African man, at times suggestive of her father, and Shamar Watt, who performs as a referee of sorts, a cheerleader, and sometimes doubles and differentiates the implications of actions on Black men. We see Chipaumire and Kaolack tethered to the stage with long white cords, sitting on two red boxes, readying for a match. Chipaumire talks over the music playing through speakers, into a mike suspended from the ceiling. Her narrative weaves together and plays on different interpretations of Christian religious texts, the American Constitution, a step-by-step how-to-guide to acquire the cool swag that marks Black street performativity, playing off an abundance even when running on broke. She speaks in English, French, and Shona, as do the other performers, and we understand

6  NORA CHIPAUMIRE: REWRITING AS DECOLONIZING HEAT 

203

through their continuous vocalization, even when we do not understand the exact words, that they are in conversation, navigating situations closely. The “match” itself never goes beyond the first round: the devastation of the Black African man in the context of repeated violences of colonial, post-colonial, neo-colonial encounters is almost a foregone conclusion. Yet, the piece takes us through sections where the two contestants perform their best moves, in this case, danced phrases that demonstrate attack. Chipaumire shows us the “Jackie Chan,” a jump with a leg kicked up high, and a clap. Kaolack goes through a series of deep-seated steps, with sudden drops, and fast footwork. When the boxing match identifies Chipaumire, the father, as a “champion” though, we realize the trickery of the vocabulary. Kaolack is, as if “shy,” refusing to show his face as he answers Chipaumire’s request to teach him to box. Or is it that he cannot show himself fully? Or that we are incapable of seeing him in his fullness? She presses in, taunting him ruthlessly about this, asking him if he is a “sissy.” Ultimately this develops into a terrifying section, where she holds up the lights to his face, backing him into the corners of the ring. He cowers as she reminds him that, as an African man, if he doesn’t want to fight, he must run, die, or fuck, for survival’s sake (Image 6.3). The boundaries of the stage, which have always been permeable throughout this performance, with Watt slipping in and out of the ring and walking and dancing among the audience occasionally, and the performers leaning over the edges to talk to audience members, become even more slippery now. As Chipaumire repeats her words on a microphone, Watt and Kaolack repeatedly leap over the ropes that mark off the stage and run out into the edges of the performance space. But there is no escape route: they keep running out only to run in and around the boxing ring, trying yet another pathway, till darkness envelops the space. The piece ends with Chipaumire carrying Kaolack on her back, reminding us that even though she never really knew her father, he lives in her body. This stunning piece continues Chipaumire’s strategy of rewriting but reimagines it at a personal yet collective and historic site of painful erasure, the colonial wound. The piece is ostensibly about her father, Barnabas Chipaumire, but it is also not about him, and about her search to reimagine him as a man in his context. It is also as much about the devastation of colonialism, the way it breaks existing social formations, economic and political arrangements, and sense of self. And, because it circulates primarily in an economy of male power and aggression, it must emasculate the figures of authority among the colonized, certainly the men. It makes

204 

A. CHATTERJEA

Image 6.3  Nora Chipaumire, portrait of myself as my father, 2016. Dancers: (right to left) Shamar Watt, Nora Chipaumire and Pape Ibrahima N’diaye. (Photo courtesy of © Peak Performances at Montclair State University. Photo credit: Gennadi Novash)

sense then, that Chipaumire locates this work in a boxing ring and constantly plays with different scales of power, only to up-end them. It is also significant, that she is the figure that holds the entire piece together, keeping the tethering ropes from Kaolack’s waist in her hands for much of the performance, and that hers is the primary voice that narrates the text throughout the piece. Ultimately, we come to believe that Black African women and femmes are the truth-tellers and leaders of the future, even as they return again and again to points of historic rupture, attend to the deletions covered up in the debris of the imperial machine’s trampling journey, and rewrite necessary stories, partly historic and partly imagined, so we may understand time, continuity, however fragmented, and healing from their perspective. At a recent post-performance discussion in Minneapolis (March 24, 2018), Chipaumire responded to my question about her attachment and repeated return to points of erasure by sharing a story about her

6  NORA CHIPAUMIRE: REWRITING AS DECOLONIZING HEAT 

205

grandmother. She spoke about her memory of her grandmother, a hero to her, a figure of protection and love, intimidated by the colonial police forces, reduced to fearfulness. Reclaiming her memory of her grandmother as she experienced her is important for her, as is rewriting the script of power to scrutinize the forces whose continued assault sustains projects of colonialism and Empire. Such reimagination refuses the impotence forced on South-South communities by colonial governments and global neo-liberal organizations that continue that legacy in the name of monitoring financial and credit health, such as the International Monetary Fund. The recitation of the names of leaders of post-colonial African countries—such as the first legally elected prime minister of independent Democratic Republic of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, who was assassinated by the coordinated efforts of Belgian and American governments, and first prime minister of independent Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, ousted by a Western-backed coup—and references to colonial renamings—from Rhodesia to Southern Rhodesia to Zimbabwe—and the partition, annexation, and occupation of African territories by European colonial powers indicate this history. The story of her father, then, is no sentimental retrieval through biography, but a large-scale complex cultural-political critique, delivered through embodied narratives that work across different temporalities and tie together textualized History with cellular memories. What are the life conditions of an African man, a regular “citizen,” within this web of historical circumstances? Indeed, Chipaumire is always in conversation with and in response to larger political frameworks, albeit juxtaposed in a densely layered composition, where history is never held at a distance, but experienced through her embodied personhood. And holding history close, in her body, and moving it literally and metaphorically, is another way for Chipaumire to heighten the heat of her choreographies. I end this chapter by thinking briefly about her 2007 work, Chimurenga, mapping the revolutionary struggle of her youth in Zimbabwe, and its renewed relevance in the light of recent events in Zimbabwe, the struggle against the centralization of power leading to the deposition of President Robert Mugabe. A historical reference, personal recollection, and affective redeployment, Chimurenga reminds us how struggles within the postcolony and the authoritative regimes that are so often spawned by it are replicated constantly, throughout history. Chimurenga: an hour-long multimedia solo, based on Chipaumire’s memories of her youth in Zimbabwe. The title refers to the Second

206 

A. CHATTERJEA

Chimurenga (1966–1979), widely known as the Liberation War, where the guerilla uprising led to the end of white-ruled Rhodesia and the effective independence of Zimbabwe. Chipaumire lived through the struggle as a child and young woman. Organized in three sections, “Kaffir,” “Convoys, curfews and roadblocks” and “Pungwe/musing out loud about the revolution,” the piece travels through gestures of hurling, raised fists, jumps, rolls to the floor, knees lifting high, moments of balance frozen in position, eyes vigilant, and moving joyfully, but with an internal focus, to the music of Thomas Mapfumo and The Blacks Unlimited. Throughout the piece she dances in space confined by light: a square in the center of the stage, a narrow strip across the downstage width, lights circled just on her sometimes anguished, sometimes defiant gaze. But she always seems to squeeze out movement from every corner of that limited space, as if daring the contours of light to cramp her dancing. In November 2017, global news channels published images of the political upheavals in Zimbabwe, of communities running away from smoke bombs, of heightened tanks and military presences in public urban space, as well as of citizens cheering and dancing in the streets. The popular support of the military maneuverings and of governmental pressure on Robert Mugabe to quit after his 37-year reign, the struggle and the movement of so many citizens, is a reminder of postcolonial reckonings and aggrandizements, and the failed promise and experiment of “democracy.” It resonates strongly with the energy of Chimurenga, created a decade ago. Chipaumire’s choreographic intention was to explore her memories of being “a child of revolution,” as she says in the piece. But as is typical with her, she pursued the multi-dimensionality of that experience in her dancing. If revolution was something she grew up with, she understood both its excitement and its devastation, she knew the losses, exhaustion, doubt, and exhilaration of it, and she knew that artists emerging from its ferment also create spaces of joy and enduring love. Shifting, rewritten, multi-arcing, intervening, embodied narratives. Because she lives and works in Brooklyn, US, but is simultaneously committed to her diasporic identity, and travels frequently to work in different projects across Africa and Europe, among other sites, Chipaumire is constantly responding to contexts that differ geopolitically, economically, socially, and culturally. This multi-contextual indexicality allows us to read her works as rewriting public, historic, hegemonic narratives that circulate both locally and transnationally, and is evident in the details of her artistic decision-making and her polyvocal aesthetic. For instance, in a videotaped

6  NORA CHIPAUMIRE: REWRITING AS DECOLONIZING HEAT 

207

interview for the City Of Women Festival in Ljubljana in October 2009, she talks about her use of movement that is “culturally available” to her, part of dancing socially in the township, along with movement that she has studied, in college, in the US (City of Women 2017). She explains how, by virtue of being post-colonial, she has always been part of the Western world even when she was in Zimbabwe.4 Again, in another interview at the Goethe-Institut in Barcelona in June 2017, she reflected that in fact she never really left Zimbabwe, that it is always part of her consciousness. And in a TEDx talk at CalArts, “Performance, Body, and Presence,” in June 2014, she spoke powerfully about the ways in which the multiple vectors of location in fact cross in and on her body: “My Black, African, female body has been historically on a collision course with power, with masculinity, with whiteness, at times validating their presence, but often refuting them” (TEDxCalArts 2014). Such collisions, strategic engagements, and rewritings have yielded layered movement vocabulary and compositional practices, underscoring Chipaumire’s choreographic intertextuality and her self-avowed location within a global, mobile, yet specific Blackness, defying nationalism and bordered understandings of identity. They have been crucial to her transnational project of organizing, rocketing, and simultaneously chiseling embodiments of Black femininity, her project of decolonizing by revealing alterities, and her insistence on reiterative cross-referentiality to multiple sites of struggle as an epistemology for her investigation: Heat. In an essay in 2006, South African dance scholar and choreographer Jay Pather, reflecting on the state of African contemporary dance, had asked some difficult questions: “Do we produce work with Europe looking over our shoulder? Is our work tailor-made for a taste that is essentially cultivated in Europe and America? Do we wear our ‘Africanness’ as a sheen—a flavor which is, at the core, an overwhelming set of European aesthetics?” (p. 12). Pather is referring to the ways in which Euro-American curation and market-control have overdetermined the creative trajectory for so many artists from marginalized locations, the price of survival in a fiercely competitive and hierarchized arts field. Almost as if she were answering back, Chipaumire’s iconic statement below refuses such domination, and reflects on her contemporary choreographic practice, her relationship to history, location, and the currency of the “avant-garde” in her own terms. This statement was published in December 2015 on the website of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, when she received a prestigious Artist Grant from the organization.

208 

A. CHATTERJEA

When I discovered “concert dance,” I hoped to use it to manifest the avant-­ garde; (a form that represented the future and released the past). At the time, I was overwhelmed by the idea and expectation (perhaps self-inflicted), that an African artist should be responsible for the rich and complicated past, the ancient cultures and rituals, to be embraced by audiences at home and abroad. I have since developed a process and work that embraces and acknowledges that an African body can be simultaneously avant-garde and guardian of ancient—the intersection of these modes of expressions has helped me create a dynamic and complex (physical) language. I am currently invested in language-building as it is my belief that the language of the body can influence or create economies and engage civic society. (Chipaumire 2015)

Moving with ferocity and determination, Chipaumire rewrites Euro-­ American/white notions of contemporary dance with possibilities of densely layered, local-global dimensionalities even as she puts forward her own practice of embodied, political, and community-engaged feminist dance-making. And, as she wrestles with, refracts, and rewrites overarching metanarratives, the friction between the choreographic layers and the labor of decolonizing and the becoming-processes of liberation flood the surfaces of her dances and the nervous connections between the dancing bodies on stage and witnessing audiences with heat.

Notes 1. Black feminist scholar bell hooks writes about “talking back” as emerging from “a legacy of defiance, of will, of courage, affirming my link to female ancestors who were bold and daring in their speech,” and as a practice that chiseled her feminist politics, in her essay “talking back” (hooks 1989, p. 9). 2. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s influential theorizing of intersectionality is core to the field of Critical Race Studies, and to the discursive framework for my argument in this book. More on intersectionality and its intertwining with assemblage in the work of Jasbir Puar in the last chapter. 3. A list of the use of the twitter hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen can be seen at https://twitter.com/search?q=%23SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen&sr c=typd. Some other interesting blogposts about this incident, which were widely read and cited at the time of this controversy are http://racialicious56.rssing.com/chan-8963585/all_p2.html#item23 (written by Jacqui Germain) and https://www.thehairpin.com/2013/08/solidarityisforwhitewomen/ (written by Jia Tolentino). 4. As Achille Mbembe reminds us, “dealing with African societies’ ‘historicity’ requires more than simply giving an account of what occurs on the ­continent

6  NORA CHIPAUMIRE: REWRITING AS DECOLONIZING HEAT 

209

itself…It also presupposes a critical delving into Western history and the theories that claim to interpret it” (2001, p. 9).

References Balanchine, George, and Francis Mason. 1975. 101 Stories of the Great Ballets: The Scene-By-Scene Stories of the Most Popular Ballets, Old and New. New  York: Anchor Books. Bel, Jérôme, Interview by Adc Geneva. 2000, February. Texts and Interviews. [Web Post on Jérôme Bel’s Website]. http://www.jeromebel.fr/index. php?p=5&lg=2&cid=193. Accessed February 20, 2015. Bhabha, Homi K. 1985. Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817. Critical Inquiry 12 (1): 144–165. ———. 1994. Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse. In The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Chipaumire, Nora. 2005. Program Notes. Poems, Tangente Danse, Montreal, Canada. ———. 2015, December. Nora Chipaumire. [Web Content]. Foundation for Contemporary Arts. http://www.foundationforcontemporaryarts.org/recipients/nora-chipaumire. Accessed December 15, 2017. City of Women. 2017, July 12. Nora Chipaumire, Chimurenga (Boj, Jok, Revolucija). [Video]. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/7127017. Accessed November 17, 2017. Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. 1989. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (8): 139–168. Germain, Jacqui. 2013, August 28. Miley Cyrus, Feminism and the Struggle for Black Recognition. [Blogpost on Racialicious]. http://racialicious56.rssing. com/chan-8963585/all_p2.html#item23. Accessed October 20, 2016. Goethe-Institut Barcelona. 2017, June 1. 3 Fragen au Nora Chipaumire. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq2ap2ePJ9I. Accessed May 17, 2017. Gordon, Avery. 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hannaham, James. 2013, October. Black African Body. [Didactic]. Text Created for and Displayed as Part of Chipaumire’s Performance Rite/Riot. French Institute Alliance Française, New York City, NY. hooks, bell. 1989. Talking Back. In Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, 5–9. Cambridge: South End Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press.

210 

A. CHATTERJEA

O’Riley, Michael F. 2007. Postcolonial Haunting: Anxiety, Affect, and the Situated Encounter. Postcolonial Text 3 (4): 1–15. Pather, Jay. 2006. A Response: African Contemporary Dance? Questioning Issues of a Performance Aesthetic for a Developing Continent. Critical Arts 20 (2): 9–15. Sandoval, Chela. 1991. US Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World. Genders 10: 1–24. Srinivasan, Priya. 2009. A ‘Material’-ist Reading of the Bharata Natyam Dancing Body: The Possibility of the ‘Unruly Spectator’. In Worlding Dance, ed. Susan Foster, 53–75. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tawadros, Gilane. 2003. Tales of Authenticity: The Artist, the Artwork, the Exhibition, & the Institution. In A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad, ed. Orlando Britto Jinorio, Ery Camara, Gilane Tawadros, Paul Ha, Salah Hassan, Tumelo Mosaka, Okwui Enwezor, and Shannon Fitzgerald, 47–52. St. Louis: Contemporary Art Museum. TEDx Talks. 2014, June 18. The Black African, Female Body: Nora Chipaumire at TEDxCalArts. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=uNpPQvupacM. Accessed May 15, 2016. Tolentino, Jia. 2013, August 13. #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen. [Blogpost on The Hairpin]. https://www.thehairpin.com/2013/08/solidarityisforwhitewomen/. Accessed October 20, 2016. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Rulan Tangen: Entangling Memory, Relationality, and Repetition to Heat up Contemporary Indigenous Dance

Our very first engagement was at the Heard Museum. Our performance was on a staircase, and in installations with other paintings. This was in 2004. … Indigenous dances, whether of this country or other countries, have always been outside of theatre spaces, creating ritual spaces that were the precursors to theatre. So, were these the original theatre spaces? Probably, whether they were indoors, inside a longhouse or a bamboo palapa. There are many different forms of theater. But I do know that there are also challenges to be getting bookings in theaters … To take that little chance, it’s actually scary for people: ‘Oh, we’ve never had that here before, we don’t know if it’ll work.’ So, as a consequence, what’s interesting as a new way to do things is something we’ve been doing for a long time, which is not (working) in theaters, it’s in warehouses and in parking lots. —Rulan Tangen, in conversation with Denise Saunders Thompson (Kennedy Center 2018)

Rulan Tangen, Indigenous choreographer, Artistic Director of the Dancing Earth Company, currently based in Santa Fe, has worked in multiple ways to center Indigeneity in dance, consequently turning Eurocentric value-systems on their head. As this quote demonstrates, she is relentless in her problem-solving, refusing to be stopped by systems that are stacked against difference. Her insistent foregrounding of Indigenous perspectives often highlights hidden privileges and hierarchies couched inside some © The Author(s) 2020 A. Chatterjea, Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance, New World Choreographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43912-5_7

211

212 

A. CHATTERJEA

core considerations in whiteness-dominated contemporary dance: artistic decisions that might appear as innovative to one community have sometimes been long-term practices of others who have not had the privilege of choosing. Simultaneously, she offers a kaleidoscopic construction of Indigeneity, where cultural identities are performative, mobile, and reconstitutive of key relationships. Tangen identifies as culturally mixed or Métis in terms of her heritage, while clearly locating herself within a global Indigenous community. While her Kapampangan, Filipina Indigenous origin on her mother’s side is clear, her teachings come from close relationships within the Indigenous communities of Turtle Island. Specific blood ties to any Native American heritage have been difficult to identify and have even been contested. Yet, because she was ceremonially adopted by a Lakota grandmother in her teens and is in close relationship with leaders and members of several Native nations, Tangen’s commitment to Native American as well as cross-­ border global Indigenous communities, artists, and aesthetics is deep. She has intentionally woven her work in dance with a broad notion of trans-­ Indigeneity, and has continually nurtured relationships with Native American leaders, immersed herself in Native communities and values, and invited Native youth, artists, and collaborators into her work alongside those who identify as globally Indigenous, for rare and potent opportunities for cultural exchange, creative collaboration, and exploring pathways for solidarity. She founded her company Dancing Earth Creations in 2004 as a grass roots, project-based initiative and now describes her work as creating “experimental yet elemental dances that reflect our rich cultural heritage and explor(ing) identity as contemporary Native peoples” (“About Dancing Earth” n.d. https://dancingearth.org/about). However, the lines separating Native lineage, indicating a specific relation to American land and history, and global Indigenous identity are difficult to navigate in Tangen’s work. It is in tracing her creative journey over the years that we understand both the tense lines she straddles and her particular formation of a contemporary, feminist, Indigenous dance. For Tangen, a primary mode of sharing her work within Native and Indigenous communities has been through teaching and the mindful nurturing of Indigenous movement aesthetics. She arrived at the particular shaping of her pedagogy through a long and continuous investigation. Initially trained in ballet and modern dance, she came to realize that her path was different, and began to search for expressions of Indigeneity. Moving away from a traditional dance career in New York, she journeyed

7  RULAN TANGEN: ENTANGLING MEMORY, RELATIONALITY… 

213

across Turtle Island, tracking Native and First Nations-lead artistic projects and community-based cultural movements, connecting with collaborators, and working with different youth groups. As she recognized the deep need within these communities, she remained in continuous investigation about what an Indigenous movement methodology and leadership might look like. Her particular movement aesthetic and choreographic methodology, the cornerstones of her process of mentoring waves of young Indigenous artists and welcoming them into the world of concert dance emerges from these many years of research and practice. Even by her mid-twenties, she had eschewed her training in Western dance forms and moved away from possibilities of “fusion,” to delve into researching Indigenous worldview and practices, mythology, story-­ gathering, and deep cultural remembering to identify the source and the nature of her movement. Genocide and systemic cultural erasure, of course, make seamless recall difficult. Even as she worked through the intricate relationship between cultural memory, imaginative re-­ embodiment, and Indigeneity, Tangen recognized the perils of essentialist constructions of identity based on “blood lineage” and inherited tradition. She speaks with caution about the idea of “blood memory,” referencing, but not fully embracing, Kiowa author N.  Scott Momaday’s (1968) signature, but provocative, concept of the blood/land/memory complex.1 Like trans-Indigenous studies scholar Chadwick Allen, Tangen’s concept of “blood” is somewhat metaphoric, more a cultural complex where archives of memory can be conjured. Allen theorizes Momaday’s concept as a “trope of continuity across indigenous generations and as a process of contemporary indigenous textual productions” (2012, p. 162). He also remarks on the double movement between racial identity and narratives of memory as a maneuver adopted by Indigenous writers to assert location. Tangen recognizes both the tropic significance of Momaday’s concept and Allen’s more porous interpretation of it, and has retooled these ideas as strategies to inspire movement improvisation. More recently, she has been working with the concept of memory in bones. But though she speaks about the material reality of bones, their DNA, and their long-lastingness, her reference to bones operates in a dual capacity, identifying markers of Indigeneity and offering scope for strategic improvisation and story-telling. This layered mode of self-­identification opens up different pathways to weave together memory fragments, cultural practices, and imaginative meditations in dance-making. And even though controversial, she feels this way of working opens up passageways

214 

A. CHATTERJEA

for people left out of specific tribal nation affiliations due to relocation, adoption, or other histories of dislocation. Here, movement becomes a study on location, sourced through the complex of memory, imagination, and story, and embodied through what Tangen describes as “kinetic wisdom” (personal communication, April 21, 2012). Dancing and dance-­ making become modes of belonging, especially for those eclipsed out by gaps in governmental record-keeping and the imperfect colonial “science” of blood quantum measurement. With deepening research and investment in dancing Indigenous stories, Tangen began to teach intensively across reservations, and invite and train Native youth through her workshops. Consequently, holding up dance as a mode of accessing memory and story-creation became increasingly important in her work. The needs of the communities reaching toward her offerings in turn shaped her aesthetic and conceptual frame and pedagogic methodologies. She found it important, for instance, to not highlight one narrative about Indigeneity, but rather offer several pathways of entering into the work. This meant that she had to formulate her technique as anti-­ essentialist, yet culturally rooted: as a way of moving that would have room for individual voices and allow dancers to access their own stories. So, the training in movement became interwoven with improvisation and creative process, and the focus came to be on articulating cultural stories from personal perspectives, instead of learning discrete dances anthropologically framed through Tradition. This, along with her willingness to work through repeated cycles of invitation has built trust in her commitment. This symbiotic relationship between her creation of a movement aesthetic, developing a specific pedagogy, and working with community, consolidated the decolonizing heat in her practice and built a deeply located dancing, where a dancer becomes both an interlocutor of memory, personal and cultural, and a creator of dream-visions. Consequently, Tangen’s workshops have also come to be shaped as spaces where many constructions of Indigeneity cross. Because she encourages participants to enter her training system from the perspective of their stories and memories, which become their starting point for interpreting the improvisational prompts she provides, the stories that enter the circle are particular to different Indigenous experiences. This process facilitates an intertribal community-building process and fosters a pluralistic notion of contemporary Indigenous identity. In an interview, Margo Lukens and William Yellow Robe Jr. talk about the Native American concept of intertribalism as providing “an alternative means of bringing cultures, societies,

7  RULAN TANGEN: ENTANGLING MEMORY, RELATIONALITY… 

215

and thoughts together. Intertribal songs at a powwow represent the opportunity for all present, hosts, guests, and strangers, to share the heartbeat of the world. It is an honor to share the moment of inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness … sharing the music is, in effect, sharing ideas … the story being told” (2010, p. 116). They are quick, though, to make an important distinction: “this new concept of intertribal literary and production criticism will have to embrace and maneuver between worlds of generalization (powwow) and sacredness (specific ritual)” (Lukens and Yellow Robe 2010, p.  119). This distinction is vital: within the Native American context, the modern powwow circuit in the latter half of the twentieth century provided a space for innovative performance strategies where a broader communal identity could be celebrated, giving rise to concepts of pan-Indian identity. This is in a different register from ceremonial contexts defined by ritualized and culturally specific practices within Native nations. In creating a contemporary Indigenous aesthetic, Tangen draws on the formations of North American Indian intertribalism, but also creates her own ritualistic structures based on Indigenous worldviews of relationship to the ecosystem and community. In her teaching, Tangen prioritizes improvisation, leaving room for both individual response and recognition of the collective. Working in the interstices of many influences and stories, she gradually layers her directions with metaphoric provocations to create moments of shared significance. Typically, as dancers respond to her purposeful prompts, she notices repeated themes within their movement generation, and facilitates their journeys toward accessing dream-worlds, where ancestral stories and conjured futures can cross. She also identifies and amplifies resonances among the group and directs dancers toward finding moments of meeting with and responding to each other mindfully. Here, inventiveness comes to be valued, not as its own end, but as a mode of connectivity, and repetition and resonance line modalities of strengthening and energizing bodily knowledges that might have been subjugated. Within this process, honoring dancers’ contributions while working through play and group dynamics has deepened her method of moving artists beyond the “techniques” they might have learned, to arrive instead at a “way of moving.” Growing her pedagogy and artistic process from models of Indigenous leadership meant that she was committed to honoring all participants in her circle of dance, even as there are key decision-­ makers. Simultaneously, her distinct way of working with dance also supported her development as an important mentor among Native

216 

A. CHATTERJEA

American, First Nations, and other Indigenous cultural communities. Dance scholar Tria Blu Wakpa has emphasized this particular mode of interweaving directed improvisation and rotating leadership within Tangen’s creative practice as “interconnected individualism” which “values the ancestral, communal, and lived understandings of the dancers, and difference is celebrated rather than suppressed. As a holistic praxis that strives to recognize the individual through communal, temporal, and non-­ hierarchical relationships, the dance promotes responsible, sustained action” (2016, p. 121). Layering and integrating physical, emotional, spiritual approaches to dance lie at the root of Tangen’s life-long project of Indigenizing contemporary dance, and simultaneously changing the dominant modality of concert dance. Adapting to the circumstances in which she was creating dance had pushed her to understand form, not simply as placement and line, but as transmission of energy, and dance as a force in cultivating community and cultural leadership. The training that Tangen offers then necessitates that we reimagine the purpose and organization of “technique” itself and move away, from both the mainstream focus on virtuosic replicability, and the shrouded whiteness inside a “non-culturally specific” pedestrian movement. Her focus is on preparing the body to channel spiritual connectivity and mythic envisioning and learning to sense Indigeneity and self through movement. Part of this emerged from her personal journey in her recovery from cancer. Tangen describes her struggles at the edge of life and death as opening up a horizon in her movement research. Hallucinating during her chemotherapy treatment, she experienced herself as standing at the juxtaposition of the ancestral world and her conceptual being-in-this-world. The blurred boundaries of her own life made her keenly aware of the Indigenous worldview where time is experienced differently, and where spans of past-present-future co-exist. In this expansive and circular view of time, the past is not a mythic or romantic projection, but accessible through different modes of knowing. She recounts dreaming about Indigenous creation stories repeatedly, willing her body on a journey of revival. In an interview, Tangen spoke about her perceptions at that time: “The body of my work is of those essences. I have experienced only a few times, so powerfully, releasing myself into a deeply intuitive space” (personal communication, April 21, 2012). Later she would write about this time as a germination period for her artistic development, which resonates with the belief of many Indigenous communities in dreams as guiding

7  RULAN TANGEN: ENTANGLING MEMORY, RELATIONALITY… 

217

life-decisions. “In my struggle with death, the in-out, in-out of my own frail breath patterns carried with them strength and a new awareness of love and life. With repeated rhythms, movements, steps, and breath, we at Dancing Earth seek to renew the earth and to recycle the patterns of life for the survival and sustaining of all creation” (Tangen 2011, p. 148). In recovery, she realized that, while she had arrived at a new philosophy of movement, she still had to figure out how to re-inhabit her body, shift her weight, and connect to her breath. Her rewriting of the script of her “technique” became her strongest initiation into what her work has become today, invigorated by the core principle of connectivity. With sensation and vibration as key impulses, Tangen devised a warmup that began with tapping on the skin to awaken the cells, massaging one’s limbs, brushing hands against skin to release old and generate new energies. She emphasizes the gentleness of touch to relax and renew the vital centers, reassuring the body and allowing intention to emerge. Witnessing her instruct dancers in a practice of self-massage as she asked them to imagine that they were molding themselves from clay, I could see how, from the very beginning, her work is rooted in affirmation and presencing self. This, in combination with the attention to breath practices throughout training, connects inner and outer cycles of energy, and centers the philosophy of deep respect for and kindness to the body in her work. Tangen’s attention to breath as sacred is inspired by the Lakota concept of woniya, breath of life. Here is Lakota medicine man, John Fire Lame Deer, speaking about the circularity of energy enlivened by breath: The spirit is everywhere. Sometimes it shows itself through an animal, a bird or some trees and hills. Sometimes it speaks from the Badlands, a stone, or even from the water … But this is a two-way thing … Listen to the air. You can hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it. Woniya waken—the holy air—which renews all by its breath. Woniya, woniya waken—spirit, life, breath, renewal—it means all that. Woniya—we sit together, don’t touch, but something is there; we feel it between us, as a presence … talk to it, talk to the rivers, to the lakes, to the winds as to our relatives. (1972, pp. 12, 119)

Tangen repeatedly weaves in instructions about breath awareness in her teaching as she grows dancers’ understanding of her technique as a healing practice. Her pedagogic language is carefully crafted to encourage dancers to enter the movement from a sustainable place, and as a connective, embodied practice with spiritual dimensions. Tapping, self-massage, and

218 

A. CHATTERJEA

intentional breath are part of her methodology of somatic decolonization, where the awakened, sensory body becomes receptive to movement’s metaphysical dimensions, often experienced through the physical sensations of heat and vibration. Dance scholar Maria Regina Firmina Castillo, reflecting on her own experience in Dancing Earth workshops, cites Tangen’s words to describe the process “as a ‘shedding and emptying’ of the imprints of colonialism, so that the body-mind can become a ‘conduit for ancestral memory’—a form of remembering enlivened by the ‘artistic imagination’” (2016, p. 68). Dancers are also charged to become attuned to their natural reciprocity with the earth, breathing in the oxygen produced by plants, and returning the carbon dioxide that plants need for the photosynthesis process. Practically, this enables dancers to relax in their bodies and find movement flow, rather than being guided by an external sense of line and shape. This is key to the structured improvisations Tangen directs to develop awareness of the body-in-space, directionality, and angles and modes of moving. For instance, beginning with sitting and/or lying down, dancers are guided to imagine the medicine wheel around them and reach toward the different colors. The invocation of the medicine wheel, at the center of the worldview of many Indigenous communities, reminds dancers to work with space as potent, sacred, and work with it, instead of seeking to conquer it. It also internalizes a spherical notion of space. Tangen is careful to teach the specific reference to the medicine wheel and to trace her use of this image to the time that she was gifted a buckskin medicine box by a respected elder. With this permission, she began to explore the image of the wheel and realized that the four directions that we might notice when the wheel is still, expand manifold when the wheel is moving. This subsequently pushed her to work with the concept of the infinite directional possibilities of the body’s kinesphere. When she transfers this concept to the studio, she sometimes begins by establishing directional guideposts: the north, traditionally the place of the ancestral corridor, is upstage; the south, the space inhabited by women, and also the space of generosity, friendship, and sharing, is beyond downstage, with the audience; the east, where we first see light of day, is the space of new ideas, and is marked on stage left; and the west, the place of reflection, is stage right.2 But, almost immediately, as she asks dancers to find their place in a circle—which allows everybody to be seen equally and be responsible for carrying their part of the circle—the directions start to multiply, as Tangen says, “like a dandelion” (personal communication,

7  RULAN TANGEN: ENTANGLING MEMORY, RELATIONALITY… 

219

February 5, 2017). Tangen’s ask, that her students/dancers organize themselves in a circle, affirming relationality with everyone they are dancing with, enter dance through participation in these exercises, and constantly mobilize the formations she has offered in the beginning, reorganizes typical dance class structures and spatialities in the Western world, and reaffirms Wakpa’s reading of her practice as “interconnected individualism.” The movement out into space happens through improvisation inspired by imagery shared in Indigenous circles, such as the botanical growth patterns of the “three sisters,” the main agricultural crops of Turtle Island Native communities: squash, corn, and bean plants. Dancers are invited to imagine their forays into space in terms of such sprouting plant-life. The brilliance of using such imagery is that dancers are immediately invited into an exploration of space and of levels in collaborative ways, even as they approach space from an Indigenous perspective, as a partner in their evolving movement. These crops have traditionally been cultivated through a system of companion planting, where the seeds are placed quite close to each other without fear of overcrowding: the corn, planted first, grows tall, reaching for the sky; the squash, spreads horizontally on the ground; and the beans, wind up and around the corn. The three plants also benefit each other and the soil in particular ways, as they return specific nutrients to the soil which the other plants need. Tangen introduces the concept, then guides the dancers’ explorations by narrating possible pathways for the growing plants. In this, she is teaching dancers a way to expand their movement while learning to be attentive to the needs of dancing in community, without teaching specific phrases. She is also cultivating in them a way to move with the ground and in space mindfully. This is her practice of what she describes as “Land Dance,” dancing as a way to animate connections to all other life forms on earth (personal communication, February 5, 2017). This ecosystemic connectivity also resonates with Castillo’s categorization of Indigenous dancing generally as “telluric”—of the earth, and in relationship to grounded being-ness (2016, p.  60) (Fig. 7.1). The lesson of dance as interactive community practice is a constant theme in Tangen’s pedagogy. When participants in her workshops are not so familiar with the conventions of dance class, she encourages a similar sensing of spatial collaboration and individual movement generation, through responses to sound and rhythm practices. For Tangen, encouraging dancers to be aware of others moving and creating sounds around

220 

A. CHATTERJEA

Fig. 7.1  Rulan Tangen, in Land Dance explorations (2015) for SEEDS RE-GENERATION. Aesthetic design with Kalika Tallou. (Photo credit Paulo Rocha-Tavares and Dancing Earth, courtesy of ©pauloT for Dancing Earth)

them even as they do the same themselves, finding complementarity of pitch and sound quality, is akin to an exploration of biodiversity from inside. At other times, perhaps when dancers in class are either not Indigenous and/or unfamiliar with Indigenous philosophies, she works through animal imagery to direct improvisations initiated by different body parts, at different levels, animated by different energies. In all of these explorations, the verbal instructions and metaphors she offers urge movement that is in sync with the patterns of the natural world. The particular prompts in this series enable her to guide dancers toward moving on different body surfaces—like an earthworm, inching forward slowly on the chest—exploring multiple points of balance—like four-legged creatures with a tail—and allow her to kindle curiosity in many ways. There are no assigned “roles,” but dancers are able to choose specific sets of directions and develop them in their own way, creating what Tangen has described as “functional microcosms of interactive diversity” (personal communication, February 21, 2017). Here again, in directing dancers to

7  RULAN TANGEN: ENTANGLING MEMORY, RELATIONALITY… 

221

evolve movement in keeping with the energy of the natural world, she moves dancing away from virtuosity as its own end. Dance scholar Maria Regina Firmina Castillo has written about Tangen’s work through the prism of Walter Mignolo’s notion of contemporary pluriversality as the “entanglement of several cosmologies connected today in a power differential … the logic of coloniality covered up by the rhetorical narrative of modernity” (Mignolo 2018, p. x). Emphasizing the predication of Mignolo’s pluriverse in multiple logics and dialogues, Castillo describes Tangen’s work in Dancing Earth as “an experiment in complexity, performing a praxis of decolonization for Indigeneity to emerge as a pluriverse with trans-ontological possibility. This is no essentialist fantasy, nor is it about relativism. Dancing Earth performs different worlds, with none having a facticity over the other. As such, it is a project of ontological regeneration that does not flatten the multiplicity of Indigenous experiences and perspectives, nor does it attempt to force an aesthetic or cultural pan-Indigeneity based on homogenizing folklorization, reified tokenization, or on illusory universals” (2016, p. 70). Castillo’s focus on the ontology that materializes from her practice compels recognition of Tangen’s insistent methodology of inviting movement, without necessarily teaching exactly choreographed or ordered sequences, to create a full-bodied, non-uniform, movement aesthetic, that in turn feeds the heat of intersecting world-makings. Tangen’s generation of movement also emerges from fostering imaginative interpretations of stories, mythic, remembered, and historic, which she describes as her practice of “re-story-ing,” which in turn juxtaposes many planes of time and space, amplifying the possibilities of pluriversality (personal communication, February 21, 2017). For instance, she recounts the story of Condor told to her by James Uqualla, an elder and medicine man of the Havasupai tribe from the Grand Canyon area in Arizona. Uqualla recounted the journey of Condor, the sacred bird, whose wings are so wide that they stretched to either side of the Canyon. He described to her how the humans riding on Condor’s back, as he flew and dipped from side to side in flight, slid off and landed on different sides of the Canyon, creating different tribal homelands. For Tangen, this story became a cue for movement, exploring what it might mean to feel the wingspan of the majestic Condor through arms and shoulders, to sense the soaring motion of the bird’s flight, to feel the tipping of balance from side to side. This process of energizing images from literature, oral traditions, and visual art supports her particular approach to movement, gentle

222 

A. CHATTERJEA

and in harmony with the ecosystem. However, Tangen’s interest in working with stories is seldom narrative: rather, it is conceptual, creating a mosaic of thematized explorations, and an entry into contemporary movement and choreography that is connected to Indigenous approaches to land and relationality (Fig. 7.2). Another prime example of this “re-storying” methodology is Tangen’s intentional technique of walking, keeping the feet soft. With limited access to studio space, she decided to pair the training inside the studio with training outside and created innovative opportunities to train the feet. She invites dancers to investigate how Indigenous ancestors might have walked bare feet on rugged terrain, as in the topography beyond the city limits of Santa Fe. Alternatively, how might they have walked with their feet in soft-­ soled moccasins? When the space is not necessarily flat, the soles have to remain alive, and make constant micro-adjustments to find equilibrium.

Fig. 7.2  Rulan Tangen and DANCING EARTH in outdoor Land Dance for SEEDS RE-GENERATION (2015), with re-purposed parachute for the scene of “Renewal” on Abaachi lands. Dancers (from left to right): Shane Montoya, Rulan Tangen, Anne Pesata, and Trey Pickett. (Photo credit Paulo Rocha-Tavares and Dancing Earth, courtesy of ©pauloT for Dancing Earth)

7  RULAN TANGEN: ENTANGLING MEMORY, RELATIONALITY… 

223

Dancing and finding stability on uneven ground with bare feet also requires tweaking the balance of our hips and pelvic floor, noticing how we hold our heads, protecting the spine from jerky movements. Learning from this context about the interconnected systems of the body and neuro-muscular responses to our environment offers a different way to know the world. Here, Tangen shares the mythical story told to her by spiritual/cultural leader Edna Manitowabi, Odawa/Ojibway from Wikwemikong, Manitoulin Island, of how the great leader Nanabush landed on earth from the sky. He did not want to hurt even one blade of grass, so he trod very gently on the ground, and the soles of his feet touching the ground became modes of sensing the reverberation from the earth’s energy fields. Practicing this mode of walking—balancing delicacy of touch with connectedness, recognizing the imprint of the footfall on the ground—over time, allows for greater understanding of the shifts in the hips and knees and how the neck must be held loosely. Ultimately, such neuro-muscular awareness in interacting with the world inaugurates dancing as a way of engaging all of the body’s interlinked systems. Moreover, it deepens consciousness about the ground on which we dance and underscores Tangen’s commitment to Land Dance. Nishnaabeg scholar and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson also refers to Nanabush’s journey in her book, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance: “Nanabush walked the world to understand their place in it, our place in it, to create face-to-face relationships with other nations and beings because Nanabush understood that the Nishnaabeg, that we all, are linked to all of creation in a global community” (2017, p.  58). Simpson also refers to Edna Manitowabi’s teachings as she talks about the values of “consent, reciprocity, respect, renewal, relationship” that are ingrained in Nanabush’s journey (2017, p.  58). This philosophy resonates through Tangen’s determined transformation of the challenges of her working conditions into her strengths and her repeated emphasis on dancing ecological connectivities. Tangen’s process of inviting movement responses to a particular set of prompts and stories to generate dance while remaining immersed in a set of aesthetic values allows us to recognize how Indigenizing contemporary dance can shift the valence of “technique” in vital ways. The pluriversal movement mode fostered by her particular way of structuring improvisation, in alignment with Indigenous principles, creates an aesthetic that is philosophically specific, yet culturally multiple. Repeated over time, such

224 

A. CHATTERJEA

improvisation leads to the emergence of noticeable patterns, which then Tangen shapes into what she describes as pathways for the transmission of energy. This not only includes directions for the artists to search for connections among each other and with the ecosystem, but also emphasizes the integral relationship of their movement invention to Indigenous contexts and values. Such attention to the energetic shaping of movement continues to be developed throughout her process, for instance, in the training of jumps, where she layers on rules of physics and draws on the traditional methods of rhythmic stepping on the ground. Jumps might be imagined by extending the principles of the footwork, as suspension and rebound taken farther, a propulsion from and return to the supporting earth. Spins, on the other hand, are imagined through images of the rotating medicine wheel, instead of using the technique of “spotting” to arrive at a fixed center every time. Here again, Tangen invites her dancers into a spherical notion of space, where the spinning medicine wheel guarantees that we perceive the colors as running into each other, creating many possibilities of center. Tangen also chisels movement quality by directing improvisational responses through evocative imagery from the natural world. For instance, she guides dancers to think of the undulations of the spine by imagining rain along the back or by sensing underground water streams. Dancers, coming from different backgrounds, imbibe notions of line and the “organic” kinesthesia of her form, by watching her model her own instructions. This leaves room for a range of interpretations, while remaining within a loosely tied together aesthetic, inspired by the energy-­ efficient lines of the natural world. It is because so much of Tangen’s process and training is based on improvisation that she intentionally organizes the warmup and beginning explorations to prepare the body to be the channel for the spirit and the imagination. Her use of language is simultaneously crafted to frame imaginative flow as a back and forth between what she describes as “instinct” and memory fragments. Specifically, she speaks about imagining as a methodology to access the unseen world, a memory bank that extends beyond the present life cycle. As dancers respond from their own cultural background to stories from particular Native/First Nations/Indigenous contexts, training in technique becomes an organizing practice, a strategy for gathering an urban, inter-tribal, intercultural Indigenous community, where diversity is honored. But, as over time and with repetition, some resonances accrue, there is no attempt at codification. This, too, is part of

7  RULAN TANGEN: ENTANGLING MEMORY, RELATIONALITY… 

225

Tangen’s commitment to Indigenizing contemporary dance: typically, the terminology for “dance” in many Indigenous languages gestures toward practices that are broader than formalized movement. As her practice of “re-storying” demonstrates, Tangen’s guidance to dancers during training integrates physical and kinesthetic notes with conceptual ones and invites them to be mindful and intelligent dancers. Her detailed instructions as she directs her Land Dance offers a striking example of how this dialogic movement generation demands granular awareness of movement intention and delivery. Watching dancers practice moving on uneven terrain in different iterations of her Land Dance, navigating the rocks and cactus in their paths, she asks them to track the knees with the feet. The ground shifts, and dancers, experiencing micro-shifts in balancing and centering, adjust their bodies. Tangen offers choices to soften energy and reground, or lift up through the center and remain nimble. She reminds dancers to note the levels of bend in the knees, deep or soft, or just a response to the crease of the hips. She directs them to note how, in stepping higher or lower, one leg can be taut and the other bent, as in a bow and arrow, gathering energy, the heels pushing into the ground in two different ways, countering gravity. Thus, the technical training she offers is constantly responsive, centering the values of mindfulness, ecosystemic reciprocity, individuality within community, responsibility for shared form and pattern, and relationship. Ultimately, the imagery and the repeated reference to these principles build a cohesive movement aesthetic, a technical similarity among the dancers. Such a grounded notion of generating knowledge through a kinetic, place-based, body-sensitive dance practice resonates again with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s writing about Nishnaabeg intelligence as being “anchored theoretically within the ways my people generate knowledge, through deep reciprocal embodied engagement with Aki, and by participating with full presence in embedded practices—inherent processes that occur within a series of ethical frameworks that, when adhered to, continually generate consent” (2017, p. 28). Aki is land as place, not as commodity, and in a practice such as Tangen’s, we come to know land through embodied relationality (Fig. 7.3). The emphasis on responsiveness and adjustment has also been circular within the broader development of her artistic vision. For instance, her understanding of technique, pedagogy, and choreography has shifted, depending on who is in the room. When she first received permission from Native community elders to create Indigenous contemporary

226 

A. CHATTERJEA

Fig. 7.3  Rulan Tangen in collaboration with branches and antlers for “Seeds Beneath Snow” (2015), a winter movement study for SEEDS RE-GENERATION. Aesthetic design with Kalika Tallou. (Photo credit Paulo Rocha-Tavares and Dancing Earth, courtesy of ©pauloT for Dancing Earth)

choreography in 2000, she began to move away from the “fusion” aesthetic she had been exploring. Within the next few years, around 2003–2004, she had to investigate a very different notion of technique, as well as learn how to share and duplicate her vision on other bodies, as she recovered from cancer. By 2006, elders in Indigenous circles, inspired by her work with dance, youth, and the upholding of Indigenous values, began to share stories and teachings with her, charging the themes she approached in her work, which consequently shaped the imagery that evolved her movement aesthetic. By 2015, elders were visiting her rehearsals, and were interested in her process, and were often willing to have their voices recorded as part of the score. Indigenous (Metis-Chippewa Cree) scholar, artist, and the first Artistic Director of the Indigenous Arts Program at the Banff Centre, Marrie Mumford, who has known Tangen for several years, speaks about how, in 2010, “Anishinaabeg grandmothers in the United States who participated in the Mother Earth Water Walks

7  RULAN TANGEN: ENTANGLING MEMORY, RELATIONALITY… 

227

around the Great Lakes requested that Tangen create a work about water” (2016, p. 131). Tangen explored the concept through a series of community engaged workshops and ultimately created Walking at the Edge of Water, which was performed through 2012–2013. It is a testament to Tangen’s resourcefulness, that she has been able to work with evolving conditions as openings for further growth and refinement for her dance-­ making, and developing more complex, interdisciplinary, and largely theatrical production visions. One strategy Tangen uses to shift the paradigm of “technical training” within the concert dance world, whether she is working with her dancers, within community, or as she teaches college dance classes, is through her particular approach to the principle of repetition. When dancers respond to her instructions, either with basic gestural expressivity, or with a more complex movement phrase, she insists that they repeat it many times. When dancers are working with partners, this might lead to a process of clarifying the mechanics of the movement and an investigation of how to make it sustainable, so it can, in fact, be done over and over again. Always, there is a negotiation between finding personal comfortability in the delivery of a movement and becoming interested in its accumulative significance through repetition. For Tangen, practicing a set of movements durationally, over an extended period of time, can be a strategy of ritualizing the movement, and gathering energy, interesting in a very different way than when a movement is done just one time. Inspired by Iroquois Haudenosaunee singer and songwriter, Sadie Buck, who speaks about repetition as survival, Tangen works with repetition as a technique of renewal, finding the breath inside a movement repeatedly, and being able to sustain one’s performance of it over time.3 In general, Tangen’s insistence on repetition as a strategy inside contemporary dance is unusual in the world of contemporary dance. Yet, several Native American Studies scholars have written about repetition as “a strengthening process, with each circuit in the dance circle, for instance, or a symbolic structure where certain numbers of repetitions are called for” as a way of accomplishing “directness and connectedness … implying a cross-over between the realms of participatory and presentational performance” (Diamond 2016, p. 50). Such use of repetition has little to do with instilling a particular movement vocabulary and is much more a strategy of Indigenizing contemporary dance. This way of working—honing in on strategies that have resonance in Indigenous cultural contexts and retooling them as generative practices in contemporary dance-making—has created legibility for her choreographic

228 

A. CHATTERJEA

work and the aesthetic she embodies. Tangen’s trajectory as a contemporary choreographer and Artistic Director of her company, Dancing Earth, is lined with intense struggle, but it is a powerful record of her commitment to her values. As in pedagogy and artistic direction, so in her choreographic practice, centering Indigenous cultural perspectives has meant having to up the ante repeatedly, turning accepted conventions of the concert dance world on its head. Making dance for peoples who have endured genocide and violent dislocation, for instance, has pushed her to value unison and symmetry through images that offer the possibility of making whole again. The emphasis for Tangen is on the “again”: she recognizes that contemporary imaginings of wholeness are distinct from recreating “origin stories.” She describes her vision rather as a wholeness that comes from pulling together disparate broken parts. Strategies of unison and symmetry, as also the desire for wholeness, might be anathema in white contemporary dance. But they align beautifully with Tangen’s goal of dancing hope, healing, and Indigeneity, and with what Dance Studies scholar, Jacqueline Shea Murphy, who has researched Indigenous dance for many years, has described as “imagining futurities of Indigeneity that aren’t articulated in relationship to histories of colonialism” (2016). Thinking through Tangen’s work, I am reminded of Indigenous Studies scholar Sandy Grande’s formulation of “red pedagogy” as a strategy of centering Indigenous knowledge and epistemological modes. Grande reminds us that despite a staunch commitment to an anti-capitalist and emancipatory agenda, much critical pedagogy taught in academia remains rooted in Western perspectives, and consequently unable to recognize the implications of Indigenous paradigms. For Grande, the primary questions refer to Western constructs of democratization, subjectivity, and property. She asks: “1. Do critical/revolutionary pedagogies articulate constructions of subjectivity that can theorize the multiple and intersecting layers of indigenous identity as well as root them in the historical material realities of indigenous life? 2. Do critical/revolutionary pedagogies articulate a geopolitical landscape any more receptive to the notion of indigenous sovereignty than other critical pedagogies rooted in liberal conceptions of democracy? 3. Do critical/revolutionary pedagogies articulate a view of land and natural resources that is less anthropocentric than other Western discourse?” (2008, p. 238). While Grande’s questions are directed toward scholarly pedagogy, they point to broader conceptual frames. Her critique of revolutionary methodologies—pedagogical, scholarly, creative—as often failing to dismantle

7  RULAN TANGEN: ENTANGLING MEMORY, RELATIONALITY… 

229

the Eurocentricity/North-specificity at their core, relates to Tangen’s rejection of constructions of the radical in contemporary dance. The epistemic basis of “red pedagogy” suggests that an intersectional understanding of what is “paradigm-shifting” might have to reconcile strategies that initially seem to cancel each other out. For instance, if repetition and symmetry have been associated with classicism in the history of Western concert dance, specifically with ballet, white contemporary dance emerging from this context might well reject these traditional choreographic strategies. Differently, Indigenous contemporary dance, responding to long histories of genocide and invisibilization, seeking to emerge dance from hidden stories and connection with land imagined as alive, and positing choreography as a mode of inter-tribal organizing, might deploy those same strategies with vastly different resonances. In many ways, Tangen’s dance practices—weaving Indigenous identities in connection with lived realities, decolonizing approach to land, the ground of dance, and imagining dance as part of an ecosystem with other life-forms—echo Grande’s “red pedagogy” framework, foregrounding “relations of mutuality … meaning-making … enhanc (ing) well-being” (2014, p. xvii). Tangen’s training and creative practices, weaving in perspectives on community, land, environment, feminine subjectivity, and Indigenous knowledge also align with Native American writer, poet, and scholar, Paula Gunn Allen’s emphasis on “right relationship, or right kinship” as core to Native aesthetics, and how relationing is everywhere “characterized by considerations of proportion, harmony, balance, and communality” (1989, p.  9). Her invitation to Native youth struggling with disconnection, to women within and outside of her community working through layers of marginalization, and her careful guidance of their journeys into a concurrent valuing of historic and current perspectives through dancing is like Gunn Allen’s reflection on the contemporary telling of Native stories: “The aesthetic imperative requires that new experiences be woven into existing traditions in order for personal experience to be transmuted into communal experience; that is, so we can understand how today’s events harmonize with communal consciousness. We use aesthetics to make our lives whole, to explain ourselves to each other, to see where we fit into the scheme of things” (1989, pp.  8–9). Gunn Allen quickly clarifies that “the scheme of things” does not immediately ask us to fall into an Aristotelian schedule, but rather re-centers the continuity of Indigenous ecologies and cosmologies.

230 

A. CHATTERJEA

In all of this, Tangen’s practice invokes dancing as inaugurating a place of meeting, which is enlivened by dancers again and again through their breath, footfalls, and memory-and-story inspired gentle mode of movement. This community-located methodology resonates with literature scholar Christy Stanlake’s particular theorizing of “platiality” as a mode of mapping dreamlife onto the stage, an old Indigenous concept that quickens contemporary practice. Stanlake writes about platiality as “an appreciation of how rootedness, or relationships between people and their homelands, creates a sense of identity and belonging within a community; an understanding that sacred places allow humans and nonhumans to connect across worlds of existence … allows humans to enter into a reciprocal relationship with place” (2010, p. 18). Tangen’s work marks the historic rupture from land and the desecration of Native American/First Nations/ global Indigenous communities. It also indicates current continuations of violences through her critiques of environmental crises, as in her works centering on water (Walking … Edge of Water, 2012) and seeds (Seeds, Regeneration, 2015). But these crises do not live at the center of her work, which is enlivened by Indigenous values and many circles of relationship. Her insistence, in her Land Dance, her evolution of a multi-relational mode of dancing, in decolonizing concert dance, and in opening the door of professional dance to talented dancers in Indigenous communities who might not have otherwise considered it, is on creating images of connection, community, survival, and reclamation via accumulating embodiments of platiality. Tangen’s take on platiality further manifests through imaginations of the epic dimensions of the sacred, celebrations of continuous life-force, references to and connectivity with the natural world, and confluences of differences within Indigeneity, both as integral part of the way she trains dancers, and also in her choreography. Almost all of her works are created through interdisciplinary collaborations including video design, body painting, and poetry, collaborations with artists from other movement genres such as hip hop, hoop dancing, and aerial work, and partnerships with community members who sometimes accentuate the images created by her dancers. Many of her pieces work with scenic elements that emphasize the dramatic impact of her work, such as long pieces of fabric manipulated to amplify dancers’ movement and invoke the multi-dimensional spiritual world. At other times, scenic elements reiterate the themes running through her work, such as baskets woven and used by the Jicarilla Apache First Nation, which company member Anne Pesata, Apache, a

7  RULAN TANGEN: ENTANGLING MEMORY, RELATIONALITY… 

231

fifth-generation basket weaver, uses in the solo Tangen created with her. All of these strategies amplify relationality to the trans-Indigenous context in which the dancing exists, while repeatedly prioritizing and paying homage to the Native American place and frame in which Tangen works. In ending, I want to return to Tangen’s practice of Land Dance, specifically to her own words about this approach to dance training, which indicate how dancing, for her, is a mode where centripetal and centrifugal forces match, dually connecting self and ecosystem. In an essay, she wrote about this way of dancing as finding “the tactile response of feet and spine to uneven ground … multi-dimensional observation and listening … We find and follow kinetic portals to understanding, through the five senses and beyond—into the countless unacknowledged senses, some of which may fall within what is called instinct, intuition, and imagination. I acknowledge these as the ‘I’s’ of me, as the less tangible that channels into the tangible” (Tangen 2016, p.  19). This is part of what Shea Murphy refers to when she argues that Tangen’s work “foregrounds its indigenous base directly,” where notions of professionalism and contemporary abstraction must bend to be in relationship with Indigenous modalities of layered space, time, and dancing (2017, p. 552). In an interview in 2014, Tangen had shared that, for her, the training process is a way to create access to ritual, not as a practice removed from daily life practices, but as embedded inside of our bodies and communities. It is a process of learning how to recall and repeat movement with continuous freshness, as in ceremony, and to renew relationalities among the dancers, and of dancers with audiences. From my own witnessing of her performances, most of them responding to current environmental crises, I have seen how this training animates the stage such that the dancing becomes larger than the individual dancers even as it foregrounds them, rendering palpable what is invisible, what Tangen describes as “ancestral space,” thickening and Indigenizing the aesthetic engagement for diverse audiences (personal communication, May 4, 2014). The heat in Tangen’s work builds patiently, woven through the repeated channeling of memory and dream-worlds, intentionally shaped improvisational practices, invitations to and engagements with communities who are so often marginalized, and through choreographies of recurrent and multifaceted drawings of ecosystemic, communal, and inter-personal relationalities. Her persistent labor in Indigenizing contemporary dance— flipping perspectives to center Indigeneity and nudging open existing constructions of Indigeneity and authenticity to create space innovatively

232 

A. CHATTERJEA

for different lines of identity and belonging—draws energy from down under her feet. I read the geo-thermal heat in her work as energized by the ground’s internal heat, activating different levels of consciousness, and flowing in concert with the magma at the core of our planet, nurturing our dancing.

Notes 1. Introduced in his 1968 novel, House Made of Dawn, and developed in his later works, Momaday locates memory in blood as a way to rearticulate the US Government’s quantification of Native identity through tabulations of blood quantum. Momaday’s concept identifies memories carried in blood as a way to re-establish genetic lineages. 2. Much of my observations about Tangen’s pedagogy and studio practice are from my personal participation in workshops, classes, and warm-ups she has led in a range of circumstances and confirmed with her through interviews. 3. Tangen cites Sadie Buck’s statement “Survival is repetition” in her 2011 essay (p. 156).

References “About Dancing Earth.” n.d. Dancing Earth Indigenous Contemporary Dance Creations. [Website] https://dancingearth.org/about. Accessed April 20, 2020. Allen, Chadwick. 2012. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Castillo, Maria Regina Firmina. 2016. Dancing the Pluriverse: Indigenous Performance as Ontological Praxis. Dance Research Journal 48 (1): 55–73. Diamond, Beverly. 2016. Decentering Opera: Early Twenty-First Century Indigenous Production. In Opera Indigene: Re/presenting First Nations and Indigenous Cultures, ed. Pamela Karantonis and Dylan Robinson, 31–56. New York: Routledge. Grande, Sandy. 2008. Red Pedagogy: The Un-Methodology. In Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, ed. Norman Denzin, Yvonna Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, 233–254. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. ———. 2014. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought, 10th Anniversary Edition. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Gunn Allen, Paula. 1989. Introduction. In Spider Woman’s Granddaughters, ed. Paula Gunn Allen, 1–25. New York: Random House. Kennedy Center. (2018, May 31). Dancing Histories/Dancing Futures: Rulan Tangen and Denise Saunders Thompson [Video of Recorded Conversation]. https://www.kennedy-center.org/video/center/discussionspokenword/2018/dancing-historiesdancing-futures%2D%2D-rulantangen%2D%2Ddenise-saunders-thompson/. Accessed June 20, 2018.

7  RULAN TANGEN: ENTANGLING MEMORY, RELATIONALITY… 

233

Lame Deer, John Fire, and Richard Erdoes. 1972. Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions. New York: Simon & Schuster. Lukens, Margo, and William Yellow Robe Jr. 2010. Two Worlds on One Stage: Working in Collaboration to Prevent Encroachment, Appropriation, and Other Maddening Forms of Imperialism. In American Indian Performing Arts: Critical Directions, ed. Hanay Geiogamah and Jaye T. Darby, 111–126. Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center. Mignolo, Walter. 2018. Foreword: On Pluriversality and Multipolarity. In Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge, ed. Bernd Reiter, ix–xv. Momaday, Scott. 1968. House Made of Dawn. New York: Harper & Row. Mumford, Marrie. 2016. Naadmaagewin: The Art of Working Together in our Communities. Dance Research Journal 48 (1): 126–151. Shea Murphy, Jacqueline. 2016. [Recorded Interview]. Interweaving Performance Cultures, Freie Universität Berlin. https://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/en/v/interweaving-performance-cultures/fellows/video/VideoInterview-Shea-Murphy/index.html. Accessed May 20, 2017. ———. 2017. Dancing in the Here and Now: Indigenous Presence and the Choreography of Emily Johnson/Catalyst and Dancing Earth. In Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, ed. Rebekah Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and Randy Martin, 535–558. New York: Oxford University Press. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stanlake, Christy. 2010. The Te Ata World Premiere: Creations from a Native Play. In American Indian Performing Arts: Critical Directions, ed. Hanay Geiogamah and Jaye T. Darby, 3–38. Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center. Tangen, Rulan. 2011. Dance—The Breath of Life. In A Cup of Cappuccino for the Entrepreneur’s Spirit, ed. Jeretta Horn Nord, Nicole Wheeler, and Molly Tovar, 148–156. Oklahoma: Entrepreneur Enterprises LLC. ———. 2016. Dancing Earth: Seeds Roots Plants and Foods, from Origi Nation to Re-generation. Dance Research Journal 48 (1): 18–23. Wakpa, Tria Blu. 2016. Culture Creators and Interconnected Individualism: Rulan Tangen and Anne Pesata’s Basket Weaving Dance. Dance Research Journal 48 (1): 107–125.

CHAPTER 8

Lemi Ponifasio, Camille Brown, Prumsodun Ok, Alice Sheppard: Constellatory Heat and Light on Alterity

In this penultimate chapter of this book, in keeping with my emphasis on multiple alterities in Contemporary Dance, I refer to the work of a few contemporary dance-makers whose work offers aesthetically distinct perspectives on critically understood globalities. I approach this discussion of their work, not as a quasi-catalogue of brilliant contemporary choreography, but as indications of a constellation, much like a meaningful pattern of stars whose gaseous heat creates light. This grounded constellation of artists from global Indigenous, Black, and of color communities maps more densely the topography of that transnational, postcolonial, feminist, queer, Black and brown, always distinct, South-South contemporaneity in dance that inspires this book. It is capacious, holding space for difference, and aligned against hegemonic imperatives of empire and nation, much like Enwezor’s postcolonial constellation discussed in Chap. 3. It is constituted by artists who challenge and affirm my reformulations of contemporary dance and its roots in a politics of difference-making, and my theorizing of choreographic interventions and contested intersectionalities. Their alignment around the political and artistic stakes I have outlined tilts the axis of the global stage even more. I will not be able, for limitations of space within this book, to speak to the breadth of their oeuvre, but I will refer to moments from their work that live in the archives of my memory, almost like a kaleidoscope of inspiration. The constellation comprises nodal moments, highlighting different ways of choreographing contemporaneity from distinct cultural contexts. The singularity of each © The Author(s) 2020 A. Chatterjea, Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance, New World Choreographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43912-5_8

235

236 

A. CHATTERJEA

analytical node is a reminder that a one-methodology-fits-many approach would fail to detect the nuances of this different, non-singular avant-­ garde. While I will fall short in holding space for all of the artists whose work in contemporary dance-making marks very different entrances into innovation, this chapter underscores that heat and light from the constellation energize the edges of difference in an expansively understood South-South Contemporary Dance. At Node One is Lemi Ponifasio, artist of Samoan origin, who has lived and worked for many years in Auckland, New Zealand. Dramatic, startling, yet minimalist, his choreographic approach emerges from his cultural context. Ponifasio does not have conventional training in concert dance, but his skill in creating moving images that communicate powerful visions and critical commentary on the world at large is extraordinary. In 1995, he founded his company and named it MAU, meaning “a declaration as to the truth of a matter, or revolution” (“Lemi Ponifasio” n.d., The Arts Foundation). Ponifasio’s work has won acclaim globally, and his work has toured to many theaters and festivals. Despite his disavowals—he has said that he did not set out to make “dance” or “theatre,” but that his intention was “to bring the audience into a moment”—Ponifasio has been called upon to stand up for artists in these fields several times (Awde 2016). In 2016, he was invited by UNESCO and its partner organizations, to author the International Dance Day message. He offered a karakia, a Māori word for prayer or incantation that invokes the spiritual goodwill of a gathering. His words invoked a sense of urgency for art-­ makers today: they reminded us that dancing’s work is historic. I cite Ponifasio’s poetic karakia here to offer an orientation to his work: touch the cosmos/ the source of our divinity/ illuminating/ the face of the ancestors/ so we can see our children/ woven above/ beside below/ unite all within/ our flesh and bones/ and memory the Earth is turning/ humans in mass migration/ turtles gather in silent preparation/ the heart is injured make dance/ a movement of love/ a movement of justice/ the light of truth. (2016)

As in the karakia, Ponifasio’s work weaves together stretchings of time and space with the urgency of earthly disasters, and the possibility of community and transformation through dance. Working deliberately with a

8  LEMI PONIFASIO, CAMILLE BROWN, PRUMSODUN OK, ALICE SHEPPARD… 

237

high-contrast black-and-white palette in costume, light, and other design choices, Ponifasio stages dance inspired by the contemporary world yet holds time and space in an expansive continuum, pushing us to see the depth of the issues troubling the work. For instance, his 2010 piece, Birds with Skymirrors is provoked by what Ponifasio saw on a beach in Tarawa, capital of Kiribati, where several of his dancers are from: frigate birds, flying, carrying shiny bits of videotape in their long hooked bills. In the piece, the projected image of an oil-­ drenched pelican, unable to free its wings enough to fly, slowly succumbing to the waters, returns occasionally to haunt audiences. Dancers change the pace of their movements repeatedly, moving across stage with fast, precise footwork inspired by traditional Kiribati dance, their arms moving in repeated circular pathways; flutter their hands as they travel horizontally in the traditional Māori wiri-wiri style, their eyes opened wide in the pūkana style; slowly undulate their torsos, lit in silhouette, hands occasionally clasped behind their backs, as if they too are like the oil-slicked birds that are stuck in place; deftly swing poi as they move, sometimes shaking the poi to emit little puffs of a white powdery substance onto the stage; vibrate the stage with quick moving feet, quivering heads, and hands striking the body in Samoan slap dance style; form a horizontal line across downstage, sitting cross-legged, as they move their arms and torsos almost ritualistically, as if to invoke a vision of another world. One dancer, wearing a big green bird head mask that covers his head and face, moves ceremonially across the stage. The images do not flow into each other in any narrative or logical continuum, but the angularities of their relationship to each other creates dialectical tension and provokes questions about the current state of our world. Birds with Skymirrors, like his other pieces, has been performed widely in festivals across Europe, Asia, North and South America, and in Australia. His work has also been performed widely in the Pacific region and the United Arab Emirates. Ponifasio’s work speaks to the power of chiseled embodied imagery, such that we encounter the choreography, not as expressions of a theme, but as the core of the experience itself. This immediate, unmediated relationship between the work, the ideas that animate the choreography, and our experience of it is his articulation of contemporaneity. It is located in the specificity of his context, geopolitical and cultural, and the materiality of the dances that are part of this context. Yet the positioning of these particularities within his work, interwoven with each other, is abstract, resonant with global resonances, and invokes emotional

238 

A. CHATTERJEA

responses from diverse audiences. Here, the staging of choreography becomes almost membranous, inviting us to experience it as pliable, sensitive, and permeable, yet intensely specific. Performance Studies scholar Keren Chiaroni emphasizes the recurring motif of undulating dancers’ torsos as energizing the entire piece and suggesting a strong connection to fluidity: “for the space of a performance, our being-in-the-world becomes a being-in-water. From a confrontation with the immanence of ecological breakdown, to the interactions between moving bodies and a liquid medium, (the) work demonstrates ways of thinking that set adrift our ideas, call into question the solid ground on which we walk and navigate new routes of enquiry and discovery on seas both rich and strange” (2016, p.  108). I interpret Chiaroni’s notion of fluidity in terms of Ponifasio’s exploration of what is unknown, which extends out from the landmarks of his cultural location. Ponifasio’s creation of contemporary performance centers Pacific cultural traditions, albeit extended and recontextualized in a contemporary context, a recognition of humanity as part of a much bigger ecological system, and dance as a way to mark moments in existence with ritualistic resonance. In this, we note his repeated distancing of himself from concertized notions of “dance” or “theater,” even as his creations demonstrate his expert negotiation of theatrical elements of movement and design. He has said, in interviews, that there are no formal theaters in Samoa, yet people dance all the time, to celebrate births or to commemorate someone’s passing for instance. His work, then, emerges from this way of approaching performance: dance is constant, but part of life processes. Yet he has also pushed back at anthropological interpretations of his work: he works through Pacific Indigenous traditions because that is what he knows. He is clear in his refusal to “represent” or speak for cultural tradition and about the tensions in his work as a contemporary dance-maker: “I am not a promoter of culture. In fact, to create is to destroy a culture … because you’re not satisfied with what’s been given to you as a reality. So you’re trying to create your own sense of being in the reality” (Kulturstruktur 2014). His creative process includes a time of preparation for dancers where he asks for their quietness and silence, so they can begin to listen and perhaps ask questions of what is yet unknown. Importantly, Ponifasio is clear that contemporary dance, for him, neither is a particular style of movement or choreography, nor does it indicate a stance against tradition. Rather, it is “the moment-ness of our lives,” which is layered with local and global significances (personal

8  LEMI PONIFASIO, CAMILLE BROWN, PRUMSODUN OK, ALICE SHEPPARD… 

239

communication, March 25, 2018). He believes that what distinguishes the contemporary dance-making of many artists from the South-South axis is how they approach the “avant-garde with content,” intersecting framings, strategies, and organizing tools with ideas and experiences from their cultural contexts, instead of a more Europeanist model of experimentation as its own end (personal communication, March 25, 2018). This assemblage makes for the multi-referentiality that Māori visual and performing artist and thinker Moana Nepia writes about: “While exploring themes of universal significance, works such as Tempest: Without a Body and Birds with Skymirrors also draw attention to issues of current concern in the Pacific” (2016, p. vi). In the end, dance-making for Ponifasio emerges from the relationships we have, so he allows his creative process the time it needs: “It’s hard to make a relationship in a hurry, and our current addiction to speed bumps up against the complication of relationships in the real world” (personal communication, March 25, 2018). The last work he made, Standing in Time, had a cast of ten women. Five of the performers have since had babies, creating a natural pause in the process. Ponifasio is currently focusing on creating the MAU school, where Māori and Pacific youth can learn about their cultural formulations, finding himself once more in the “moment-ness” of his life’s work. At Node Two is New York-based Camille A. Brown whose work connects with various lineages of African-American feminist choreography, while experimenting with different kinds of staging and interdisciplinary modes. Her trilogy of works, Mr. TOL E. RAncE (2013), BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play (2015), and Ink (2017), comprise her layered statement about Black life in America. Mr. TOL E. RAncE, born out of Brown’s own struggles as an artist, looks at the ways in which African-American performers have been stereotyped historically, and in current popular culture, and how they have survived it through humor and the refuge of artistic practices. Danced against deft interweavings of animated video imagery and live music, this ensemble piece criss-crosses temporalities and complex emotional planes. The second in the trilogy, BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play, is a sensitively choreographed piece inspired by the rhythmic joy that runs through Double Dutch, social dances, and hand-clapping games that have been part of the experience of African-American women and girls. Ink weaves together solos, duets, and a brief sextet, articulating Black life through personal relationships, intimacies, struggle, support, and thriving. The emphasis of Brown’s choreography on the many aspects of Black life is primarily brought to life through the movement vocabulary, carved

240 

A. CHATTERJEA

through intersecting a richly gestural language with elements from African-­ American social life, and dance movements from genres that have originated in Black communities and/or are historically marked by Black presence. Because the dancing is absolutely driven by rhythm at points, and by gestural flow at others, I notice how phrases charged with sassy, playful energy are woven in with sections that are sharply poignant. The continuity of dance with live music in Brown’s work most often manifests itself as a through-line of the commitment to survive and thrive. This repeated resurfacing of interlinked play, struggle, resistance, joy, where the emotional palette shifts, sometimes imperceptibly, underneath the movement, sometimes on a dime, produces energetic grip within the work and supports the unfolding of the abstract narrative. This is powerfully seen in a duet between Maleek Washington and Timothy Edwards entitled “Turf” in Ink. The piece begins playfully, the men backing in toward each other from the two downstage corners. Gestures of looking at the sky together, as if tracing the movement of something there, jumps, hands patting the air as if dribbling a ball, sitting closely together, little sounds escaping their lips, the tonality suggesting a close friendship and brotherhood. Suddenly, they jump high, their elbows pulling back to open their chests, drop to the floor. Washington rolls to a corner, while Edwards lies on the floor, his head locked in the curve of his arms. Their sharp inhales, the hard angles of their changing movements, and the swift level changes remind us inevitably of how danger lurks at so many corners of Black life, how issues of police brutality, for instance, are always close at hand. Yet, Brown makes sure we understand the multiple layers here so that the choreography is stunned by tragedy but refuses to get stuck in victimhood: soon the men are up and move into a more danced section, where they push each other in a little playful one-­ upmanship. This complex interaction between two Black men is choreographed beautifully through Brown’s skillful interweaving of different movement vocabularies. In other sections and pieces, we see similar imbrications of movement and gesture to eke out an exquisite emotional expressivity. In BLACK GIRL, for instance, the quick moving feet, the body percussion, and the rhythmic complexity connect back to social dances such as the Juba and the Charleston, and to hand-clapping games, and double Dutch, invoked through choreographic play and remix. Danced on a multileveled stage with raised platforms, which allows for greater playfulness, the piece has moments of exuberant energy, where the polyrhythmicity, articulated

8  LEMI PONIFASIO, CAMILLE BROWN, PRUMSODUN OK, ALICE SHEPPARD… 

241

through the isolation of limbs, heightens the chemistry among the women and the closeness of Black sisterhood. At other moments, the quiet gestural language punctuating syncopated rhythm-play makes plain the anguish of the women. Long sections of tap footwork and changing floor patterns in front of the piano in Mr. TOL E. RAncE suddenly reveal a different painful depth, when Brown and another dancer stop suddenly with deeply bent knees, microphones in their hands, and move their heads and mouths exaggeratedly, reminding us about the tropes of minstrelsy. And in moments when the fast dancing slows down, and the gestures, heightened by the white-gloved hands of the performers, pull away from the core of the body, we see the intense pain hidden in the history of American “entertainment” dance. Brown’s contemporaneity is linked to her choreographic style that insists that social dance and dance from platforms traditionally regarded as entertainment and historically heavily peopled by Black and brown artists constitute a viable starting point for contemporary choreography. In this, she reminds and continues the tradition of choreographers like Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and her company Urban Bush Women. Brown heightens that tradition by removing the borders between social and formal dances, between dance and gesture, and between spoken and danced rhythms. Moments of quick jumps from Double Dutch roll into the big arm swings and steps with high knees from West Africanist diasporic movement styles; quick flexions and extensions of the wrists that flick the hands inward travel the arms from low to high, gaining intensity to the point that they pull the dancer’s body off the stool on which she is sitting and mobilize her up and around; the repetition of words, “shimmy shimmy shimmy shimmy,” and numbers add up to a fiery climax and the rhythm is immediately transferred to the feet, stepping on the ground, pulling back the heel, placing the ball of the foot deliberately to mark time. These become Brown’s choreographic strategies, such that an entire landscape, with many narratives, is invoked through movement and music without any literal story-telling. Ultimately, Brown’s trilogy, emerging from different aspects of African-­ American life, and repeatedly traveling between references to experiences that are social and public, and those that explore interiority and subjectivity, speaks to ethnographer and African-American Studies scholar, Aimee Meredith Cox’s theorization of the “missing middle” (2015, p. 10). Writing about how young Black women in a homeless shelter in Detroit negotiate various vectors of violence and pain that would render them partial citizens,

242 

A. CHATTERJEA

to create more meaningful lives for themselves, Cox refers to the words of one of her primary interlocutors, Janice, to theorize the missing middle: the thick, complex, richly textured, and uncategorizable aspects of the lives of young low-income Black women … what constitutes their ‘truth,’ or their legibility as fully human … a double consciousness that is both aware of external assumptions made about Black girls and attuned to the fact Black girls create their own measures of success, health, and happiness … The missing middle is grounded in Black girls’ identification of the complicated interplay of external and self-evaluations fueled by the representational work of labels and tropes hurled at them from multiple points of origin (2015, p. 10).

Brown’s choreography, weaving in and out of public and private moments of Black life—the high-energy performative choreography of entertainment that begins Mr. TOL E.  RAncE, the playful all-women duets in BLACK GIRL, and the intimate romantic duets of Ink, for instance—stands in the place of one such “middle” so that so many Black girls can see both their history and futurity represented, made real and highlighted, on stage. At Node Three is Prumsodun Ok, an exquisite performer of classical Khmer dance, who grew up in Long Beach, California, but now lives and works in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, leading his company of gay men classical dancers. Ok founded his Natyarasa Dance Company in Phnom Penh in 2015 and continuously trains young artists alongside choreographing on his company. As performer, choreographer, and teacher, Ok is committed to the aesthetic and technical specificities of classical Khmer dance. His contemporaneity emerges through the ways in which he bends some of the foundational principles of the dance form by deflecting the presentation of gender and sexuality within it, and often, in the startling juxtaposition of an unexpected soundscape for his choreography. His dancers move with the classical serenity and soft grace of Khmer apsara dancers, in roles traditionally reserved for “women” dancers. It is important that we do not slide the aesthetic that Ok is staging into a facile classification of “drag.” Ok intends to render rigid gendered and sexualized distinctions fluid here. Some of the images show the men with full Angkorian headdress, jewelry, and makeup, yet bare torsos and short sampots, signaling alignments with particularly gendered notions of beauty while immediately disturbing them. There is no pointed performance of excess, rather by intentionally inhabiting the category of classical dance normally reserved for cis-gender women, and by embodying the finely chiseled femininity that defines the form, Ok perturbs the boundaries of this historic dance.

8  LEMI PONIFASIO, CAMILLE BROWN, PRUMSODUN OK, ALICE SHEPPARD… 

243

Perhaps Ok’s enlivening of the liminal space between binarized formulations of gendered and sexual identity resonates with his experience of growing up in Long Beach, California. Being Cambodian-American meant, for him, being pulled in conflicting directions continuously— between stereotypes of slow-moving, tradition-bound Cambodian-ness and fast-paced, dynamic, Americanness—and always caught in a sensation of “not-enough.” He studied Khmer classical dance from his guru Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, primarily as cultural expression,  as youth in many diasporic communities do, but went on to study experimental film in college. Understanding the impact of film on audiences and his study of the nuanced craft in experimental film-making brought him to contemporary dance. Ok believes that contemporary dance, like experimental film, is an approach, and does not have to look any specific way: “I can perform a dance that is centuries old. But because of the way I approach it, I can give it contemporary meaning and purpose” (personal communication, February 7, 2018). Integral to Ok’s approach is a complex understanding of traditional dance as constantly changing, even in small ways, different from the stereotypical notion of static cultural practices. Witnessing his company rehearsing a devotional dance to the Earth Goddess, Buong Suong Thorani, is mesmerizing. The dancers begin on the floor, sitting on their heels. Their palms come together in salutation, the tips of the fingers reaching outward in curving lines. As the fingers draw the arms around the torso and above the head, the dancers move their weight easily to one knee, while the other leg lengthens behind them. Slowly, as their arms move in curvilinear patterns, the dancers come to rise, balancing on one leg. The raised foot slowly places in front of the grounded one, the weight shifts, the arms change direction, and the movement of the chin shifts the torso slightly. The movements are never rushed, nor big, yet their constant, weighted moving elasticizes time. The small side to side movements, initiated by the pull of the wrists, are performed with a viscosity that suggests a shifting of spatial boundaries. The grounded turns on parallel feet connected fully to the floor are relatively faster, but they return to the same unhurried exploration of balances, where one leg bends at the knee, flexing the foot upward, in parallel and in turned-out positions. The hyper-extended elbows and fingers emphasize the overarching curvilinearity of the dance form, and complement the slight tilting of the chin, marking the oblique gaze. I realize I am watching young male-presenting artists dancing in their t-shirts and sampots. I understand that beauty paves the path for a series of provocations.

244 

A. CHATTERJEA

Sometimes, Ok heightens the associations of his work with queer love through the sound scape. In 2015, he choreographed a piece, PRUM x POP #1, juxtaposing the classical vocabulary with British pop singer/ songwriter Sam Smith’s 2014 hit single “Lay Me Down.” Interestingly, the music video for this song, beginning with a funeral in a church, and then transforming into a joyous wedding between two men, was one of Smith’s earliest, most unambiguous, declarations about his queerness in his music. Ok’s choreography takes the form of an intimate duet, where the space between the two dancers expands and contracts. Their wrists and hands intertwine as they move in circular pathways, mostly one standing just slightly behind the other, opposite shoulders touching, and sometimes facing each other. We witness the classical vocabulary breathe through their tender performance and clear lines, marked by the arched lines of the arms and fingers, and the sharply flexed up line of the knee and foot in balances. At one moment, one dancer reaches toward the other from behind and catches the other’s wrist in the circle of his fingers, and we experience that moment of touch keenly, tender yet surprising in its erotic charge. At other moments, our breath catches as we witness one dancer lean slowly back, to rest his head on the other’s shoulder, and both come to sit on the ground, their knees folded behind them. The articulation of desire is quiet and, simultaneously, deeply resonant. The juxtaposition of this movement with the song, and their divergent histories and contexts is no simple layering. The particularity of that alignment becomes clear as we hear Ok speaking about his choreography in a feature on the Singaporean English language Asian cable television news channel, NewsAsia: “Experimentation is not just about being new. Experimentation is about finding new paths and possibilities for survival and life itself” (2017). We note his clear distinguishing of his work from trends of the “new” and the location of his experimentation in the grittiness of life processes. In an interview, Ok emphasized that, for him, “experimentation” has to be purposeful, assessed along three parameters: What investigation does it produce for himself, for the art form, and for the world generally? As we see two of his dancers, Morn Sopharoth and Touch Monyka, performing the delicately sensuous duet, we also recognize that Ok’s vision of Contemporary Khmer dance is not positioned in opposition to existing cultural practices. But it deliberately troubles the singular narrative that frames much of Cambodian dance: the brutality of the Khmer Rouge. Ok talks about his vision of dance as “the ultimate form of protest

8  LEMI PONIFASIO, CAMILLE BROWN, PRUMSODUN OK, ALICE SHEPPARD… 

245

against this legacy of violence and legacy of pain. The teaching and continuity of the art form is itself the gesture of healing. It’s a testament to the resilience of beauty” (personal communication, February 7, 2018). Ok’s work acknowledges the devastation of the Khmer Rouge, but refuses both mono-chromatic narratives about annihilation by it, and the urgent Western saviorism typically facilitated by that one historical account. His contemporaneity can be traced through a range of artistic choices as it stretches the assumed boundaries of Tradition, while remaining culturally located. He insists on the practice of beauty within the aesthetic of Khmer classical dance as a gesture of resistance. His work offers embodied affirmation for young, queer Cambodian men who are seeking spaces for self, outside of Western performances of non-normative sexuality as the compulsory intervention. And because of the philosophy that undergirds his work, his choreography invites different possibilities for cultural transformation. Moreover, his framing of the long-standing cultural practices of Khmer classical dance as larger than discrete historic periods—the idea of discontinuous continuity despite rupture—also suggests that his choices are not about replacing women in their traditional roles in apsara dances, but as reimagining femininity as a broader performative mode, locatable in different bodies, and about making space for marginalized voices within existing corporeal articulations. Of course, Ok’s journey has not been easy. In 2013, when he queered the apsara dance, the classical symbol of femininity, he received threats of violence, quite a few from other artists. The Apsara signifies, in Cambodia, both transcendence and immortality in the image of the heavenly dancer, rendering Ok’s reaching for that imagery particularly poignant. Recognizing that the attachment to “tradition” can be intensified in a post-genocide context, Ok dove deeper into the cultural fabric, and strengthened his resolve by aligning himself with the mythological imagination of the god Shiva as drinking the poison of the world and holding it in his throat. As an artist committed to the transformation of society, in particular, to diminishing the cycle of stigma and oppression that has erased the contributions made by queer artists to the field of Cambodian dance, Ok began to insist that audiences love all of him, his meticulous performances of the classical dance, his careful pedagogy, as well as his queering of tradition. This insistence on juxtaposing and bridging contesting categories is also Ok’s critical postcolonial aesthetic, and related to his rejection of the categorizing, divisive mode of colonial epistemology. Ok’s queering of beauty within the aesthetic frame of Khmer classicism and his unyielding yet soft

246 

A. CHATTERJEA

attachment to dancing every detail of the apsara choreography shake the ground of dance precisely because of his insistence that the articulation of contemporaneity is multiple, hence ungovernable by specified modalities. And locating his work inside contemporary dance reminds us of his repeated assertion about the resilience of Khmer dance, and his renewal of its old connections to rivers and flow through a new vocabulary of desire. As I think about Ok’s commitment to technique and his gentle yet closely connected pedagogy of the classical technique even as he undoes some its long-standing associations from inside, I am reminded of dance scholar Judith Hamera’s concept of the “answerability” encoded in “technique” (2002, p. 65). Writing about Cambodian classical dance’s intimate relationship to memory, Hamera writes about technique as more than protocols for reading the body: it is also a technology of subjectivity, a template organizing sociality, and an archive that links subjectivities to histories. As archive, technique contains and organizes the traces and residues dance leaves behind, and out of which it forms again: injuries, vocabulary, relationships …. Its conversations are uniquely affected and inflected by the exigencies of those who keep it in play, set it to music, or deploy it to remake both it and themselves (2002, pp. 65, 81).

The way in which Ok shapes his dancing of this classical aesthetic to flow through seemingly disparate, even opposed formations, holding paradoxes within his and his dancers’ bodies with softness, demonstrates his bending of technique to be answerable to history and contemporaneity simultaneously. At Node Four is Alice Sheppard, whose work provokes yet another dimension of conversations about contemporary dance. A distinguished scholar of literature who left academia in order to focus on dance, Sheppard draws together in her work insights from race, gender, sexuality, and disability studies. Her entry into the field of contemporary dance, at the crossroads of several discursive formations, is an invitation to reimagine technique, training, craft, beauty, aesthetic, and difference. Disabled artist and Disability Studies scholar, Simi Linton, reminds us that the very appearance of disabled bodies disrupts a social infrastructure ordered by the normalization of able-bodiedness, unmarked as privilege. Just as Disability Studies “provides the means to hold academics accountable for the veracity and social consequences of their work,” so the work of artists like Sheppard agitates normativized dance contexts which hold space for primarily non-disabled bodies (Linton 1998, pp. 1–2).

8  LEMI PONIFASIO, CAMILLE BROWN, PRUMSODUN OK, ALICE SHEPPARD… 

247

Two dancers, Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson, wheel their chairs fast down and across a ramp in parallel lines, swiftly turn themselves around, and retrace their routes back up to the opposite edge of a ramp on which they are dancing. Their arms fly up, and palms connect behind them as they reach the peak of their pathways. They continue in swooping circular pathways, curling the ends of their lines to a moment of pause, as their arms extend out in opposite directions, spiraling their torsos. The velocity of their motion, the sharply cut corners of their turns, the charging of the space between them as they move from being side by side to suddenly facing each other, the changing lines of their forward-leaning backs as they push themselves in acceleration, to arching back, or reaching sideways, as they change direction, are exciting to witness. Sheppard and Lawson are rehearsing for DESCENT (2018), an evening-­ length piece exploring the mythological figures Venus and Andromeda, particularly as they were imagined by sculptor Auguste Rodin in his 1886 sculpture: women in “toilette,” side-by-side, their bodies, unclothed from the waist up, suggesting intimacy. The dance happens on a ramp installation which is about six feet tall and spans 24 × 15 feet of the space. The highest end of the ramp marks the upstage limits of the stage, and from there, it simply flows onto the stage through a multi-leveled, curving, peaking, and sloping surface, where the angles fold into descent. It was designed by Sara Hendren, an artist who is faculty in an engineering school, and a researcher with a particular interest in reimagining concepts of “normalcy” in spatial design, in collaboration with Yevgeniya Zastavker, a professor of physics, and a group of first-year engineering students from Olin College in Massachusetts, with input from Sheppard. What immediately strikes us is that the ramp is neither simply a scenographic element, nor just an adaptation of the stage for ADA compliance, allowing for logistical mobility needs. It is architectural, a deliberate and thoughtful shaping of space, conjuring a context that will be activated by the dancers. In fact, the ramp, an intimate partner in the choreography, and designed with a “commitment to aesthetics, movement pleasure, and new virtuosities,” is not ADA compliant (Rachel 2018). The choreography means to emphasize the curving lines of the ramp, that must be traversed with directional sharpness and internal strength. Moving along its surface with speed and precision, creating a frictional yet supportive relationship with the floor, demands that dancers find new modalities of dance: the ramp generates and makes for the realization of much of DESCENT’s crucial movement language. Moreover, its

248 

A. CHATTERJEA

continuous but unpredictable lines in fact mirror the connectivities between the dancers, highlighting the queer desire at the heart of the piece. Lawson’s palms are connected to Sheppard’s knees and the impulse to motion is shared, as they, face-to-face, wheel their chairs through the down-curve and reach the peaking corner of the ramp, and then slide down again to the other side. Sheppard turns and turns in her chair, the top of her head reaching behind her to spiral her spine around. The repeated curvilinearity of the dance, layered with the choreography of touch and swirling movement, fills the space with energy that is at once deeply feminine and feminist, queer, and dangerously exhilarating. The edginess of many of the moments pushes us, audience members, to see the material manifestations of training and research in movement. Latching her chair to one edge of the ramp, Sheppard perches herself along the sloping edge, sitting on her haunches. Reaching her arms high, she lengthens her torso, and then slides along the floor, under the down-­ facing seat of the chair, her torso arching up off the edge of the ramp. The deftness and craft of such moments when Sheppard and Lawson intersect the sloping angles of the ramp with velocity generated by their chairs and an urgent relationship with the edges of the ramp often emphasize their play with control and the borders of equilibrium. We see the labor of changing levels, of building speed with the wheels, of manipulating their weight. At yet another moment, Lawson is on her stomach on the upper level of the ramp, pulling herself forward with extended arms, her hands grabbing the edges of the ramp. Her chair is attached at her hip, the wheels in the air. Sheppard circles her chair to arrive by her, just one level lower. Grasping the sides of the ramp with her hands, Sheppard pulls herself to the edge and swings herself and her chair up to the same ramp level as Lawson. Immediately, they tumble, roll, and move on all fours, together, down the sloping path of the ramp. As we witness such movement, we are drawn into the inner life of motion, and we come to know and sense the transformation of the logistics of “access” into aesthetic possibilities. This choreography of constant translocation alternates with sections where touch heats the air around the dance. Sheppard is on all fours, her chair attached to her seat, jutting out in the space behind her. Lawson wheels up to her and lays her entire torso on Sheppard’s back, draping her head and arms around to reach toward the ground. As her torso rolls down, her wheelchair lifts up in the air, but does not throw her off her upturned balance. The entangled bodies of the two dancers negotiate weight, movement with the chair, integral part of their embodiment, and

8  LEMI PONIFASIO, CAMILLE BROWN, PRUMSODUN OK, ALICE SHEPPARD… 

249

their support of each other, constantly. As they move together, in adjacence, or as partners in a single movement frame, their bodies in close touch, they queer classic lines of partnering, typically dominated by gendered lifts and spectacularized manipulations of one body by another. Sheppard and Lawson find ways to climb on and be lifted by each other, bringing their chairs in close proximity, in ways that communicate mutuality and sensuous connection. They are simultaneously daring as the ramp launches them into the air with and without their chairs for some segments. We see them hook on to the edges of the ramp and find moments of interconnected flying, diving their torsos and arms out and off the surface, curling their torsos out and over the ramp to hang off and below that surface. The contemporaneity of Sheppard’s work emerges from her conviction that disability formulates its own aesthetic: her movement generation and choreographic imagination flow from that different perspective. Unlike some instances, where we might see disabled dancers fit beautifully inside established vocabulary such as ballet and modern dance, Sheppard’s choreography refuses apology and accommodation and places disability at the starting point of movement. She still refers to her training in mainstream Western dance but embodies this through the alchemy of her particular body and her specific relationship to floor support. The movement, understanding of space, and thematic focus emerge from embodying disability as a layered and rich choreographic aesthetic: they speak at once to what dance is, to queer desire, and to racial and cultural differences. In this complexity, she shifts the conversation about disability from conditions of lack to enabling conditions, from being “mired in this see-saw of can and cannot do” to artistic difference (Siebers 2010, p. 60). In her troubling of the existing understandings of Western concert practices, modern dance forms, and beauty, Sheppard also reminds us that she is not looking to push for a never-before “new,” nor an absolute difference outside of conventional understanding. Indeed, Sheppard’s investigation centers on the implications of corporeality’s multiplicity and how the intersections of kinesthetic difference laying claim to dance can in fact radically alter the meaning possibilities within the field. Disability Studies scholar, Tobin Siebers, has suggested that disabled bodies are both materially and metaphorically present within mainstream society’s rabid fear of difference, showing up both as themselves and as metaphorically imaged through other differences: “The oppression of women, gays and lesbians, people with disabilities, blacks,

250 

A. CHATTERJEA

and other ethnic groups often takes the form of an aesthetic judgment, though a warped one, about their bodies and the emotions elicited by them. Their actions are called sick, their appearance judged obscene or disgusting, their mind depraved, their influence likened to a cancer attacking the healthy body of society” (2010, p. 60). Sheppard’s work refutes this immediate association of difference with pathology and, in her tireless advocacy, reminds formal dance to see the privileges and exclusions it is hiding within its aesthetic folds. In her insistence that we reimagine access, such that it is not an additional consideration to mainstream pathways, but centered as a partner in dance-making, Sheppard is in fact radical. Verticality and conventional notions of virtuosity are not of the greatest value here, so other aspects of motion emerge as focus, and their exploration creates the vocabulary of desire and connection. Speaking at Emory University in 2014, Sheppard spoke eloquently about detecting dance in new places and new ways, from exploring the tensions inside pedestrian movement. For instance, in her solo, Trusting If/Believing When, we see her continuously, patiently, investigate locomotion: from her chair, one arm reaches up and curves behind to yield her into a back-bend. As both palms bridge her connection to the ground, lengthening her down-reaching torso, she walks with her hands, upside down. Again and again, she turns conventional notions of “locomotion,” as being enabled by our walking feet only, on its head, as she explores this movement from different angles, with variations, inviting audiences into this meditation on possibility. Part of her investigation emerges from her multi-modal relationship with the embodiment of disability. Her chair, for instance, facilitates speed in traveling phrases and circular pathways, braces her as she lowers herself to the floor or raises herself from it, and stabilizes her as she wraps her torso precariously around overhanging edges. Sometimes, it expands her weighted relationship to the ground to emphasize her marking of time: weighting the back end of the wheel so much as to tip the chair back slightly, she lifts off the front wheels and drops them to the floor again with sound. Twice, tap, tap, then faster, tap, tap, again, and then a launch into a traveling trajectory. She plays constantly with the direction and placement of her chair; tilts it sideways sometimes to allow her to create one-armed diagonal reaches from the floor; side-lays it so that the wheels are raised in the sky, creating opportunities for floor-supported reaches and partnering work. Somewhat differently, she wields her rubber-tipped

8  LEMI PONIFASIO, CAMILLE BROWN, PRUMSODUN OK, ALICE SHEPPARD… 

251

metal crutches to extend the lines of her arms, tap the floor, and push off, as she turns in a circle in her chair, leaning way forward. In contrast, she sometimes swishes them against each other in the air to create a complex sonic universe for her work, as in her solo Doors. Sheppard is not interested in arguments for “inclusion,” though she has danced in physically integrated companies in the past. In an interview (February 7, 2018), she referred to a 1975 address by Toni Morrison at Portland State, where Morrison argues that the biggest function of racism is, in fact, to prevent people from accomplishing what they want to: It’s important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary.

This is also Sheppard’s argument. Because she is uninterested in participating in conventional structures of beauty and virtuosity “despite” her disability, her work is not about achieving those standards through different means. Consequently, while there is a celebration of motion and embodied innovation, the focus is choreographic, the artistic unfolding of the theme laden with nuanced conversations about justice, equity, transformation, and meaning. This also means that there is emphasis on particularity, the specific meaning formations in this kind of work. In DESCENT, for instance, we see how a range of touch—soft, direct, supporting, desiring—underscores Sheppard’s (n.d.) artistic explorations, and how touch between two disabled dancers tells us a complicated, and layered story. On her website, in an Intersectional Disability Arts Manifesto, Sheppard lays bare what is at stake for her: “Disability is more than the deficit of diagnosis. It is an aesthetic, a series of intersecting cultures, and a creative force” (2018). The ramp in DESCENT can be ADA-­ noncompliant because dancers, who have investigated and trained in different movement possibilities, are working with it as scenographic partner. And, as she has recently reminded us in her powerful New York Times

252 

A. CHATTERJEA

piece entitled “I dance because I can”: “access is also about the commitment to learn and be with each other differently” (2019). This is also why there is such clear attention, in Sheppard’s work, to thoughtful aesthetic and production design. The design of the ramp in DESCENT is but one aspect of that. The subtle diagonal lines of light that silhouette her reaching and lengthening torso, shoulders, arms, crutches, in her solo Doors, deepen her thematic articulation of alienation and desire for connection. For DESCENT, her latest and most ambitious work to date, she worked with disabled lighting designer Michael Maag, who illuminates the cyc and the floor to conjure up a dramatic universe filled with different shades of light. And, when the dancers are framed against a cyc lit with multiple points of light like a star-filled night sky, or when different hues of light reveal the curving levels of the ramp that recall ocean waves, we are reminded of the mythological and layered inspiration for this work. Witnessing Sheppard’s choreography and her dancing, and its intersecting lens of race, gender, sexuality, and disability, is a transformative, opening, experience. As a brown, queer, disabled woman artist insisting on different beauty, Sheppard changes the register of our desire, what we might want to see on stage. But she is also committed to expanding the reach of the stage itself. Sheppard has been working with her presenting partners to make available at least 20% of the seating for disabled audience members, and on accessible marketing approaches. Among other strategies, she is working with collaborators to develop an app that can offer a multiplex sound design that responds to dancers’ movement and creates a sonically mapped experience of the work. This holistic reshaping of the field of contemporary dance is part of her innovation, reminding us crucially that when difference and justice are yoked to experimentation, the field of dance can be transformed and expanded in vital and far-­ reaching ways. Node: Typically, a point of confluence. I have slanted the conception of node to suggest both intersections of discursive and cultural workstreams and fiery points in a beautiful constellation in order to reflect the heat generated by the crossing of many lines of force. With this rhizomatic nodal structure, my hope has been to indicate a field of many, such that the artists in this book, while significant and unique in their work, are not absorbed through maneuvers of exceptionalism. Simultaneously, by marking a singular node for each of the artists in this chapter, I hope to have tracked how contemporary dance becomes a descriptor stretched with every iteration, malleable in conversation with life conditions  and

8  LEMI PONIFASIO, CAMILLE BROWN, PRUMSODUN OK, ALICE SHEPPARD… 

253

demands for liberation, a practice that can offer many artists a shared tethering and a ground that is so heated by its intersecting, often unpredictable, vectors that it immediately deflects algorithms that would seek to split us into binaries. The heat is in the ground as much as it is in the air around us. Heat, generated by difference within, animating South-South choreographies.

References Awde, Nick. 2016. Lemi Ponifasio: Dance Shouldn’t Be Like Watching Wrestling— It Should Have Opinions. The Stage, April 14. https://www.thestage.co.uk/ features/2016/international-lemi-ponifasio-dance-shouldnt-be-like-watching-wrestling-it-should-have-opinions/. Channel NewsAsia. 2017, November 26. Cambodia’s Ancient Dance Gets Modern All-Male Makeover. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ZM_cG8iKn10. Accessed April 30, 2018. Chiaroni, Keren. 2016. Fluid Philosophy: Rethinking the Human Condition in Terms of the Sea. Performance Research 21 (2): 108–116. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/13528165.2016.1162499. Cox, Aimee Meredith. 2015. Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press. Emory University. 2014, October 13. Embodied Virtuosity: Dances from Disability Culture. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqfZA1V7Yo. Accessed May 30, 2018. Hamera, Judith. 2002. An Answerability of Memory: ‘Saving’ Khmer Classical Dance. The Drama Review 46 (4): 65–85. Kulturstruktur. 2014, August 23. Lemi Ponifasio Interview. [Video]. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/104649994. Accessed April 15, 2018. Linton, Simi. 1998. Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. New  York: New York University Press. Morrison, Toni. 1975, May 30. A Humanist View. [Script of Talk Presented at Portland State University]. Transcribed by Keisha E.  Mackenzie. https:// mackenzian.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Transcript_PortlandState_ TMorrison.pdf. Accessed May 14, 2018. Nepia, Moana. 2016. About the Artist: Lemi Ponifasio. The Contemporary Pacific 28 (1): vi–xvii. https://doi.org/10.1353/cp.2016.0005. Ponifasio, Lemi. 2016. International Dance Day Message 2016. [Blogpost on Danz: Dance Aotearoa New Zealand.] https://danz.org.nz/international+dan ce+day+message+2016. Accessed February 4, 2018. ———. n.d. Lemi Ponifasio. The Arts Foundation. [Artist Page]. http://www. thearts.co.nz/artists/lemi-ponifasio. Accessed February 4, 2018.

254 

A. CHATTERJEA

Rachel, T. Cole. 2018, March 7. On Expectation and Transformation: An interview with Dancer and Choreographer Alice Sheppard. [E-Resource]. The Creative Independent. https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/alicesheppard-on-expectation-and-transformation/. Accessed October 20, 2018. Sheppard, Alice. 2019. I Dance Because I Can. New York Times, February 27. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/opinion/disability-dance-alicesheppard.html Accessed May 20, 2019. ———. n.d. Intersectional Disability Arts Manifesto. [Webpost on Alice Sheppard]. http://alicesheppard.com/intersectional-disability-arts-manifesto/. Accessed March 6, 2018. Siebers, Tobin. 2010. Disability Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

CHAPTER 9

Heat: An Entropic Practice of Contemporary Dancing

To arrive might be to return, or to start again. Or to hook into the cyclical processes of time where beginnings and endings merge and experience the rising heat from the ground transform into cooling rain, nurturing fresh growth. In arriving at the end of this journey through multiple choreographies of contemporary dancing, I look back at my mapping of a South-­ South oriented global stage. To briefly highlight and reflect on the landmarks of my argument: Before laying claim to and recasting, contemporary dance, I have distinguished the layers of its construction as a historic and aesthetic-political category, the global desire for affiliation with it, its often unmarked association with what I have described as “white dance,” and the layers of cultural supremacy currently implicit in its folds. I have argued that the slippage of chronological and aesthetic hierarchies into indicators of “experimentation” aligns contemporary dance with the mapping of “new” modalities in linear Western historiographies, which buoys the narrative of continuous innovation and forward movement that supposedly characterizes artmaking in the Euro-American North. This, in turn, scaffolds the North’s commandeering of Time and reduction of History, in Olu Oguibe’s words, to “a colony whose borders, validations, structures, and configurations, even life tenure, are solely and entirely decided by the West. This way history is constructed as a validating privilege that is the West’s to grant, like United Nations recognition, to sections, nations, moments, discourses, cultures, phenomena, realities, and peoples” (2004, © The Author(s) 2020 A. Chatterjea, Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance, New World Choreographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43912-5_9

255

256 

A. CHATTERJEA

p. 3). My argument, in other words, has been as much about contemporary dance, as about the broader categories its operations reveal: narrations of time and place, relations of power, and cultural relevance. Simultaneously, I have pointed out how, in the global cultural map, South-South communities have been relegated to holding patterns of artistic practice narrativized as ancient or old, and belonging to the past. This, along with the lack of attention to oral historical transmissions and the failure to read significant shifts inside existing artistic practices, has lodged these cultures in an ahistoric otherness, obstructing pathways to a contemporary or an avant-garde, unless it is through participation in already established models from the Euro-American aesthetics, or through concessions via tired “diversity and inclusion” representations. Ultimately, this has overdetermined the global cultural leadership of the Euro-West. Oguibe’s insistence on “the universality of the concept of History while … leaving its specific configurations to individual cultures” is once again helpful here (2004, p.  4). The claim to contemporaneity as temporal-­ aesthetic complex is a reminder that history, change, and entangled cultural articulations are part of global experience, and runs counter to the casting of certain contexts as history-less, to be valued primarily as museological marvels, not as offering innovative and just articulations on urgent questions of the day. In un-knotting the hidden imbrications of notions of “cutting-edge” and “artistic excellence” within colonial framings of Time and History, I hope to have demonstrated the high stakes of my argument. In theorizing contemporary dance from South-South perspectives, I have traced a social justice-based approach to experimentation, and dance’s integral connection to current struggles to uphold our shared humanity and to large-scale socio-cultural and grassroots movements. I have suggested that part of contemporary dance-making here is figuring out what constitutes artistic relevancies in terms of particular lived experiences and bending the status quo of Tradition/Heritage and other hierarchies, hold-­ overs of Empire, and neo-colonialisms toward a politics of just signification. I have emphasized how contemporaneity as an embodied aesthetic imperative is identified in different ways, perhaps by tracing interstitial and intersectional relationships to existing cultural practices and histories, connecting to certain aspects while extending, rejecting, reimagining certain kinds of conventions, a bricolage of re-drawings and experiments. This necessitates renouncing the linear construction of Time as vertical, and of Space as horizontal expansion, and instead prioritizing looping, overlapping, crossing lines of cultural change parallel to the entanglements

9  HEAT: AN ENTROPIC PRACTICE OF CONTEMPORARY DANCING 

257

theorized by Achille Mbembe. Very often, this has led artists to tackle the multiple hegemonies in this field through sets of double refusals—neither the legacy of Western modernity nor that of state-sanctioned dominant Tradition—to imagine possibilities beyond binarized choices. In tracing the movement of alterity within contemporary dance, I have critiqued the induction of a few “exceptional” artists in the hallowed circuitry of avant-garde performance, where power of anointment remains with a shrouded white-centeredness. I have simultaneously critiqued the “inclusion” of different artists solely as response to, for instance, the pressures of demographic change, or to relieve long histories of encrusted hegemonies. To claim space for South-South artists and flip the script of contemporary innovation, I have pushed back at the limited notions of experimentation and excellence that excluded other articulations in the first place, and focused on how the layered significations in the work of these artists inevitably restructure understandings in and of dance. In this, I have followed Sara Ahmed and centered difference itself as organizational principle. My goal has been to highlight decolonial and liberatory multiplicities in contrast to simple reversal of hierarchies as a mode of undoing hegemonic curatorial and resource-distribution practices. As a scholar of cultural production, I have charged myself with tracking the specific pathways forged by artists to intervene in their working context and in global cultural discourse, and fashion their own contemporaneity. It is my hope that this methodology of lighting up the different articulations of power, poetry, and beauty can continuously direct us inward, to question the constraints of our own acquired “taste” in contemporary dance. Perhaps then the field can become more responsive to different contemporaneities, even as the innovations of South-South choreographers continuously exceed the logic of the categories that frame their work. As I have viewed these choreographies again and again, I have come to appreciate complex and mobile griddings of multiple vectors of difference. Recalling Alexander Weheliye’s move toward “habeas viscus,” and processes of fleshly becoming, I have found generative a mobilizing of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s articulation of intersectionality, in a manner, a crossing, with Jasbir Puar’s subsequent formulation of assemblages. Puar suggests that assemblages attune us to “intensities, emotions, energies, affectivities, textures as they inhabit events, spatiality, and corporealities” while intersectionality “privileges naming, visuality, epistemology, representation, and meaning” (2005, p. 128). Because of the nature of dance, visual evidence, certain aspects of representation, and signifying processes

258 

A. CHATTERJEA

have been important to my analysis, as have energetic habitations, corporeal shapings, and movement textures. As Puar herself argues, “one of the big payoffs for thinking through the intertwined relations of intersectionality and assemblages is that it can help us produce more roadmaps of precisely these not quite fully understood relations between discipline and control” (2012, p. 63). I would argue that, in addition to identifying the complex ways bodies are written into and shaped by social formations and assessing the different kinds of interventions choreographed by these artists, this intertwining also foregrounds how practices of dancing produce knowledge about simultaneous differences, not as discrete consolidations, but as modalities of knowing and re-making our world. Moreover, it is pivotal in understanding dancing’s pluriversal and multi-modal practices of liberation and becoming. At this moment of closing, I reflect briefly on some of my earlier questions: What is gained from claiming location in contemporary dance-­ making? Is the purchase of participating in a category that, despite claims of global constitution, has typically worked through transnational circuitries only  to affirm Northern hierarchies too steep? Alternatively, what might be lost in asserting total separation via positing a distinct category? And my many years of study of the artists in this book has convinced me to reinvest in contemporary dance, albeit reimagined, as a viable zone of artistic reclamation. Their occupation of this category and self-­descriptions as contemporary dance artists have brought me to the place of dancing within the larger fields of cultural organizing and movement building, and the deep connectivities of contemporary dance-making with re-narrations of History, articulations of subjugated knowledges and marginalized subjectivities, relations of power, survival, reframings of beauty, and decolonizing dance and cultural production. I have noted how this descriptor is helpful in signaling their interruptions of long-standing cultural practices in their working contexts with the objectives of justice and liberation, and in distinguishing their work from concurrent creative practices that may not have similar interventionary intention. And as I have worked through the juxtaposed and complex stakes that jeopardize paradigm-shifts in this field, the real precarity of artistic survival, the strategic necessities for redistributing concentrated resources, and the determined, innovative kinetics of these South-South artists, I have been persuaded about repurposing and upcycling Contemporary Dance, while placing multiplicity and alterity at its core.

9  HEAT: AN ENTROPIC PRACTICE OF CONTEMPORARY DANCING 

259

Even in this assertion, I heed sociologist Ronaldo Vázquez’s caution against the normativization of contemporaneity in art which then “reproduces the colonial difference” and functions as “a powerful field of exclusion” (in Wevers 2019). Differently, Vasquez follows anthropologist Adolfo Alban Achinte to propose connecting the typically dichotomized worlds of decolonial and contemporary aesthetics through “a movement of re-existence”: “Decolonial aesthesis comes under the sign of the return: return of suppressed trajectories, of the histories and lives and experiences of people that have not been allowed to be in the world, to become a world-historical reality” (in C& 2017). I understand the work of South-­ South choreographers as resonant with this mode of re-existence: they reimagine cultural practices from their context through a radical zigzagging of multiple refusals and expansive affirmations, not in search of a “new,” but to reorganize old hierarchies and inaugurate futurities of justice. In this, and in the committed decolonial intentionality of their work, they scramble the internal linear organization of contemporary dance and exceed its definitionally exclusionary stratagem. Repeatedly, prominent thinkers in my theoretical framework—Maria Lugones (Chap. 1), Lisa Lowe (Chap. 2), Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Walter Mignolo (Chap. 3), to name some—have echoed this methodology of reorganizing a category from within through a different logic. Now, to bolster my stand, I turn to feminist Sara Ahmed’s theorizing of the “willful subject,” who must insist on belonging to particular categories that are simply given to others, and of how such insistence must be understood as agential, “a form of political labor” (2014, p. 149). Urging us to guard against the reduction of one’s bodily actions or inactions signaling dissent to individual acts of against-ness, Ahmed writes about the signifying and amplifying power of heightened embodiments of resistance to become communal acts of intervention and empowerment. Her articulation of resistive multiplicity echoes my argument for the necessity of a South-­ South reiteration of contemporary dance harnessed by difference: “it is the willingness of a community that allows an act to acquire the status of willful for others, to be available for recall as political memory…The individual capacity not only to say no but to repeat the no in bodies that do not do could be described as a willful gift: a no is what can be given to others” (Ahmed 2014, p. 143). Extending the line of Ahmed’s argument of willfulness, I have matched the refusals with resounding series of “yes!” and sought to populate contemporary dance with South-South corporealizations, different iterations of no and yes, that are intentional practices of

260 

A. CHATTERJEA

community- and culture-making, and consequently, of freedom and justice. The courageous artistic strategies embedded in these choreographies are modes of willing sites of “un-meetings” to expand and shift, ultimately transforming the field of dance. I consider this manuscript as holding space for such difference-­ illuminated contemporary dance-making. By highlighting the conditions and context of work for each artist, their aesthetic priorities and strategies, I have sought to emphasize the distinction between an expansive multiplicity, which flourishes through an assertion of local particularities in the midst of global crossings, and notions of universality that often pervade cosmopolitanisms and tacitly reassert Northern dominance in the guise of equalizing moves. And I have necessarily committed to multi-referential, non-binary, yet infinitesimally focused modes of critical discourse where resonance sits amidst difference. In so doing, these pages have become my constitution of a different global stage, where experimentation is born of questions of justice and community engagement, and where the artists are my co-conspirators in activating issues and values in contemporary dance-­ making. Through their particular, sometimes at-odds, creative modes of addressing issues, these artists have cross-pollinated the principle of difference that enlivens this global stage, demarcating it sharply from an aggregation of “diverse” offerings. This project has constantly pushed for complexity. I have had to theorize location, not through a narrowed lens of identity politics, nor ethno-­ national ownership of “culture,” but as a rich intersection of shaping influences and inspirations. I have been reminded repeatedly that the dynamic nature of innovation is born out of the particular needs in these contexts, sometimes survival, sometimes rewritings of history, sometimes explorations of futurity. This, in turn, has expanded the significance of artistic work as commentary on and intervention in the power relations that skew local and global fields of cultural production. Artists have shown up in expanded roles, as cultural activists, not “representing” their communities, but insisting on the locational and community-embedded particularity of their artistic voices. Speaking from, never for, their contexts and communities, artists have also shown up the many layers in current debates on opacity and transparency. In rejecting overdetermined and representational, often singularized, pathways of identity, thus embracing a certain Glissantian opacity, these artists have yet demonstrated transparency by tethering artistic methodology, production choices, and

9  HEAT: AN ENTROPIC PRACTICE OF CONTEMPORARY DANCING 

261

project-building to accountability to a particular set of values and chosen community. Such dialogic, sometimes dialectical, decolonial processes involving the interweaving of non-spectacular, non-linear, metaphoric, story-making with spiritual reconnection and empowerment have also provoked questions about the invitation to audiences. In parsing the currency of contemporary concert dance and the metaphoric articulations of selected South-South choreographies, I have hoped to reveal the socio-cultural, thus political, directing of “aesthetic preference,” and the inexorable privileging of audiences holding place as elites. This book, and the dances I have written about, welcome in specific publics who have often felt outside the call of theatrical dance, and propose contemporary dance’s spectatorship as plural, messy, engaged in different meters. Simultaneously, I have had to think through and reimagine existing notions of “commons” and “community” and the work that dance can do to organize its citizenries. While I have deliberately distanced myself from comparative studies of these dances, writing about the different journeys of these choreographers and their particular iterations of contemporary practice has offered prismatic elucidations of history, community, beauty, dance, self, belonging, and liberation, constituting a differently-valenced commons. The many stakes and desires that flow into South-South contemporary dance-­ making speak to the urgency of decolonizing the global stage, discourses of contemporary dance, and dance’s many publics, mobilizing a structural, justice-based reboot from inside while pushing from outside. In curating the artists for this book, I have gestured toward abundance: there are many more artists within the South-South contemporary dance field whose work deserves careful study. In inviting in the artists that I have written about, I have intentionally sought out different contexts, histories, aesthetics, and modes of dance-making, and I have also leaned on existing and long-term relationships. This has been helpful as I have researched and written about dancings in the way artist and scholar Roselle Pineda reframes curation as care-giving. Drawing on the meaning of curating as “to care for or be the custodians of artifacts and other natural objects that are deemed important in the history and heritage of cultures and societies,” she urges us to think of curation “not only as selection, design, and interpretations, but as care-taking—as a kind of intimate, intersubjective, and interrelational obligation” (2019, p. 278). The care-full witnessing and experiencings of performances, workshops, and conversations have guided me to investigate the multiple valences of these

262 

A. CHATTERJEA

choreographies, the different ways the works testify, push limits, ask questions, and spark joy. Growing my relationships with the work and these artists has been exhilarating, bathing the rigor of analysis and writing with aesthetic intimacies. It is my hope that the energetic and value-based resonances between these choreographies will find vibratory seepage into the in-between spaces of cultural difference, intersectional identities, geographical distance, and ensure that the global stage of this manuscript refuses a static structure. In reckoning with the shape-shifting magic of this field, I have also eschewed distance between the subjects of this book and my own desire for the field they animate and have woven my discursive voice with my advocacy for difference throughout. In concluding my journey, I reflect on my own stakes, and share some of the questions and processes that I have had to work through in evolving my own contemporary practice. I enter this last section of this manuscript with caution and humility. I have claimed heat and alterity as core to the formation of South-South Contemporary Dance and have argued for choreographic renarrativizings of history. And I am conscious of the necessary analyses of power that must accompany this reflection of my own journey, in keeping with Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s exhortations in her classic essay, “Who claims Alterity?” Chakravarty Spivak reminds us of the pitfalls of rewriting history in Western academia, and the particular deployment of the postcolonial diasporic, often gendered, subject as informant, who “identified and welcomed as the agent of an alternative history, may indeed be the site of a chiasmus, the crossing of a double contradiction: the system of production of the national bourgeoisie at home, and, abroad, the tendency to represent neocolonialism by the semiotic of ‘internal colonization’” (2012 [1989], p. 61). Alterity here demands intervention into culturalist contextualizations, ensuring that cultural location is finite, negotiable, and subject to critique in its triangulation with nationalism and internationalism. And I fully recognize the systemic privileges of my savarna Hindu caste status in accessing  dance  training, for instance, despite  my struggles with class and diasporic racialization. The following, then, is my mindful reflection on my practice of refracting culturalist claimings while locating the body in specific lineages of my training. Indeed, describing my aesthetic sometimes feels like navigating my way across a potential minefield. It is a matter of pride for me that my distinct language of contemporary dance, which I call Yorchhā, created from the remix of core principles from Odissi, the classical dance form from the state of Odisha, vinyasa yoga, and Chhau, the martial art style from the Mayurbhanj district of Odisha, includes no elements of Western dance

9  HEAT: AN ENTROPIC PRACTICE OF CONTEMPORARY DANCING 

263

forms. I am committed to this articulation of contemporaneity in my own terms, refuting the neo-colonial suggestion that any artistic innovation is inevitably the result of Westernization, or some kind of “fusion.” But I have to immediately steer away from possible co-optation by nationalist notions of a “pure” history, untouched by “other” cultures, and critique the revisionist move of the current Hindu fundamentalist regime in India, which insists on erasing historic heterogeneity, and projecting a seemingly monolithic past of Brahminical Hinduism, reflected in saffronized arts and culture. How to align with the broader geopolitical formation of “South Asia,” distinct from the ethno-nationalist belonging suggested by “Indian dance,” in a field where there is a long history of usage of that latter category, signaling recognition of cultural and aesthetic specificities? Then, what constant vigilance and dismantlings must accompany the categorical classification of “Indian dance” that signals an aesthetic lineage, to trouble it immediately by describing one’s work as “social justice choreography” associated with “contemporary dance” and a “company of  BIPOC women  and  femme artists”  committed to  anti-oppresion artistry? What are the most effective methodologies of signaling an active critique of caste and religious injustices when upholding aesthetic particularities and practices within forms frequently  co-opted by “Hindu” rhetoric, for instance, a salutation to the earth to begin practice? How to constantly de-­ essentialize descriptors even as we adopt short-hand signals such as “BIPOC women and femmes,” such that we are actively welcoming trans-, non-binary, and queer artists? How to be ready for the disruptions such difference will bring? How to keep alive, through dancing, reminders of solidarity among a diverse range of artists whose experiences of racialization are different but whose experiences of different categories of oppressive domination are resonant? How to invite in artists of color who are mixed-race and might not fit popular understandings of how “of color” looks, and ask that presenters, audiences, and funders be sensitive to multiple narratives of racialized struggle, to silences even within empowered movements for cultural freedom? How to hold on to each other through shared sweat, rhythm, and intention in dance, and work through how Indigenous, Black, and communities of color, globally, are so often positioned against each other and can be instrumental in chipping away at each other’s dreams of justice and liberation? How to always question my own implications in systemic injustices, unearned privileges, and nationalist oppressions, and choreograph genuine solidarities with oppressed peoples, particularly, in my own case, Dalit, Muslim, Kasmiri, Indigenous,

264 

A. CHATTERJEA

Black, working class, unhoused, trans, and other communities? These, and other such urgent questions, have been my haunting in contemporary dance-making, such that an easy entry into innovation for its own sake has never been possible, or even interesting. Like the artists who heat up this constellation, my need to carve a different dance has come from the attachment to a politics of decolonizing imaginations and aesthetics, and every claim of “experimentation” and contemporaneity has come from a material struggle toward shared values of liberation and equity. Through the process of making dance, I have learned discursive complexity and analytical nuance. One of the first questions I had to think through was the consolidation of a movement style, and its immediate implications of time and labor. I learned how difficult it is to choreograph manifestations of solidarity and shared space with dancers trained in vastly different aesthetics especially when I, as choreographer, was trained only in a particular set of movement practices. Even as I needed to get everyone on the same page to begin working, I needed to reframe technical training so it could mark a gathering place, particularly in the context of a company of BIPOC women and femmes, instead of becoming a methodology of churning out “sameness.” And even though I wanted to choreograph stories about the lives of everyday women and hybridize formalized dance language with everyday movement, I needed to be careful that “pedestrian” movement woven in with Yorchhā was clearly accented, distinguishing it from a white postmodern dance aesthetic. In fact, in crafting choreography that wove in pedestrian movement with formal danced language, I knew that technique and choreography had to be weighted with the matrix of different histories awakened by dancing. For instance, in a recent piece I choreographed (Shātrangā 2018) provoked by migrations toward survival, running appears neither as phenomenological unit nor as choreographic object, but rather as memory-­ laden practice. Across the ensemble of artists I work with, such frantic, but stuck-in-place running invokes cellular memories of generational border-­ crossings, associated with partition and demarcation of nation-states, struggles at refugee camps, crises of “undocumented” immigrants, police brutality, fleeing from KKK rallies, among other histories. Our histories and experiences shape how we run, making each one of us different. Moments of abstract movement became the glue among this assemblage of stories, congealing them around the central practice of running in place, sometimes fragmenting them and cleaving the dancers apart from each other. How and when we enter the moments of dance in this structured improvisation indicates different lines of experience, inviting in different

9  HEAT: AN ENTROPIC PRACTICE OF CONTEMPORARY DANCING 

265

timescapes. Moreover, while running, the dancers jostle with each other in a struggle to grab a few golden sneakers that have been introduced into the scene, never enough for everybody. Shoes, of course, are typically anathema in Indian performance practices that mark the stage as “ritual” space. It seemed flippant and binarizing to code sneakers with “contemporary” and “rebellious” affect, yet I wanted to invite in the many layers of significance that attach to designer sneakers in the global market currently. I had to carefully contextualize this section, stitch it in with other parts of the larger piece, so that all choreographic and design choices evolved in contiguity with each other. Ultimately, the shoes are never worn on the feet, but attached to other body parts and connected to different choreographies of labor and competition. The choreographic statement and the affective significance of the sneakers emerged from the tension between the stories that now ran parallel to each other. In this discussion, I resonate with Nora Chipaumire’s explorations of moving, beginning with explorations of the feet’s contact with the ground, and developing this into locomotion, in ways that absolutely seep “pedestrian” movements of walking in urban Black experience. This is different from the way pedestrian movement shows up, for instance, in Belgium-­ based Dutch choreographer Jan Martens’ 2009 piece, The Dog Days Are Over, built almost entirely on hopping and jumping movements. The piece is a feat of endurance as the dancers change formations, facings, and spacing; create intricate spatial patterns; and very occasionally add in brief movement variations, and it is challenging both physically and intellectually. We empathize with the dancers as we see their sweat and effort and appreciate their stamina through the repetition of primarily one movement impulse. We also applaud how the dancers’ idiosyncratic execution of this simple movement allows us to see individual differences, but this indicates little else about location in socio-cultural formations. In wondering why Martens chose this particular movement for this work, I find no particular clues. Perhaps it is part of his mission to separate art from entertainment, and “dance” might have been entertaining. Martens’ website’s landing page features a playful quip: “Who still dances anyway?” (“Landing page,” https://www.janmartens.com/). I share my reading of Martens’ work as a reminder of my argument about the weight of particular, contextual, choices and the importance of critically reading the details of movement and choreography. Juxtaposing Martens’, Chipaumire’s, and my own choices is another indicator of the multi-modality of contemporary dance and the range of signifying practices in this field.

266 

A. CHATTERJEA

As I clarified an aesthetic framework for Yorchhā, I knew that “technique” could not become a hard-and-fast set of rules and exercises that could be lifted and deployed as a tactic of façade diversity in an era of late capitalism. I had to resituate technique, and my pedagogy, as a methodology of learning about and organizing one’s body and articulating the depths and complexities of how we come to understand the world around us. Always, there were more questions: What might be the rammifications  of a technique, created on the bodies of a diverse group of  BIPOC women and femme dancers, from identifying, extending, and intersecting core movement principles of Odissi, currently categorized as a “classical” dance form, but originally marked by great regional specificity; Chhau, that was until recently, practiced primarily by male-identified dancers; and yoga, that is the site of multiple levels of appropriation and silencings? Yet, I have found in a regular practice of footwork, balances in vinyasa flow, and movements combining attack and defense, a methodology of accessing nimbleness-in-groundedness, the kinesthetic equivalent of the discursive mode that permeates the South-South contemporary dance axis. I have also found that accessing continuous breath flow, sharing space through complex floor patterns in ensemble work, and collectively marking time through polyrhythmic structures can offer multiple sensory ways of entering an artistic space dedicated to social justice. This practice set the groundwork for listening to each other in conversations about beauty, choreography, pleasure, audiences, negotiating the crossings of invisibility and hypervisibility in which Indigenous, Black, and women and femmes of color are often caught, remembering sacred geometries of dancing bodies, and forging a politics of solidarity. These shared practices also prepared us for the rigor of an ensemble practice, where we all had to commit to the embodiment of details and delivering finish in the execution of lines and rhythms, with no attempt at producing an undifferentiated “sameness.” I know that constructions of excellence in dance are often wrapped up in privilege, yet to encourage BIPOC artists toward their own distinction in dancing, particularly in a context where they are often “collected” for diversity, is important. I have noted that when artists of color participate and excel in mainstream forms or forms marked as “representative” of their “culture,” they are often lauded for their exceptional work. Differently, participation and accomplishment in a non-mainstream form dedicated to social justice frequently raises questions. In my experience, non-South Asian Asian-American artists have sometimes been asked why they are performing “Indian dance,” though they had never been asked

9  HEAT: AN ENTROPIC PRACTICE OF CONTEMPORARY DANCING 

267

why they had danced ballet. Some African-American artists are asked why they are not practicing “African dance” (seldom anything more specific than that) or hip hop, instead of Yorchhā. I used to question why some desires are allowed to be opaque, while others are policed for transparency: white artists are seldom asked why they have embraced yoga, that misnamed category “belly dance,” or break dance. But I want to disinvest from any kind of nationalism, and from policing the borders of any dance form. Instead, I want to infuse my working in contemporary dance with a practice of accountability in aesthetic self-determination and participation in cross-racial, cross-community solidarity. I puzzled over these conundrums even as I pored over palm-leaf manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and investigated movement possibilities to create a training sequence. The labor of experimenting with artists in the company materialized, for me, the notion of transnational feminisms, the work we need to take on to arrive at a shared dance. And I recognized how much depended on a mindful navigation away from multiple forces of erasure, marginalization, and specious celebrations of “diversity,” and toward grassroots organizing forces where hard questions around power, space, labor, and equity had to be reckoned with. Throughout my artistic journey, I have wondered what it means for emerging artists from marginalized Black and brown communities, that so much contemporary dance, as postmodern dance, has shifted the focus to choreography and moved away from the professional training in dance practices. And concomitantly, what it means for me, and the artists I work with, to reinvest in a particularly shaped aesthetic, and work so diligently on redrawing the embodiments of emotional states. Once framed, I knew the urgency of sharing the training and aesthetic with next generations of artists, but I worried as much about uncritical notions of access as about narrow notions of identity politics. And then, there are always questions around my desire to intersect stage choreography with participatory experiences, to create greater access to the work and bring dance closer to different audiences, in the context of today’s public culture. On January 1, 2018, Netflix launched an original series We Speak Dance. Imagined and hosted by Vandana Hart, a young white graduate from New York University and a former coordinator of the UN Safe Cities program, the currently five-part series is filmed in Lagos, parts of Vietnam, Beirut, parts of Bali, and Paris. Throughout the series, we witness Hart’s easy passage inside all of these different cultures, even when she herself states, for instance, that the vogueing she features in her Paris episode is a particular cultural articulation of the queer of color communities and their creative resistance to the racist and homophobic exclusion they experience. We see her go to different places of the world, interview

268 

A. CHATTERJEA

members from local communities, who are all welcoming of her, and then weave herself in even as she narrates the context of dance there. Every episode features Hart dancing different dance forms with local artists, or dancing by herself against different topographies. Ultimately, while we celebrate the talented and important local artists whose dancing and interviews we witness, we must critique the self-willed mobility of white subjects, particularly middle-class women who would claim feminism, whose penetration into “otherness” becomes a costume that can be put on and taken off with no impact, and whose hosting and translation of “otherness” always recenters them. Not unsurprisingly, Hart’s universalized celebration of dance, supported by the resources of Netflix, even as it highlights the different histories of the sites she visits, turns a blind eye to her white privilege. Recurring histories like this urge me to think carefully through my own desire to create participatory public art projects where I want to invite audiences to experience dancing as acts of community. What is the impact of such participation on the very distinct labor of BIPOC women and femme artists embodying historical trajectories and dancing with passion, fury, and humility to broker hope for the future? In my desire for concentric communities in dance, I remember Angela Davis’ brilliant reminder at her Occupy Philadelphia speech in 2011: “The unity of the 99% must be a complex unity” (Maria 2011). Every invitation to dance together must be crafted with care, intention, and marked delimitations. Yet, at the deepest end of my investigations, I arrive inevitably at a complete and unwavering celebration of dance, with all of its implications of rigor and discipline, even as we reimagine notions of beauty, power, and choreography. I refuse current discursive trends that void dance, as rigorous corporeal practice, of possibility, upholding, instead, non-­participation in any structured embodied engagement. I wonder if this dismissal of dance, its evacuation from a range of signifying practices, and the theoretical parallel of the “non-danse” movement in contemporary dance are yet another iteration of “white flight,” an old move of devaluing spaces when, finally, marginalized communities have succeeded in nudging them open enough to be seen in their light. This movement certainly does not comprise all white scholars, but it does emerge from the academy, and is wrapped in its own elite systems of self-validation. I fear that such discursive movements that circumvent dance and embodied practice to look at “choreography” only through theorizations of public behaviors ultimately re-energize the Cartesian binary: the reading of something as “choreography” is more valued than an intentional choreographic practice. My

9  HEAT: AN ENTROPIC PRACTICE OF CONTEMPORARY DANCING 

269

advocacy for multitudinous Contemporary Dance is also a call to embrace many kinds of embodiments and discursivities. Figuring out what “social justice choreography”—as I came to describe my work—entailed taught me detailed attention to intention. As I worked collaboratively with organizers and activists, I understood that social justice necessitated an investigation of process, relationships with artists, all aspects of design, methods of production, marketing, and developing audiences, very different from simply making a work about a political theme. In fact, my commitment to social justice taught me a particular choreographic mode, it made for a different aesthetic, and pushed me to think about staging, placement of dancers next to each other, lighting, costuming, the intersection of stories: it is what pushed me into the mode of contemporaneity where I had to teach myself to create coherent yet rhizomatic dance-making structures. It also taught me to value process in the shaping of choreographic arcs. The thematic foci I began with seldom invited discrete, linear stories, and instead provoked conversations from a range of vantage points and experiences. As in the dialogues and workshops that are always part of the process, I learned to foreground the layering of perspectives and interlinked themes, such as environmental justice, land appropriation, or systemic violence in the lives of the communities around me. Some of these stories sat in hard angles with others, some yearned away from others, and some resonated. And yet, it was not my choreographic goal to create a collage of representative stories. I evolved the principle of Shawngrām, meaning resistance in Bānglā, to name the energetic adhesive that held these stories kaleidoscopically within the same work, not in a neatly causal relationship, but through the resonant spirit of solidarity and shared humanity, offering layered elaborations of the idea. My long-term collaborator, playwright and performer Laurie Carlos described this as part of a “jazz aesthetic,” where different lines of exploration were ultimately connected to the central set of notes.1 And because the dialogues and contestations within transnational feminisms and BIPOC women and femmes alliances sparked my choreographic and movement explorations, I came to understand contemporary choreography as politically charged, structurally responsive to the many discursive and experiential frames from which the work was created. Other design elements are collaboratively created to support these original devised dance theater works reflecting the entangling of global and local frames. For instance, the text I write for the work is often translated into different languages and recited by the dancers, and the vocal artists and

270 

A. CHATTERJEA

musicians I invite to be part of the soundtrack interweave many different musical influences. My collaborating composers continuously support my work in creating this sonic invocation of a landscape of women refusing national identity cards but claiming cultural specificity and intersectionality simultaneously, in search of justice. In September 2017, I began to convene, in collaboration with other thinkers, a series of formal conversations with presenters, funders, artists, and thought-leaders about the multitudinous constructions of “contemporary.” This first curatorial conversation was held in the Twin Cities and the dialogue was structured around questions about how to unhook the field of contemporary dance from old legacies that held it hostage and recognize the cultural specificity of all artists and aesthetics. I led other iterations of this conversation at the 2017 Dance/USA conference in Kansas City, the 2017 National Performance Network Conference in San Francisco, the 2018 Association of Performing Arts Professionals in New York City, and the 2018 Art Change US Conference in the Twin Cities, often with collaborators. Every gathering had a particular “vibe” that energized the conversation differently, but in the end, it was clear that this was a beginning only and much more was needed to sustain the intervention. On each occasion, the response was significant, with many attendees asking when the framework would be published, or if they could get the questions that had been used to structure the conversation. Some participants wanted to organize their own conversations, and did. But only a few were able to honor the labor and meta-material resources it took to convene these discussions. Fewer still were able to celebrate that this conversation emerged from the nuanced critical thinking of a group of BIPOC women and femme artists. Sometimes I worried that the push to replicate these conversations reflected a quick, new “recipe” for equity, and did not build in enough space for difficult questions in each situation. But it is a beginning, an endeavor parallel to many others in the field. This book is yet another invitation for conversation. Depending on one’s vantage point in the prism, it is also part of the strategy of abundance/repetition with alterity. This book carries a strong desire that different voices in the world of contemporary dance—like the artists whose work inspires this book—be supported by the kinds of infrastructure that keeps the creation, production, and circulation of their work in keeping with their values possible and enjoyable. It is written in the spirit of Education scholar Christopher Emdin, who refers to the title of the last album by American hip-hop group, A Tribe Called Quest, “We got it from here. Thank you for your

9  HEAT: AN ENTROPIC PRACTICE OF CONTEMPORARY DANCING 

271

service” in his keynote speech at South by SouthWest Education Conference (Elite Consultoria Empresarial, 2017).2 Emdin repeats these words again and again as if to mark a limit to a mode of education that has systemically marginalized Black and brown youth by delegitimizing their cultural values and to call for developing pedagogic strategies that recognize the innate but different learning skills of these youth. The amazing resourcefulness of the artists I write about fascinates me: they, too, have worked in the same vein. In the absence of fora, they have made their own, and the world of dance is better for it. Yet, even when creativity is infinite, resources are needed for sustainability and growth. May the tremendous innovation and resourcefulness of these artists be matched with material support that can keep us all moving. May there be shared and different management of opportunities so we can structure and share our work in ways that match our values. In concluding, I circle back to the opening claim of this book: that we all enter contemporary, innovation, experimentation, conceptual versus representational, and other concepts and debates in dance-making from our particular contextual lens. Choreographies along the South-South axis, sometimes contesting, sometimes resonating with each other, energize and heat up these descriptors, moving and expanding them in response to the major issues of our times, reminding us of the value of keeping alterity at the core of contemporary dance. In thermodynamic theory, heat is caused by the kinetic energy of small molecules. As heat flows, the state of a system is changed, from solid to liquid for instance. This change causes entropy, greater freedom in molecular structure, allowing for even more movement. Heat is in my daily claiming of contemporary dance while insisting on its infrastructural decolonization. Heat is in the breath I exhale as I dance in support of communities fighting injustices, activists from Dalit, Black, Indigenous, queer, trans, and other communities. Heat is in the ways justice-oriented South-South choreographers bend the dialectics of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, caste, ability, and nationality, to trouble and color monolithic aesthetic and cultural expectations. I hope that the heat of clashing viewpoints within this book contributes to forces changing the shape of the contemporary dance field. The word entropy, often associated with ideas of disorder, comes from the Greek entropia, which means a turning toward, or transformation. Heat is in the embracing of disorder as old hierarchies are dismantled and in the consequent transformation of the field of dance. May the outpouring of sweat from our dancing bodies dislodge old remnants of solidified power and flow us into a celebration of dancing’s multiplicity. I dedicate my book

272 

A. CHATTERJEA

to the vision of a vibrant global dance field, pulsing with boisterous alterity, always producing heat with its circulation and generation of powerful ideas and drive toward equity, transforming us along the way. Invoking Black feminist queer poet June Jordan, I remind us: “We are the ones we have been waiting for” (1980, p. 42).3

Notes 1. Laurie Carlos, performer, playwright, director, and a powerful voice in American avant-garde theater, was a deeply valued collaborator for me personally, and with the company, from 2003 till the time of her passing in 2016. Performance scholar and artist Omi Osun Joni L. Jones (2015) writes about Carlos’ particularly brilliant experimental style in her book Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àse, and the Power of the Present Moment. 2. Christopher Emdin’s keynote speech was presented at SxSW Education Conference, March 6–9, 2017. A Tribe Called Quest’s last studio album We Got It from Here … Thank You 4 Your Service was released on November 11, 2016, by Epic Records. 3. June Jordan’s “Poem for South African Women” was written in commemoration of the 40,000 women and children who, on August 9, 1956, presented themselves in bodily protest against the “dompass” in the capital of apartheid. Jordan presented the poem at the United Nations, on August 9, 1978.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2014. Willful Subjects. Durham: Duke University Press. C&. 2017, June 5. Decolonial Thinking with Rolando Vázquez: The End of the Contemporary? [Blogpost on C& Online Magazine]. https://www.contemporaryand.com/magazines/the-end-of-the-contemporary/ Accessed August 1, 2019. Chakravarty Spivak, Gayatri. 2012 [1989]. Who Claims Alterity? In Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, 57–72. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Elite Consultoria Empresarial. 2017, March 16. Christopher Emdin SXSWedu 2017. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac83fNGg_ lw. Accessed November 19, 2018. Jones, Omi Osun Joni L. 2015. Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àse, and the Power of the Present Moment. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Jordan, June. 1980. Poem for South African Women. Passion: New Poems 1977–1980. Boston: Beacon Press.

9  HEAT: AN ENTROPIC PRACTICE OF CONTEMPORARY DANCING 

273

Keener, Chris (Executive Producer & Director) with Vandana Shiva (Creator & Host). 2018. We Speak Dance. [Documentary Series]. US: Hart Media with Netflix. Maria, Vanesa. 2011, October 29. Angela Davis at Occupy Philadelphia. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=_osUZd0IXl4. Accessed February 13, 2014. Oguibe, Olu. 2004. The Culture Game. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pineda, Roselle. 2019. Framing a Network, Charting Dis/Courses: Performance Curation, Community Work, and the Logic/Anxieties of an Emerging Field. In Curating Live Arts: Critical Perspectives, Essays, and Conversations on Theory and Practice, ed. Dena Davida, Véronique Hudon, Jane Gabriels, and Marc Pronovost, 275–281. New York: Berghahn Books. Puar, Jasbir K. 2005. Queer Times, Queer Assemblages. Social Text 23 (3–4): 121–139. ———. 2012. ‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess’: Becoming-­ Intersectional in Assemblage Theory. Philosophia 2 (3): 49–66. Wevers, Rosa. 2019. Decolonial Aesthesis and the Museum: An Interview with Rolando Vázquez Melken. Stedelijk Studies 8. https://stedelijkstudies.com/ journal/decolonial-aesthesis-and-the-museum/ Accessed August 1, 2019.

Index1

A Abhinaya, 79, 90 Abraham, Kyle, 3, 4, 48 Abstract, 13, 20, 45, 64, 72, 96, 103, 124, 174, 237, 240, 264 Access, xi, xii, 5, 13, 20, 21, 24, 45, 46, 62, 72, 73, 92–94, 97, 104, 116–118, 158, 163, 180, 199, 201, 214, 222, 224, 231, 248, 250, 252, 267 Accommodation, 49, 249 Accountability, 66, 67, 107, 129n10, 199, 261, 267 Acogny, Germaine, 33, 94, 95, 97, 100, 102, 105, 134–153 Adjacence, 27, 105, 249 Aesthetic, xi, 2–5, 7–10, 12–16, 18–21, 23, 24, 29–33, 34n4, 39, 42–44, 46, 51, 53–55, 57, 59–61, 63, 72, 74, 77, 80, 81, 83n10, 84n11, 84n12, 89, 90, 94–96, 99, 102–107, 111, 113, 114,

117–120, 122–124, 128, 137, 139–141, 143, 145, 146, 149–151, 164, 176, 178, 180, 195, 202, 206, 212–215, 220, 221, 223–226, 228, 229, 231, 242, 245–252, 255, 256, 259–264, 266, 267, 269–271 Affect, 8, 10, 58, 72, 109, 112, 176, 180, 197, 265 African, xivn3, 25, 35n7, 52, 66, 83n5, 94, 100, 102, 108, 126, 134–153, 187, 197, 201–205, 207, 208 Africanist, 94, 97, 198 African-American, 25, 44, 55, 60, 75, 82n1, 117, 136, 239–241, 267 Africanité, 135, 138–141, 145, 148, 151 Agency, 12, 19, 27, 34n4, 39, 67, 121, 167, 168 Ahmed, Sara, 125–127, 257, 259 Al-Azmeh, Aziz, 176

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Chatterjea, Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance, New World Choreographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43912-5

275

276 

INDEX

Alexander, M. Jacqui, 26, 89, 94–96 Alfred, Gerald Taiaiake, 46 Allen, Chadwick, 213 Allen, Paula Gunn, 229 Allen, Zita, 71 Alterity, xii, xiii, 26, 29–34, 46, 47, 54, 55, 62, 71, 77, 82, 84n12, 112, 114, 125, 153, 169, 194, 199, 207, 235–253, 257, 258, 262, 270–272 Altermodern, 177, 181n4 Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, 48 Anti-violence, 119 Appadurai, Arjun, 32, 35n8 Appiah, Anthony Kwame, 55, 83n5, 111 Appropriation, 8, 46, 51, 58, 62, 64, 67, 69, 70, 84n13, 98, 127, 173, 200, 266, 269 Apsara, 242, 245, 246 Archetype archetypal, 173 Archive, 4, 103, 104, 213, 235, 246 Assemblage, 20, 28, 119, 199, 208n2, 239, 257, 258, 264 Audience, ix, xii, 5, 10–12, 14, 16, 18, 19, 23, 29, 39, 49, 50, 54, 67, 72, 74, 75, 78, 80, 90, 94, 110, 112, 122, 125, 137, 139, 142, 146, 152, 160, 161, 169, 171, 172, 174–176, 178–180, 188, 191, 195–197, 201–203, 208, 218, 231, 236–238, 243, 245, 248, 250, 252, 261, 263, 266–269 Authenticity, 40, 51, 75, 138, 139, 151, 152, 174, 190, 198, 201, 231 Avant-garde, 2, 16, 17, 29, 30, 35n6, 39, 51, 105, 110, 207, 208, 236, 239, 257, 272n1

B Bailey, Brett, 66 Balance, viii, 46, 54, 76, 113, 117, 119, 121, 145, 146, 170, 172, 179, 190, 192, 206, 220, 221, 223, 229, 243, 244, 248, 266 Ballet Djoliba, 137 Ballet Preljocaj, 19, 118 Beauty, viii, x, 18, 30–33, 51, 57, 59, 60, 62, 72, 78, 90, 97, 100, 101, 109, 113, 114, 120, 123, 171, 188, 196, 202, 242, 243, 245, 246, 249, 251, 252, 257, 258, 261, 266, 268 Becoming, 5, 21, 60, 78, 83n4, 90–95, 97, 99, 106, 120, 121, 126, 127, 208, 227, 257, 258, 264 Bejart, Maurice, 135, 142, 150, 195 Bel, Jérôme, 2, 10, 16, 114, 119, 201 Belonging, vii, xii, 20–23, 62, 80, 81, 84n13, 91, 98, 124–128, 214, 230, 232, 256, 259, 261, 263 Bernard, Michel, 16 Bhabha, Homi, 47, 194 Binary, 18, 30, 102, 143, 150, 174, 175, 253, 268 Black, xii, xiii, 1, 25, 28, 29, 32, 33, 49, 52, 53, 55, 56, 62, 65–67, 71, 73–77, 83n4, 84n13, 85n15, 92, 93, 95, 112, 116–118, 127, 128n2, 136, 150, 152, 162, 173, 191–193, 196, 197, 199, 200, 202–204, 207, 208n1, 235, 237, 239–242, 249, 265–267, 271 blackness, xivn3, 26, 73–75, 207 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 177, 181n4 Bridgforth, Sharon, 92 Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), 152, 170, 172, 175

 INDEX 

Brown, 1, 26, 29, 32, 53, 55, 62, 65, 67, 68, 71, 98, 235, 252, 267, 271 Brown, Adrienne Maree, 40, 93 Brown, Camille A., 4, 33, 112, 113, 235–253 Bryant, Homer Hans, 116, 117 Burke, Siobhan, 118, 130n16 Burt, Ramsay, 97, 98, 113, 119 C Capitalism, 8, 10, 15, 22, 27, 40, 41, 44–46, 61, 71, 93, 97, 98, 180, 202, 266 Carlos, Laurie, 269, 272n1 Cassirer, Thomas, 140 Castillo, Maria Regina Firmina, 218, 219, 221 Categorization, vii, 219 Censorship, 62, 65–68 Césaire, Aimé, 152, 153 Chahrour, Ali, 114, 115, 129n14 Chaki-Sircar, Manjusri, x, 105 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 107, 129n11 Chakravarty Spivak, Gayatri, 262 Chaleff, Rebecca, 82, 84n11 Chandralekha, x, 4, 105 Charmatz, Boris, 10, 16, 114 Cherkaoui, Sidi Larbi, 3, 18, 47 Chhau, 60, 83n10, 262, 266 Chiaroni, Keren, 238 Chipaumire, Nora, 33, 94, 95, 100, 102, 108, 112, 126, 127, 130n17, 151, 265 Circuitry, 13, 14, 21, 29, 40, 42, 44, 62, 80, 164, 257, 258 Circular, 60, 95, 142, 147, 163, 172, 178, 216, 225, 237, 244, 247, 250 Citation, 8, 63, 79, 129n11, 173, 199, 201

277

Class, vii–ix, 2, 12, 24, 25, 41, 47, 53, 60, 91, 97, 110, 116, 118, 127, 130n17, 135, 149, 165, 199, 219, 220, 227, 232n2, 271 Classicism, 145, 202, 229, 245 classical, 1, 4, 9, 16, 22, 34n4, 55, 57, 60, 83n8, 83n9, 90, 105, 122, 123, 128n3, 144, 145, 158, 163, 172, 187, 188, 190, 194, 196, 198, 242–246, 262, 266 Code, 81, 89, 121, 152, 176, 180, 265 Cohen, Joshua, 137, 138 Cohen, Matthew, 177 Cole, Teju, 22 Collaboration, xii, 3, 63, 165, 168, 212, 219, 226, 230, 247, 270 Collusion, 25, 49 Colonial, 27, 28, 30, 32, 46, 51, 52, 56, 66, 95, 101, 103, 105–107, 109, 114, 128n1, 134, 139, 153, 158, 171, 172, 175, 176, 181n2, 188, 194–196, 198, 203, 205, 214, 245, 256 colonization, 24, 25, 101–103, 109, 152, 153, 175, 176 Combahee River Collective, 25 Commons, x, 17, 97–100, 110, 113, 119, 126, 129n10, 140, 261 Compagnie Jant-bi, 4, 136, 141 Conceptual, 3, 6, 7, 10–12, 16, 17, 31, 33, 39–82, 84n11, 96, 113, 118, 138, 140, 214, 216, 222, 225, 228, 271 Connectivity, xi, 21, 40, 78, 95, 101, 113, 125, 145, 149, 150, 215–217, 219, 223, 230, 248, 258 Consolidation, 95, 141, 190, 193, 258, 264

278 

INDEX

Contemporary, vii, 1–7, 39–82, 89, 134–153, 158, 187, 211–232, 235, 255–272 Contestation, 1, 29, 34, 62, 82, 104, 108, 125, 269 Convection, 153 convective, 134–153 Corporeal, 10, 40, 75, 84n11, 101, 107, 245, 258, 268 Cosmopolitan, 14, 47, 81 Cox, Aimee Meredith, 241, 242 Craft, vii, 31, 58, 78, 125, 191, 243, 246, 248 Cramer, Franz Anton, 7 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 199, 208n2, 257 Crossing, 7, 29, 32, 65, 81, 94, 95, 103, 106, 107, 115, 116, 137, 141, 174, 187, 197, 252, 256, 257, 260, 262, 266 Culturalist, 48, 177, 262 Culture cultural, vii, 2, 40, 89, 135, 158, 187, 212, 237, 255 cultural context, vii, 26, 29, 30, 34n2, 42, 65, 83n2, 107, 123, 163, 174, 177, 227, 235, 236, 239 Curation, 13, 14, 20, 21, 28, 51, 103, 110, 207, 261 curatorial, 13, 14, 22, 55, 73, 109, 196, 257, 270 Curran, Seán, 62, 63 Currency, xivn3, 21, 27, 49, 51, 118, 138, 198, 207, 261 Cvejić, Bojana, 17, 43 D Dabke, 63–65, 84n13 Dalit, 26, 44 DanceAfrica, 52 Dancing Earth, 110, 211, 212, 217, 218, 220–222, 226, 228

Decolonial decolonization, 24, 46, 100–102, 108, 110, 120, 218, 221, 271 decolonizing, 31, 32, 95, 100–113, 120, 127, 214, 229, 230, 258, 261, 264 Democracy, 59, 193, 206, 228 democratic, 13, 47 Descriptor, vii, 4, 5, 10, 17, 23, 25, 31, 47, 51, 54, 71, 73, 147, 252, 258, 263, 271 Desirability, 53 desire, vii–xiii, 6, 14, 18, 20–23, 25, 28, 32, 35n8, 55, 59, 79, 91, 96, 98, 100, 109, 120, 192, 228, 244, 246, 248–250, 252, 255, 261, 262, 267, 268, 270 Desmond, Jane, 50, 55 Dhamal, 51 Dialectical, 67, 92, 104, 112, 118, 124, 174, 237, 261 Diaspora, 124, 152, 180 diasporic, 173, 206, 241, 243, 262 Difference, ix, xi, xii, 1, 4, 5, 7, 9, 12–15, 19–25, 27–29, 31, 32, 34, 40, 41, 44–55, 57, 59, 61, 62, 66–68, 71–73, 77, 80–82, 84n12, 89–128, 139, 140, 143, 145, 146, 149, 153, 164, 169, 174–177, 187, 190, 192–194, 201, 211, 216, 230, 235, 236, 246, 249, 250, 252, 253, 257–260, 262, 265 Dirlik, Arif, 26, 27 Disability, 246, 249–252 Disjunction, 69, 188 Disruption, 15, 158–181 Diversity, xi, 14, 15, 19–23, 47, 49, 51, 53, 54, 67, 82, 84n12, 99, 103, 126, 129n10, 138, 140, 175, 220, 224, 266, 267 Dixon-Gottschild, Brenda, 33

 INDEX 

Dominance, xii, 13, 25, 54, 103, 143, 198, 260 dominant, 12, 23, 31, 34n1, 51, 54, 55, 83n9, 95, 190, 194, 199, 216, 257 Double-bind, 53, 109 Driscoll, Faye, 78, 79 Durant, Sam, 66 E Échauffement, 149 École des Sables, 102, 136, 137, 142–144, 146, 147, 149, 151, 153 Ecology, 93, 111, 145, 146, 164, 165, 181, 229 Economy/economies, viii, xii, 2, 5, 11, 35n8, 71, 98, 101, 109, 110, 165, 180, 198, 203, 208 Ecosystem, 31, 94, 168, 169, 215, 222, 224, 229, 231 El Fanoun, 64 Emancipation, 3, 114, 129n13 Emdin, Christopher, 270, 271 Empire, 24, 108, 109, 187, 197, 205, 235, 256 Empower, ix, 118, 119, 175, 199 Energy, x, 14, 29, 40, 56, 59, 70, 77, 114, 115, 123, 124, 146–149, 152, 159, 160, 164, 173, 174, 206, 216, 217, 220, 221, 223–225, 227, 232, 240, 248, 257, 271 Enslavement, 99, 141 Entangled, 95, 123, 187, 197, 248, 256 entanglement, 20, 29, 55, 78, 104, 137, 189, 221, 256 Environmental, 124, 158, 165, 169, 230, 231, 269 Enwezor, Okwui, 107–111, 152, 181, 235 Ephemerality, 77, 95, 96, 128n6

279

Epistemologies, 27, 75, 93, 97, 101, 103, 109, 193, 207, 245, 257 Erasure, 33, 44, 61, 67, 68, 70, 77, 104, 190, 203, 204, 213, 267 Esplanade Theater, 177 Essentialism, 30, 74, 75 Ethnography ethnographic, 51, 138, 151 Eurocentric, xii, 12, 27, 54, 82, 101, 103, 211 Exceptionalism, 48, 49, 252 Excess, 63, 83n8, 180, 242 Exclusion, xii, 23, 25, 84n11, 92, 250, 259, 267 Exhaustion, 96, 114, 142, 206 Experimental, 2, 13, 22, 74, 81, 82, 110, 124, 126, 172, 174, 212, 243, 272n1 experimentation, 1, 7, 8, 10–12, 14–17, 20, 23, 29–31, 35n8, 43, 59, 72, 73, 76, 97, 121, 160, 174, 239, 244, 252, 255–257, 260, 264, 271 F Fanon, Frantz, 138 Femininity, 188, 189, 207, 242, 245 Feminist, 105–107, 114, 125, 192, 195, 197, 199, 20, 200, 208, 208n1, 212, 235, 239, 248, 25–28, 259, 272, 31, 34n4, 40, 49, 67, 89, 96 Fiction, 47–54, 72, 73, 76, 93, 106, 152, 201 First Nations, 216, 224 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 39, 40 Fodéba, Keïta, 138 Fokine, Mikhail, 58, 108, 187–189, 200 Footwork, ix, xi, 60, 65, 116, 120–124, 143, 146, 203, 224, 237, 241, 266

280 

INDEX

Forces of Nature Dance Company, 51 Frazier, Demita, 25 Frétard, Dominique, 10, 11 Friction, 29, 75, 187, 190, 197–199, 201, 208 Fundamentalist, 44, 101, 263 Fusion, 59, 213, 226, 263 Futurity, 46, 93, 228, 242, 259, 260 G Gaslighting, 66–68, 82, 125 Gatekeeper, viii, xii, 7, 11, 13, 32 Gender, xi, 2, 6, 18, 19, 24, 25, 27, 41, 53, 76, 112, 116, 118, 119, 199, 242, 246, 252, 271 Genealogy, 7–16, 23, 40, 45, 46, 76, 80, 106, 197 Genocide, 65, 69, 70, 99, 141, 213, 228, 229 Geopolitical, xii, 1, 28, 228, 237, 263 Gesture, xii, 5, 17, 39, 63, 72, 73, 76, 111, 113, 115, 121, 127, 148, 161, 171, 172, 179, 180, 190–192, 198, 199, 201, 206, 225, 240, 241, 245 Gilroy, Paul, 92 Ginot, Isabel, 17 Glissant, Edouard, 99 Global globalization, 2, 14, 21, 26, 27, 35n8, 45, 50, 99, 101, 109, 142, 152, 177, 180 global stage, 1, 5, 14, 21, 23, 32, 35n8, 44, 61, 62, 67, 82, 103, 110, 111, 128, 143, 175, 180, 235, 255, 260–262 Golden, Thelma, 73, 74 Gordon, Avery, 193 Gotheiner, Zvi, 63, 64 Grande, Sandy, 228, 229 Gutierrez, Miguel, 18

H Habeas viscus, 28, 257 Hamera, Judith, 246 Hannaham, James, 195, 196 Harrell, Trajal, 18, 48 Hartman, Saidiya, 106 Haunting, 120, 193, 264 Healing, 31–33, 65, 94, 97, 100, 101, 112, 114, 204, 217, 228, 245 Hegemonic, 30, 56, 58, 69, 92, 100–102, 108, 110, 143, 206, 235, 257 Heritage, 30, 31, 64, 82, 100, 103, 138, 174, 196, 212, 256, 261 Heterogeneity, 125, 177, 263 heterogeneous, 198 Hierarchy/hierarchies, xii, 2, 6–8, 10, 12, 13, 17, 19, 21, 24, 25, 40, 43, 46–51, 53, 55, 56, 68, 71, 94, 95, 98, 118, 139, 176, 187, 195, 211, 255–259, 271 Hiplet, 116–118 Historicization, 105 History/histories historicity, 104, 208n4 hooks, bell, 208n1 Hope, 42, 45, 55, 127, 140, 228, 252, 256, 257, 262, 268, 271 Houston-Jones, Ishmael, 74 Howard, Theresa Ruth, 117 Hula, 50, 51 Hybrid, 7, 27, 81, 107, 117 hybridity, 144, 194 Hypervisibility, 73, 266 I Idealized, x Identity/identities, vii, 100, 116, 119, 139, 141, 150, 152, 180, 199, 202, 206, 207, 212–215, 228–230, 232, 232n1, 24, 243,

 INDEX 

260, 262, 267, 27, 270, 32, 40, 41, 45, 49, 53, 56, 63, 64, 67, 74, 78, 91, 92 Imada, Adria, 50 Imarisha, Walidah, 93 Imperialism, ix, 25, 69, 102, 103, 127 Improvisation, 17, 80, 95, 97, 113, 143, 159, 213–216, 218–220, 223, 224, 264 Inclusion, 13, 20–23, 47, 49, 51, 55, 57, 61, 62, 103, 117, 125, 251, 257 Indexicality, 206 Indigeneity, xivn3, 26, 102, 122, 211–214, 216, 221, 228, 230, 231, xivn3 indigenous, xiii, xivn3, 24, 27, 28, 32, 33, 42, 46, 48–50, 53, 62, 65, 67, 69–71, 94, 97, 100–102, 105, 107, 110, 122, 137, 165, 168, 211–232, 235, 238, 266 Individualism, 10, 17, 44, 49, 50, 61 Inequities/inequity, ix, xi, 14, 32, 47–49, 54, 55, 65, 67, 71, 81, 89, 119 Infrastructure, xii, 3, 7, 153, 193, 246, 270 infrastructural, 48, 55, 71, 109, 271 Innovation, 3, 7–18, 20, 28–30, 40, 44, 45, 47, 52, 53, 62, 65, 74, 79, 81, 82, 93, 94, 99, 106, 108, 111, 112, 118, 124, 158, 175, 198, 236, 251, 252, 255, 257, 260, 263, 264, 271 innovative, 1, 14, 16, 19, 30, 45, 48, 79, 90, 93, 100, 212, 215, 222, 256, 258 Intention, xii, 5, 22, 41, 43, 49, 62, 63, 79, 82, 84n11, 85n15, 90, 91, 94, 97, 119, 125, 143, 162,

281

169, 197, 198, 206, 217, 225, 236, 258, 263, 268, 269 intentionality, 259 Intersection intersectional, xiii, 22, 26, 28, 30–32, 49, 53, 54, 61, 67, 80, 96, 99, 113, 126, 127, 199, 229, 256, 262 intersectionality, 24, 99, 199, 208n2, 235, 257, 258, 270 Interstices, 191, 215 interstitial, 109, 256 Intertextuality, 190, 198, 207 Intertribal, 214, 215, 224 Intervene, 15, 70, 94, 112, 151, 257 intervention, 12, 13, 24, 30, 44, 72, 92, 106, 111, 112, 119, 121, 129n11, 138, 158, 159, 171, 175, 193, 235, 245, 258–260, 262, 270 Intimacy, 78, 106, 112, 119, 239, 247, 262 Invisibilization, 43, 66, 120, 229 Irony, 62, 68, 69, 79, 179, 196 J Jakarta Post, 164 Jazz, 5, 8, 9, 113 Jiménez, Pedro, 74 Johnson, E. Patrick, 92 Jordan, June, 272, 272n3, 63 Justice, viii, xii, 22–24, 29, 32, 34n4, 45, 55, 67, 68, 92–95, 99–101, 110, 111, 123, 129n10, 181, 193, 236, 251, 252, 258–260, 263, 266, 269, 270 Juxtaposition, 3, 9, 27, 52, 77, 91, 142, 143, 158, 164, 169, 174, 176–178, 200, 216, 242, 244 juxtapositional, 158–181

282 

INDEX

K Kalbfleisch, Elizabeth, 24 Kapur, Geeta, 181 Kaschl, Elke, 64, 65 Kealiinohomoku, Joanne, 4, 34n2 Kecak, 159–161 Keigwin, Larry, 18 Khan, Akram, 3, 48, 57, 108 Kinetic, xii, 142, 225, 231, 258, 271 Klunchun, Pichet, 4, 57, 58, 83n7, 108 Kompas, 160 Kourlas, Gia, 16, 18, 51, 52, 74, 84n13, 116 Kringelbach, Hélène Neveu, 137–139, 150 Kuchipudi, 22, 47 Kunst, Bojana, 34n5, 44 Kusumo, Sardono, 33, 94, 95, 100, 121, 122, 158–181 L Laâbissi, Latifa, 68–70 Labor, 2, 5, 15, 19, 23, 45, 54, 62, 66, 68, 70, 71, 75, 81, 82, 90, 92, 95, 98, 99, 110, 111, 119, 124, 126, 127, 177, 180, 188, 191, 208, 231, 248, 264, 265, 267, 268, 270 Laermans, Rudi, 2, 3 Larasati, Diyah, 175, 180 Lawson, Laurel, 113, 247–249 Le Roy, Xavier, 2, 7, 16 Lee, Young Jean, 74 Legibility, 20, 23, 29, 227, 242 Lemon, Ralph, 48 Lepecki, André, 34n1, 96, 113, 114 Les Ballets Africains, 137 Lexicon, 56, 60 Liberation, 26–28, 46, 95, 96, 99, 208, 258, 261, 263, 264 liberatory, 30, 46, 257

Line, x, xii, 1, 21, 28, 29, 32, 42, 48, 51–53, 55, 57, 59, 60, 64, 65, 77, 78, 81, 83n8, 83n9, 84n10, 102, 103, 105, 106, 113, 115, 117, 122, 146, 158, 168, 170, 174, 187, 192, 212, 215, 216, 218, 224, 232, 237, 243, 244, 247–249, 251, 252, 256, 259, 264, 266, 269 Linton, Simi, 246 Local, ix, 24, 26, 29, 30, 44, 50, 59, 81, 93, 98, 100, 103, 106, 109, 114, 115, 136, 159–161, 165, 168, 172, 175, 177, 179, 180, 187, 238, 260, 268, 269 Locate, x, xivn3, 5, 6, 10, 25, 53, 54, 62, 80, 112, 141, 150, 177, 198, 204 location, x, 23, 24, 28–31, 45, 54, 72, 73, 77, 80, 81, 92, 94, 96, 102, 107, 112, 115, 120, 124, 139, 141, 165, 167, 176, 180, 194, 201, 207, 213, 214, 238, 244, 258, 260, 262, 265 Looseleaf, Victoria, 9, 10 Lorde, Audre, 96 Lowe, Lisa, 45, 67, 259 Lugones, Maria, 27, 28, 259 Lukens, Margo, 214, 215 M Macaulay, Alastair, 64 Manitowabi, Edna, 223 Map, xii, 4, 11, 13, 25, 30, 32, 55, 106, 122, 149, 152, 163, 181, 193, 235, 256 Martens, Jan, 265 Masilo, Dada, 56 Massaro, Orazio, 10 Masterpiece, 177, 190, 193, 194, 198 Material, xi, 20, 24, 28, 40, 43, 54, 61, 72, 77, 91, 92, 98, 138, 190, 191, 213, 228, 248, 264, 271

 INDEX 

materiality, 28, 39, 40, 43, 45, 72, 74–76, 92, 95, 96, 109, 125, 202, 237 MAU, 236, 239 Mbembe, Achille, 102, 104, 208n4, 257 Meaning, 31, 39, 41, 77, 93, 96, 104, 236, 243, 249, 251, 257, 261, 269 Medicine medicine box, 218 medicine wheel, 218, 224 Memory, 18, 43, 67, 95, 97, 103, 104, 106, 107, 112, 121, 151, 161, 205, 206, 211–232, 235, 236, 246, 259, 264 Mentor, 215 Metanarrative, 175, 180, 194, 208 Metaphoric, 28, 43, 54, 72, 91, 100, 112, 151, 161, 162, 178, 213, 215, 261 Methodology, 10, 31, 33, 46, 61, 76, 82, 94, 97, 101, 104, 107, 113, 141, 151, 165, 187, 193, 194, 213, 214, 218, 221, 222, 224, 228, 230, 257, 259, 260, 263, 264, 266 Métissage, 137, 143, 144 Micropolitics, 61, 81, 122, 123 Mignolo, Walter, 103, 221, 259 Migrant, 41, 121, 124, 170, 180 Mimicry, 114, 194 Minimal minimalism, 96 minimalist, 12, 164, 168, 236 Mitra, Royona, 56, 57, 108 Mobility, 21, 72, 79, 117, 198, 247, 268 Modern modernism, 84n11 modernity, 8, 10, 15, 17, 19, 30, 43, 44, 73, 96, 97, 105, 109, 135, 137, 141, 142, 161, 165, 168, 181, 221, 257

283

Momaday, Scott N., 213, 232n1 Morgan, Christopher, 110 Morrison, Toni, 251 Moss, Dean, 74 Mudra Afrique, 135–137, 149 Multi-centricity, 62, 99 Multicultural, xi, 48 multiculturalism, x, 21, 22, 51, 53, 82, 126 Multiplicity, xivn3, 14, 27, 29, 30, 53, 55, 104, 112, 126, 152, 181, 194, 221, 249, 257–260, 271 Mumford, Marrie, 226 N Nanabush, 223 Narrate narrative, 3, 15–20, 23, 29, 31, 32, 40–42, 45, 46, 49, 50, 52, 59, 91, 92, 94, 95, 97, 100, 103, 104, 106, 107, 111, 112, 119, 130n16, 152, 161, 168, 169, 173, 174, 177, 179, 187, 188, 194, 195, 197, 198, 201, 202, 205, 206, 213, 214, 221, 222, 237, 240, 241, 244, 245, 255, 263 narrativization, 15, 32, 106, 176, 193, 197, 199 Nation, 24, 25, 82, 108, 126, 138, 139, 150, 163, 180, 199, 212, 214, 215, 223, 230, 235, 255 nationalism, 105, 207, 262, 267 National Ballet of Senegal, 138 National Coalition Against Censorship, 66 Native, 44, 69, 70, 82, 95, 110, 128n7, 212–215, 219, 224, 225, 229, 230, 232n1 Nativism nativist, 101 Natyarasa Dance Company, 242

284 

INDEX

Negritude, 141, 150, 151 Neoliberal, 22, 23, 51, 53, 113, 129n10, 175, 196, 205 neoliberalism, 26, 40, 101 Neo-traditional, 137, 138 Nepia, Moana, 239 Neutral, 28, 47, 48, 54, 80, 81, 103 Nhaka, 95, 126 Nijinksy, Vaslav, 108 Node, 53, 95, 236, 252 Non-singular, 62, 71, 84n12, 236 O Oblique, 173, 243 O’Connor, Tere, 76, 77 Odissi, viii, 34n4, 90, 91, 122, 262, 266 Of color, 263 Ok, Prumsodun, 33, 105, 235–253 Okazawa-Rey, Margo, 67 Ontology, 61, 93, 97, 201, 221 Opacity, 41, 99, 115, 260 opaque, 51, 100, 139, 201, 267 Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, 110 O’Riley, Michael F., 193 Other, otherness, 23, 28, 46, 48–50, 75, 80, 81, 107, 108, 145, 153, 174, 194, 195, 197, 199–201, 263, 268 P Paradigm, xi, 15, 21, 24, 27, 31, 46, 47, 90, 95, 99, 107, 109, 116, 140, 202, 227, 228 Partnering, 19, 63, 112, 118, 130n16, 249, 250 Pather, Jay, 103, 104, 207 Pedagogy, 33, 94, 97, 135, 136, 141, 143, 146, 212, 214, 215, 219, 225, 228, 232n2, 245, 246, 266

Pedestrian, 2, 61, 72, 81, 116, 122, 127, 216, 250, 264, 265 Performance, x, xi, xiii, 4–7, 10, 17, 30, 32, 33, 39, 40, 43, 44, 49–52, 56, 57, 59, 64–68, 70, 73–76, 78–80, 82, 83n8, 90–93, 96, 104, 106, 109, 110, 112–114, 118, 119, 127, 128n3, 137, 139, 152, 158, 160, 161, 165, 168, 170–173, 175, 177, 179, 180, 188, 190, 191, 194, 196, 197, 199–204, 215, 227, 231, 238, 242, 244, 245, 257, 261, 265, 272n1 Performative, 9, 18, 69, 115, 121, 129n15, 212, 242, 245 performativity, 75, 92, 158, 159, 161, 202 Perron, Wendy, 9, 16 Pineda, Roselle, 261 Platiality, 230 Pleasure, 101, 114, 120, 123, 124, 127, 189, 247, 266 Plural, 261 pluralism, 51 Pluriverse, 221 Police, 44, 45, 52, 56, 82n1, 83n1, 112, 113, 205, 240, 264 Policy, xi, 12, 25, 48, 49, 51, 176, 180 Pollution, 145 generative pollution, 144, 148, 149 Polyrhythmic, 117, 143, 266 polyrhythmicity, 147, 240 Ponifasio, Lemi, 33, 105, 235–253 Post-black, 73, 74 Postcolonial, 30, 31, 101, 103, 105, 107–109, 111, 137, 140, 141, 144, 151, 152, 163, 188, 193, 194, 199, 206, 235, 245, 262 postcolony, 102–104, 193, 205 Postmodern, x, 2–5, 9, 10, 16, 18, 41, 42, 48, 59, 63, 74, 82, 84n11, 111, 112, 181n4, 264, 267 postmodernism, 84n11, 111

 INDEX 

Post-race, 47, 48, 73 Power, viii, xii, 1, 4, 8–10, 20–25, 27, 28, 31, 32, 40, 45, 46, 48–51, 53–57, 61–65, 67, 69–72, 76, 81, 90, 91, 94, 95, 99–103, 106–109, 119, 120, 127, 162, 163, 167, 172, 187, 189, 190, 193, 198–205, 207, 221, 237, 256–260, 262, 267, 268, 271 Preljocaj, Angelin, 3, 18, 19, 118 Presence, 8, 33, 39, 40, 43, 50, 69, 70, 77, 79, 95, 97, 100, 106, 109, 112, 113, 121–123, 128n7, 171, 189, 190, 195, 199, 206, 207, 217, 225, 240 presencing, 54, 95, 217 Primitivism, 52, 197 Privilege, viii, 22, 52, 56, 71, 72, 82, 194, 211, 212, 246, 250, 255, 257, 266, 268 Progressive, ix, xi, 19, 24, 119, 151 Protest, x, xiii, 45, 50, 65, 66, 68, 85n15, 112, 119, 120, 123, 244, 272n3 Provincialize, 107 Puar, Jasbir, 208n2, 257, 258 Purchase, viii, xi, 6, 7, 49, 51, 67, 75, 110, 258 Purkayastha, Prarthana, 105, 106 Q Queer, 18, 26, 56, 105, 120, 121, 181n2, 191, 235, 244, 245, 248, 249, 252, 263, 267, 272 R Race racial, ix, 14, 23, 24, 28, 29, 44–55, 71–80, 82, 84n11, 91, 92, 98, 118, 120, 140, 187, 201, 213, 249

285

racialization, 73, 74, 263 Racism, 10, 25, 66, 84n11, 126, 251 Radical, 12, 39–82, 92, 96, 105, 176, 229, 250, 259 Rainer, Yvonne, 41, 42 Ranciére, Jacques, 114, 129n13 Ratmansky, Alexei, 118, 130n16 Reception, 55, 66, 177, 197 Recuperation, 84n12, 105, 138 Reed, Alison, 92 Re-existence, 259 Refugee, 26, 121, 124, 180, 264 Reimagine reimagined, xii, 16, 25, 28, 31, 46, 56, 78, 89, 106, 109, 111, 113, 119, 150, 159, 187–189, 194, 195, 197, 198, 203, 216, 246, 250, 258, 259, 261, 268 Rejection, 1, 7, 10, 15, 16, 22, 30, 43, 91, 229, 245 Relationality, 125, 211–232 relationship, 3, 6–10, 13, 19, 27, 30, 31, 35n6, 43, 51, 55, 65, 67, 71, 72, 74–77, 90, 92–96, 99, 100, 102–106, 108, 109, 118–120, 122, 124, 134, 159, 164, 168, 174, 176, 197, 207, 212–216, 219, 223–225, 228–231, 237, 239, 246–250, 256, 261, 262, 269 Relativism, 200, 221 Relevance, 43, 173, 205, 256 Repertoire, x, 4, 12, 34n4, 90, 91, 104, 123, 137, 151, 201 Repetition, 59, 114, 115, 159, 169, 193, 215, 224, 227, 229, 241, 265, 270 Representation, xi, 39–41, 44, 50, 73, 112, 121, 152, 197, 198, 201, 256, 257 representational, 17, 21, 39, 40, 44, 113, 242, 260, 271

286 

INDEX

Resistance, ix, xivn3, 29, 46, 53, 64, 71, 89, 96–98, 120, 127, 176, 181, 194, 201, 240, 245, 259, 267, 269 Resources, xi, xii, 13–15, 20–24, 32, 45, 46, 53, 55, 64, 68, 71, 81, 93, 97, 99, 102, 103, 106, 111, 113, 125, 142, 153, 168, 228, 258, 268, 270, 271 Rewriting, 95, 96, 177, 217, 260, 262 Rhizomatic, 32, 55, 177, 252, 269 Rina, I Ketut, 159, 160, 179, 180 Risk, 12, 13, 20, 21, 73, 75, 76, 80 Ritual, 46, 78, 92, 114, 115, 139, 149, 158–160, 163, 172, 197, 208, 215, 231, 265 Ross, Loretta, 25 Rupture, 32, 33, 35n6, 97, 109, 158–181, 204, 230, 245 S Sa’at, Alfian, 175 Sabar, 135, 143 Sakata, Hiromi, 50 Salia Nı̄ Seydou, 4 Samasthiti, 53, 54 Sandoval, Chela, 192 Sarieddine, Junaid, 115 Saviorism, 13, 19, 22, 56, 128n1, 245 Scanlan, Joe, 75 Scape, 32, 35n8, 93, 101, 150, 244 Schutz, Dana, 75, 85n15 Selasar Sunaryo Art Space (SSAS), 168 Senghor, Leopold, 135–142, 147, 149–151 Serimpi Sangupati, 171, 172, 175 Sexuality, 18, 19, 24, 41, 112, 119, 189, 191, 192, 198–200, 242, 245, 246, 252, 271 Shapiro, Sophiline Cheam, 58, 243 Shapiro-Phim, Toni, 58

Shea Murphy, Jacqueline, 228, 231 Shechter, Hofesh, 3, 18 Sheppard, Alice, 33, 113, 120, 235–253 Siebers, Tobin, 249 Signification, 6, 41, 43, 44, 73, 90, 92, 94, 96, 109, 124, 169, 256, 257 Simas, Rosy, 68–70, 95, 105, 110, 112 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, 223, 225 Sivalingappa, Shantala, 22 Smith, Barbara, 25, 26 Smith, Beverly, 25 Smith, Santee, 110 Solidarity, xiii, xivn3, 24–27, 67, 70, 119, 165, 212, 263, 264, 266, 267, 269 Solomon, Noémie, 2, 11 South global south, xii, 1, 14, 23, 27, 28, 49, 59, 101 South Asia, 22, 50, 263 South-South, 24–30, 32, 33, 35n7, 35n8, 43, 44, 46, 47, 52–55, 61, 62, 70, 71, 82, 89, 90, 94–96, 98–103, 108, 110–114, 116, 119, 121–125, 127, 153, 162, 205, 235, 236, 239, 253, 255–259, 261, 266, 271 Space-clearing, 71, 111 Spångberg, Mårten, 40–42 Spatiality, 35n6, 104, 219, 257 Specific aesthetic specificity, 53, 96, 124, 150, 263 cultural specificity, 8, 12, 30, 31, 44, 51, 61, 65, 80, 81, 98, 107, 151, 173, 174, 270 specificity, xii, xivn3, 24, 26, 28, 40, 41, 81, 82, 92, 100, 120, 138, 146, 148, 237, 242, 266

 INDEX 

Spectator, 70, 114 unruly spectator, 201, 202 Spine, 145–149, 152, 166, 167, 196, 223, 224, 231, 248 Spirit, 94–96, 100, 105, 159, 162, 217, 224, 269, 270 spiritual, xi, 91, 94–96, 99, 145, 151, 191, 216, 217, 223, 230, 236, 261 Srinivasan, Priya, 201, 202 Stagist, 15, 16, 23, 104, 105 Stakeholder, 1, 6, 11 Stanlake, Christy, 230 Stereotype, 4, 28, 63, 83n2, 90, 139, 243 stereotypical, 30, 31, 63, 144, 151, 174, 197, 243 Story, 17, 19, 27, 33, 40, 44, 45, 49, 50, 56, 77, 78, 83n2, 91, 93, 100, 106, 123, 128n3, 129n7, 162, 172, 173, 188–190, 193, 194, 197, 199, 204, 205, 214–216, 221–224, 226, 229, 230, 251, 264, 265, 269 Story, Jamal, 117 Strategy, xi, xivn2, 3, 6, 7, 14, 19, 25–27, 31, 33, 44, 46, 49, 52, 54, 55, 59–61, 69, 79, 93, 94, 96, 97, 100, 102, 106–110, 112, 117, 118, 120, 121, 127, 136, 148, 149, 153, 159, 163–165, 169, 173, 175–177, 187, 193–197, 199, 201–203, 213, 215, 224, 227–229, 231, 239, 241, 252, 260, 270, 271 strategic, 111, 194, 207, 213, 258 Subject, 19, 46, 66, 75, 92, 94, 111, 112, 114, 188, 190, 193, 197, 201, 262, 268 Subjectivities, 20, 43, 92, 97, 102, 109, 111, 112, 119, 190, 192, 193, 197, 201, 228, 229, 241, 246, 258

287

Subjugated, 101, 192, 215, 258 Success, viii, xi, xii, 5, 12–14, 48, 49, 55, 57, 93, 110, 125, 242 Sunaryo, 168 Surplus, 71, 82, 90, 111 Survivance, 95, 128n7 Sustainable, 111, 217, 227 Switch, 120–122, 124, 127, 128n3, 153 Systemic, 10, 44, 47, 48, 52, 55, 93, 99, 129n10, 200, 213, 269 T Talpade Mohanty, Chandra, 26, 27 Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM), 160, 161, 165 Tangen, Rulan, 33, 94, 95, 97, 100, 105, 110, 122, 211–231 Taste, 11–13, 207, 217, 257 Tawadros, Gilane, 194 Taylor, Diana, 104 Technique, 3, 5, 8, 9, 43, 45, 53, 60, 61, 65, 71, 91, 97, 113–120, 122–124, 127, 129n15, 135, 136, 141–152, 163, 214–217, 222–227, 246, 264, 266 Telluric, 219 Temporality, 15, 35n6, 97, 123, 142, 194, 205, 239 Tharp, Twyla, 118, 129n15 Thiong’o, Ngũgı̃ wa, 81 Tradition, xi, 13, 41, 50, 52, 57, 96, 138, 150, 158, 176, 179, 221, 229, 238 traditional, x, 4, 10, 12, 13, 19, 30, 46, 50, 51, 61, 63, 64, 69, 79, 81, 92, 102, 105, 123, 124, 135, 136, 138–140, 145, 158, 159, 161, 162, 171, 172, 174, 175, 193, 196, 212, 224, 229, 237, 243, 245

288 

INDEX

Training, x, 33, 47, 60, 61, 90, 102, 113–116, 119, 122, 135, 136, 139–141, 144–146, 149, 158, 162–164, 213, 214, 216, 217, 222, 224, 225, 227, 229, 231, 236, 246, 248, 249, 262, 264, 267 Transform, xiii, 40, 58, 129n13, 255 transformation, 29, 43, 45, 78, 80, 90–92, 94, 101, 111, 112, 126, 148, 152, 167, 223, 236, 245, 248, 251, 271 Translation, 54–62, 82, 175, 268 Transmission, 14, 60, 94, 120, 216, 224, 256 Transnational, xivn3, 11, 13, 14, 21, 22, 24, 26, 27, 31, 32, 59, 106, 110, 115, 122, 124, 139, 175, 181, 198, 207, 235, 258, 267, 269 Transparency, 99, 115, 260, 267 Trauma, 62, 76, 94, 101, 121, 123 Trope, 26, 59, 68, 84n11, 121, 122, 145, 180, 190, 194, 197, 213, 241, 242 tropic, 29, 173, 213 Tsing, Anna, 198, 199 Tsunami, 100, 165–169 Tuhiwai Smith, Linda, 101, 102, 108, 259 U Ungoverning, 98, 113 Universal, 21, 45, 81, 82, 99, 126, 221, 239 universalism, xi, 92, 103, 126 Un-meeting, xii, 14, 21, 29, 30, 126, 260 Unruly, 201, 202

Uqualla, James, 221 Urban Bush Women, 111, 189, 191, 192, 241 V Vasquez, Ronaldo, 259 Ventriloquy, 62–71, 82, 98 Vibrate, 95, 124, 147, 152, 169, 237 vibration, x, 95, 123, 127, 147, 161, 190, 217, 218 Vigilance, 61, 62, 263 Violences, ix, x, 24, 48, 50, 63–68, 77, 91–93, 101, 103, 118, 120, 124, 128n1, 163, 165, 176, 180, 188, 193, 203, 230, 241, 245, 269 Virtuosity, 3, 8, 10, 16, 18, 51, 59, 72, 96, 97, 113–120, 122, 198, 221, 247, 250, 251 Visibility, viii, 6, 32, 33, 41, 51, 53, 62, 72, 73, 99, 110, 112, 118, 121, 152, 192 Vizenor, Gerald, 95, 128n7 Vulnerability, 73, 191, 197 W Wakpa,Tria Blu, 216, 219 Walker Art Center, 66, 76 Weheliye, Alexander, 28, 257 Wells, Charmian, 52, 53 Wheelchair, 113, 120, 248 White, xi, 8, 13, 20, 22–24, 32, 48, 54–56, 59, 61, 62, 66, 67, 70, 71, 75, 76, 79–81, 84n11, 120, 136, 152, 162, 168, 170, 173, 189, 191, 194, 200–202, 208, 228, 229, 237, 264, 267, 268

 INDEX 

whiteness, 21, 33, 54, 56, 69, 72–76, 80–82, 84n11, 207, 216 Whitney Museum, 75 Willful, 50, 259 Witness, vii, 68, 90, 104, 109, 153, 163, 165, 167, 201, 244, 247, 248, 267, 268

Y Yamazaki, Kota, 141 Yellow Robe, William Jr., 214, 215 Yoga, 53, 54, 61, 262, 266, 267 Young, Ann Liv, 74, 75 Z Zollar, Jawole Willa Jo, 111, 241

289