African-American Theatrical Jazz Dance—Solidarity Versus Self-Fulfillment

Starting in the early 1960s different styles of African-American theatrical jazz dance migrated almost simultaneously to countries in the Nordic region: to Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.Footnote ² Important agents in this period were dancers from the United States, many of them African Americans, such as Walter Nicks, Clifford Fears, Vanoye Aikens, and Claude Marchant. They all had different connections to the dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham, and Aikens had been a star dancer in her company. Generally speaking, it was difficult for African-American dance artists to find employment in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s (Manning Reference Manning2004, 187), but in Sweden they were offered good working conditions, and they often combined work as performers and teachers. Nicks and Aikens became important figures in the development of higher education in dance in the school that today is called Stockholm University of the Arts, and Marchant was central in funding the Ballet Academy in the city of Gothenburg.

The reasons for this open attitude from the Nordic labor market were complex, but important factors were the sociopolitical climate with programs for political refugees, other kinds of radical political engagement by the Swedish and Finnish governments such as supporting the American Civil Rights Movement, and the growing economic stability. In Sweden there was also an emerging infrastructure of state-funded and community-based dance schools with courses aimed at amateurs of all ages, as well as courses geared to future professionals. The question is, what happened once these individuals and dance styles became part of the regional sociocultural infrastructures?

When I first started to teach jazz dance I went through a short introductory course aimed at all teachers in various subjects at ABF. We were taught how important it was to conceive of the teaching as an act creating “[d]emocracy, diversity, justice and equality … the foundations of the ABF's operations” (“About ABF in English” 2017). The courses included textbooks aimed at achieving these goals. The book I used was the anthology Jazzdans, which includes chapters on dance and anatomy, jazz terminology and movement exercises, improvisation, music, and the history of jazz dance (Vásárhelyi et al. [1973] Reference Vásárhelyi, Frankenstein, Harryson, Cramér, Lopez and Häger1975). The historical section has questions for discussions with the students, formulated in order to enhance a political awareness and a sense of solidarity with oppressed groups of people: Dancing played an important part of the cultures in black Africa—why do you think this was the case? Which social and political effects has the slave trade led to in the United States today? How much of the original African choreography, music, and movement dynamics is left in the modern jazz dance? (73–97; my translation). Consequently, in my understanding, learning about jazz dance and its sociocultural history was one of the main objectives for teaching jazz dance in the evening schools. According to the credo of the workers’ association, dancing should be an act of democracy and solidarity. In this particular context I understood solidarity as the interest in learning about the history of the jazz dance tradition and its intimate connection to the particular historical experiences of African Americans.

There were additional goals: for example, for amateur students in evening schools, the jazz dance genre was thought to help improve the students’ awareness of their own bodies and the possibilities of expressing themselves in using a variety of movements, materials, and techniques. The goal was described as follows: “With a well-trained body and knowledge about the different dance styles and their movement patterns as ‘material,’ the participants can in time be able to express themselves artistically through dance” (Vásárhelyi et al. [1973] Reference Vásárhelyi, Frankenstein, Harryson, Cramér, Lopez and Häger1975, 7; author's translation). Improvisation was a supplementary practice, conceived of as helping to free the participants from shyness and social inhibitions.

This mix of goals and learning outcomes created a dilemma. Self-improvement was made possible by reducing the dance to a movement technique and to skills for achieving physical well-being and artistic, self-expressive movements. This is a viewpoint that (potentially) stands in opposition to an emphasis on understanding jazz dance as a cultural and historical expression that originated in a particular geographical place and over time developed in tandem with different sociopolitical phenomena.

To conclude, the dance styles that the migrating pedagogues, choreographers, and dancers brought with them underwent significant changes in the encounter with Swedish culture and politics. The 1960s and 1970s can be considered a period marked by a kind of “invitation” to the dance artists from abroad to settle down in Sweden, that is, an attitude of openness to transnational mobility, if the mobility is conceived only as a linear move from one country to another (Sirkeci Reference Sirkeci2009, 3). When the artists arrived, their status was high, and expectations about what the new dance styles could achieve within the art form and in educational contexts were equally high. Reinforcing this positive situation toward the African-American culture was the fact that many jazz musicians from the United States visited and settled down in both Copenhagen and Stockholm (Helgesson Reference Helgesson2015). Nevertheless, the circumstances changed, and one context in which jazz dance became increasingly popular was physical education. Monica Beckman was the first physical education teacher in Sweden to use movements from jazz dance in her classes. She wrote several books on the topic and toured around the world lecturing and giving workshops. She argued for the rewarding use of jazz gymnastics in schools by referring to teenagers’ need to use free corporeal expressions, like they did when they danced to pop music (Beckman Reference Beckman1966, 107). At the same time, the role of jazz dance in professional performance contexts diminished. The reasons are complex but can be traced to difficulties in upholding professional companies, as well as to aesthetic preferences when jazz became part of amateur education and physical education. It led to some African-American jazz teachers returning to the United States.

Another result of this development was that many dance teachers of the second generation were native Swedes like me, hence the strong link to the specific African-American history of the genre became weaker. Students continued to practice the technique in class, and part of the jazz aesthetics became appropriated by the show dance genre, a more commercial branch aiming toward entertainment. In this way jazz became excluded from other genres of high art, and consequently generic boundaries between ballet, modern, and jazz were upheld in a mode similar to Anthea Kraut's (Reference Kraut2008) analysis of black diasporic dance. Her study of Afro-Caribbean dance reveals how it has remained perpetually “subordinate to the disciplines of ballet and modern dance” (210).

Dances from West Africa—A Corporeal Consumption

A different migratory pattern is apparent when people from West Africa started migrating to Sweden, mainly beginning in the 1980s. Many of them came from Gambia, to some extent because Gambia had been a popular destination for Swedish tourists as early as the 1960s and hence the visitors helped to spread information about Sweden as a welfare society. In contrast to the African-American dance artists, this group of African migrants usually came for adventure and economic reasons, carrying only short-term visas (Wagner and Yamba Reference Wagner and Yamba1986, 202). Therefore their social situation was vulnerable, which was emphasized by the economic recession that marked the 1980s in Sweden, and a more restricted employment market. For some individuals, teaching African dance or drumming for amateurs became a way to get employment. Very few had formal education as teachers and/or performers, although it is important to understand the ways in which dancing, drumming, and singing can be part of everyday aesthetic practices in many parts of Africa rather than part of a professional education (Cohen Bull Reference Cohen Bull and Desmond1997).

Social anthropologist Lena Sawyer conducted fieldwork in African dance classes in Stockholm during 1995 and 1996, and a male Gambian interviewee explained his ideas on teaching African dance and drum in this geographical context:

Thus, Sawyer stresses the fact that on arriving in Sweden, it was possible to become a teacher regardless of one's background. Moreover, it was a situation clearly marked by gender, so not everyone had the same employment possibilities. Initially, men were the primary teachers of African dance, and women from West Africa usually worked with the sale of African food, clothing, and beauty products (319).

There were individuals whose careers took other trajectories. Bedu Annan, born in Ghana, came to Sweden in the 1970s, and he was one of the very first African men to introduce West African dances (Bergstrand Reference Bergstrand2001). Although Ghana has an early history of creating institutional education in dance, which happened after the country gained independence in 1957 (Ayi Reference Ayi, Nielsen and Burridge2015, 69), Annan's education in dance started abroad when he studied languages in New York. Later on, when he had settled down and worked in Sweden, he developed a system of exercises based on different African dance practices, which he named “Grounding.” He continued teaching until his death in 2001, and Grounding is now a registered Swedish trademark mainly taught by women born in Sweden and educated by Annan.

As is evident concerning the heritage from Bedu Annan, a shift has occurred concerning who is also teaching the dances in other educational contexts. Since the late 1990s and continuing today, Swedish-born women have made up more than half of those involved in teaching African dances, whereas men from different African countries usually work as drummers or drum instructors (Sawyer Reference Sawyer, Clarke and Thomas2006, 319). This is exemplified in one of the most well-established schools in Stockholm, called Urkraft (roughly translated, it means “primordial force”), established in 1999 by Jenny Ajland. A majority of the courses are geared to a non-African population and largely consist of women. To Lena Sawyer (Reference Sawyer, Clarke and Thomas2006), these gender and race perspectives speak of a commodification of Africa. According to her, it is not surprising, given a cultural context in which “white and non-immigrant” Swedish women have an expendable income to spend on self-care. In addition, she argues, many African dance courses are marketed specifically as alternative spaces of personal transformation through consumption of “an Africa” that is embellished with specific qualities (Reference Sawyer, Clarke and Thomas2006, 324–325).

In response to Sawyer's analysis, it has been remarked that one must also question the concept of “African dance.” In an interview, ethnologist Ebrima Kamara states that even though this current situation could be critiqued, it is still quite logical that Swedish women are leaders of the dance studios since they are the ones who best know the kind of African dance taught there (Elfving Reference Elfving2005). Kamara is arguing that the name “African dance” itself has a specific history outside of the African continent. It is a hybrid concept that has emerged from the encounter between Africa and the West. According to Kamara, it is Swedish culture, mentality, and expectations that shape the dance and music being practiced in the dance studios (Elfving Reference Elfving2005). I find this interesting because of the nuances it brings to the topic, and in fact, the concept of “jazz dance” has been described as bearing a similar complexity as it moved between the United States and Europe. In France, as one example, over several decades there have emerged subcategories of theatrical jazz dance: modern jazz, contemporary jazz dance, and the jazz Nouveau concept (Wray Reference Wray, Guarino and Oliver2014, 257). In Sweden, the development of the dance has been described as initially being true to its African-American roots and then affected by disco dancing during the 1970s, and by street dancing during the 1990s (Lundmark Reference Lundmark, Grönlund, Redbark-Wallander and Ståhle2011). There are also different opinions concerning the definition of jazz dance. Some relate it to its West African and African-American roots, others point to the influence of ballet and modern dance, including the import of the dance to Europe, and to the context of dance education (Crosby and Moss Reference Crosby, Moss, Guarino and Oliver2014, 55).

Some of Sawyer's informants make arguments similar to Kamara's, but with a different viewpoint and conclusion. That is, they critique nonimmigrant Swedish dance teachers for simplifying African dance forms and for lacking a “deep knowledge and respect for the complexity” (Sawyer Reference Sawyer, Clarke and Thomas2006, 328). In this case it is an obvious critique of not respecting a specific dance tradition, a tradition with which the African teachers feel deeply connected. These discussions, including both individuals and dance forms, exemplify Ibrahim Sirkeci's use of transnational mobility, not as a concept for “linear migration models” but connected to “circular, fluctuating and dynamic ties built by human movements across borders” (Reference Sirkeci2009, 4). It is a mobility that can be seen as manifesting certain kinds of conflicts, not always in the meaning of violent clashes, but also of aesthetic and ideological tensions. In this context, I interpret the conflict as a competition between different educational goals and ideas of origins.

A Comparison—Similar Power Asymmetries

Comparing the two examples—the arrival of African-American theatrical jazz dances during the 1960s and their development throughout the 1970s on the one hand, and the introduction of West African dances in the 1980s and their current status on the other—one could say that, initially, the dancing migrated and settled into different social spaces. In the 1960s, the dancing mainly took place in the professional dance studio with associations to high culture (e.g., the Ballet Academies in Stockholm and in Gothenburg). In the 1980s, the dancing appeared in evening classes for amateurs, and thus can be placed within popular culture with a focus on leisure.

What did it mean to be the migrating subject involved in these educational practices? The professional African-American jazz teachers were invited to the most prestigious new dance schools, and in some cases they even helped to found the schools. Their social status was high and they were considered experts in their field. Conversely, there were definitely limited possibilities for most of the West African teachers to acquire a higher professional and social status when the focus, from the beginning, was placed on the needs of the customers—that is, the amateur dance students—rather than on the communication of the dance form as an aesthetic, professional, and culturally specific expression.

In the 1970s, when African-American jazz dance became integrated into physical education and used for self-improvement in evening classes for amateurs, and interest in jazz as part of a performance culture decreased, similar power asymmetries, as in the case of the West African dance education, appeared. The significance and importance of the African-American teachers mastering a professionally performed dance technique became replaced by the dance students’ images and kinesthetic sensations of having well-trained bodies and feeling liberated through the dancing. In this development, the African-American and the West African dances ended up in similar social spaces marked by commercialism and acts of corporeal consumption. Thus, the individual student's own needs and exploration of physical and mental well-being became more important than the origin of the dances and the skills and expertise of the teachers. This symmetrical development is interesting, in that popular cultural practices are considered to be able to both question and reproduce systems of power, since they are usually created “within the context of changing transnational circuits of ideas, opportunities, and constraints” (Thomas and Clarke Reference Thomas, Clarke, Clarke and Thomas2006, 24). These changing circumstances were manifested in the Swedish examples when the dance forms changed from being articulations of specific sociocultural subjectivities to being included in an industry of consumption. Even though the sociopolitical aspects changed quite radically from the 1960s to the 1980s, as is explained above, the final result for both the dance practices and the practitioners became more or less the same.

Dancing and Agency—Exchanges of Cultural Practices

The analysis of how different African-derived dances arrived and were practiced in a Swedish context is consistent with a general postcolonial critique of cultural appropriation in which the use of cultural phenomena by members of another culture is central (Rogers Reference Rogers2006, 476). The same perspective also forms the basis of Lena Sawyer's (Reference Sawyer, Clarke and Thomas2006) research project. However, aiming to look more closely at what happens in the exchange between teacher and student in the dance studio, and wanting to put an emphasis on investigating the bodily, somatic/sensory experience of dancing, I will revisit the interpretation of appropriation through two complementary theories. Arnd Schneider (Reference Schneider2003) formulates the first, and he argues for a renewed definition of appropriation in relation to global art practices. The second approach involves applying ideas of agency and embodiment (Sklar Reference Sklar, Noland and Ness2008; Noland Reference Noland2009). My aim is to investigate whether embodied experience and agency can act as practices of resistance to cultural consumption within the framework of appropriation. I consider this focus on dancing as a bodily materiality, important because, far too often in critical cultural studies, the practice of dancing has been considered marginal to, for example, music, literature, and visual art.

Schneider takes as his departure point a critique of earlier theories of cultural change and exchange, which suffers from “a holistic view of bounded cultures” as well as a focus on groups of individuals rather than individual actors (Reference Schneider2003, 215). He suggests that we look at cultures as open systems and that appropriation has a hermeneutical potential. It is “one of the principal practices underlying any cultural context or exchange, and therefore underlying any dialogical situation of ‘understanding’ each ‘other’” (223). He means that both sides become (or have the potential of becoming) transformed, since appropriation through its hermeneutical process works in several directions simultaneously. The Sawyer, Kamara et al. discussion described above could be analyzed from this viewpoint. The Swedish, nonimmigrant dance students and teachers incorporate elements into their own movement vocabulary from African cultures taught by African-born teachers (or later, nonimmigrant teachers). In this manner, their ways of moving hold traces of their own habitual movement patterns as well as of the particular African dance they have studied. If Kamara's opinion and Schneider's analysis would hold, it must also mean that the African teachers incorporate something new in the meeting with “African dances” outside of their presumed origin. The pedagogical situations they have participated in have worked as points of entry into a different learning practice than they have been used to, which in itself could be conceived as an additional form of transformation. They have become bearers of what are, to them, partly new traditions.

The risk with this argument is obvious. The African teachers become invisible as generators of specific cultural traditions, and their skills in dancing and drumming are merely appropriated by the students. However, based on Schneider's view on the transformative aspects on both sides of the transaction, the African teachers become active agents in this encounter. I find this happens through, for example, individuals’ reflections on who the “master” in the dance studio is; the possibility of teaching without formal training; the extent to which there is an original African dance form practiced in Sweden; and what an in-depth knowledge of a dance form can be. These are all thoughts articulated by African agents in the discussion described above, and I find an exploratory, critical, and self-critical dimension present in the different statements. The exchange of opinions created in the larger community of different actors, with different individual backgrounds and ways in which they mobilize knowledge, can be viewed as an example of a hermeneutic, interpretative, and multidimensional encounter. All sides in this encounter could, according to Schneider's theory of appropriation, experience a change in their own cultural practice as a result of partaking in a teaching and learning situation. I am aware of the critique of what is called a “racialized affective consumption,” in which merchandise “ensures that racialized things will continue to deliver positive and happy experiences of consumption” (Danbolt Reference Danbolt2017, 110). The dancing practice can be seen as differing in kind from this act of consuming commodities, in that it involves the whole being. It demands a change of bodily behavior because it involves what Arthur W. Frank (Reference Frank, Featherstone, Hepworth and Turner1991) has called a dyadic communication between several people, a communication that is productive in that the final result is not known during the process. The question is, what kind of teaching and learning situation enables this type of productive encounter? Sawyer has convincingly demonstrated the limitations of the African dance class, so how could it lead to “positive” effects?

Dancing as Interpretative Transformation—A New Pedagogy?

The question is, what would the change of one's own cultural practice actually entail if we were be able to move beyond merely feeling “well-trained” and able to express ourselves (ABF goals) or “free” (Sawyer's interviewees) while dancing? How can corporeal transformation be understood? According to Noland, bodily training can make changes, and it

She suggests that by repetitive training, and through kinesthetic or somatic experience, one can alter preexisting cultural meaning and discursive conventions, hence implying the possibility for individual agency. (In dance practices, somatic and kinesthetic experience are concepts used for different forms of the individual's sensory perceptions of body parts, muscles, and movement.) Consequently, would it be possible to speak of the dancing as a kind of subversion of the norm, be it corporeal and/or discursive, even if the dancing is part of a European, “white” appropriation of Africa-derived movement and dance? Noland is explicit in stating that the demand for somatic experience “may be one of the greatest challenges to social construction the subject can pose” (Noland Reference Noland2009, 171). She continues by remarking that both racialization and gender construction create barriers to somatic experience.Footnote ³

Noland's belief in movement's capacity to produce new cultural meaning links into how Deidre Sklar discusses the differentiation “between visual and somatic, specifically kinesthetic, modalities” in analyzing human movement (2008, 88). She argues that a mere focus on culture-specific dimensions is not enough if we want to understand communication via movement and grasp the kind of knowledge thus transmitted. Besides the particular steps, the ways in which the body moves through space, and the choreographic structures (i.e., visual aspects of dancing), there also needs to be an in-depth study of the body-specific, proprioceptive dimension (87–88). Looking at Sawyer's impressive field study, it is clear that neither students nor teachers explicitly attend to body-specific categories in the interviews. One reason can be, of course, that Sawyer has not focused on interrogating the corporeal sensations and processes in more detail. From my perspective of looking more closely at the practice going on in the studio and its effects, it is important to analyze the details of what happens through our corporeal, interoceptive awareness, and how this awareness is articulated within the communicative situation. When we are engaging our interoceptive awareness, we manage, if only for a short while, to break the hold of the habitus, that is, the movement patterns we are used to and mostly perform automatically. In Sklar's words, we open up the possibility of no longer perpetuating “social structures at the level of the body” (Reference Sklar, Noland and Ness2008, 91). To be able to break this hold is a powerful statement, and one must ask what it takes for the social structures to remain open, and for the habitus not to be changed only momentarily, otherwise a more long-lasting agency would not be the result.

In Sawyer's (Reference Sawyer, Clarke and Thomas2006) analyses, the dance students attest to feeling free through the dance, which Sawyer reads as acts of consumption, given the intention and context of her research. However, if we were to look deeper into the somatic experiences of these students (as well as to those dancing African-American theatrical jazz), there could be something more happening that radically transforms the individual and her sense of corporeality and the space she occupies. It could, for example, appear through the use of body parts in different ways, by becoming sensitive to isolations of single body parts, to ways in which muscles move differently than before, to the strength needed in order to keep arms lifted in square shapes, to ways in which several spatial directions can work in one and the same movement, and by following and repeating unfamiliar rhythmic patterns. These sensations could produce variations of negotiating with corporeal cultures different from the one inhabited by the individual student. In an earlier study, I conducted interviews with people who had taken classes in African-American theatrical jazz dance in the early 1960s, and they all described how inspiring and demanding it was “because of the way they were forced to break their spatial, kinesthetic and rhythmical patterns” (Hammergren Reference Hammergren, Vedel and Hoppu2014, 123). The overarching result could be that students become aware of the richness of dynamic and movement nuances in different African or African-American dance styles, rather than conceiving of the dances as belonging to one coherent category.

In my understanding, this change in interoceptive awareness would demand of the teaching situation a detailed and skilled articulation of nuances in both movement and musical accompaniment, as well as in the kind of pedagogy that is applied. One of Sawyer's Gambian informants talks about this necessity to really learn the dances in depth: “It is about respect.… It takes more than to go down for two weeks or a month in Africa and learn” (Sawyer Reference Sawyer, Clarke and Thomas2006, 327). It is not enough to attend the class for purposes of exercising, sweating, and having fun. The “complex cultural transmissions” (326) going on during class must also take place and be studied through the body. It demands an investigation that drills deeper into each dance student's corporeal experience, as well as the teacher's ability to address movement in this manner. This would include an analysis of the kinds of somatic negotiations that occur between teachers and dance students in the studio, in which people enter into an embodied dialogue with one another. Corporeal experiences occur during the dancing, and they are not necessarily possible to translate into words during an interview.

In investigating the pedagogy applied in dance classes, it is interesting to see how this dialogue has changed over time, at least in the education of future professional dance teachers.Footnote ⁴ Today, students are invited to interrogate the movement material they are presented with: Where does it come from? How have teachers developed their techniques, and where is the material from? How are movements translated through the students’ own bodies? How can alternative modes of describing the somatic effects be articulated? This pedagogy is far from the “master-apprentice” tradition that has historically been so common in both professional and amateur dance education.

Thus, it is highly important to analyze the particular pedagogical and communicative situation in which the dance practice takes place, and the detailed ways in which movements are verbally and corporeally performed and communicated. In fact, I see this approach as a central mode for investigating the transmission of movement, and of perhaps not verbally but corporeally entering into a “discussion” of ownership and appropriation. To my knowledge, the pedagogical dimension has often been lacking in studies of cultural appropriation, but it can be found in web pages on curricula development (Antoine et al. Reference Antoine, Rachel Mason, Palahicky and Rodriguez de France2018), as well as in other kinds of appropriation in educational contexts, such as “historical appropriation” in the context of reenactments (Hardt Reference Hardt and Franko2017).

Ann Cooper Albright is a dance scholar and teacher who has addressed the dilemma of how to teach a dance form that is not part of one's own tradition. She describes how she successfully solved the problem related to issues of appropriation when she developed the teaching of cross-cultural dance history (Cooper Albright Reference Cooper Albright2013). In the beginning, she invited teachers who were experts in each dance form to give occasional master classes as a complement to her own theoretical teaching about the history of the dances. She found that this only reinforced a divide between herself, the full-time white professor teaching theory, and the guest artist of color doing the practice (265). She therefore redesigned the course and intertwined the theoretical historical approach with somatic explorations of all the material. It helped students encounter difficult questions concerning authenticity, appropriation, and gender issues, as well as a Western romanticizing of non-Western cultures, in a combined corporeal and discursive manner.

There is reason to highlight a methodological insight here. Instead of seeing embodied transformation and cultural appropriation as an impossible contradiction, the juxtaposition could exemplify both Cooper Albright's educational example and Sklar's two ways of understanding the dancing: the discursive culture-specific and the body-specific, and how they must work in tandem with one another. This thought bears a resemblance to a more recent discussion on what could be called “affect-as-inquiry,” which has mainly addressed issues of reenactment in performance theory, that is, how to acquire knowledge of the past through engaging affectively with it in the present (Landsberg Reference Landsberg2015; de Laet Reference De Laet and Franko2017). According to Landsberg, the notion of an “affective engagement” combines thinking and feeling, the embodied as well as the discursive dimension (Landsberg Reference Landsberg2015, 20). The embodied experiences existing in the present are different from a total identification with the past, but they nevertheless help in making sense of the experience (de Laet Reference De Laet and Franko2017, 17). Referring back to the context of my examples, the problem is not how to bridge over proximity and distance in performance history, but how to come to terms with ideas of, for example, origin and appropriation. My opinion is that having a sensorial experience might include an affective inquiry, which results in some kind of analytical and meaning-making understanding, with the potential of disrupting acquired behaviors and beliefs. The more recent pedagogical approach to inviting students’ critical reflection on the movement material while it is practiced in the dance studio is one exemplification of an affective inquiry. With hindsight, it is clear to me that I totally lacked this capacity as a young dance teacher. It was impossible for me to merge the teaching of a dance form that had a long history outside of my own experience with an affective investigation, and translate them both into a singular pedagogical practice.

Potential Results and Conclusion

My question at the beginning of this article dealt with the possibility of using embodied practices as a kind of resistance to situations of cultural appropriation, or at least as a transformation of former cultural expectations, of widening one's understanding of cultures other than one's own. I see that this can be a potential result, but in the examples above from the African dance classes, I think that the corporeal experiences are still working within the frame of appropriation because of the teaching model and the existing sociocultural power differences between students and teachers, immigrants and nonimmigrants—a situation in the dance studio described in Sawyer's research project and mirrored in the large-scale report of African phobia from 2014. Even though some years have passed since the report was published, I would dare to say that not much has changed. If I look at the outcome of my analysis of dancing from a current Swedish political perspective and ask if the dancing practices have produced “new forms of subjectivity, cultural practice, and political action that also move us beyond racism” (Thomas and Clarke Reference Thomas, Clarke, Clarke and Thomas2006, 3), the answer must be, overall, negative. Hence, can I really argue that what occurs in the dance studio matters, even though affective inquiries are interwoven in some of today's teaching modes?

In fact, I do see some promising changes emerge, and here I refer to a local situation at a dance school of higher education in Stockholm. Quite recently, students of color have used this attitude of affective inquiry to put pressure on teachers to be explicit about their own teaching and movement traditions. The dance students raise questions of appropriation, racialization, and intersectionality in relation to individual dance classes, to the kind of courses on offer, and to the institution and education as a whole (see “Disorienting Whiteness and Heterosexuality–Course” n.d.). These questions have started to affect the education on both micro and macro levels. I find here a situation in which a profound learning of the movements have started to challenge discursive norms, that is, a normative and often limited way of describing dancing practices and their background. It should be pointed out that this concerns the pedagogical context in the training of future professionals. To my knowledge, this changed educational setting has yet to occur in amateur education.

To finish, there is reason to believe in Noland's assertion that bodily, repetitive training can make changes, but as I see it, it also demands a pedagogical situation that invites experiencing movement proprioceptively as well as through the language used to describe it. This occurs in some dance contexts but not in others. Given the current sociopolitical moment, it still remains a challenge to mediate between the different positions of appropriation and embodied transformation. But, addressed in relation to one another, hopefully they will lead to a more nuanced understanding of the productive role that a profound investigation of movement sensations, and the language we use in communicating these sensations, can play in analyses of embodied cultural practices in times of migration.