It is common for many dance artists and scholars to move within nations and between countries as part of their professions. With this multitude of lived, global trajectories comes the awareness of site-specific, issue-specific, and audience-specific views on dance, work with dance, and reception of dance. One such intriguing aspect concerns different articulations of dancing the political, and of defining, debating, and comparing its forms, affects, and effects. What were the political factors behind the arrests and killings of Indonesian classical dancers between 1965 and 1966 (Larasati Reference Larasati2013)? How can these historical events be related to the desires of today's European choreographers to create political dances without explicit political content or identity politics (Hammergren Reference Hammergren, Ravn and Rouhiainen2012)? Why was dance made a tool of foreign policy and exported across the world during the Cold War by both the Soviet Union and the United States, and why does this not happen today (Franko Reference Franko, Franco and Nordera2007, 17)? Why has the field of Dance Studies taken so long to recognize the established tradition of investigations of the interrelations of migration and dance (Scolieri Reference Scolieri2008, v)?
With questions like these in mind, it is timely to see the publication of an anthology on dance and politics that seeks to explore “the implications of dance in the explicitly political realm” (xiii). As editor Alexandra Kolb herself states, the definition of the expression “an explicitly political realm” is ambiguous; but, as the articles show, this can be a fruitful point of departure for investigating different meanings, as well as for provoking our understanding of the limits of the concept of “the political.”
In her introductory chapter, Kolb sets a framework for various meanings, and articulates four basic modes by which dance and politics can interact: through the content of dance, through its genre and form, through its impact on external political reality, and through the effects of state and governmental politics on dance itself. I find this a very useful model, which could benefit from being read in tandem with Mark Franko's essay, “Dance and the Political” (2007). Franko's work includes a differently articulated description of the kind of politics we use when we speak about dance and politics. He writes about the power of dance to make and unmake identity; the way in which interpretation is inferred in articulating the political; the relation of dancer to choreographer (which is a political relation); how dance acts in its role as public art; and dance's “social conditions of possibility,” or how it is performed and produced (2007, 16–7). This broad definition can, of course, risk emptying “the political” of its interpretative force, but it still seems congenial to the understanding of the concept from a perspective that is not geographically limited.
Against this backdrop of an extended concept, it is interesting to note that only one author in Dance and Politics makes a clear distinction between real and purely symbolic politics. Roger Copeland's main thesis is to critique the ways in which “the growing emphasis on traditional and popular culture … is played at the expense of individual Western choreographic ‘authors’” (55). He thereby denounces scholars who have a vision of choreographic authorship, “which conceives of the dancemaker as ‘laborer and collaborator’ rather than ‘inspired genius’” (40). This in turn leads Copeland to make a distinction between genuine political action in the real world, and the “purely imaginary” and symbolic substitutes for serious political work performed by academic scholars (62). There is, indeed, much to discuss in this densely written chapter, but in relation to my initial paragraph, I find it crucial to highlight local geographies and hence the difference between his description of the state of dance studies and choreography in the United States, and the aesthetics favored by many choreographers working in Europe. I would argue that the emphasis on collective work that Copeland sees as only a scholarly preference reflects the manner in which many European choreographers of a younger generation would describe themselves and their dances. Hence, it is not an academic analysis made in the ivory tower, but a real danced politics in the public sphere, created in order to explore issues of ownership, aesthetic criteria, and the nature of so-called immaterial labor. In this case, both Copeland's and my own understanding of the interaction between dance and politics are deeply marked by the local context in which they are articulated.
A positive effect of the selection of authors and themes in Dance and Politics is how the different articles can be made to speak to one another. In this manner, they open spaces for readers to engage in tracing dialogues, even if they are not explicit in each chapter. Alexandra Kolb's analysis of work by choreographers Johann Kresnik and David Dorfman disputes Copeland's division between real political action and symbolic substitutes. In her striking comparison of the work Ulrike Meinhof (1990) by Kresnik, who was a member of the German so-called Baader-Meinhof Group, with Dorfman's dance about the Weathermen/Weather Underground (a far-left organization in the U.S.), Kolb succeeds in showing how choreography can compel us in meaningful ways to critically reflect on the activist practices of terrorist organizations in different countries. Her analysis makes it clear that we need to historically and geographically contextualize the intellectual space from which we are evaluating the political effects of choreography.
Another example of this dialogic nature is to read Victoria Marks's text on her choreography Not About Iraq (2007) as a comment on Kolb's analysis of Dorfman's Underground (2006), in which the American consumerist society and political climate of apathy and disengagement play a central role. When Marks was working with her own choreography, she asked questions concerning political engagement: “Could I make a dance that directly confronted the current political moment without being didactic? Could a dance be a forum in which to better understand my own problematic sense of citizenship?” (225). In this compelling essay, Marks reveals a completely opposite attitude to ignorance and political apathy, and she articulates the possibility of a heightened concern for the suffering and violence of others, even if the events take place far away. Ramsay Burt's emotive analysis of work by Teresa De Keersmaeker and Tino Sehgal adds to this perspective of personal engagement with his focus on political affect. He points to how “performances of powerlessness and vulnerability” (259) have the power to appeal to our individual imaginations of where we stand in relation to war, and to social and physical degradation.
What is particularly intriguing about Dance and Politics is how it makes the reader aware of the power of dancing, with its potential to create both positive and negative effects. In contrast to Victoria Marks's empowering narrative on the ways in which dancing and politics merge and to Burt's insistence on how performance can make beholders aware of their own material presence, Suzanne Little provides a sharp and convincing critique of how the political fails in dance when a choreographer tries to represent the “traumatic ‘real’ in performance” (234). Little's analysis focuses on the reference to the Abu Ghraib photographs in Douglas Wright's dance work Black Milk (2006), and shows how choreography “aimed at critique seemed perversely to reinscribe the original humiliation tactics and power hierarchies of the political realm that created them” (233). Little's insightful text places the context of the live performance event in the forefront of the discussion. She notes, for example, that the dancers, unlike the Abu Ghraib prisoners, have beautiful, aesthetically pleasing, healthy bodies, which removes much of the horror from the event. She also underlines how the photographs themselves are “bound up with performativity” (249), and when they are kept in circulation through performance they will continue to re-enact the unequal power structures that originally contrived them.
The multifaceted views on the power of dancing prevalent in the anthology speaks to the socio-cultural and political force of this human, corporeal practice to a much greater degree than if we simply conceived of dancing as a universally valid kinesthetic pleasure and as “inherently related to ideals such as dignity, equality, justice, and peace” (210). Naomi M. Jackson points this out with elegant clarity in her text on dance and human rights. She should also be praised for the excellent way in which she extends the anthology's mostly Western focus, for example by placing the attacks against dance by the Taliban in Afghanistan side-by-side with the cabaret license in New York that often prohibits social dancing in the city.
As Kolb argues in the preface to the anthology, there has been a lack of books with a comprehensive and overarching view of the relationships between dance and politics. However, there have been numerous exhibitions and conferences addressing the theme, including the successful “Communications: Dance, Politics & Co-Immunity” symposium that took place in Germany in 2010 (http://dance-tech.tv/video-category/giessen). Nevertheless, in this symposium, as sometimes occurs in other such conferences, dance was included as only one part in a much wider definition of “aesthetic practices.” Dance and Politics is therefore useful because of the insights it offers about theatrical dancing, and because it paves the way for further important investigations. Given the impact of global perspectives on dancing, one crucial issue to explore is the question of how danced politics travel between cultures, societies, and local aesthetics. This approach could perhaps help us understand why choreography focusing on “radical form—as a new way of producing, disrupting, or interrogating the definition of meaning” (from Kolb's introduction, 17) cannot be encountered in the same way by different groups of audiences and scholarly interpreters, as for example a dance in which urban relations and intra-communitarian issues are central. It would also highlight additional aspects of the broad spectrum between perceiving dance politically and conceiving the politics of dance.
