Performance, Dance and Political Economy: Bodies at the End of the World

by Katerina Paramana (Editor), Anita Gonzalez (Editor)

Overview

This book examines the relation between bodies and political economies at micro and macro levels. It stands in the space between ends and beginnings - some long-desired, such as the end of capitalism and racism, and others long-dreaded, such as the climate catastrophe - and reimagines what the world can be like instead. It offers an original investigation into the relation between performance, dance, and political economy, looking at the points where politics, economics, ethics, and culture intersect.

Arising from live conversations and exchanges among the contributors, this book is written in an interdisciplinary and dialogical manner by leading scholars and artists in the fields of Performance Studies, Dance, Political Theory, Economics, and Social Theory: Marc Arthur, Melissa Blanco Borelli, Anita Gonzalez, Alexandrina Hemsley, Jamila Johnson-Small, Elena Loizidou, Tavia Nyong'o, Katerina Paramana, Nina Power, and Usva Seregina. Their critical and creative examinations of the relation between bodies and political economy offer insights for both imagining and materializing a world beyond the present.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350188754
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	10/20/2022
Series:	Dance in Dialogue
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.06(w) x 7.81(h) x 0.43(d)

About the Author

Katerina Paramana is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Theatre and Performance at Brunel University London, UK. She is co-editor of the book Art and Dance in Dialogue, author of several articles on the socio-political and ethical dimensions of contemporary performance, and co-editor of the Interdisciplinary Book Series Dance in Dialogue. Her performances have been presented internationally.

Anita Gonzalez is Professor of Theatre, Chair of Dance and Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs at the University of Michigan, US. Gonzalez is co-editor of the book Black Performance Theory with Thomas DeFrantz and author of Afro-Mexico: Dancing Between Myth and Reality and Jarocho's Soul, as well as of numerous articles and book chapters.

Table of Contents

Foreword: A Gesture
Tavia Nyong'o

Opening Thoughts and Introductions
Katerina Paramana and Anita Gonzalez

Provocations
CHAPTER 1:
Performance, Dance and Political Economy: A Provocation
Katerina Paramana
CHAPTER 2:
Recognizing Race and Class in Dance: Gonzalez Response to Paramana
Anita Gonzalez

Dialogue 1: Control of Bodies
CHAPTER 3:
A World Beyond the Captured Body
Nina Power
CHAPTER 4:
Choreographing Rage
Marc Arthur

Dialogue 2: Commodification of Bodies
CHAPTER 5:
Honesty and the Body
Nina Power
CHAPTER 6:
Feeling my way through several beginnings
Alexandrina Hemsley

Dialogue 3: Rest, Productivity, and Survival
CHAPTER 7:
Sleepwalking: Toward A New Corporeality of Dance
Marc Arthur
CHAPTER 8:
It Only Happens In Daylight
Jamila Johnson-Small

Dialogue 4: Communal Disruptions
CHAPTER 9:
Community, Coloniality and Convivencia in the Festival de Danza de Santa María la Antigua del Darién, Colombia
Melissa Blanco Borelli
CHAPTER 10:
Changing Our Bodies' Relationships to Reality
Usva Seregina

Dialogue 5: Anarchic Inversions of Neoliberal Economies
CHAPTER 11:
The “End,” “Lived Time” or How to Say Goodbye to Your World, A World.
Melissa Blanco-Borelli
CHAPTER 12:
Dance, Anarchism, Mutual Aid
Elena Loizidou

Dialogue 6: Escaping Capitalism?
CHAPTER 13:
Breaking the Illusion of Reality: Exploring Reiterations of the Performance of Consumption
Usva Seregina
CHAPTER 14:
From Exchange to Freedom and back. No guarantees.
Elena Loizidou

Group Conversation
CHAPTER 15:
In Conversation – Bodies at the End of the World: Performance, Dance and Political Economy
Katerina Paramana, Anita Gonzalez, Nina Power, Marc Arthur, Melissa Blanco Borelli, Usva Seregina, Jamila Johnson-Small, Elena Loizidou, and Alexandrina Hemsley (in the order of speaking)

References
Index

Editorial Reviews

Anyone encountering Paramana and Gonzalez's volume for the first time will be thrilled to find that finally here comes a book that addresses how our bodies claim back the world by rejecting abuse and commodified relations.
Performance, Dance and Political Economy

The book excellently captures dance as a semio-technological structure that discursively and corporeally targets the accelerated system of necrocapitalist economic restrictions, discrimination, and expropriation to incite a genealogy of historical and future transformations - to literally dance against reinvigorated control and rapacious extractive violence.
Marina Grzinic, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria

This book is a conversation. Not a record of finished discussions, it is a purposeful provocation toward the engagement of otherwise futures. Taking the form of call and response, sets of essays respond to each other and to art works, weaving an open invitation to concerted participation in collective efforts we must make toward change - change in the global political economy and change in the genre of human delimited by the lifeways of colonial-capitalism. Powerful, insightful, and brave imaginings here welcome, through the prism of performance, the "end of the world" as we have known it. Importantly, the authors in this collection also get on with the business of choreographing elsewise. The call is to rearrange ourselves at the granular level of our bodies in space, our bodies in relation to each other and to the political economies that delimit us. We are asked to extend our limbs like our abilities to theorize, and insist upon our capacities to listen, learn, heal, breathe, bend, love, fly. Kudos to Anita Gonzalez and Katerina Paramana for a book that, with an inspiring Foreword by Tavia Nyong'o and contributions by political and social theorists as well as by performance and dance studies scholars, makes so many contemporary ends into even more future beginnings.
Rebecca Schneider, Brown University, USA

From the Publisher