Dance and Activism

A Century of Radical Dance Across the World

Dana Mills

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350137035
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Danse

This study focuses on dance as an activist practice in and of itself, across geographical locations and over the course of a century, from 1920 to 2020. Through doing so, it considers how dance has been an empowering agent for political action throughout civilisation. Dance and Activism offers a glimpse of different strategies of mobilizing the human body for good and justice for all, and captures the increasing political activism epitomized by bodies moving on the streets in some of the most turbulent political situations. This has, most recently, undoubtedly been partly owing to the rise of the far-right internationally, which has marked an increase in direct action on the streets. Offering a survey of key events across the century, such as the fall of President Zuma in South Africa; pro-reproductive rights action in Poland and Argentina; and the recent women's marches against Donald Trump's presidency, you will see how dance has become an urgent field of study. Key geographical locations are explored as sites of radical dance - the Lower East Side of New York; Gaza; Syria; Cairo, Iran; Iraq; Johannesburg - to name but a few - and get insights into some of the major figures in the history of dance, including Pearl Primus, Martha Graham, Anna Sokolow and Ahmad Joudah. Crucially, lesser or unknown dancers, who have in some way influenced politics, all over the world are brought into the limelight (the Syrian ballerinas and Hussein Smko, for example). Dance and Activism troubles the boundary between theory and practice, while presenting concrete case studies as a site for robust theoretical analysis.

1 IF WE CAN’T DANCE,
WE DON’T WANT TO BE
PART OF YOUR
REVOLUTION

“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution”: a misquote from one of the twentieth century’s most influential activists and thinkers, Emma Goldman, has become a popular slogan for placards and tea towels. “Red Emma”, the anarchist who was imprisoned for her advocacy for contraceptive rights and whose lifelong resentment toward capitalist structures of power, who arrived on the shores of America, a poor refugee working in sweatshops herself, provides a more useful way of elucidating the theory of this book in the actual instance she recalled in her autobiography, Living my Life:

I threw myself into the work with all the ardour of my being and I became absorbed in it to the exclusion of everything else. My task was to get the girls in the trade to join the strike. For that purpose, meetings, concerts, socials, and dances were organized … At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things. Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world—prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.¹

Returning to the origins of the quotation here is crucial not only to correct false histories and misquoting of radical women, but because the actual statement by Goldman very much sits at the heart of the ethos of this book. Emma Goldman’s dedication to the cause—and to dancing—is the underpinning argument of this book: the inextricability of dance from agitation, and especially seeing dance as activism and movement as a lived ideal. This has been an underlying narrative of politics, especially in the turbulent twentieth century. The book starts from asking the question: How do people live their beautiful ideal as activism through dance?

This is a book about dance and activism, or rather about dance as activism. The book is about women and men who believe that dance can serve the beauty of their causes. This book pursues a theoretical argument as well as a historical argument. First, it aims to place center stage the work of artists who see dance as essential work toward bringing forth a better future in different corners of the world. The book aims to show how historical interventions that burst into the world a hundred years ago resonate today, at the closing of the second decade of the twentieth century.

This is a book about the praxis of radicals. It is a book about failures as well as successes, it is a book about rehearsals and walking to and from rehearsals, about strikes and about sit-ins, about birthday parties and break-ups and tears and happiness; all those elements which are part of everyday life of a dancer-activist. The book focuses on dance that was able to project a vision for a better world, at times, or to trouble what seems as unavoidable justice at others. The book focuses on a century that commences in the 1920s and ends as we enter the year 2020. These are not coincidental choices, but rather two placeholders or unique moments of history in which people rose and took to the streets to claim their rights. This book does not attempt to provide a comprehensive theory of activism; its understanding is that dance, like activism, holds unique power by providing its agents with extra-verbal meaning. The book is a chronicle of the times that have passed, of the dances that have been danced, and of the processes that are galvanized and yet beginning. The book returns to the concept of action that is central to political and critical theory and is at the heart of the concept of activism.

This book is a first. There are no conceptual or theoretical studies of dance and activism for it to rely on, and in so being it proposes ideas that, it is hoped, will be taken by many others and developed in their own modes of thinking. The book and its specific analytical, theoretical, and political premises arise from a burning and timely theoretical aporia.

The field of writing on dance and politics has been fast expanding beyond its founding moment. Randy Martin’s work in the field as well as Mark Franko’s ongoing contributions in the world of dance studies have been significant. Alexandra Kolb’s book Dance and Politics² from 2011 added much needed layers to the study of these two worlds. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics³ was a significant intervention in the field of the study of dance and politics; collecting and collating the work of the most profound and important scholars in dance studies into a handbook is an intervention and creation of a canonical resource. Most importantly for the ideas behind this book, Dance, Human Rights and Social Justice⁴ was a specific look at how ethical and political burning issues are handled through dance, though in the form of a collected volume.

Important interventions challenging the white and male dominance of the field came from manifold sources (and in fact, as this book shows, have always been present both in the field of dance practice as well as writing). It is crucial to cite here Thomas DeFranz’s Dancing Many Drums⁵ as well as Thomas DeFranz and Anita Gonzales’ Black Performance Theory (2014).⁶ Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s The Black Dancing Body (2003)⁷ brought center stage voices that had shaped black dance, but most profoundly, dance, as the book highlights the significant place black dance has in American dance. Jacqueline Shea-Murphy’s The People Have Never Stopped Dancing (2007)⁸ discusses Native American dance over the past thirty years. These are all important interventions in dance writing; however, it might be significant to highlight that nearly all center on American dance from various perspectives.

In political theory the work of Erin Manning⁹ and Carrie Noland brought discussions of the body to political theory, much in the context of what was then termed “the embodied turn,” galvanized by the pioneering work of Jane Bennett.¹⁰ However, none of these studies aimed to look at activism and indeed the focus on “politics” as a field of study allowed for competing interpretations of politics as a field of study and action, and most of them weren’t derived from the agents studied themselves, the dancers. Moreover, all these works occurred before the major political upheavals that galvanized the arguments of this book occurred.

This book responds more strongly to a different strand in contemporary writing coming out of political theory, radical theory, and radical democratic theory. Whereas politics continues to be discussed by scholars who do not settle upon definitions of concepts such as justice, equality, and democracy, these issues have moved to being discussed on the streets and on the march. Events unfolding around the world and especially in Anglo-America from 2016 have forced theorists and scholars to reconsider their approaches to politics, in theory and practice. These processes have been ongoing in many circles for a long time, specifically in fields of study such as African-American studies or Women’s Studies, which had seen themselves as antagonistic to the method and ethos of detached reflective thinking sitting at the heart of Western philosophy and political theory. However, the election of Donald Trump to the White House, the rise of right wing governments worldwide, and Britain’s ongoing debates around leaving the European Union brought a force of urgency to academic work and life in circles that had been mostly sheltered from the need to take to the streets and reflect upon action from the position of those inducing it. From the women’s marches in the USA, which galvanized a mass movement and return to direct action in the UK around Brexit, and in particular ongoing strikes in the higher education sector facilitated by the University and College Union (UCU), many academics in the Anglo-American world who had been theorizing about politics and its methods were forced to consider those as praxis. The owl of Minerva was beating her wings fast, and the time to withdraw and reflect using analytical disembodied constructs about questions of justice was running out.¹¹

However, there are strands of change and responses to these processes in writing. Most have been initiated, perhaps unsurprisingly, by women, and within feminist studies; the long tradition of feminist action as theory and theory as action has generated new responses to the burning issues of our time. And so, this book, examining dance and activism, is a response to new strands of writing tapping into long-existing traditions that had become very urgent. Bhattacharya, Fraser and Arruzza’s Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto,¹² Lola Olufemi’s Feminism, Interrupted,¹³ and Allison Phipps’s Me, not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism were a critical response to the rise of the #MeToo movement and return of feminism to be a hotly debated issue in action and theory. The collapse of Hilary Clinton’s campaign and withering of hopes of the first woman president of the United States, together with normalizing of misogyny and sexism around the world, attacks on hard-won reproductive rights—those rights for which Emma Goldman gave energy and time (sometimes in prison); attacks on gender studies programs, on LGBTI+ people all brought questions of feminist strategy into the mainstream in a quick and dramatic arc. All these studies cited are a questioning of how much mainstream feminism, focused on representation and debates around legal structures, can aid in challenging these new attacks. Furthermore, all these studies question how structural inequalities and marginalization (including racism and anti-queer sentiment and discourse) within feminism itself hinder it from attaining its radical possibilities. Intersectional justice sits at the heart of this book’s argument, and the critique issued in these books and others very much inform my own theoretical approach.

Another profound theoretical inspiration for this book is the longstanding radical work of Jodi Dean. Her Communist Horizon was a study of the Occupy movement and brought to discussion a grassroots activist uprising as a field of study. Her most recent intervention, Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging,¹⁴ asks about the use of comrade rather than ally in the context of the bigger context of solidarity and genuine partaking in struggles as active participant, not onlooker, which is the heart of this study of dance and activism. The move is, then, from politics to activism, from theory to praxis, from that which had passed and can be dissected and analyzed to that which unfolds in the now. There are many challenges and problematics that arise from this move, thus the analytical structure and the underlying assumptions of the study will be set out here.

And yet, reflecting on the many theoretical discussions that have galvanized thinking that led to this book, its motivation comes always from dancers. Martha Graham premiered her great call for humankind’s responsibility to each other in the face of rising violence and war, Chronicle, in 1936. The work Chronicle, in Graham’s time and understanding, as well as in those of the many generations who danced it, gives this book its organizing structure, spine, and impulse. Graham’s understanding of dance as action is vital for this book’s conceptual structure. Graham said “Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place.”¹⁵ Drawing on this constellation the book uses the term “chronicle” as a verb before it is a noun; a way of living rather than a title, praxis before it is a dance work. A central motivating question in this book is how do we chronicle radical action, in dance and word? What is the relationship between ...