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83 5 Dancing the ruptured body: One Billion Rising, dance and gendered violence I move the reader–spectator to view the performance of a protest movement that calls on us to end violence against women through the power of dance. One Billion Rising, initiated by feminist author and activist Eve Ensler, calls for a global uprising on Valentine’s Day, utilising dance to protest against gendered violence. The impact of the movement has been far-reaching and its scope ambitious. The site of the movement is the moving body upon which gendered violence is inscribed
48 3 ‘The body says what words cannot’: Martha Graham, dance and politics Before Isadora Duncan’s untimely exit from the world stage in 1927, she and Martha Graham (11 May 1894–1 April 1991) shared the limelight for a while. After training in 1910 in the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts, mentored by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, in 1926 Graham founded the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, creating a hub for ongoing embodied conversations and revolutions in American dance. Those revolutions continue, they spill into multiple dancing
Dance has always been a method of self- expression for human beings. This book examines the political power of dance and especially its transgressive potential. Focusing on readings of dance pioneers Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, Gumboots dancers in the gold mines of South Africa, the One Billion Rising movement using dance to protest against gendered violence, dabkeh in Palestine and dance as protest against human rights abuse in Israel, the Sun Dance within the Native American Crow tribe, the book focuses on the political power of dance and moments in which dance transgresses politics articulated in words. Thus the book seeks ways in which reading political dance as interruption unsettles conceptions of politics and dance.
11 1 Moving beyond boundaries: writing on the body The book is written by many bodies who danced and inscribed their worlds upon the intersections between dance and politics. The argument is a three-dimensional space bounded by three axes; in this chapter I elaborate, explore and problematise the three axes which demarcate the space of the argument. The ontology upon which the argument acts is twofold. On the one hand the argument is grounded in the dancing bodies of those subjects whose political intervention has written upon the argument. On the other hand
66 4 ‘I want to tell them how I feel and how black people feel’: gumboot dance in South Africa Isadora Duncan’s rebelling body, dancing the chorus, was released into Martha Graham’s contracting chorus. But Duncan and Graham were not the first to mobilise choruses and their transgressive potential. I invite the reader–spectator to watch gumboot dance in South Africa, which, as we will see, utilised many elements performed by Graham and Duncan in a radically different context. The body is able to intervene universally; and it does so beyond theatrical
the question of jurisdiction: over what domain is the democratic body we are about to constitute authorized to take decisions? By a domain here I mean a geographical area – a territory – within which the decisions that the democracy is going to take will be applied. 2 Then there is the question of inclusion: who will form part of the relevant demos that makes these decisions, in the sense of being eligible to vote in elections and referendums, stand for office
ideologies’ are a tightly argued body of ideas that logically hang together in a well-constructed framework, as can be seen in the ‘great texts’ of the ideological traditions that have shaped modern political life. Liberalism, conservatism, socialism, Marxism, fascism and the other ideological traditions and movements all have a recognised body of literature expounding the main tenets of their ideological belief systems
, which motivate the chapter's turn to Beauvoir's feminist existentialism in The Second Sex ( 1972 ). Section 3 identifies in Beauvoir's earlier text The Ethics of Ambiguity ( 1948 ) her understanding of the struggle for recognition as an ambiguous tension between human agency and the constraints of the body and situation. Suggesting that Beauvoir's cosmopolitan universalism lies firstly in the common risk
99 6 Dancing human rights We have seen that ever since Isadora Duncan entered the stage of political dance, various instances of sic-sensuous have been performed on the stage of the argument by bodies contracting into themselves and releasing to other bodies, moving and being moved. Those bodies affirm their equality to other bodies –whether the dancing bodies they intervene against, or bodies inhabiting other worlds that deem them unequal. From Martha Graham’s audiences who are uninvited spectators to the gumboot dancers in South Africa and the flash mob
1 Introduction Our political world is in constant motion. Our lives are continually shifting. Collective communicative structures which have held us together in various forms of communal life are relentlessly being challenged by new languages. Practices that have bound human beings together for thousands of years are transformed, gain new meaning and receive renewed significance. This book is a study of one such practice, dance. The book intervenes in critical conjunctures in political theory, bringing together new reflections on the moving body, spaces of