Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance

This book argues that contemporary dance, imagined to have a global belonging, is vitiated by euro-white constructions of risk and currency that remain at its core. Differently, the book reimagines contemporary dance along a "South-South" axis, as a poly-centric, justice-oriented, aesthetic-temporal category, with intersectional understandings of difference as a central organizing principle. Placing alterity and heat, generated via multiple pathways, at its center, it foregrounds the work of South-South artists, who push against constructions of "tradition" and white-centered aesthetic imperatives, to reinvent their choreographic toolkit and respond to urgent questions of their times. In recasting the grounds for a different "global stage," the argument widens its scope to indicate how dance-making both indexes current contextual inequities and broader relations of social, economic, political, and cultural power, and inaugurates future dimensions of justice.
Winner of the 2022 Oscar G. Brockett Prize for Dance Research

1. Introduction: Speaking from the waiting rooms of History . - 2. States of contemporary concert dance: The tyranny of the pointed foot. - 3. Sardono Kusumo/ Growing contemporary movement from vibration. - 4. Germaine Acogny/The technical strategies of pollution and Rulan Tangen/The entanglement of memory and imagination in technique. - 5. Rosy Simas: Deflating conventions of indigeneity differently. - 6. Nora Chipaumire: The politics of continuous re-writing. - 7. Conversations that raise the roof: In dialogue with Hari Krishnan, Marcus Young, and the dancers of Ananya Dance Theatre.