Foreword
This blog was launched back in 2018 as an (overly) ambitious project of articulating ways in which dance — in a variety of traditions and forms — enters a realm of the political. My initial claims and hopes led me only to further questions and doubts, yet the resulting journey provided me with plenty of ideas and impulses that found their realization in various projects at the intersection of art practice and theory. The texts published here are an expression of that learning process, which entailed not only research in the fields of dance history, social anthropology, politics, art history, etc., but also a continuous attempt to develop and refine a writing practice that can produce a vivid engagement for a reader, inciting joy, curiosity, and trembling in the face of the complexity of the world we live in.
Many of the dance artists and theorists featured in the texts, even if almost all are deceased by now, have impacted the ways I do and think dance, and I take it as a testimony of a paradoxical longevity of dancing, which travels between bodies and times. The writing itself I propose as never solitary, with the writer not only entering multiple co-working and co-thinking arrangements with the living but also surrounded by ghosts and spirits, listening to the voices in their own head and from afar.
Ultimately, this blog is a platform dedicated to learning. It aspires to reclaim dance and embodied knowledge as continually relevant, and to show how such recognition can unfold in a plethora of ways—both capturing and liberating. The choice of direction(s), I leave up to the readers.
This blog was launched back in 2018 as an (overly) ambitious project of articulating ways in which dance — in a variety of traditions and forms — enters a realm of the political. My initial claims and hopes led me only to further questions and doubts, yet the resulting journey provided me with plenty of ideas and impulses that found their realization in various projects at the intersection of art practice and theory. The texts published here are an expression of that learning process, which entailed not only research in the fields of dance history, social anthropology, politics, art history, etc., but also a continuous attempt to develop and refine a writing practice that can produce a vivid engagement for a reader, inciting joy, curiosity, and trembling in the face of the complexity of the world we live in.
Many of the dance artists and theorists featured in the texts, even if almost all are deceased by now, have impacted the ways I do and think dance, and I take it as a testimony of a paradoxical longevity of dancing, which travels between bodies and times. The writing itself I propose as never solitary, with the writer not only entering multiple co-working and co-thinking arrangements with the living but also surrounded by ghosts and spirits, listening to the voices in their own head and from afar.
Ultimately, this blog is a platform dedicated to learning. It aspires to reclaim dance and embodied knowledge as continually relevant, and to show how such recognition can unfold in a plethora of ways—both capturing and liberating. The choice of direction(s), I leave up to the readers.
Practicing of mass dance was to be ‘moving’ to the participants. Only when the feeling actualized the purpose of dance, could the dancing body find itself anew in the space shared with other fellow dancers. Their bodies were joint in a composition that
provides the sensation of intensely compressed experience characterizing momentous historical events
The significance of dance must be felt. In such rediscovery of a feeling body, one can be liberated not only from the alienation in relation to work but also in relation to self and one’s community. If we used to dance dances that meant something for us (Anna Halprin), the revival of dancing is initiated when its meaning is restored.
From "It's Alive" (Posted September 2019)
provides the sensation of intensely compressed experience characterizing momentous historical events
The significance of dance must be felt. In such rediscovery of a feeling body, one can be liberated not only from the alienation in relation to work but also in relation to self and one’s community. If we used to dance dances that meant something for us (Anna Halprin), the revival of dancing is initiated when its meaning is restored.
From "It's Alive" (Posted September 2019)
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