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

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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.

Reviews

Anyone encountering Paramana and Gonzalezs 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. * Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy *
[Performance, Dance and Political Economy] addresses how dance and movement provide a means for our bodies to claim back the world and reject the commodified relations of capitalism ... The collection successfully illuminates the role of dance in thinking about these political questions. * Dance Chronicle *
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 Nyongo 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 *
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 Grinic, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria *
This new interdisciplinary dialogue opens up fresh perspectives that strike a good balance between theoretical perspectives and responses to these that are grounded in the experiences of artists and others in the field. Gonzalez and Paramana have assembled a team who have a wide range of knowledge and expertise, are all well established but progressive, and offer stimulating contributions. * Ramsay Burt, De Montfort University, UK *

Author Bio

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 Jarochos Soul, as well as of numerous articles and book chapters.