Dance and politics: Moving beyond boundaries

Dance and politics

Dance and politics

Moving beyond boundaries

Dana Mills

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Dana Mills 2017

The right of Dana Mills to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 1 5261 0514 1 hardback

ISBN 978 1 5261 0515 8 paperback

First published 2017

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Minion by Out of House Publishing

In song and dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way forward flying into the air, dancing.

Friedrich Nietzsche

You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.

Merce Cunningham

For my father, Harold Mills, who taught me how to love dance, books and the world.

With love and thanks, always.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Moving beyond boundaries: writing on the body

2 ‘I dreamed of a different dance’: Isadora Duncan’s danced revolution

3 ‘The body says what words cannot’: Martha Graham, dance and politics

4 ‘I want to tell them how I feel and how black people feel’: gumboot dance in South Africa

5 Dancing the ruptured body: One Billion Rising, dance and gendered violence

6 Dancing human rights

Conclusions: the dancer of the future dancing radical hope

References

Index

Acknowledgements

I thank everyone at Manchester University Press. I thank Chris Goto-Jones and Cissie Fu for having faith in this project since its inception. Special thanks to Caroline Wintersgill, who really made this project possible on so many levels.

I am indebted to Michael Freeden, who encouraged me to pursue this project and commented on many drafts since its inception. I thank David Leopold for his wonderful conversation on political theory and beyond, who with exceptional generosity and kindness has helped me bring many of the ideas here into writing. David’s engagement with political theory has been a constant source of inspiration for me. I thank Marc Stears and Beverley Clack for their comments on an early version of this book, and for their ongoing generosity and inspiration.

I would especially like to thank practitioners who made time for me and shared their experiences of working on the various pieces I write about in the book. Lori Belilove, artistic director of the Isadora Duncan Dance Company, invited me to watch a rehearsal and spoke with me about her dance education. I spent some valuable time in the Martha Graham archives in the Library of Congress as well as in the Graham School in New York. I would particularly like to thank Janet Eilber, artistic director of the Graham Dance Company, for talking with me and giving me insights into the company’s work during its time at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. A very special thank you goes to the inimitable Marni Thomas Wood; first, for an inspirational Graham class I carry in my body still, and then for ongoing conversations in New York and Oxford, which taught me I can never really know enough about Martha Graham. Norton Owen, director of preservation at Jacob’s Pillow, made my stay there transformative and helped me through the many Graham materials the Pillow holds. Arkadi Zaides was very generous in sharing his work with me and talking with me about it.

I have benefited hugely from conversations with many scholars who engage with themes explored in this book in various ways. I would like to thank: Davide Panagia (for the best reading recommendations and for his inspiring energy), Vicki Thoms, Susan Jones, Fiona Macintosh and everyone at the APGRD, Pamela Sue Anderson (for fantastic feminist support and wonderful conversations on feminist philosophy and life beyond it), my dear friend Jonna Patterson (my favourite Rancière interlocutor who always pushes me to think further and harder), participants of an APSA panel in 2013 in which I gave an earlier version of Chapter 3 of this book, Elisabeth Anker (for support and inspiration) and my select group of theorist friends and comrades – Eloise Harding, Or Rosenboim and Genia Ivanova – for friendship, encouragement and always stimulating conversation.

I was fortunate to spend time in the classics and political science departments at Northwestern University. I thank all members of those departments, who were such hospitable hosts. Sara Monoson had made the experience happen and has been a wonderfully generous mentor to me since. I thank Mary Dietz for an inspirational exchange that has inspired me to extend my thinking what I am doing. I thank Bonnie Honig for ongoing conversations which never cease to galvanise and inspire me. Bonnie’s example has been truly transformative for me.

I met Rachel Holmes too late in this project for her to suffer its full consequences. However, her never-ending passion and commitment to both social justice and writing, and her inimitable combination of principle and compassion, have been transformative for me. I thank Rachel – Sister Comrade – for her inspiration and generosity, in conversation between living and dead feminists that is always going ahead.

I have been humbled by sharing an intellectual space with one of the most powerful voices of our time on social justice, Baroness Helena Kennedy QC. Helena’s uncompromising ethics have galvanised and profoundly inspired me. I will not attempt to add to the high praise that Helena receives in every possible medium of communication, but those who are blessed to know her in person will testify that she is far better than any superlatives and honours bestowed upon her. Helena is my role model in everything that is good and just in the world, and through her example always pushes me to be a better person. I thank and love Helena for being a never-ending source of inspiration for me in her extraordinary mentorship and friendship.

This book was written during my time teaching political theory at Hertford College, Oxford. I thank my colleagues for thought-provoking conversations and for support and encouragement. A special tribute goes to the very singular Principal of Hertford, Will Hutton, who makes the college a truly egalitarian, vibrant and energetic space for radical discussion about politics and justice. Will’s leadership makes the college a really wonderful place to think and write in. I thank Will for his example, generosity and inspiration, for being a role model for us all in how good we can be.

A big thank you goes to my most constant interlocutors in political theory, my students, who always push me to think harder and keep my mind alive; and a special tribute goes to the women’s studies MSt cohort of 2014–15 for asking me the best questions about the manuscript in the course of writing it and inspiring me in our joint effort to smash the patriarchy.

The manuscript has benefited hugely from Clare Joyce’s and Kiley Hunkler’s very careful reading. I cannot thank both of these brilliant women enough for their incredibly helpful comments and for being such wonderful interlocutors with me in the process of tying up this project.

I have been blessed by a fantastic posse of extraordinary friends around the world who I wish to thank: Yonatan Bar On, for cooking for me, supporting and inspiring me for so long; my gorgeous Lee Peled, whose willpower and good judgement have sustained me since our days dancing together through both personal and professional changes, and whose presence in my life is a constant mainstay of inspiration; Adi Shoham, who has shared the ride with me in so many ways and always has been there for me; my dearest Tamara Sharon-Ross, who, despite being on the other side of the Atlantic, makes my life much more worth living through her friendship; the one and only Hodaya Jane Slutsky Kashtan, for strength and inspiration over such a long time; Nancy Eisenhower and Jan Calamita, who have given me a home away from home, many fabulous conversations and the best company I could ask for in Oxford; Jane Buswell, woman of great compassion and fierce personality, for everything; Clio Kennedy-Hutchison for feminist fabulousness; and last but definitely not least, the wonderful Dawn Berry, who has made Oxford worthwhile.

My family has tolerated and supported me in the long period of working on this project. I would like to thank my sister Susan Lucas for love and support and my cousins all around the world. I would especially like to thank Julian and Margaret Haines, Louise and Matt Dunstan and Samantha and David Haines, for giving me a home in Wales.

My beloved aunt Tirza Posner has been a pillar of strength throughout my life and a ceaseless source of support and love. My mother, Gabriella Mills, has been a constant role model for me in her love of books and of the world beyond them and in always being relentlessly compassionate. My father, Harold Mills, is always my hero and the biggest inspiration on my life. This book is for him.

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 action and our interpretation of politics and political theory more broadly. Jodi Dean’s careful examination of the Occupy movement in The Communist Horizon, in which, quite literally, bodies intervened in public spaces in order to reconsider distributive justice; Jane Bennett’s crucial intervention into the humanist and language-driven world of political theory, Vibrant Matter; and Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s edited collection New Materialisms opened up a vista for scholars and theorists seeking new ways to consider the body in its relationship to the physical world it inhabits, as well as to understanding politics through the long-standing humanistic tradition in philosophy. However, the inspiration and galvanising force for embarking on my own argument comes from a question raised by Bonnie Honig in her reading of Antigone, which converses with numerous other readings of this play, from Hegel to Butler through Lacan, in her Antigone, Interrupted; she revisits an invitation to leave grief behind, dance all night and join the feast of Dionysus (Honig 2013: 119). Honig asks us to reconsider that invitation from the chorus; I follow her in reconsidering this invitation and yet show throughout the book that dance has served many people around the world for various purposes; it was never merely just a way to forget.

This book illuminates the power of dance to bring people together, as well as to separate them, in different moments in time as well as in different geographical and cultural locations. Throughout the book I argue that dance is a sustained method of communication that includes grammatical structures and units, just like verbal language; at the same time it is a method of intervention that brings new speaking beings into shared spaces. Dance has its own methods of interpreting values through symbolic structures. Thus dance provides interpretations of questions regarding human beings’ political lives within its own system of signification. At times, these interpretations through movement challenge and transcend conceptual interpretations articulated in verbal language. Consequently, I read dance as an embodied method of communication which is a subversive practice. It challenges women’s and men’s perceptions of themselves as members of communities as well as their shared spaces and communal lives. Dance inserts new voices into existing communities; those voices are articulated through moving bodies.

Dance has been always been an essential part of human life. It has always occupied a central position in the manifold forms of shared human existence. Throughout time and space, women and men have expressed themselves through their moving bodies by dancing on stage, which, in turn, has moved other bodies, those of their audiences. Further, the bodies which have been moved have not kept still themselves; they have, in turn, affected other bodies and altered the way they have been perceived. Those bodies are, in and of themselves, political bodies. They are part of engrained symbolic webs that mould them and enable them to become what they are. Hence, dance and politics are always already intertwined. Dancing bodies affect bodies in the audience; all of those bodies are political entities.

Understanding dance as including linguistic and communicative features within it, as being part of a whole world, allows the study to expand into understanding issues and ideas articulated through moving bodies. In this book I show that dance indeed allowed moments of transgression and emancipation; but dance has also been used by oppressors and at times has darker sides to it than meet the eye. Thus the book draws away from the absolute alignment of the normative and emotive content that can be articulated in dance. Dance can be used to better and worsen human beings’ lives. Dance can articulate joy and pain, anger and jubilation. The conceptual focus in the book is on moments in which dance has been used by moving subjects for the better. The first chapter shows the underlying conceptual logic for this focus; drawing on an assumption of equality allows me to argue that human beings utilised their bodies when they were deemed unequal and achieved greater visibility within their communities. The concluding chapter of the book will push this thesis further, into the boundaries between ethics and politics, by examining this moment of subversion through the body operating within the normative-theoretical idea of radical hope; a new ontology that gives its subject the possibility to dance a world in becoming.

It is crucial to pause here and illuminate my use of the term ‘world’. The use of the term world does not correspond to a known ontological space from the so-called ‘canon’ of Western political thought. The argument starts from an awareness that what has been termed a ‘known’ world in political theory will tend to lapse into a white, middle-class, male, Judeo-Christian world. My use of the term ‘world’ aims to do the opposite – to look at diverse subjects who have mobilised their bodies to create systems of signification out of their own environment. Thus the book starts from the recognition that human beings occupy separate worlds which yield different meanings and forms of life.

The first chapter of the book outlines the conceptual structure as well as the arc of the argument. The argument is structured as a three-dimensional argument that occupies a space of its own; it works within the space demarcated by its axes. This is never a metaphorical space, as the argument arises from the bodies of people who danced and from the stages upon which performances took place. The book does not only consider dance for the theatre; thus the use of the term ‘stage’ is representative of a space allowing for communication between two bodies: one audience member and one dancer.

The first of the three axes around which the argument is structured is the tension between contraction and release – the politics inscribed within the body itself as a space, and the politics generated from interaction between two moving bodies. The second axis is the distinction between the weak reading of political dance – the representation through moving bodies of ideas previously articulated in words – and the strong reading of political dance – the creation of a phenomenologically independent world which includes its own system of inscription and world of reception. The third axis is that of sic-sensuous. The concept of sic-sensuous looks at processes of intervention occurring between two sensed and sensing bodies, when meaning is transferred and sometimes creates new methods of embodied interpretation. I turn away from those narrating the story of the politics of dance – theorists and historians – towards the dancers and audience members themselves. I ask that we, as readers–spectators of the argument, become more attentive to the dancing bodies that have interrupted and transfigured our symbolic frameworks across space and time. I have constructed my conceptual framework