Full Description
If we imagine multiple ways of being together, how might that shift choreographic practices and help us imagine ways groups assemble in more varied ways than just pairing another man with another woman? How might dancing queerly ask us to imagine futures through something other than heterosexuality and reproduction? How does challenging gender binaries always mean thinking about race, thinking about the postcolonial, about ableism? What are the arbitrary rules structuring dance in all its arenas, whether concert and social or commercial and competition, and how do we see those invisible structures and work to disrupt them?
Queer Dance brings together artists and scholars in a multi-platformed project-book, accompanying website, and live performance series to ask, "How does dancing queerly progressively challenge us?" The artists and scholars whose writing appears in the book and whose performances and filmed interviews appear online stage a range of genders and sexualities that challenge and destabilize social norms. Engaging with dance making, dance scholarship, queer studies, and other fields, Queer Dance asks how identities, communities, and artmaking and scholarly practices might consider what queer work the body does and can do. There is great power in claiming queerness in the press of bodies touching or in the exceeding of the body best measured in sweat and exhaustion. How does queerness exist in the realm of affect and touch, and what then might we explore about queerness through these pleasurable and complex bodily ways of knowing?
Contents
Introduction
Clare Croft
Section 1: Queering the Stage
1. To Be A Showboy
Lou Henry Hoover
2. "Our Love was not Enough": Queering Gender, Cultural Belonging, and Desire in Contemporary Abhinaya
Sandra Chatterjee and Cynthia Ling Lee
3. Women Dancing Otherwise: The Queer Feminism of Gu Jiani's Right & Left
Emily E. Wilcox
4. The Hysterical Spectator: Dancing with Feminists, Nellies, Andro-dykes and Drag Queens
Doran George
5. Chasing Feathers: Jerome Bel, Swan Lake, and the Alternative Futures of Re-enacted Dance
Julian B. Carter
6. Dancing Marines and Pumping Gasoline: Coded Queerness in Depression-era American Ballet
Jennifer L. Campbell
7. Queer Spaces in Anna Sokolow's Rooms
Hannah Kosstrin
Section 2: Dancing Toward a Queer Sociality
8. queer dance in three acts
thomas f. defrantz
9. In Praise of Latin Night at the Queer Club
Justin Torres
10. An Buachaillín Bán: Reflections on One Queer's Performance within Traditional Irish Music & Dance
Nicholas Gareiss
11. Aunty Fever: A Queer Impression
Kareem Khubchandani
12. Last Cowboy Standing: Testing a Critical Choreographic Inquiry
Peter Carpenter
13. RMW(a) & RMW from the inside out
Jennifer Monson
Section 3: Intimacy
14. Futari Tomo: A Queer Duet for Taiko
Angela K. Ahlgren
15. "Oh No! Not This Lesbian Again": The Punany Poets Queer the Pimp-Ho Aesthetic
Raquel L. Monroe
16. Choreographing the Chronic
Patrick McKelvey
17. Expressing Life Through Loss: On Queens That Fall With A Freak Technique
Anna Martine Whitehead
References
