Full Description
Reframes dance as an intersectional practice of community-building and just world-making
Through empowered movement that centers the lives, stories, and dreams of marginalized women, Ananya Dance Theatre has revealed how the practice of and commitment to artistic excellence can catalyze social justice. With each performance, this professional dance company of Black, Brown, and Indigenous gender non-conforming women and femmes of color challenges heteronormative patriarchies, white supremacist paradigms, and predatory global capitalism. Their creative artistic processes and vital interventions have transformed the spaces of contemporary concert dance into sites of empowerment, resistance, and knowledge production.
Drawing from more than fifteen years of collaborative dance-making and sustained dialogues based on deep alliances across communities of color, Dancing Transnational Feminisms offers a multigenre exploration of how dance can be intersectionally reimagined as practice, methodology, and metaphor for feminist solidarity. Blending essays with stories, interviews, and poems, this collection explores timely questions surrounding race and performance, gender and sexuality, art and politics, global and local inequities, and the responsibilities of artists toward their communities.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword by D. Soyini Madison
Acknowledgments
Dancing and Writing Together
Feminist Embodiments, Transnational Solidarities
Ananya Chatterjea, Hui Niu Wilcox, and Alessandra Lebea Williams
PART I. MULTIPLE IDENTITIES: SHARED DREAMS OF COLLECTIVE DANCING
1. Historical Ruminations: Breath, Heat, and Movement-Building
Ananya Chatterjea
2. "It's Been My Community": Interview with Gina Lynn Kaur Kundan
Alessandra Lebea Williams
3. Ananya Dance Theatre as Social Justice Experiment: Where We Were in 2005, Where We Are Now
Shannon Gibney
4. The Gone Bird Song
Chitra Vairavan
5. Dance of the Spiraling Generations: On Love and Healing with Ananya Dance Theatre
Hui Niu Wilcox
PART II. EMBODYING SOLIDARITIES AND INTERSECTIONS: BLACK AND BROWN DANCING
6. Femininity, Breaking That Boundary: Interview with Orlando Zane Hunter Jr.
Alessandra Lebea Williams
7. Loving Deeply: Black and Brown Women and Femmes in the Theatrical Jazz Aesthetic of Laurie Carlos and the Yorchhā Practice of Ananya Dance Theatre
Alessandra Lebea Williams
8. Emerald City
Renée Copeland
9. Dancing Black Militancies: Written Meditation on Performance, Black(female)ness, and Dance as Ecological Resistance in Ananya Dance Theatre
Zenzele Isoke, with Naimah Petigny
PART III. TRANSGRESSING SPACE AND BORDERS: LOCAL POLITICS, TRANSNATIONAL EPISTEMES
10. Mindful Space-Making: Crossing Boundaries with Ananya Dance Theatre
Surafel Wondimu Abebe
11. Speculative Choreography: Futures of Feminist Food Justice and Sovereignty
Jigna Desai
12. Musings on Crossing: Ananya Dance Theatre in Addis Ababa
Hui Niu Wilcox
13. Ananya Dance Theatre and the Twin Cities: Community and Dance
David Mura
14. Forecast
Mankwe Ndosi
PART IV. AGAINST CATEGORIES OF TIME: HISTORY, TRADITION, CONTEMPORARY DANCE
15. This Stage Is Not a Safe Space
Thomas F. DeFrantz
16. My Work Is Worth the Struggle
Sherie C. M. Apungu
17. Ananya Dance Theatre in the Genealogy of Women of Color Feminism
Roderick A. Ferguson
18. Absence/Presence/Silence/Noise
Toni Shapiro-Phim
PART V. IMAGINING RESISTANCE AND HOPE
19. A Politics of Hope: Letters, Dance, and Dreams
Patricia DeRocher, Simi Kang, and Richa Nagar
20. A Personal Reckoning: Reflections from Duurbaar to Mohona
Brenda Dixon-Gottschild
21. Fire from Dry Grass
Nimo Hussein Farah
22. Affirmation
Ananya Chatterjea
List of Contributors
Index
