DANCE AND POLITICS: RESEARCH ITINERARIES FROM THE POLITICAL EXPERIENCES OF DANCE
Dance, understood as an artistic discipline, has a historical and theoretical trajectory consolidated through the exchange of repertoires and research from different countries and continents. Its trajectory, within the framework of modernity, entails a relationship of imbrication with the political that can be identified from its very genesis, and which can be understood as the consolidation of hegemonic discourses through artistic practices fostered by the State, mainly from the twentieth century onward (Eiff, 2020).
The well-known founding milestone of the creation of the Royal Academy of Dance in 1661 by King Louis XIV of France, which inaugurated choreographic notation and began to be articulated in various treatises (Lepecki, 2006, pp. 13-46), gave rise to a discursive field of choreographic reproduction of a series of practices of meaning (Foster in Franko and Vallejos, 2021). In this way, in the various countries where the discipline has developed, a certain continuity can be understood among common phenomena, including the presence of stable companies employing diverse academic techniques, theaters and venues, training spaces, and the programming of festivals and gatherings specific to the discipline.
Already in the twentieth century, the consolidation of Dance Studies (Morri, 2009; Gonzalez, 2023) provided a nourishing basis for critical reflections that, contributing their own methodologies, recognize the field of dance as a producer of knowledge and no longer merely as a body of works organized along a historical timeline. This perspective, which moves away from purely repertoire- and/or aesthetics-focused analyses, has made it possible to study the discipline as part of the social, cultural and political fabric in which it unfolds. And, at the same time, to carry out, through its own methodological approaches, a reading of social and cultural dynamics in specific historical contexts, contributing to theoretical, political, social and aesthetic debates, in close dialogue with the Social Sciences.
Thanks to the proliferation of university professionalization programs over the past three decades, a growth in theoretical reflections seeking to read the political implications of the dances practiced in our territories has been observed, as well as proposals for situated theoretical frameworks. This has broadened the reading of the relationship between dance and politics, ranging from the institutional, through the aesthetic, to the social manifestations articulated from within the discipline itself.
In this context of openness and debate, it is key to open a space for dialogue that enables and nourishes the exchange of theoretical, methodological and political frameworks guiding this research, highlighting the value of the very political practices that, from dance (mainly contemporary dance), are identified today as a space in which theoretical-political, as well as social, anthropological, aesthetic and historical conceptualizations are at play.
