Dance and Politics edited by Alexandra Kolb (review)

It is common for many dance artists and scholars to move within nations and between countries as part of their professions. With this multitude of lived, global trajectories comes the awareness of site-specific, issue-specific, and audience-specific views on dance, work with dance, and reception of dance. One such intriguing aspect concerns different articulations of dancing the political, and of defining, debating, and comparing its forms, affects, and effects. What were the political factors behind the arrests and killings of Indonesian classical dancers between 1965 and 1966 (Larasati 2013)? How can these historical events be related to the desires of today’s European choreographers to create political dances without explicit political content or identity politics (Hammergren 2012)? Why was dance made a tool of foreign policy and exported across the world during the Cold War by both the Soviet Union and the United States, and why does this not happen today (Franko 2007, 17)? Why has the field of Dance Studies taken so long to recognize the established tradition of investigations of the interrelations of migration and dance (Scolieri 2008, v)?

With questions like these in mind, it is timely to see the publication of an anthology on dance and politics that seeks to explore “the implications of dance in the explicitly political realm” (xiii). As editor Alexandra Kolb herself states, the definition of the expression “an explicitly political realm” is ambiguous; but, as the articles show, this can be a fruitful point of departure for investigating different meanings, as well as for provoking our understanding of the limits of the concept of “the political.”

In her introductory chapter, Kolb sets a framework for various meanings, and articulates four basic modes by which dance and politics can interact: through the content of dance, through its genre and form, through its impact on external political reality, and through the effects of state and governmental politics on dance itself. I find this a very useful model, which could benefit from being read in tandem with Mark Franko’s essay, “Dance and the Political” (2007). Franko’s work includes a differently articulated description of the kind of politics we use when we speak about dance and politics. He writes about the power of dance to make and unmake identity; the way in which interpretation is inferred in articulating the political; the relation of dancer to choreographer (which is a political relation); how dance acts in its role as public art; and dance’s “social conditions of possibility,” or how it is performed and produced (2007, 16–7). This broad definition can, of course, risk emptying “the political” of its interpretative force, but it still seems congenial to the understanding of the concept from a perspective that is not geographically limited.

Against this backdrop of an extended concept, it is interesting to note that only one author in Dance and Politics makes a clear distinction between real and purely symbolic politics. Roger Copeland’s main thesis is to critique the ways in which “the growing emphasis on traditional and popular culture … is played at the expense of individual Western choreographic ‘authors’” (55). He thereby denounces scholars who have a vision of choreographic authorship, “which conceives of the dance-maker as ‘laborer and collaborator’ rather than ‘inspired genius’” (40). This in turn leads Copeland to make a distinction between genuine political action in the real world, and the “purely imaginary” and symbolic substitutes for serious political work performed by academic scholars (62). There is, indeed, much to discuss in this densely written chapter, but in relation to my initial paragraph, I find it crucial to highlight local geographies and hence the difference between his description of the state of dance studies and choreography in the United States, and the aesthetics favored by many choreographers working in Europe. I would argue that the emphasis on collective work that Copeland sees as only a scholarly preference reflects the manner in which many European choreographers...