Power and the Body: Revisiting Dance and Theatre Aesthetic of Resistance in the Academy

The Congress on Research in Dance (CORD’s) thematic and structural concerns over the years, which seek to bring together dance and its allied fields of the performing arts (theatre, music, cinema, etc.), parallel the African aesthetic experience that emphasizes the interconnectedness and inseparability of theatre, dance, and music in performance. Theorizing on the self and the social, to examine the state of the profession, this paper offers an autoethnographic account not only of the contradictory ways in which personal and professional subjectivity is constructed but also of the performing body’s power and capacity to reproduce and transform the world. The paper argues that, historically, the performing body of color constitutes a continuum of creative possibilities whose capacity to resist state and institutional hegemonic power has always manifested itself covertly or overtly. In conclusion, the paper celebrates a long history of the performing body of color’s ability to double-speak. The performing body’s ability to create ambivalent discourses that can be outwardly entertaining while secretly radical and deeply revolutionary has throughout history empowered the body of color to resist even the most repressive circumstances.