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  • Moving Otherwise: Dance, Violence, and Memory in Buenos Aires by Victoria Fortuna
  • Dasha A. Chapman
MOVING OTHERWISE: DANCE, VIOLENCE, AND MEMORY IN BUENOS AIRES. By Victoria Fortuna. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019; pp. 276.

How might critical dance studies help us understand the embodied dimensions of political violence and economic precarity, as well as the myriad corporeal strategies people use to navigate, process, and intervene within such contexts? Victoria Fortuna's Moving Otherwise: Dance, Violence, and Memory in Buenos Aires responds to this inquiry in her meticulously researched account of contemporary Argentinian dancers' bodily engagements with political terror, personal and collective trauma, and economic crisis from the 1960s through the early 2000s. The book's conceptual framework of "moving otherwise" extends recent dance studies theories of movement's relationship to the political and deepens historical analyses of performance and power in Argentina. Inspired by a conversation with dancer-interlocutor Deborah Kalmar (6–7), Fortuna's analytic foregrounds the ways Argentina's repressive state thoroughly aimed to restrain bodily movement, and argues that therefore it must be the body's corporeal-kinetic maneuvers that "expose [the] limits" of state disciplinary mechanisms, shift such confining violent landscapes, and "negotia[te] new political possibilities" (5–7). Fortuna weaves a richly detailed genealogy of moving otherwise through fifty years of concert dance works that explicitly or implicitly activated political themes, placed in conversation with the capacious ways dancers have moved politically in streets, studios, and unconventional environments. In a contemporary moment when calls to reckon with intensifying authoritarianism, neoliberal insecurity, and sexual/gender-based violence fuel mobilizations of bodies on the pavement and on our screens—such as the recent feminist protest choreography "Un violador en tu camino" (A rapist in your way) initiated in Chile but now performed and distributed across the globe—Moving Otherwise in content and method inspires a turn not only toward histories of violence and resistance but also toward alternative pathways to other futures.

To trace the networks of dance-makers, techniques, and infrastructures that contributed original practices of "moving otherwise," Fortuna's study excavates Argentina's transnational dance history from archives, personal collections, dancers' own embodied memories, documented and undocumented performances, ethnography, and her own experiences dancing in Buenos Aires. Notably, Fortuna's analyses of the ways dance intervened politically emerge from close attention to the kinetic-corporeal theories put into motion by her Argentinian interlocutors. A strength of the work is the manner in which she foregrounds the voices, experiences, and performances of these dancers. As part of Oxford University Press's growing body of dance studies publications, a companion website hosts full and partial video documentation of performances described in the text. Together, the book and website offer new visions of Argentinian embodied politics and model a hemispheric performance studies enlivened by multiple dance studies modalities.

Progressing chronologically through Argentinian political history, Fortuna employs a comparative approach that places both staged and "nonstaged" performances in conversation within each chapter's designated temporal-political context, highlighting the given period's specific authoritarian demands on bodies in relation to the vibrations of movements otherwise. Chapter 1, "Mobile Bodies," launches the book's genealogy in the formative period of 1960s Buenos Aires. Decentering Euro-American narratives of contemporary dance through transnational perspective, Fortuna examines how the work of choreographers Ana Kamien and Susana Zimmermann, alongside prominent performance institutions, facilitated possibilities for social critique and experimentation in the city's cosmopolitan middle-class milieu. At the same time, their performances also declared a "state of alert" about an increasingly repressive military government in the latter part of the decade (34).

The stakes of Fortuna's work sharpen as we encounter the intensity of violence and restriction in Buenos Aires, consequently registering the magnitude of risk taken by the movers featured in the book. In chapter 2, "The Revolution Was Danced," early 1970s state repression clashes with leftist political militancy, as Fortuna elucidates the concrete ways dancers contributed to revolutionary political action in spaces of confinement and on concert stages. Following an archival trace, Fortuna reveals [End Page 269] the militancy of dancers Silvia Hodgers, María Elena Maucieri, and Alicia Sanguinetti, who brought dance training, choreography, and...

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