Pigs Might Fly: Dance in the Time of Swine Flu

This essay takes the coincidence of pandemic H1N1/09 virus (so-called swine flu) and a collaborative dance-making project in Beijing in 2009 as a starting point for exploring some of the corporeal consequences of "Asian modernity." Tasked with researching the dance-making collaboration, I found that public debate about the pandemic, and the attendant restrictions on travel and movement, threw into relief otherwise unnoticed aspects of the choreographic process and the meanings of the resulting performances. Accordingly, the essay locates the project in relation to some of the networks of mobility, meaning, and exchange that impacted inter-corporeal relations within the dance studio, and extended out from it along flight paths and vectors of disease. In so doing, the analysis considers human-animal relations, intercultural collaboration, the status of the dancer in a "risk society," and the ethics of performance research against the backdrop of China's reemergence to geopolitical prominence on the world stage.