Dance, Politics & Co-Immunity

Extract

Dance, Politics & Co-Immunity developed out of a symposium organized by the Master in Choreography and Performance at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Germany, which was held with a joint symposium Thinking—Resisting—Reading the Political organized by the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture at the same university in 2010. Whereas the cultural studies symposium asked, “What specific perspectives and methodological consequences arise for the study of culture that are informed by recent deliberations on the relationship of the political and the aesthetic?” (2010), the dance symposium invited participants and contributors to the anthology “to think about the multiple connections between politics, community, dance, and globalization from the perspective of Dance and Theatre Studies, History, Philosophy, and Sociology” (13). As indicated by the title of the cultural studies symposium and some of the key speakers, including Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe, and Judith Butler, the term political is not used as broadly as it might be used in U.S.-based dance studies discourse. Rather, the political is predominantly investigated by both symposia for its resistive potential and from a liberal or post-Marxist stance.