Dancing Bodies, Racialized Futures: Choreopolitical Curriculum and Human Optimization

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 9:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Arts based educational research and dance/movement

Abstract

Dance privileges embodied education's questions, speaking specifically on how its practices reveal how bodies move together in space and enact social politics. This paper is a historical analysis of a 1940s University dance program that traces the choreopolitical orders found in the mission and administrative materials of dance curriculum, specific to the making of Black dancers (aesthetics of beauty, evaluations of fitness, market value, and social capital). Data points to eugenic frameworks of the racialized making of optimized humans. Such analysis of the dance curriculum aids understanding for intersectional navigations of difference—choreopolitical curriculum—within movement training and is timely in the call for intentional research reexamining historical frameworks still in operation within our educational spaces.

Author

• Kandyce A. Amie, DePauw University