Fighting Choreographies: Dance and Violence in American Popular Culture

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

In her analytical treatment of breakdance as an element of hip hop, dance scholar Sally Banes describes its hyper-physical, competitive dance style as a bodily rhetoric reproducing territorial rivalries between neighborhood factions. In this connection she calls break dancing “a stylized, rhythmic, aesthetically framed form of combat.” The bodily kinetics of fighting are not unique to the breakdance form, but are more broadly present across the medium of dance.

All of the presentations in this panel examine the intersection between dance (or bodily choreographies more broadly construed) and violence. In our analyses we have focused on interpreting the disposition and movement of bodies in spaces as our primary cultural text. Because dance engages so intimately with the body, it functions as a relevant site from which to critique and understand the corporeal dimensions of violence, both as it is inflicted and as it is suffered.

Particularly at this moment in the history of cultural studies, Dance Studies presents itself as an important methodological addition because of its unique ability to contribute to what is emerging as an interpretive “revolution from below” — that is, a radical reassessment of the politics of cultural forms based on a recovery of the embodied subject at the center of meaning-making. In 1986, Susan Foster’s Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance proposed an epistemological conception of the dancing body as a site of cultural power. Ten years later, Jane Desmond argued in her essay “Embodying Difference: Issues In Dance and Cultural Studies” for a more expansive understanding of “text” in the scope of cultural studies, advocating for the field to move towards and recognize the research potentialities of dance: “By enlarging our studies of bodily ‘texts’ to include dance in all its forms . . . we can further our understandings of how social identities are signaled, formed, and negotiated through bodily movement.” However, dance studies still remains underrepresented in cultural studies and American Studies circles.

As an insistently embodied art form, dance is an invaluable textual resource for recovering the centrality of affect to the processes of meaning-making. Affect is the physiological “feeling” response of the human organism to experiences. In his analysis of the “micro-biopower” of urban spaces, Nigel Thrift has called for a better understanding of the affective procedures by which subjectivity is constructed. Dance studies offers methodological illumination in this project, since affect is expressed by the dancing, attitudinal body in complexities that are not readily available to other forms of communicative media. Theorist and critic Julia Kristeva has borrowed Husserl’s idea of the “thetic threshold” to describe the pervious boundary between the spoken and the unspeakable that affect traverses. Dance movements poised on the thetic threshold can articulate complex and even conflicted affective states. This is particularly relevant in the study of violence and the subjective experiences with which violence is associated.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• To Be Announced, NA

Individual Presentations

• Engineering the Choreography of 21st-Century U.S. Warfare - Jessica Behm, CITYatwork (NY)

• Fighting Angry: “Cool” Violence in the Dancing of West Side Story - Daniel Belgrad, University of South Florida (FL)