Dancing Politics: Worldmaking in Dance and Choreography

Abstract

Dance is a world in itself -this is a central figure of discourse since the beginning of the 20th century, i.e. the period in which modern industrial society was established. 1 As a world of the body and the senses, of movement and feelings, as a world of metaphors, for which words fail us, dance in the modern age, according to the modern dance discourse, constitutes an alternate world, namely a world beyond language and rationality.In the 20th century, dance, regardless of what kind, whether artistic dance, popular dance, religious ritual or therapeutic setting, represented a contrast to rationality, mechanization, technology and geometry.It was seen as an alternative realm to industrial work (cf.Klein 1992).Dance in the modern age drew its aesthetic legitimacy and its social justification for existence from this pattern of discourse, which allotted dance the social position of 'Outsider' and defined it as the 'Other'.Dance was considered an expression of feelings and understood as honest, authentic, organic or holistic: and this pattern of discourse formed the basis for asserting its subversive power and socio-critical and emancipatory potential, from which dance has derived and still derives its avant-garde claims as well as its educational mandate.

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