Love Dances

Abstract

Abstract Our current geopolitical moment is characterized by shockingly aggressive forms of xenophobia and racism. This alarming, though not new, predicament compels us to seek creative modes for resisting hatred and encouraging care across difference. Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration explores the possibilities for global interrelationality in the realm of dance. The book contends that performances of interculturalism in dance offer opportunities for practicing intersubjective connection. Body-to-body engagement in the studio and on the stage carries the potential to shape everyday encounters with difference in the world. Looking specifically at duets, Love Dances examines how pairs of dance artists from unique cultural and aesthetic backgrounds—from Asia, the Asian diaspora, and the West; trained in contemporary dance, hip-hop, flamenco, Thai classical dance, kabuki, and butoh—find ways to co-create, in spite of contention, histories of power, misunderstanding, and mistranslation. Love Dances explores the ethics and politics of intercultural collaboration, acknowledging the forces of dissension, prejudice, and violence present in any contact zone, but ultimately arguing that choreographic invention across difference can be an act of love in the face of loss and serve as a model for difficult, imaginative, compassionate global affiliation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.