DECENTRALIZING DANCE STUDIES: HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF CIRCULATIONS
Organization: Ivan Jimenez (Université Paris-Est Créteil) y Isabelle Launay (Université Paris 8).
Abstract:
The aim of this workshop is to share the state of research on the history and anthropology of dance circulations, insofar as they help to decentralize dance studies and historiography. The proposal for this workshop stems from a close collaboration between two partner universities of the Institut des Amériques - Université Paris-Est Créteil (UPEC, laboratoire IMAGER, groupe CREER) and Université Paris 8 (Laboratoire MUSIDANSE, équipe Danses, gestes et corporéités) - and the Réseau Descentradxs (Décentrer les recherches en danse).
Initially, considering the territory of the Americas as a whole, the aim will be to open up reflection on the epistemological and political significance of the concepts of decentering and situated knowledge, from a transnational and transdisciplinary perspective nourished by exchanges between dance researchers (history, anthropology, aesthetics) and specialists from other disciplinary fields (arts, literature, philosophy, among others). Secondly, given the epistemological and political issues raised by post-colonial and decolonial studies, for example, concerning a modernity conceived according to a linear Eurocentric temporality, a second thematic axis is proposed around the concepts of modern/modernity, contemporary/contemporaneity, postcolonial/postcoloniality and decolonial/decoloniality.
Sometimes criticized or questioned, but always at work in the histories of stage dance in the Americas - North America, Central America, South America - the categories of modern and contemporary dance are increasingly situated in local contexts, while at the same time drawing attention to gestural circulations across national borders - for example, in the context of training or artistic collaborations. For example, emblematic figures of the so-called “modern” dances of Europe and the United States have left visible traces in the choreographic landscapes of Central and South America.
What critical approaches to these gestural transfers can be proposed today, from the point of view of the asymmetry of geopolitical relations between North and South? Elsewhere, in a number of African countries such as Niger and Senegal, the category of modern dance is also being used in a number of ways, demonstrating the construction of a modern/contemporary but non-Western identity, by reactivating historical and imaginary links with the Caribbean. How can we deconstruct the essentialisms surrounding the modern and the contemporary? How does the question of modernity and contemporaneity in dance intersect with the question of national identity? How do dancers express and materialize their desire for modernity and contemporaneity? What gestural circulations, what processes of identification and disidentification, what ideas of the body carry these desires for modernity and contemporaneity? How do dance practices help to counter the exclusion and invisibility that result from the perceptual schemes imposed by hegemonic centers? More generally, what consequences can be drawn from the problematization of the “coloniality of power” (Quijano) in the decentered histories of danced gestures, outside the current paradigm of a multipolar world?
