Moving Otherwise

Abstract

Moving Otherwise examines how contemporary dance practices in Buenos Aires, Argentina, enacted politics within climates of political and economic violence from the mid-1960s to the mid-2010s. From the repression of military dictatorships to the precarity of economic crises, contemporary dancers and audiences consistently responded to and reimagined the everyday choreographies that have accompanied Argentina’s volatile political history. The central concept, “moving otherwise,” names how concert dance—and its offstage practice and consumption—offers alternatives to, and sometimes critiques, the patterns of movement and bodily comportment that shape everyday life in contexts marked by violence. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and the author’s embodied experiences as a collaborator and performer, the book analyzes a wide range of practices including concert works, community dance initiatives, and the everyday labor that animates dance. It demonstrates how these diverse practices represent, resist, and remember violence, and engender social mobilization on and off the theatrical stage. As the first book-length critical study of Argentine contemporary dance, it introduces a breadth of choreographers to an English speaking audience, including Ana Kamien, Susana Zimmermann, Estela Maris, Alejandro Cervera, Renate Schottelius, Susana Tambutti, Silvia Hodgers, and Silvia Vladimivsky. It considers previously undocumented aspects of Argentine dance history, including interactions among contemporary dancers and 1970s leftist political militancy, Argentine dance labor movements, political protest, and the prominence of tango themes in contemporary dance works that address the memory of political violence. Contemporary dance, the book demonstrates, has a rich and diverse history of political engagement in Argentina.