Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance: South-South Choreographies by Ananya Chatterjea
This book argues that contemporary dance, imagined to have a global belonging, is vitiated by euro-white constructions of risk and currency that remain at its core. Differently, the book reimagines contemporary dance along a “South-South” axis, as a poly-centric, justice-oriented, aesthetic-temporal category, with intersectional understandings of difference as a central organizing principle. Placing alterity and heat, generated via multiple pathways, at its center, it foregrounds the work of South-South artists, who push against constructions of “tradition” and white-centered aesthetic imperatives, to reinvent their choreographic toolkit and respond to urgent questions of their times. In recasting the grounds for a different “global stage,” the argument widens its scope to indicate how dance-making both indexes current contextual inequities and broader relations of social, economic, political, and cultural power, and inaugurates future dimensions of justice.
Ananya Chatterjea is Professor of Dance at the University of Minnesota, USA, where she teaches courses in Critical Dance Studies and Contemporary Technique. Her work as choreographer, dancer, and thinker brings together contemporary Dance, social justice choreography, and a philosophy of #OccupyDance. She is artistic director of Ananya Dance Theatre, a Twin Cities-based professional dance company of Black and brown women and femmes, and Co-director of the St. Paul-based Shawngrām Institute for Performance and Social Justice.