Choreographing in Color

Author(s):  
J. Lorenzo Perillo

In Choreographing in Color, J. Lorenzo Perillo investigates the development of Filipino popular dance and performance since the late 20th century. Drawing from nearly two decades of ethnography, choreographic analysis, and community engagement with artists, choreographers, and organizers, Perillo asserts the importance in shifting attention away from the predominant Philippine neoliberal and US imperialist emphasis on Filipinos as superb mimics, heroic migrants, model minorities, and natural dancers, and instead asks: what does it mean for Filipinos to navigate the violent forces of empire and neoliberalism with street dance and hip-hop? Employing critical race, feminist, and performance studies, Perillo analyzes the conditions of possibility that gave rise to Filipino dance phenomena across viral, migrant, theatrical, competitive, and diplomatic performance in the Philippines and diaspora. Advocating for serious engagements with the dancing body, Perillo rethinks a staple of hip-hop’s regulation, the “euphemism,” as a mode of social critique for understanding how folks have engaged with both racial histories of colonialism and gendered labor migration. Figures of euphemism—the zombie, hero, robot, and judge—constitute a way of seeing Filipino hip-hop as contiguous with a multi-racial repertoire of imperial crossing, thus uncovering the ways Black dance intersects Filipino racialization and reframing the ongoing, contested underdog relationship between Filipinos and US global power.

Author(s):  
Cindy García

This chapter puts race in a transnational context in the Americas, expanding their framework to the context of dance, music, and performance. It addresses the ways that two Latina-originated dance companies in Los Angeles stage coalition from the placeless realm of the undercommons. Ana Maria Alvarez's CONTRA-TIEMPO Urban Latin Dance Theater and Miss Funk Jackie Lopez's hip-hop and house-based Versa-Style theorize the complex dance and musical migrations that underscore their experiences and visions of latinidad in coalition. Both companies have a foundational connection to dances of the African diaspora. Using choreographic analysis of dance and performance studies as well as interviews with the choreographers, the chapter examines the coalitional dimensions of their works. At the heart of this work is the question “In this contemporary moment of Black Lives Matter, how do these Los Angeles-based companies cultivate alternatives to racialized violence”?


Author(s):  
Rebecca Caines

This article documents improvisatory practices in Australian community-based hip-hop, with reference to the work of Australian hip-hop artists Morganics and Wire. It places their teaching work with disadvantaged Indigenous communities in context with the work of free improvisation teachers and theories of improvisation and history, drawn from key critical texts in improvisation studies. Improvisation is shown as key to hip-hop practice and pedagogy in Australia. This paper argues, by employing a performance studies model of the archive and the repertoire, that improvisation in these case studies offers participants the chance to be part of a type of history making that accepts the constructed and performed nature of history and forwards improvisation-led challenges to social injustice.


Author(s):  
Andrea Harris

Making Ballet 3 provides a choreographic analysis of the ballet Western Symphony, produced by the New York City Ballet in 1954 with choreography by George Balanchine, music by Hershy Kay, scenery by John Boyt, and costumes by Karinska. It brings to light the multitude of intertextual allusions that occur throughout the ballet, playfully intermingling references of “America” with an entire lineage of nineteenth-century European classicism. Although Western Symphony has no story line, it crafts a deliberate message: a long, transatlantic genealogy of Western classicism that, in the twentieth century, has come to rest in America. Drawing on archival sources and movement analysis, this interchapter argues that Western Symphony incorporates parody to present a revisionist ballet history in which the high cultural lineages of Europe and America are intimately entwined. Ultimately, this message reinforced the Atlanticist politics of private and state anticommunist groups in the cultural Cold War, the historical setting for its production and performance.


Author(s):  
Brahma Prakash

Folk performances reflect the life-worlds of a vast section of subaltern communities in India. What is the philosophy that drives these performances, the vision that enables as well as enslaves these communities to present what they feel, think, imagine, and want to see? Can such performances challenge social hierarchies and ensure justice in a caste-ridden society? In Cultural Labour, the author studies bhuiyan puja (land worship), bidesia (theatre of migrant labourers), Reshma-Chuharmal (Dalit ballads), dugola (singing duels) from Bihar, and the songs and performances of Gaddar, who was associated with Jana Natya Mandali, Telangana: he examines various ways in which meanings and behaviour are engendered in communities through rituals, theatre, and enactments. Focusing on various motifs of landscape, materiality, and performance, the author looks at the relationship between culture and labour in its immediate contexts. Based on an extensive ethnography and the author’s own life experience as a member of such a community, the book offers a new conceptual framework to understand the politics and aesthetics of folk performance in the light of contemporary theories of theatre and performance studies.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942094003
Author(s):  
Peter Burke

George L. Mosse took a ‘cultural turn’ in the latter part of his career, but still early enough to make a pioneering contribution to the study of political culture and in particular what he called political ‘liturgy’, including marches, processions, and practices of commemoration. He adapted to the study of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the approach to the history of ritual developed by historians of medieval and early modern Europe, among them his friend Ernst Kantorowicz. More recently, the concept of ritual, whether religious or secular, has been criticized by some cultural historians on the grounds that it implies a fixed ‘script’ in situations that were actually marked by fluidity and improvisation. In this respect cultural historians have been part of a wider trend that includes sociologists and anthropologists as well as theatre scholars and has been institutionalized as Performance Studies. Some recent studies of contemporary nationalism in Tanzania, Venezuela and elsewhere have adopted this perspective, emphasizing that the same performance may have different meanings for different sections of the audience. It is only to be regretted that Mosse did not live long enough to respond to these studies and that their authors seem unaware of his work.


Author(s):  
Raaj Kishore Biswas ◽  
Rena Friswell ◽  
Jake Olivier ◽  
Ann Williamson ◽  
Teresa Senserrick

Polar Record ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Flamm

Abstract While the Antarctic Treaty System intended to keep Antarctica an area of international cooperation and science free from militarisation and international conflict, the region has not been completely shielded from global power transitions, such as decolonisation and the end of the Cold War. Presently, emerging countries from Asia are increasingly willing to invest in polar infrastructure and science on the back of their growing influence in world politics. South Korea has also invested heavily in its Antarctic infrastructure and capabilities recently and has been identified as an actor with economic and political interests that are potentially challenging for the existing Antarctic order. This article first assesses the extent and performance of the growing bilateral cooperation between South Korea and one of its closest partners, New Zealand, a country with strong vested interests in the status quo order. How did the cooperation develop between these two actors with ostensibly diverging interests? This article finds that what may have been a friction–laden relationship, actually developed into a win-win partnership for both countries. The article then moves on to offer an explanation for how this productive relationship was made possible by utilising a mutual socialisation approach that explores socio-structural processes around status accommodation.


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