States of Contemporary Dance

This chapter takes a prismatic look at the field of contemporary dance to outline some of the primary challenges that South-South artists must contend with as they enter it and stake a claim for visibility and survival in their own terms. Beginning with an examination of the inherited opposition of conceptual versus representational art in the history of Western avant-garde performance, it traces some of the irreducible differences that emerge when racial and cultural differences are placed at the center. It looks at the ways in which difference is strapped by mainstream management strategies of exceptionalism, individualism, multiculturalist performances of Tradition and Heritage, and the rhetoric of translation. Working through some of the significant debates in contemporary performance and art roughly through the last decade, it looks at the evolution of contemporary dance as “white dance” and the complex network of centrifugal and centripetal forces that undergird this field.