Queer Dance

If we imagine multiple ways of being together, how might that shift choreographic practices and help us imagine ways groups assemble in more varied ways than just pairing another man with another woman? How might dancing queerly ask us to imagine futures through something other than heterosexuality and reproduction? How does challenging gender binaries always mean thinking about race, thinking about the postcolonial, about ableism? What are the arbitrary rules structuring dance in all its arenas, whether concert and social or commercial and competition, and how do we see those invisible structures and work to disrupt them?Queer Dance brings together artists and scholars in a multi-platformed project-book, accompanying website, and live performance series to ask, "How does dancing queerly progressively challenge us?" The artists and scholars whose writing appears in the book and whose performances and filmed interviews appear online stage a range of genders and sexualities that challenge and destabilize social norms. Engaging with dance making, dance scholarship, queer studies, and other fields, Queer Dance asks how identities, communities, and artmaking and scholarly practices might consider what queer work the body does and can do. There is great power in claiming queerness in the press of bodies touching or in the exceeding of the body best measured in sweat and exhaustion. How does queerness exist in the realm of affect and touch, and what then might we explore about queerness through these pleasurable and complex bodily ways of knowing?

Table of Contents:
Introduction Clare Croft Section 1: Queering the Stage 1. To Be A Showboy Lou Henry Hoover 2. "Our Love was not Enough": Queering Gender, Cultural Belonging, and Desire in Contemporary Abhinaya Sandra Chatterjee and Cynthia Ling Lee 3. Women Dancing Otherwise: The Queer Feminism of Gu Jiani's Right & Left Emily E. Wilcox 4. The Hysterical Spectator: Dancing with Feminists, Nellies, Andro-dykes and Drag Queens Doran George 5. Chasing Feathers: Jerome Bel, Swan Lake, and the Alternative Futures of Re-enacted Dance Julian B. Carter 6. Dancing Marines and Pumping Gasoline: Coded Queerness in Depression-era American Ballet Jennifer L. Campbell 7. Queer Spaces in Anna Sokolow's Rooms Hannah Kosstrin Section 2: Dancing Toward a Queer Sociality 8. queer dance in three acts thomas f. defrantz 9. In Praise of Latin Night at the Queer Club Justin Torres 10. An Buachaillín Bán: Reflections on One Queer's Performance within Traditional Irish Music & Dance Nicholas Gareiss 11. Aunty Fever: A Queer Impression Kareem Khubchandani 12. Last Cowboy Standing: Testing a Critical Choreographic Inquiry Peter Carpenter 13. RMW(a) & RMW from the inside out Jennifer Monson Section 3: Intimacy 14. Futari Tomo: A Queer Duet for Taiko Angela K. Ahlgren 15. "Oh No! Not This Lesbian Again": The Punany Poets Queer the Pimp-Ho Aesthetic Raquel L. Monroe 16. Choreographing the Chronic Patrick McKelvey 17. Expressing Life Through Loss: On Queens That Fall With A Freak Technique Anna Martine Whitehead References

About the Author :
Clare Croft is a dance historian, theorist, dramaturg, and curator. She is the editor and curator of Queer Dance, and the author of Dancers as Diplomats. Her writing about dance and performance has appeared in academic journals, including Theatre Journal and Dance Research Journal, and she has been a regular contributor to a number of newspapers, including The Washington Post and the Austin American-Statesman. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Dance at the University of Michigan, where she teaches in the BFA and MFA Dance programs.

Review :
"Clare Croft's Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings provides just the sort of field-breaking effort we've needed. Bringing together the work of dancers and scholars, the volume surveys the many facets of queerness and dance in the 20th and 21st centuries...In Queer Dance, the personal and the political continually intersect, reminding us of the centrality of pleasure and desire in the formation and circulation of social identities. Whether carving out a space for new queer representation, speaking to nationalist discourses, or finding ways to work through the loss and trauma that too often shapes queer experience in contemporary life, Croft and the authors she has assembled in this book capture how our bodies animate these meaningful moments when we dance -- especially when we dance queerly." --Los Angeles Review of Books "Never taking 'queer' or 'dance' for granted as stable terms, the contributors stretch and bend them to render visible the ways in which dance is a queer praxis and queerness is a dancing analytic. The result is a volume spinning pirouettes on the cutting edge of work being done in dance studies and queer studies."--E. Patrick Johnson, Chair of the Department of African American Studies, and Director of the Black Arts Initiative, Northwestern University "This is a necessary book that extends its reach outside accepted registers of queerness to bring the subjects it finds crashing into convergence. The willful braiding of feminism, race, and queerness, simultaneously distinct and integrated, reveals an amplified understanding of queer dance and offers new portals for engagement both in and outside of dance."--Tere O'Connor, Choreographer / Center for Advanced Studies Professor in Dance, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign "Queer in its sensibilities and passions, this vibrant and expansive collection of essays emphasizes the political potentiality of reading movement queerly. Forged through the performative gestures of diasporas and differences, protest and potentiality, this text charts bold new directions for dance studies, as it demands of queer theory a sensorial engagement with the embodied physicality of diverse bodies and collectives."--Juana María Rodríguez, author of Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings "Clare Croft's extraordinary collection of essays embodies and attempts to name the geography and topography of nascent transcendent explosive 'queerness.' This array of essays navigates new vocabularies, within a set of genders, that finally encompasses the very real complexity of 'being human now.'"--Elizabeth Streb, Choreographer, STREB Extreme Action "Queer Dance is a readymade curriculum for a dance history or queer studies course, its included video documentation ideal for classroom screenings and/or homework."--The Village Voice "As creative scholarly voices continue to advance the depth of dance studies as an academic field, there is a continued need for outstanding collections like Queer Dance. Divided into three parts, this compilation of essays will not only expand dance scholarship but also be of great benefit to many interrelated areas, like performance studies...This work sets the bar high for those scholars who follow." --S.R. Irelan, Western Michigan University, IChoice