Choreographing the North: Settler Affinities in Contemporary Dancemaking(Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)

Choreographing the North examines 11 contemporary dance pieces that perform northern culture, landscape, folklore, and ideas of "North." The choreographers, from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Luxembourg, Australia, and Argentina, translate their real or imagined journeys to the North for stage and/or screen. This book examines the ways Indigenous subjects and subjectivities have been diminished and/or distorted and considers how that diminishment has fuelled misrepresentation both inside and outside the field of contemporary dance. Where Indigenous presence is represented in dances about the North, it is as discarnate storytellers or “everyman” pastoral figures against backdrops of ice and snow. Indigenous presence is there but it is romanticized, caricatured, flattened. Using these works as moving texts Cauthery argues that, in many regards, these dances are colonizing acts that either ignore or erase the land and people upon which they are based. In analyzing and deconstructing these dances, this book acknowledges the land- and culture-based inheritances embedded in and performed through the works themselves. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in dance studies, theatre and performance studies, and cultural studies, as well as those interested in environmental psychology, human geography, and the expanding field of Arctic humanities.

Table of Contents:
1. Arctic Orientalism 2. Approaching Indigenous Myth as "Open Source": Marie Chouinard’s Les trous du ciel (1991/2011) and Christopher House’s Severe Clear (2000/2010) 3. Icebergs and Empty Gestures: Daniel Léveillé’s La pudeur des icebergs (2004) and Virginie Thirion’s L’Iceberg qui cache la forêt (2012) 4. The Psychology of White Space: Diana Szeinblum’s Alaska (2007) and Anne-Mareike Hess’ Never-ending up North (2010) 5. Slowly: Eiko & Koma’s Raven (2010) and Brandy Leary’s Glaciology (2015) 6. At the Site of Wilderness: Meredith Monk’s Facing North (1990) 7. Imagined Geographies: Nanette Hassall’s As the Crow Flies (1988) 8. Black Bodies, White Snow: Isaac Julien and Russell Maliphant’s True North (2007)

About the Author :
Bridget Cauthery is Associate Professor in the Department of Dance, Theatre & Performance Studies at York University, Canada.