The Dispute Over Movement and The Non-Time Of The Struggle. (Notes For a Performance “On The Way”)

Scholar André Lepecki’s work focuses on what he terms choreopolitics. This term signifies dance and choreographic practices that enable freedom in the social realm. Choreopolitics resists the policing of movement. Its politics is much more than policy in a formal sense. It resists enforced forms of physical circulation, and it extends dancers’ capacity to move against choreography’s disciplinary rules. Lepecki considers how time may be a technology for policing movement, and looks at performances and works that challenge it.

As the speaker writes: “In this talk, movement and time will be addressed as fundamental political substances through which a whole system of dominance over bodies, their actions, and their non-actions has been erected under different names—such as ‘liberal modernity,’ or ‘progress,’ or ‘global capitalism.’ With the help of some recent choreographies and performances—particularly by the Brazilian duo Davi Pontes & Wallace Ferreira, and by the Berlin-based duo Pauline Brody & Renate Lorenz—we will see how current disputes over who owns movement, who has the right to movement, and when should movement take place, may help us rethink (together with the critical theory of Denise Ferreira da Silva, Michelle Wright, and Sylvia Wynter) the very foundations of what we still insist on calling ‘time.’ In short, another title for this talk could simply be: The continuous struggle: towards a choreopolitics without time.” –André Lepecki

All are invited to stay for the public reception following the talk.