Dancing Land, Dancing Power

How does dance take up space in the world? Why pay attention to the histories of the places where people gather to create and watch choreography? What happens when those places are contested?

This dialogue between Arabella Stanger and María Firmino begins with a simple premise: dancefloor histories matter. Bringing their respective research into conversation, together they explore the often ambivalent relationships between concert dance and other forms of performance, land use, and histories of social struggle. Stanger and Firmino each approach choreography as a process both embodied and geographic, unearthing its relationship to territorial seizure, racialized displacement, and acts of defiance to such conditions. Both celebrating and complicating dance’s promise to release bodies into space, their conversation suggests that acts of hope might arrive through observing the power dynamics of performances—embedded in their material contexts—from Stanger’s analysis of the “violent ground” beneath Merce Cunningham’s utopic experiments at Black Mountain College, to Firmino’s engagement with “telluric” performance in the context of Mexican and Guatemalan necropolitics, and even to this festival at EMPAC.