Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice
Dignity in Motion
Contributions by Germaine Acogny, Marjorie Agosín, Gaby Aldor, Elizabeth Aldrich, Alito Alessi, Carol Anderson, Wyatt Bessing, Linda Frye Burnham, Ananya Chatterjea, Ya-ping Chen, César Delgado Martínez, Mary Fitzgerald, David Gere, Amber Gray, Judith Lynne Hanna, David Alan Harris, Joan Huckstep, Judith Brin Ingber, Judith Kajiwara, Marion Kant, Robin Lakes, Ralph Lemon, Sal Murgiyanto, Cecilia Olsson, Lemi Sala Ponifasio, Maysoun Rafeedie, Janice Ross, Nicholas Rowe, Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, Anthony Shay, Allison Singer, Yunyu Wang Edited by Naomi Jackson, Toni Shapiro-Phim
Publication date:
06 November 2008Length of book:
398 pagesPublisher
Scarecrow PressISBN-13: 9780810861497
Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion presents a wide-ranging compilation of essays, spanning more than 15 countries. Organized in four parts, the articles examine the regulation and exploitation of dancers and dance activity by government and authoritative groups, including abusive treatment of dancers within the dance profession; choreography involving human rights as a central theme; the engagement of dance as a means of healing victims of human rights abuses; and national and local social/political movements in which dance plays a powerful role in helping people fight oppression.
These groundbreaking papers—both detailed scholarship and riveting personal accounts—encompass a broad spectrum of issues, from slavery and the Holocaust to the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; from First Amendment cases and the AIDS epidemic to discrimination resulting from age, gender, race, and disability. A range of academics, choreographers, dancers, and dance/movement therapists draw connections between refugee camp, courtroom, theater, rehearsal studio, and university classroom.
These groundbreaking papers—both detailed scholarship and riveting personal accounts—encompass a broad spectrum of issues, from slavery and the Holocaust to the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; from First Amendment cases and the AIDS epidemic to discrimination resulting from age, gender, race, and disability. A range of academics, choreographers, dancers, and dance/movement therapists draw connections between refugee camp, courtroom, theater, rehearsal studio, and university classroom.
Jackson and Shapiro-Phim are the first to focus an investigation so cohesively on the political implications of movement. The result is a ground-breaking anthology that repositions understandings of the fundamental ways in which the dancer's body serves a range of human rights agendas from the oppressive to the corporate-controlled, nationalist, and liberatory. Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice asks readers to re-evaluate the power of dance as a staged form of resistance. In the process, contributors reveal in more subtle ways the complexity of defining human rights. This book is of interest to an audience much broader than just those interested in the performing arts.