Worlding Dance and Dancing Out There in the World

Abstract

Prompted by the late twentieth-century, and still growing, interest in World Dance evidenced by the emergence of this rubric in US college circles (including courses in Dance departments and newly developed academic jobs), bookings in performing venues (including World Dance festivals and shows), the support offered through funding agencies invested in arts and cultures, and the attention devoted by dance critics and scholars, as by dancers and dance lovers, I propose to consider some questions related to the discursive formation of this field. These questions are entangled with ethico-political concerns. What does ‘world dance’ actually represent at this historical conjuncture? What is the effect of imposing the ‘world,’ as a qualifying categorization, on ‘dance,’ as a set of aestheticized movement practices, in the era of so-called globalization? How does this totalizing framing (the ‘world’) work to supplement and expand the dance field as it fixes differentiations within it? How are dances from ‘out there’ selected to be included or excluded from ‘world dance’? What kinds of institutional investments, technical knowledges, economic interests, aesthetic and ethical assumptions, political arrangements, pleasures and desires participate in the process of worlding Dance?