Shifting Cultural Power: Questions and Case Studies in Performance<\/a>, imagines equity-based models in dance that decenter whiteness.<\/p>\nWriting about anti-racism work is a fraught endeavor because, as a white person, I\u2019ll always have blind spots. For example, the book includes a list of \u201c25 Practices for Decolonizing Dance (and finding your Poetic Nerve).\u201d In retrospect, I should have used different language.<\/p>\n
\u201cDecolonize\u201d has become a ubiquitous term because colonialism is everywhere. Colonial legacies exist not only outside of us, in sociopolitical power dynamics, but also in our bodies. Colonial legacies pervade dominant cultural notions of time, value, space and language.<\/p>\n
But Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang\u2019s article \u201cDecolonization is not a metaphor\u201d criticizes use of the term in contexts other than the repatriation of Indigenous land, saying that decolonization \u201cis not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies.\u201d Holding Tuck and Yang\u2019s article in mind, I want to be more specific with my language when I talk about reorganizing the field to resist complicity with legacies of oppression. We can ask many questions that interrogate power and privilege in the field: How can we compose bodies in space and time without asserting power over those bodies? How can we resist monolithic meaning in dance? How do we disentangle authority from authorship? How can dancemaking be liberatory for everyone involved? How can we anchor dancemaking in authentic community and in trust? How can we dismantle white supremacy in the field? These questions are related to the important economic and political work of decolonization, but not synonymous with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\u201cThere\u2019s value in putting ourselves in a destabilized space and listening for what comes next.\u201d <\/p>\n
Hope Mohr<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n
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Courtesy Mohr. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\nI want to talk about aligning choreographic practice with commitments to mutual liberation. This is necessarily both structural and personal work. We must reorganize the underpinnings of art practice: our organizations, agreements with collaborators and relationships in the studio. We must democratize arts leadership, demand equitable contracting, train arts workers in cultural competency, add Indigenous representation to boards and staff, center BIPOC artists in programming, honor Indigenous protocol by acknowledging Native land, and advocate for reparations for the displacement of Indigenous peoples.<\/p>\n
And politics don\u2019t stop at the studio door. How can we integrate political commitments into our dances, our bodies?<\/p>\n
With this context in mind, I offer this revised list of prompts from Shifting Cultural Power: \u201c25 Practices for Aligning Choreographic Practice with a Commitment to Mutual Liberation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\nThe space should not be white-dominated. Indigenous people and people of color should be fully integrated, engaged, empowered, acknowledged and respected in the cast, crew and artistic staff.<\/li>\n Practice sustained listening.<\/li>\n Encourage imperfection and doubt (yours and others).<\/li>\n Slow down. Value pause. Waste time. Wander.<\/li>\n Value pleasure.<\/li>\n Invite excess, kitsch, camp, sentimentality and overmuchness.<\/li>\n Orient the dance and its systems outward. Make in relationship. Make dance in the mess of the world.<\/li>\n Allow the dancing to be invisible, ambiguous and illegible.<\/li>\n There is no original, truest version of movement. Movement material is collectively owned and authored.<\/li>\n Allow edges to be a part of the landscape of the dance. Refuse a fixed front.<\/li>\n Be transparent about your needs and your fallibility as an artist. Be clear about the terms of the work with yourself and your collaborators. Name collaborative periods of work. Name when you need to author or edit.<\/li>\n Acknowledge and credit sources of movement, both in the studio (\u201cThis is a phrase that Jane made.\u201d \u201cI pulled this idea off of YouTube.\u201d) and in promotional materials (\u201cThis dance was co-created by\u2026\u201d).<\/li>\n Allow for multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple variables, multiple vocabularies. Develop a vocabulary of inclusion sourced from multiple bodies. What does it mean to express authorship amidst multiplicity?<\/li>\n Acknowledge and pay attention to how everyone in the room works at different processing speeds. Orient the process to different people\u2019s sense of time.<\/li>\n Explore what it might mean for the dance to be porous. What can you let into the space of the dance?<\/li>\n Practice making without a show in mind. Hold the creative process lightly while still staying engaged, accountable and supportive of others in the space.<\/li>\n Allow improvisation to take over the process. Maintain a state of radical uncertainty about what the dance might become.<\/li>\n Allow for sustained movement research outside of the task of making. Find creative modes beyond composition and mimicry.<\/li>\n Collaborate with people and places that destabilize and challenge authorship.<\/li>\n Question your choices. Question instinctual preferences. Work with a palette you despise. Stay with an idea much longer than you think is appropriate.<\/li>\n Invite other people\u2019s emotional lives into the work.<\/li>\n Invite other people to hijack the process.<\/li>\n Practice financial transparency about artist pay, project budget and funding sources.<\/li>\n Show up with no agenda. Work with what and who is in the room.<\/li>\n Be vulnerable.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\nIf I were to implement all of the above prompts, I might not end up making a dance at all. But there\u2019s value in putting ourselves in a destabilized space and listening for what comes next. These are prompts for locating your political and poetic nerve. Poetic nerve does not necessarily mean surrendering authorship. It means going beyond yourself, and then back within again, and then again out past yourself, and so on, in a constant conversation between the dance and the world. <\/p>\n
Doing the Work<\/h2>\n These ideas are not mine. Throughout the vast and violent span of colonial history, dance artists, especially Native artists and artists of color, have been doing and continue to do this work. There\u2019s Sydnie L. Mosley, advocating for liberation of dance pedagogy through practices such as acknowledging that \u201call dance forms are specific cultural practice and should be acknowledged and specifically named as such\u201d; Mar Parrilla\u2019s cultural exchange projects with Puerto Rico\u2013based artists and members of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe to explore colonial legacies; Emily Johnson, whose decolonization rider calls on presenter partners to commit to the \u201cliving process\u201d of decolonization, including compliance with Indigenous Protocol, acknowledgment\u00ad of host Nations in all press, and engagement with the Indigenous community. There are countless other examples.<\/p>\n
Why am I, as a white person, even trying to talk about decolonization? Because for too long, Indigenous people and people of color have shouldered this work. In the words of feminist writer Judit Moschkovich, \u201cit is not the duty of the oppressed to educate the oppressor.\u201d White people must do this work too.<\/p>\n