(Un)covering ground: dance, space and mobility

Article


Brazzale, C. 2014. (Un)covering ground: dance, space and mobility. Theatre, Dance and Performance Training. 5 (2), pp. 107-118.
AuthorsBrazzale, C.
Abstract

Ballet and modern dance teachers often exhort students to ‘travel across the floor’ and ‘cover ground’. These instructions invoke metaphors of travel and mobility that capture an array of common assumptions about dance, space and movement. This essay examines the spatial and mobility discourses that these instructions simultaneously build upon and produce while exploring the seductiveness of technique’s promise of mastering space through the moving body.
Threading auto-ethnography with critical theory and moving across different disciplinary fields and writing styles, I explore the ways in which these instructions leak outside the perimeter of the dance studio to feed into the narrative of a dancer’s extended physical, geographical and social mobility. Analysing the mobility and travel discourses of my dance training vis-à-vis poststructuralist theorizations of the subaltern power of the nomad and theories of space and place, I argue that this narrative becomes complicit in the construction of an idealized notion of artistic nomadism, which, in turn, aligns with current neoliberal logics organised around the production of mobile subjects.

JournalTheatre, Dance and Performance Training
Journal citation5 (2), pp. 107-118
ISSN1944-3919
1944-3927
Year2014
PublisherTaylor & Francis
Accepted author manuscript
License
CC BY
Web address (URL)http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2014.908140
Publication dates
Print08 Aug 2014
Publication process dates
Deposited11 Jul 2016
Copyright informationThis is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training on 08.08.14, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/19443927.2014.908140
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