Fragile Edges: Dance as a Provocation for Human-ness

Abstract

This paper reflects on what dance reveals about the notion of “human-ness” at a time when globalization could be understood as defining humanity in terms of bound, isolated bodies that generate capital, are fixed by borders, and recognized through surveillance. Rather than treating humans as a bounded interior essence of a bodied-self, I suggest it emerges at the edge, where sense of self meets otherness. I suggest dance offers conversation at the periphery of self, where perceived othernesses are met (floor, music, another dancer). In dancing, the self becomes most discernible at points of encounter with texture, rhythm, and trajectory. Human-ness, then, is not form/possession but relational. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the colonial figure of “Man,” within the notion of ‘human’, and Timothy Morton’s concepts of hyperobjects and ecological entanglement, which challenge bounded scales of human perception, I position dance as a practice that unsettles narrow categories of the human. I discuss dance as a method to unearth epistemologies of the edge, articulating humanness as intra-active and ecological, constituted through relation rather than containment. In this framing, the edge of globalization reveals an urgent fragility and the hopeful possibility of other genres of being human: relational, porous, and responding to ecological and historical entanglements. I suggest that dance as a method of moving together discloses an opportunity to reevaluate humanness and consider a definition of ‘to be human’ that is an action and an ever-emerging practice of being in relation.