Theater Dance’s Material Underneath

Abstract

Arabella Stanger’s first monograph, Dancing on Violent Ground: Utopia as Dispossession in Euro-American Theater Dance, is a brilliant study of the spatial philosophies, practices, and politics underpinning histories of dance as a theatrical art form. For this project, Stanger has built a thorough theoretical apparatus that scaffolds significant contributions to the fields of dance and performance studies through an interdisciplinary approach drawing primarily from critical race theory and Native studies. Employing a materialist attention to both staged and social choreographies of space, Stanger analyzes how theater dance—which she describes as “a nexus of corporeal, discursive, and institutional practices” (p. 4)—enacts and extends violent processes of racialization and dispossession. Dancing on Violent Ground contends that dance “can model harmonic or freeing experiences for dancers and audiences while masking and legitimizing imperial, colonial, and white supremacist practices of space” (p. 4). Stanger makes this argument elegantly and compellingly through her engagement with carefully selected objects of analysis, including the choreographies, drawings, and philosophies of Marius Petipa, Martha Graham, George Balanchine, Rudolf von Laban, Oskar Schlemmer, Merce Cunningham, and Boris Charmatz. Stanger’s theoretical turn to choreographies of space is enriched by a vast archive of historical material that spans multiple continents and several centuries. These examples from ballet, modern, and contemporary dance both prove and further complicate her pertinent critiques of how choreographic cultures uphold the supremacy of whiteness. Despite the temporal and geographic breadth of her research, Stanger’s attention to the pervasive imperial and settler colonial ideologies that pulse throughout the history of Euro-American theater dance provides strong connections among her objects of study. Stanger achieves a clear intervention in the field of dance studies by shifting her analytical attention toward the ways that bodies and