The Activism of Dance Performance in Appalachia: Utilizing the Arts to Address Social and Environmental Crisis and Injustice in the Mountains

IF 0.1 0 LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM

American, British and Canadian Studies Pub Date : 2022-12-01 DOI:10.2478/abcsj-2022-0021

Theresa L. Burriss

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Abstract

Abstract For well over a century, the human and more-than-human of Central Appalachia have endured oppression and exploitation, primarily due to natural resource extraction. In spring 2008, the author led a dark touri to a mountaintop removal coalmining site in Southern West Virginia for colleagues, which included Dance Professor Deborah McLaughlin. As a result, the two collaborated on three evening-length dance/theater works highlighting social and environmental crises and injustices in the region. The performances incorporated contemporary dance, poetry, the spoken word, and the visual arts, as well as contemporary and traditional music. The first, Eating Appalachia: Selling Out to the Hungry Ghost, focused on mountaintop removal coalmining and its environmental and cultural destruction. With Sounds of Stories Dancing, the duo paid homage to millions of mountain residents forced to leave the region to find stable employment, despite longing to remain. In the final piece, The Shadow Waltz, they honored the lives of coalminers with black lung disease, as well as their families. This essay discusses the challenges of creating art that critiques socially constructed messages portrayed as given truths, as well as the educational and social successes of daring to dance truth to power.

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阿巴拉契亚地区舞蹈表演的行动主义:利用艺术来解决山区的社会和环境危机和不公正

一个多世纪以来，阿巴拉契亚中部的人类和非人类一直忍受着压迫和剥削，主要是由于自然资源的开采。2008年春天，作者带领同事们到西弗吉尼亚州南部的一个山顶采煤地点进行黑暗旅行，其中包括舞蹈教授黛博拉·麦克劳克林。因此，两人合作了三个晚上长度的舞蹈/戏剧作品，突出了该地区的社会和环境危机以及不公正。表演融合了当代舞蹈、诗歌、口语、视觉艺术，以及当代和传统音乐。第一篇，《吃阿巴拉契亚:卖给饿鬼》，聚焦于山顶移除、煤矿开采及其对环境和文化的破坏。在《舞动的故事之声》中，两人向数百万被迫离开该地区寻找稳定工作的山区居民致敬，尽管他们渴望留下来。在最后一首作品《影子华尔兹》中，他们向患有黑肺病的矿工及其家人的生命致敬。这篇文章讨论了创作艺术的挑战，批评社会构建的信息被描绘成给定的真理，以及敢于在权力面前跳舞的真理在教育和社会上的成功。

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来源期刊

American, British and Canadian Studies Arts and Humanities-Literature and Literary Theory

CiteScore

0.20

自引率

0.00%

发文量

审稿时长

10 weeks

期刊介绍： Founded in 1999, American, British and Canadian Studies, the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania, is currently published by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. Re-launched in refashioned, biannual format, American, British and Canadian Studies is an international, peer-reviewed journal that sets out to explore disciplinary developments in Anglophone Studies in the changing environment forged by the intersections of culture, technology and electronic information. Our primary goal is to bring together in productive dialogue scholars conducting advanced research in the theoretical humanities. As well as offering innovative approaches to influential crosscurrents in contemporary thinking, the journal seeks to contribute fresh angles to the academic subject of English and promote shape-changing research across conventional boundaries. By virtue of its dynamic and varied profile and of the intercultural dialogue that it caters for, ABC Studies aims to fill a gap in the Romanian academic arena, and function as the first publication to approach Anglophone studies in a multi-disciplinary perspective. Within the proposed range of diversity, our major scope is to provide close examinations and lucid analyses of the role and future of the academic institutions at the cutting edge of high-tech. With this end in view, we especially invite contributions in the fields of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Language and Linguistics, Multimedia and Digital Arts, Translation Studies and related subjects. With its wide subject range, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to become one of the academic community’s premium scholarly resources.