Choreographing Rebellion

An auto-ethnographic account of a choreographic praxis developed outside of a Western framework, which engages with identity, decoloniality and transformation from a feminist perspective. Choreographing Rebellion details the methodologies and thinking-processes employed in the dramaturgy and performance of 24 choreographic works, produced by the author over almost three decades in South Africa and Japan. Drawing throughout on lived experiences and their socio-political contexts, the author's starting point is the crafting of a signature dance language to respond to the oppressive socio-political system of apartheid in their native South Africa. The second part speaks to choreographies to have come out of Japan, where elements of daily life and principles of Butoh are applied to making dance performance, and uniquely offers a first-hand understanding of Butoh in the line of Kazuo Ohno from a South African perspective.The book concludes again in South Africa, where the author's experience of Butoh in Japan assimilates into an already existent dance practice, with that synergy enabling new meanings of personhood in a post-apartheid context.Throughout, the book resists binary tropes too often ascribed to dance performances in these contexts (such as descriptions of black v. white, victim v. aggressor, African v. classical dance, community v. high art, or raw talent v. sophisticated technique). It draws on psycho-physical practices and philosophies of the body (such as those of Giorgio Agamaben and Henri Bergson) and argues for the transgressing of human-centric approaches to race, gender and class in our dance practice.