Dance and politics

Dana Mills is College Lecturer in Politics at Hertford College, University of Oxford. In 2016-17 she was Fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University and Visiting Scholar at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, New York. Alongside her academic interests she is a dancer and a political activist.

• Introduction1 Moving beyond boundaries: writing on the body2 'I dreamed of a different dance': Isadora Duncan's danced revolution3 'The body says what words cannot': Martha Graham, dance and politics4 'I want to tell them how I feel and how black people feel': Gumboots dance in South Africa5 Dancing the ruptured body: One Billion Rising, dance and gendered violence6 Dancing human rightsConclusions: the dancer of the future dancing radical hopeIndex

‘Aimed at an audience of political theorists and dance and performance students and scholars, the technical language and critical readings of Jacques Rancière, among others, can make for heavy going for the untutored enthusiast. But as Mills develops the discussion, she moves away from abstract theory and into a series of case studies that start with Isadora Duncan’s 1907 Musical Moment. It’s at this point that the arguments within Dance and politics begin to intersect and gain clarity.’Susan Darlington, The Morning Star‘Dance and Politics: Moving Beyond Boundaries offers a fresh and essentially optimisticexploration of the political dimensions of dance.’Victoria Thoms, Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), Coventry University, Dance Review Journal