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- Convenors:
-
Beatriz Herrera Corado
(MDW KUG)
Subhashini Goda (University College Dublin)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Beatriz Herrera Corado
(MDW KUG)
- Format:
- Roundtable
- Location:
- Room 24
- Sessions:
- Thursday 5 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
‘Dance’ is a concept that has triggered epistemological discussion on multi-layered experiences. As researchers from different countries and bodily practices, our inquiry follows the need to unwrite the term 'dance' to open a space for varied ontological understandings of corporeal practices.
Long Abstract:
Around the world, there are complex and multi-layered bodily activities that academia calls and researches as ‘dance’. While a commonly used term, the concept of a ‘dance’ has triggered much epistemological discussion and calls for a multi-layered engagement. As researchers and practitioners from different countries and bodily understandings, our inquiry follows the need to unwrite the term dance to open a space for varied ontological understandings of corporeal practices. Stemming from how communities define their practices to how we as researchers immerse and represent multi-dimensionality and multi-sensoriality of bodily experience and knowledge, we aim to discuss unconventional lines of representing and writing about “dance”. The discussion will unfold based on three intersecting pathways: (1) the unwritten notions of dance accessed through maternal lines of memory and the use of the body, the voice, and the gesture—as the primary mode of remembering and narrating; (2) the unwriting of patriarchal epistemologies and male-centric notions of performativity and everyday existence within dancers’ construction of belonging and community making; (3) the unwriting of the personal agency when addressing the complexities of the nationalistic definition of certain dance genres, while simultaneously reflecting on diasporic representations and conflations. We hope this panel contributes to a wider discussion on dance and bodily experience as a tool that addresses local ontologies and paths for including ephemeral knowledge in ethnographic and artistic research.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Thursday 5 June, 2025, -Contribution long abstract:
In the context of the Ballroom Culture community of Lima, the concept of dance falls short. This community gathers LGBTQIA+ population and other marginalized groups, such as immigrants from Venezuela, Afro-Peruvian people, people living with HIV, and sex workers, to celebrate diversity through dancing and battling in competitions called balls. As they often highlight, their artistic practices go beyond the concept of dance, given that they embody their life struggles and histories. Following this line of thought and taking as inspiration the concept of social choreography (Andrew Hewitt, 2005) as reworked by dance scholar Imani Kay Johnson (2018), I look at this community’s performances as a prolongation of their daily movements and circulation. Taking as example a battle between two femme queens from the community, Leiia Kameleon and Yari 007, I intend to build connections between these performers’ strategies and enactments during a battle in a ball and their everyday survival techniques as trans women living in a homo/transphobic context. Thus, in this attempt, I aim to posit dance in this community as intertwined with their everyday choreographies and as a kind of movement that stretches its definition to incorporate issues of survival, visibility, and labor.
Contribution long abstract:
As a Brazilian historian researching dance in Egypt, my work explores how the intersections of positionality – between academic fields and regions of the Global South – shape the writing and production of knowledge in dance within the social sciences. In the field of History, the body is often treated as an object of study, recognized primarily when it disrupts the universalized, normative body: male, white, adult, heterosexual, and able-bodied. While research has addressed dance and in relation to historical perceptions of corporeality, it rarely considers the body as a starting point for rethinking disciplinary foundations. This neglect perpetuates a Cartesian separation of body and mind, excluding the physical dimension of existence from epistemological reflections that could transform historical inquiry. This presentation questions how bodies and corporealities are addressed across academic disciplines and considers the implications of researching dance from and about the Global South. By highlighting the coloniality embedded in academic traditions, I aim to explore how dance practices, particularly from cultures on the periphery of capitalism, could challenge dominant epistemologies and offer new perspectives on community, embodiment, and knowledge production. Ultimately, I propose a critical reevaluation of how we conceptualize dance and its meanings in global academic contexts.
Contribution long abstract:
I approach bharatanatyam as community-based labour where artists of Indian-origin based in Ireland negotiate with bharatanatyam in various ways as a practice of identity and tradition. In doing so, they introduce classicism as a marker of authenticity, a label that ‘unwrites’ the importance of their personal pedagogies in favour of a more controlled narrative of current ethno-nationalism and casts the form as an 'ethnic' dance in multicultural initiatives. As a genre that is ‘local’ in Tamil Nadu, but transforms into a cosmopolitan activity in the Irish diaspora, bharatanatyam’s diasporic avatar becomes a link to the nation-state of India, while paradoxically welcoming people from all backgrounds to pursue the form by packaging it as a transnational art form. Foregrounding an analysis of embodiment on-stage and off-stage, the paper breaks down 'classical' as a post-national construction in favour of textualisation, and calls for an understanding of diasporic bharatanatyam as a paradoxical translocal identity-making activity by looking at specific choreographic and non-choreographic examples that include self-representation and transgressions. To achieve this, I employ hybridity as a framework that brings attention to these unwritten, deterritorialised spaces through a contrapuntal approach as proposed by Kraidy (2005).
Contribution long abstract:
This paper explores “unwriting” as a radical framework for engaging with maternal memories by centering on the intangible remains of memories—singing in the kitchen, storytelling, and embodied gestures—that transmit knowledge beyond formal documentation. Drawing from women’s autobiographical writings who were home bound, this study examines how domestic spaces, particularly kitchens, function as sites where memory, labor, and creativity converge. In the case of South Asian households, maternal practices such as singing while cooking transform mundane routines into rituals of storytelling and remembrance. These acts carry histories of migration, displacement, and cultural identity while resisting the linearity and permanence of academic narratives. For instance, the rhythms of a mother’s song, infused with nostalgia and resilience, embody a fluid, cyclical transmission of memory that thrives in its ephemeral nature.
This paper also engages with the systemic erasures of women’s voices within patriarchal histories, demonstrating how unwritten traditions preserve marginalized narratives. Drawing on my own autoethnographic reflections, I argue that unwriting allows us to reclaim these intimate bodily practices without reducing them to static data. By privileging the multi-sensorial and corporeal nature of maternal memories, unwriting honors their transience and capacity for continual transformation. Ultimately, this study reframes kitchens not merely as spaces of labor but as archives of oral tradition, where storytelling, song, and gesture become acts of resistance, memory, and belonging. This approach challenges dominant frameworks, positioning unwriting as a means to amplify maternal voices in their dynamic and lived forms.