Dancing on Violent Ground: A Conversation with Arabella Stanger (Online and In Person – 4th June 2024)

In her brave and provocative book “Dancing on Violent Ground”, Arabella Stanger challenges us to critically interrogate the apparent utopianism of dance. Whilst dance has often been an exhilarating and cathartic release for those involved, Stanger challenges us to look deeper at the geographies of exclusion that underpin it.

Drawing on Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s assertion that “Being a good geographer means going to look and see, and then to challenge oneself in one’s description of what one has seen”, Stanger asks “what if dancers and dance scholars were to take up Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s geographic imperative and commit to looking beneath the movement forms we cherish, forms that have promised, even delivered, danced embodiment as an exceptional site of exhilaration and release?”

In this session we will be in conversation with Arabella Stanger and cover a range of topics including…

•⁠ ⁠Marius Petipa’s Sleeping Beauty and Russian Imperialism

•⁠ ⁠Martha Graham, George Balanchine, and land as acquisition

•⁠ ⁠Rudolf von Laban, Oscar Schlemmer, and Reactionary Living Diagrams

•⁠ ⁠Merce Cunningham, Black Mountain College and white ideality

•⁠ ⁠alongside decolonial thinkers like Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Frantz Fanon,

•⁠ ⁠And the Henri Lefebvre’s materialist philosophy of space

Arabella Stanger is senior Lecturer in Drama: Theatre and Performance and Joint Head of Subject for Drama at the University of Sussex.

Session Lead: Bradley Tuck

In Person: Southern Belle, 3, Waterloo Street, Hove

Click to join: On Zoom

Meeting ID: 844 3015 3412

Passcode: 312951

Time: 7:00 pm Doors. 7:30pm-10:00pm

Image: Merce Cunningham Dance Company in Cargo X, 1989 Photography by Jed Downhill

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