If we imagine multiple ways of being together, how might that shift choreographic practices and help us imagine ways groups assemble in more varied ways than just pairing another man with another woman? How might dancing queerly ask us to imagine futures through something other than heterosexuality and reproduction? How does challenging gender binaries always mean thinking about race, thinking about the postcolonial, about ableism? What are the arbitrary rules structuring dance in all its arenas, whether concert and social or commercial and competition, and how do we see those invisible structures and work to disrupt them?
Queer Dance brings together artists and scholars in a multi-platformed project-book, accompanying website, and live performance series to ask, "How does dancing queerly progressively challenge us?" The artists and scholars whose writing appears in the book and whose performances and filmed interviews appear online stage a range of genders and sexualities that challenge and destabilize social norms. Engaging with dance making, dance scholarship, queer studies, and other fields, Queer Dance asks how identities, communities, and artmaking and scholarly practices might consider what queer work the body does and can do. There is great power in claiming queerness in the press of bodies touching or in the exceeding of the body best measured in sweat and exhaustion. How does queerness exist in the realm of affect and touch, and what then might we explore about queerness through these pleasurable and complex bodily ways of knowing?
Industry Reviews
"Queer Dance pulled me into this gathered/distributed community of queer makers with a wink, a shimmy, and a wake-up shake-up all at once... The writing in Queer Dance is its own lyrical, rhythmic, rebellious dance. In moments, the authors bring their knowledge of the body and language to challenging real-life moments." -- Miryam Coppersmith, thINKingDANCE
"Clare Croft's Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings provides just the sort of field-breaking effort we've needed. Bringing together the work of dancers and scholars, the volume surveys the many facets of queerness and dance in the 20th and 21st centuries...In Queer Dance, the personal and the political continually intersect, reminding us of the centrality of pleasure and desire in the formation and circulation of social identities. Whether
carving out a space for new queer representation, speaking to nationalist discourses, or finding ways to work through the loss and trauma that too often shapes queer experience in contemporary life, Croft and the authors she
has assembled in this book capture how our bodies animate these meaningful moments when we dance -- especially when we dance queerly." --Los Angeles Review of Books
"Never taking 'queer' or 'dance' for granted as stable terms, the contributors stretch and bend them to render visible the ways in which dance is a queer praxis and queerness is a dancing analytic. The result is a volume spinning pirouettes on the cutting edge of work being done in dance studies and queer studies."--E. Patrick Johnson, Chair of the Department of African American Studies, and Director of the Black Arts Initiative, Northwestern University
"This is a necessary book that extends its reach outside accepted registers of queerness to bring the subjects it finds crashing into convergence. The willful braiding of feminism, race, and queerness, simultaneously distinct and integrated, reveals an amplified understanding of queer dance and offers new portals for engagement both in and outside of dance."--Tere O'Connor, Choreographer / Center for Advanced Studies Professor in Dance, University of Illinois
at Urbana Champaign
"Queer in its sensibilities and passions, this vibrant and expansive collection of essays emphasizes the political potentiality of reading movement queerly. Forged through the performative gestures of diasporas and differences, protest and potentiality, this text charts bold new directions for dance studies, as it demands of queer theory a sensorial engagement with the embodied physicality of diverse bodies and collectives."--Juana María
Rodríguez, author of Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings
"Clare Croft's extraordinary collection of essays embodies and attempts to name the geography and topography of nascent transcendent explosive 'queerness.' This array of essays navigates new vocabularies, within a set of genders, that finally encompasses the very real complexity of 'being human now.'"--Elizabeth Streb, Choreographer, STREB Extreme Action
"Queer Dance is a readymade curriculum for a dance history or queer studies course, its included video documentation ideal for classroom screenings and/or homework."--The Village Voice
"As creative scholarly voices continue to advance the depth of dance studies as an academic field, there is a continued need for outstanding collections like Queer Dance. Divided into three parts, this compilation of essays will not only expand dance scholarship but also be of great benefit to many interrelated areas, like performance studies...This work sets the bar high for those scholars who follow." --S.R. Irelan, Western Michigan University,
IChoice
