Eastern bodies that dance : difference and otherness in the economy of contemporary dance performance

• Main Author: Njaradi, Dunja
• Published: Lancaster University 2011
• Subjects: 792.8
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.587510

This thesis locates at the intersection between the practice of dance and the notion of 'cultural difference' in the discourses of contemporary globalization. Electing to focus on dancers and dance practices from South East Europe, and critically drawing on post-colonial, Balkan, and globalization studies, the thesis interrogates the multiplying and shifting meanings of the terms East and Eastern Europe in an age of globalization and transnationality. By investigating masculinities and labour in professional dance in the context of the contemporary dance scene in South East Europe, the thesis looks at the cultural, historical, and material conditions that shape both the dancer's experience of his/her dance practice and his/her experience of 'the everyday'. The emphasis on the dancer's experience of 'the everyday' is designed to critically explore and to challenge the established methodological boundaries of dance studies: the critical focus shifts away from the scholarly attentions that are more regularly paid to the phenomenology and perception of performance towards the conditions of dance production. As the thesis approaches dance as a practice similar to any other art practice in the globalized art markets of 'the contemporary modernity', it understands the production of dance as now bound to the function of performance in relation to the historical and cultural discourses of dance, and as conditioned by geopolitical tensions and contradictions in the world of twenty-first century globalization. Finally, in respect to dance practices in South East Europe, the thesis traces the aesthetic and political choices that dancers make in their attempts to articulate their 'difference' through practice/s resistant to commodification as a 'spectacle of difference' in an increasingly globalized contemporary dance market.