Tanzquartier Wien

Katie Beswick
Embodiment and the working class: habitus and infrapoltics 

Societies such as the USA and UK operate through both explicit and implicit semiotics of class, in which class stratification serves as a powerful means of social control. In these contexts, notions of class perform through structures of relation as well as within the symbolic and material realm. In this way, class intersects with raced and gendered positionalities and can efface the importance of class as a lens for understanding inequalities, and demanding justice. Classed subjects are often aware of their own positions within an overarching structure of inequality, but also subject to classed interpellations (that might be expressed through raced or gendered language), which studies have demonstrated have damaging effects on the well-being of those classed subjects who experience upward social mobility (Crew 2020). In this paper, I want to think about how embodied movement practices might contribute to a semiotics of class, and, when leveraged in certain contexts, bring about moments of social justice. To do so, I apply two theoretical lenses, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and Scott’s infrapolitics to think about the movement practices of working-class Litefeet dancers in New York City’s subway system, and working-class beatboxers in London’s Battersea Arts Centre. In both cases, I analyse the ways in which physical spaces (the subway and the theatre) are effectively disrupted through movement in order to stage a working-class politics, which draws from a repertoire that might be framed as habitus but might also be understood within the frame of infrapolitics.

Alice Baldock
Butoh Bodies in postwar Japan: Self-annihilation, becoming nothing, and the erasure of the socially marked body  

This presentation is an example of how attention to class, and to how class intersects with both gender and dis/ability and illness, can lead to dance which can reimagine social possibilities. This presentation bridges the historical and the contemporary, by charting the trajectory of ankoku butoh – the ‘dance of utter darkness’ – from its conception by women dancers in the early postwar Tokyo, to its manifestation around the world in the 21st century.  These dancers’ shared idea of the body began in the early postwar context, known as the ‘age of the flesh’, in which male intellectuals from elite institutions postulated that the only source of knowledge one could trust was nikutai, or the flesh body. I show how these ideas were also taken up by a group of women dancers to show that the body was the source of knowledge about the world, but that this knowledge came from paying attention to every-body. The dance that these women created, butoh, developed by incorporating bodies which had become outcast in the social context of postwar Japan. The presentation will demonstrate how the simultaneous attention to, and erasure of these marginalised categories produced a new aesthetic style and consider the potential applications of this style to ways of living for everybody.

Hannes Bohne
(Historical) intersections of class and race in contemporary dance 

This lecture performance explores traces of how social constructs of class and race are possibly intertwined with and present in contemporary dance practices. It will ask who is able to experience and practice contemporary dance as meaningful and artistic, if (and how) social constructs of class and race are still present in contemporary dance. Do teaching and performances of contemporary dance exclude dancers and audiences with certain backgrounds systematically? Based on a historiographic perspective on the beginnings of modern dance in the 1920s in Germany and the influences of ‘Körperkultur’ and ‘Lebensreform’ (including e.g. Yoga practices, ideals of the ‘natural’ body and ‘appropriate’ ways of life), I will argue that some practices of contemporary dance reproduce deeply rooted constructions of class and race. These considerations will be explored in a short experimental and participatory dance practice to question and experience possible constructs of class and race in contemporary dance technique.