Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance

Annotation

In this publication, Lepecki examines dance and performance at a time of rampant neoliberalism and the financialisation governing our lives. Examining how the movement of bodies is instrumental in this regime, he coins two terms: ‘choreo-policing’ (the policing of the circulation of bodies in the public sphere, and the imposition of somatic forms of control and obedience) and ‘choreo-politics’ (the kinetics of the political, understood as a choreography of freedom). From there he delves into a series of critical singularities (those traits that prove impossible to capture or objectify) of dance and performance; a set of vectors and conditions which allow us to unleash the political urgency and potential of these practices.

Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga

Dance’s most significant singularity is its capacity for gathering and articulating the set of defining problems in neoliberal production of subjectivity as it produces counter-moves and counter-discourses. Because the singularity that transforms spaces of circulation into spaces of freedom and of moving political potentialities has a specific name: the dancer.