Abstract
Many recent pre-pandemic dance choreographies in the post-anthropocene tradition patently favor the presentation of haptic intimacies through the interplays or autoplays of increasingly disembodied dancers (McGregor, Navas et al.). Through “lighting out” the insides of the body Agamben’s homo sacer’s status (i.e., man’s status of being fair game) is doubled and thus becomes dangerously increased. This presentation aims to investigate the ruptures of such an aesthetic approach during the pandemics (Covid-19 intertwined with systemic racism) in which both the homo politicus and the homo rassisticus seem to retake center stage and thus revive the Foucauldian tenet that the biological existence is intrinsically reflected in the political existence. Re-embodying the dancer through turning off the “inside lighting” while redressing the now (pandemically evoked) necessary spatially distanced (and masked) body as an aesthetico-political agent has the preoccupation with haptic intimacies cede its place to that of longings for social interconnectedness, for new forms of social intimacies, even; a shift which will weigh heavily on all post-pandemic forms of biopolitical action in the near future: London’s 1665 Great Plague’s “Ring around the Rosy… we all fall down” has turned into Covid-19’s ‘Love Song to Bill’ (José Navas), NTH’s ‘New Bach’ in Harlem choreography, and Bill T. Jones’ ‘Afterwardness’ (premiering in May 2021) – into current choreographies which redeploy the importance of personal and social intimacies while simultaneously putting racial inequities and injustice front and center.
Presenters
Gerburg GarmannProfessor of French and German, Global Languages and Cross-Cultural Studies, University of Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2021 Special Focus—Life after Pandemic: Towards a New Global Biopolitics?
KEYWORDS
Dance, Post-Anthropocene, Embodiment, Homo Sacer, Homo Politicus, Homo Rassisticus, Biopolitics
