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Activating Whiteness: Racializing the Ordinary in US American Postmodern Dance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2018

Rebecca Chaleff
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rchaleff@ucr.edu
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Abstract

“Activating Whiteness: Racializing the Ordinary in US American Postmodern Dance” explores how the choreographic turn to postmodernism twisted the trope of racial exclusion from a focus on trained bodies to a focus on ordinary bodies. Analyses of Yvonne Rainer's Trio A (1966) and Trisha Brown's Locus (1975) demonstrate how ordinary bodies shape racially exclusive spaces and activate the biopolitical mechanisms of normalization that their choreography allegedly contests. This essay argues that the spaces activated by the bodies that shaped them carry the physical trace of the performers’ race through the enduring invisibility of whiteness.

Keywords

ordinariness race Whiteness postmodernism biopower phenomenology Judson Dance Theater Yvonne Rainer Trisha Brown Gerald Casel Xandra Ibarra
Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , December 2018 , pp. 71 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © Dance Studies Association 2018 

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