Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments If we can't dance, we don't want to be part of your revolution Alienation solidarity Method Prelude to action Martha Graham: Embodied Chronicle 2. ‘Go ahead and be a bastard’ Anna Sokolow Through dance I have experienced the wordless joy of freedom: Pearl Primus Dance as intervention, dance as action Ballet beyond borders ‘No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin’ ‘Going around the house like a butterfly’ Ballet, home, Syria The canon must be fired! Ballet and the long arc of history There is only now: radical ballet going forward Erbil/ New York City: Break/ Dance The body in battle Those who leave and those who stay Not just for you, but for the rest of the earth Ballade of belonging At the still point of the turning world Break/ dance: echoing further: Erbil Steps in the street: Revolution DJ Dance on the march The People (dancing) united can never be defeated Dancing onwards! Dance as a home Transitions Home, exile, words, movement Arriving Storytelling Unraveling Homelessness- Devastation- Exile Spectre, haunting Bibliography Index

Promotional Information

A work examining never-before-discussed connections between dance and activism internationally from the 1920s to our times.

About the Author

Dana Mills is a writer, activist and dancer based in Amsterdam. She is the author of Dance and Politics: Moving beyond Boundaries and Rosa Luxemburg.

Reviews

Mills artfully weaves together a massive array of case studies, drawing connections across the globe and throughout the century.
*Dance International*

Mills brings an investigative style and ethnographic approach to dig deep—within contextual layers and personal stories—to discover an interpretation that positions the dialog between the social cultural moment, the dancer, and the dance … A tightly and provocatively argued book that provides a new perspective on dance as activism.
*Journal of Dance Education*

Dance and Activism: A Century of Radical Dance Across the World, makes an important contribution to ongoing conversations within the field of dance studies about the political nature of dance. The book explores the mobilization of dance as a language and method for activism and radical hope, extending and refining the intimate relationship between dance and politics outlined in Mills’s previous work.
*Dance Chronicle*

Dance and Activism’s main strength is that it is something of a pioneer ... Dance and Activism is a welcome and necessary addition to the dance history and dance studies canon. Graduate program directors would be wise to point students toward this book not only as a resource, but as a reminder that powerful and transformative dance exists outside the concert stage.
*Theatre Topics*

A most intriguing, erudite book.
*Sydney Arts Guide*

Mills’s book provides unique case studies that draw from different forms of dance across the globe. These case studies analyse the actions of the dancers and choreographers, not choreographed works. The majority of books about dance and politics rely on analysis of dance pieces or theorize from generalized notions of dance. Mills also focuses on the actions of the dancers and choreographers whose actions are explicitly political/create direct action in the world. The site of their action is the world at large, not the theatre for a select audience. The majority of books about dance and politics discuss the political effects of events that occur in the closed environment of the theatre or dance studio.
*Leah Cox, Dean of the American Dance Festival*

Mills shows how dance and dancers from the stage to the streets have responded to forces of alienation and oppression, and how they have moved their bodies—and others—to imagine different worlds. It is a stirring and powerful read, and a prelude to action.
*Glory Liu, Harvard University, USA*

The past is constantly present as Dana Mills chronicles the extraordinary potential our expressive dancing body/mind. In an age of increasingly sedentary work, her deep analysis of “dance as activism” lays bare a far-reaching radicalism and breadth of diversity in dance forms. Dance and Activism is both timely and necessary.
*Blakeley White-McGuire, Dancer, Choreographer, Educator and Activist, USA*

In this groundbreaking multi-disciplinary book, Dana Mills leads dance from the wings of political activism to the centre stage of human resistance and the creative struggle for freedom and our most precious, primordial material possession – the bodies in which we live and struggle for self-possession. Mills deftly choreographs a century of global theatre of street protest and popular movements through the individual stories and collective moments and movements that create surprising uprisings and new solidarities. A brilliant political theorist, activist and dancer at the forefront of the pursuit of a new dialectics for our troubled modern age, Mills shares her cogent analysis and innovative thinking in a readable, engaging form that leaps beyond intellectual boundaries and galvanises a new genre of thought in action. Vividly describing how our restless bodies can and will reach out, rise up and protect everything that is human and beautiful in our world, Dana Mills shows, with passion and commitment, why people will never stop dancing in search of freedom.
*Rachel Holmes is critically acclaimed author of, most recently, Eleanor Marx: a Life and Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel*

This book is essential for anyone who wants dance to be part of their revolution.
*New Books Network*