Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City

Every day, urban communities are danced into being. This is more than a metaphor, it is a testament to the power of performance as a social force, as cultural poeisis, as communication infrastructure that makes identity, solidarity and memory sharable. Communities are danced into being in daily, routine labour, time and talk backstage and off-sometimes way off - stage, as well as onstage. They are danced into being by virtuoso technicians and earnest amateurs. Communities that serve as exemplary models for diverse, global connections emerge at dance's busy intersections of discipline and dreams, repetition and innovation, competition and care.

Dancing Communities examines amateur and professional dance in Los Angeles, and argues that concert and amateur dance practices are laboratories for re-fashioning myriad complex intersections of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and culture. Here, dance offers solidarity, and communal and cultural continuity. Using the 'global' city of Los Angeles, Hamera offers new possibilities for transforming intimacy in/and urban life and for wider discussions of the social and aesthetic force of performance as an urban political infrastructure.

About the Author:
Judith Hamera is Professor and Head of the Department of Performance Studies at Texas A&M University, USA