(Post)Socialist Dance

Book excerpt: This book sets out to search for the Second World - the (post)socialist context - in dance studies and examines the way it appears and reappears in today's globalized world. It traces hidden and invisibilized legacies over the span of one century, probing questions that can make viewers, artists, and scholars uncomfortable regarding dance histories, memories, circulations and production modes in and around the (post)socialist world. The contributions delve into a variety of dance practices (folk, traditional, ballet, modern, contemporary), modes of dance production (institutionalization processes, festival-making and market logics), and dance circulations (between centres and peripheries, between different genres and styles). The main focus is Eastern Europe (including Russia) but the book also addresses Cuba and China. The book's historical examples make the reader aware, too, of the (post)socialist bodies' influence in today's dance, including in contemporary dance scenes. The (post)socialist context promises to be a prosperous laboratory to explore uncomfortable questions of legitimacy. Whose choreographic work is staged as a 'quality' dance production? Which dance practices are worthy of scholarly study? What are the limits of dance studies' understanding of what dance is or should be? In view of reclaiming the Second World through dance, this book thus probes questions that should be asked today but are not easy to answer; questions that dance practitioners, facilitators, critics, and researchers, including ourselves, are often not at ease with either. In doing so, the cracks of dance history begin to be sealed, and neglected dance practices are written back into history, provided with the academic recognition that they deserve.