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This chapter uses a framework of queer theory to argue that the particular aesthetic and affect of resistance in North St. Louis County made visible the extreme violence of the state in addition to exposing the inherent contradictions within masculine and heteronormative spaces of Black struggle. This is a critical component of queer of color critique. Similar to an Afro-pessimistic perspective of blackness, which locates Black life as a site of ontological death, the chapter argues that “the problem posed by blackness” is an antagonism rooted in the historically naturalized logics of society, including physical space, and is not a conflict that can be rectified through legal means. Through a more optimistic lens, it also highlights the various ways Black women and gender nonconforming individuals practiced a choreopolitics—of bodies in space—that demanded the terms of visibility be set by those “in view.” This particular practice of visibility and an insistence on simply living as an act of protest illustrate the capacity and power that Black lives and life hold in revealing the truth and thus reconfiguring the metrics of living as fully human.

Choreomania became distinctly political. Missionary physicians and neuroscientists stationed in Madagascar and Brazil compared trance-like revolutionary uprisings to the literature on choreomania. Unlike earlier cases, however, these ‘movement disorders’, large-scale anti-colonial demonstrations characterized by shaking, frothing, falling, and visions—as well as, in Madagascar, ancestor worship—tipped ‘choreomania’ (and ‘epidemic chorea’) into the realm of government administration. Worried that uprisings could take place in other colonies, physicians argued that choreomania spread by pathological sympathy; it migrated. Demonstrators angered at the missionaries’ black hats, gathering at sacred sites, convulsing, and ultimately unseating a pro-European king represent, following Giorgio Agamben, a form of ecstasy-belonging: a state of exception characterized by spirit possession and repossession, through which they take back what is rightly theirs. The disorder of ‘choreomania’ represents a choreopolitics of revolt. Similarly, in Brazil, revolutionary underclasses gathered together in what was dismissed as a ‘choreomaniacal’ epidemic of delusion—a religious psychosis.

The introduction first considers the movement for a National Dance Law (2008–), which aims to establish infrastructure and federal funding for all genres of dance in Buenos Aires and throughout the Argentine provinces. It introduces the book’s central concept of “moving otherwise,” outlining the kinds of political engagement it encompasses, as well as how it dialogues with conversations in dance and performance studies. It then explains how the category of “contemporary” dance functions in the text, and argues for an approach to contemporary dance history that decenters the United States and Europe as the original sites and ongoing loci of production. Additionally, it offers a brief overview of the transnational history of modern and contemporary dance in Buenos Aires through examination of the work of Miriam Winslow; Susana Tambutti; and Luciana Acuña and Alejo Moguillansky. Finally, it details the archival, ethnographic, and embodied research methodologies that Moving Otherwise employs.

Modernity can be understood as the cultivation of a fantasy about the past: in the case of choreomania, this ‘past’ was imagined as a rumbling horde, a Bacchic chorus against which purposeful ‘modernity’ positioned itself. Meaningless gesture, after Agamben, epitomized in the nineteenth century in the figure of ‘chorea’, similarly became with the scientific discourse on choreomania a manner of thinking modernity’s double movement, forward and back, between efficient industrialization and the collective archaicity out of which this efficiency imagined itself to arise. Reperforming my own archival return to the still ‘living’ site of the Echternach dancing procession, I discover that the ever more institutionalized event highlights the power of choreopolitical organization displayed by the nation state. As in Meige’s day, the procession has been evacuated of nervous disorder or bodily disruption. My archival reperformance reveals an experience of historicity shorn of a historical encounter.

Through an interrogation of hybrid social dance/jazz concert events held in Atlanta in 1938, this chapter presents the book’s guiding questions and methods, which also stem from the author’s own experience as a social jazz dancer. Applying Susan Foster’s model of choreography as a broadly applicable analytic for the socially reinforced structuring of movement in space, it asks how and why jazz audiences’ default listening postures have moved from standing and dancing to relatively motionless sitting and listening. Exploring this question requires a critical, reflective look at the role of bodies in intellectual and aesthetic hierarchies and the complex webs of desire and anxiety that have shaped American institutional cultures’ conflicted relationships with music, with dance, and with all things corporeal. Critiquing the valorization of transcendence and universalism in American aesthetic discourses and in jazz music history specifically, this chapter advances an embodied approach to jazz history where dance becomes a point of entry into stories that de-center the pillars upon which jazz music’s canonic historical and ideological narratives rest. Following choreographer/folklorist Mura Dehn’s description of social jazz dancing, this book thus advances a perspective that operates “between the beats” of jazz history’s canonic time-spaces, seeking to focus on dancing and musicking as practices that begin within the body and to dig into the complex and messy viscera underneath the skin of those narratives that form the so-called jazz tradition.

Whether it has been the case of Kabir Kala Manch (KKM) in Maharashtra or Jana Naṭya Manḍali (JNM) in Andhra Pradesh, the labouring bodies of subaltern communities have made their presence felt by reconfiguring the language and aesthetics of political theatre performance in India. Expounding on the choreopolitics of labouring bodies, the chapter while discussing the shortcomings of the middle class led left cultural movements, also offers a critique to the ongoing criticisms coming from an essentialist and ahistorical reading of art and politics. The chapter takes up cultural labour and its transformative potential in the context of Gaddar and JNM. It shows the ways in which the ‘folk performance’ can be radically constituted for a transformative politics. Gaddar and JNM reconstitute the cultural labour by reclaiming the radical language and revolutionary subjectivities of labouring body.