By Clare Croft
I created Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings because I need to know, to prove, and to remind myself that queer people—and queer people of all kinds—dance.
As a lesbian, being in dance has not always been easy, even though I deeply love dancing. Especially in institutional settings, dance can be a place where we get to rehearse and stage new possibilities, but it all too often is a place where I’ve been told I wasn’t what a woman was supposed to be and a place I rarely got to see physical and emotional interactions that resonate with all the ways I live my life. I believe the best dance scholarship is the scholarship people write in order to survive, and Queer Dance is my survival guide—my reminder that this thing we call “dance” is a broad world full of people living across the entire spectrum of gender and sexuality, offering ways of relating that reflect diverse experiences of race, nationality, geography, and aesthetics. Queer Dance is testimony that I, nor you, are alone in our too often othered desires. Queer Dance is testimony that we have been here a long time; we are staying; and we will change dance.
Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings includes seventeen essays written by dance artists, dance scholars, and many people who test the boundaries of such categorizations. Across the essays, including my introductory essay, writers explore and examine what queer and dance might have to do with one another — not to define what constitutes “queer dance,” but to imagine how queerness and dancing, taken up together, might help us critique and re-imagine living and loving. To purchase the book, go here, using the code AAFLYG6 to get a 30% discount.
Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings also has a complementary Website featuring performances by the artists in the book, as well as interviews I conducted with those artists. To check out the Website, go here. (To check out the performances and interviews, use the username Music3 and the password Book 3234.)
In the book, you’ll find essays by Lou Henry Hoover (drag king based in New Orleans and Seattle), members of Post Natyam Collective (South Asian performance collective based in the US, Europe, and Canada), Emily Wilcox (scholar of Chinese performance), Doran George (artist and somatics practitioner), J. Carter (trans studies scholar and artist based in the Bay Area), Jennifer Campbell (musicologist), Hannah Kosstrin (scholar of dance history and Jewish studies), Thomas DeFrantz (artist and dance and Black studies scholar), Justin Torres (award-winning novelist, author of We are the Animals), Nicholas Gareiss (percussive dancer based in Michigan), Kareem Khubchandani (gender and performance scholar, and the fantastic aunty/drag professor, LaWhore Vagistan), Peter Carpenter (Chicago-based artist and scholar), Jennifer Monson (choreographer and performer based in Illinois and New York), Angela Ahlgren (scholar of Asian American theatre and dance), Raquel Monroe (Chicago-based artist and scholar of hip-hop), Patrick McKelvey (disability studies scholar), and Anna Martine Whitehead (Black queer performer and poet based in Chicago).
On the website, you’ll find performances by and interviews with Lou Henry Hoover, Kitten LaRue and Elby Brosch; Post Natyam Collective; Beijing-based contemporary dance artist Gu Jiani; SLIPPAGE (Thomas DeFrantz, Kevin Guy, James Morrow, and Gina Kohler); Nicholas Gareiss and musician Cleek Schrey; LaWhore Vagistan; Peter Carpenter; DD Dorvillier and Jennifer Monson; and Anna Martine Whitehead.
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Clare Croft is a dance historian and theorist, as well as a dramaturg and curator. She is the author of Dancers as Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange (Oxford 2015), a study of US State Department-sponsorship of international dance tours as a form of cultural diplomacy. She is also the editor of the book and Website, Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford 2017), a collection of essays by scholars and artists. In connection to this volume, Croft also curates the EXPLODE: queer dance project, which began in Ann Arbor (2012-2015), toured to New York (2015), and will tour nationally in 2019. Croft is also the founder and curator of Daring Dances, a curatorial initiative based in southeast Michigan dedicated to making space for dance and the pleasurably difficult conversations dance invites. An active dramaturg, Croft frequently collaborates with artists including Thomas DeFrantz and Jennifer Harge, as well as leading community engagement work with arts presenters, including Ann Arbor’s UMS; the Fusebox Festival in Austin, Texas; and Portland, Oregon’s TBA Festival. Croft’s academic writing has appeared in numerous journals including QED: Journal of LGBTQ Worldmaking, Dance Research Journal, and Theatre Journal. Her writing has been recognized widely: Dancers as Diplomats received the Congress on Research in Dance’s Outstanding Publication Prize in 2016, and she received the American Society of Theatre Research’s Sally Banes Publication Prize in 2010 for the article, “Ballet Nations.” Croft is also the Editor of the series, Studies in Dance History, the book series of the Dance Studies Association. In all her work, Croft seeks to cross the divide between academia and the arts world, and she has written for venues like The Brooklyn Rail and The Washington Post. Croft teaches in the MFA and BFA Dance programs at the University of Michigan, and holds a PhD from the University of Texas-Austin.
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Related posts:
Thinking Queerly: Summer Correspondence with Leah Cox @ ADF
Artist Profile: Jennifer Monson
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