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Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration explores global relationality within the realm of intercultural collaboration in contemporary dance. Focusing on "East"-"West" pairings and how dance artists from different cultural and movement backgrounds find ways to collaborate,
Love Dances contends that the practice and performance of dance serves as a revelatory site for working across culture.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Love in the Shape of Loss
- Chapter 1 Talking: Pichet Klunchun and Myself
- Chapter 2 Mourning: Flash and Simulacrum
- Chapter 3 Loving: Spiel and Talking Duet
- Epilogue The Wages of Dying is Love
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
SanSan Kwan is Associate Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces (2013) and co-editor, with Kenneth Speirs, of Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects (2004). She remains active as a professional dancer and is currently performing with Lenora Lee Dance.
Summary
Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration explores global relationality within the realm of
intercultural collaboration in contemporary dance. Author SanSan Kwan looks specifically at duets, focusing on "East" "West" pairings, and how dance artists from different cultural and movement backgrounds -Asia, the Asian diaspora, Europe, and the United States; trained in contemporary dance, hip hop, flamenco, Thai classical dance, kabuki, and butoh - find ways to collaborate.
Kwan acknowledges the forces of dissension, prejudice, and violence present in any contact zone, but ultimately asserts that choreographic invention across difference can be an act of love in the face of loss and serve as a model for difficult, imaginative, compassionate global affiliation. Love Dances contends that the practice and performance of dance serves as a revelatory site for working across culture. Body-to-body interaction on the stage carries the potential to model everyday encounters across difference in the world.
Additional text
Simultaneously heartfelt and critical, Love Dances provides a nuanced analysis of intercultural duets. Through vivid and compelling prose, Kwan mobilizes emotion as a means of rethinking collaboration across the divides of race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, age, and ability. In the process, Kwan reframes not only the promises and pitfalls of intercultural collaboration but also the crises of our current economic and political moment.
