(Oxford Studies in Dance Theory) Giersdorf, Jens Richard - Morris, Gay - Choreographies of 21st Century Wars-Oxford University Press (2016)

Choreographies of 21st Century Wars
Oxford Studies in Dance Theory

MARK FRANKO, Series Editor
French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop

Felicia McCarren
Watching Weimar Dance
Kate Elswit
Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-â•‰Gardes
Gabriele Brandstetter
Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body, Revised Edition
Mark Franko
Choreographies of 21st Century Wars
Edited by Gay Morris and Jens Richard Giersdorf
Choreographies of 21st
Century Wars
E dited by Gay Morris

and
Jens R ichard G iersdorf
1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-â•‰in-â•‰Publication Data

Choreographies of 21st century wars /â•‰edited by Gay Morris and Jens Richard Giersdorf.
pages cm. —â•‰(Oxford studies in dance theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–â•‰0–â•‰19–â•‰020166–â•‰1 (cloth : acid–â•‰f ree paper) —â•‰ ISBN 978–â•‰0–â•‰19–â•‰020167–â•‰8 (pbk. : acid–â•‰f ree
paper)â•… 1.â•‡Dance—â•‰Political aspects.â•… 2.â•‡Choreography—â•‰Political aspects.â•… 3.â•‡Dance
criticism.â•… I.â•‡ Morris, Gay, 1940–â•‰â•… II.â•‡ Giersdorf, Jens Richard. III. Title: Choreographies
of twenty first century wars.
GV1588.45.C47 2016
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9â•‡8â•‡7â•‡6â•‡5â•‡4â•‡3â•‡2â•‡1
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CONTENTS
Prefaceâ•‡ vii
Introductionâ•‡ 1
Gay Morris and Jens Richard Giersdorf
1. Access Denied and Sumud: Making a Dance of Asymmetric Warfareâ•‡ 25
Nicholas Rowe
2. Questioning the Truth: Rachid Ouramdane’s Investigation of
Torture in Des Témoins Ordinaires/Ordinary Witnessesâ•‡ 45
Alessandra Nicifero
3. “There’s a Soldier in All of Us”: Choreographing Virtual Recruitmentâ•‡ 63
Derek A. Burrill
4. African Refugees Asunder in South Africa: Performing the
Fallout of Violence in Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walkingâ•‡ 85
Sarah Davies Cordova
5. From Temple to Battlefield: Bharata Natyam in the
Sri Lankan Civil Warâ•‡ 111
Janet O’Shea
6. Choreographing Masculinity in Contemporary Israeli Cultureâ•‡ 133
Yehuda Sharim
7. Affective Temporalities: Dance, Media, and the War on Terrorâ•‡ 157
Harmony Bench
8. Specter of War, Spectacle of Peace: The Lowering of Flags
Ceremony at the Wagah and Hussainiwala Border Outpostsâ•‡ 181
Neelima Jeychandran
9. A Choreographer’s Statementâ•‡ 203
Bill T. Jones
10. Dancing in the Spring: Dance, Hegemony, and Changeâ•‡ 207
Rosemary Martin
vi Contents
11. War and P.E.A.C.E.â•‡ 223

Maaike Bleeker and Janez Janša
12. The Body Is the Frontlineâ•‡ 241
Rosie Kay and Dee Reynolds
13. Geo-â•‰Choreography and Necropolitics: Faustin Linyekula’s
Studios Kabako, Democratic Republic of Congoâ•‡ 269
Ariel Osterweis
14. Re: Moving Bodies in the USA/â•‰Mexico
Drug/Border/â•‰Terror/â•‰Cold Warsâ•‡ 287
Ruth Hellier-â•‰Tinoco
15. After Cranach: War, Representation, and the Body in William Forsythe’s
Three Atmospheric Studiesâ•‡ 315
Gerald Siegmund
16. The Role of Choreography in Civil Society under Siege:
William Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studiesâ•‡ 333
Mark Franko
Contributorsâ•‡ 351
Indexâ•‡ 359
PREFACE
GAY
This book began to take shape in the latter days of the American invasion
of Iraq. At the time, the nightly news was dominated by what seemed end-
less images of advancing tanks, house-â•‰to-â•‰house searches, distraught civilians,
and, finally, photos of every American soldier who had died the previous week.
Altogether, it was a heartbreaking sight of pain and destruction.
As I watched the news broadcasts, I began to consider this war in light of
research I had done earlier on the Second World War and Cold War (A Game
for Dancers: Performing Modernism in the Postwar Years, 1945–â•‰1960, 2006). To
my mind, this conflict was very different. Instead of nearly equal forces vying
with each other on a worldwide stage, this war pitted the most powerful mili-
tary in the world against what could only seem a puny enemy. And since I had
previously argued that dance played a role in 20th-â•‰century wars, I wondered
what kind of relationship it might have to contemporary warfare. To come to
grips with this question, I at first thought of developing an anthology of com-
parative essays, half the book dealing with the 20th century, the other with
the 21st. I invited Jens to act as a coeditor, since he had also done extensive
research on the Cold War (The Body of the People: East German Dance since
1945, 2013) and had lived through it in East Germany, where he also served in
the military.
JENS
Shadows of war were omnipresent while I was growing up in East Germany
in the 1970s. There was our missing grandfather, who hadn’t returned home
from war to my mother and grandmother, and the unacknowledged fact that
all members of my father’s family were refugees, displaced from what is now
Poland. All around us, cities had integrated the traces of war—â•‰empty areas
viii Preface
where houses once stood, ruined buildings that hadn’t been rebuilt even
decades after the war, facades that still showed signs of the heavy artillery
fights of the last days of World War II. It was normal that my parents never
threw away food; my siblings and I knew they had nearly starved for years at
the end and after the war.
The school year always started with the annual celebrations of the liberation
by the Red Army, our comrades in arms. It was the Cold War—â•‰and we learned
to hide behind our desks in the event of a nuclear attack, probably the same
way a child in Pittsburgh was instructed to do. We built gas masks out of dis-
carded plastic shopping bags and trained to use them as protective gear, heads
covered in bags printed with miscellaneous logos, a ridiculous sight even to
ourselves.
Eventually, in 1982, like every man in East Germany, I was drafted into the
army, serving at the border between the two Germanies. The border was the
symbol of Cold War divisions, and it was at that point armed with over a mil-
lion land and splatter mines. Border guards were stationed there not only to
prevent fellow citizens from escaping to the West; we were also trained as the
first defense against the capitalist aggressors. I trained to kill a person with
the bayonet on my Kalashnikov, to dig trenches that protected me from tanks
driving over me during joint military exercises of the Warsaw Pact countries,
and to assemble and shoot antitank defense missiles. It was the time of the
Polish Solidarity movement (Solidarność), and we were dispatched repeatedly,
never knowing if we would participate in the suppression of the movement in
the way the Soviet army did during the Prague Spring.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification in 1989, the
remnants of these different wars were slowly cleaned up and erased. When I
thought about war again, it was mostly about the Cold War for my work on the
politics of dance in East Germany. When Gay approached me with her idea of
a project on dance and war, I assumed it would deal mainly with the Cold War,
since she had worked on that era from the other side.
GAY AND JENS
We soon realized that the 21st century warranted study on its own, and so
focused solely on contemporary warfare. We also shifted our gaze from what
is traditionally called dance to choreography, which, in many forms, has been
closely associated with war, and which is theoretically complex and compel-
ling. Yet we also understood that we needed to rethink what choreography
does in relationship to war, and we had to find contributors that were doing
this kind of rethinking from very different areas and in relation to distinct
parts of omnipresent contemporary wars. This was uncharted territory in
Preface ix
many ways. What would choreographic evidence suggest about contemporary

war, if anything? That is what we had to wait to learn from our contributors.
We were greatly impressed by the diversity and power of the essays that came
back to us. And they did indeed point in quite a different direction from the
Cold War choreography we had analyzed earlier. That evidence comprises the
content of this book, and our analysis of it appears in the introduction.
We would like to thank our authors not only for their commitment to their
individual essays but also for their contributions to new thinking in dance
studies and politics. We would also like to thank our editor at Oxford, Norman
Hirschy, our series editor, Mark Franko, production editor, Stacey Victor, and
our copyeditor, Ben Sadock.
Introduction
GAY MOR R IS A N D J E NS R IC H A R D GI E R S DOR F
It is now widely accepted that 21st-â•‰century wars differ to varying degrees from
the major conflicts of the 20th century. No longer are wars dominated by the
“great powers,” the sovereign states that took the world into two devastating
wars in the first half of the 20th century and then into the forty-â•‰year Cold
War. The major conflicts today are more amorphous and shifting than in the
last century, the boundaries and enemies less clear, the difference between war
and peace less distinct. Although these conflicts are often marked by an asym-
metry of forces, the mightier do not necessarily prevail. These wars go by a
variety of names, including fourth generation wars (4GW) (Hammes 2006),
small wars (Daase 2005), low-â•‰intensity wars (Kinross 2004), postmodern wars
(Duffield 1998), privatized or informal wars (Keen 1995), degenerate wars
(Shaw 1999), new wars (Kaldor 2006; Münkler 2003, 2005), and asymmetrical
wars (Münkler 2003, 2005). They may include state and nonstate combatants
in conflicts that include interstate wars, civil wars, insurgencies, counterinsur-
gencies, and revolutions.1
Choreographies of 21st Century Wars is the first book to examine the com-
plex relationship between choreography and war in this century. War and cho-
reography have long been connected through war rituals and dances, military
training and drills, parades, and formal processions. While the essays here
are concerned with such uses of choreography as components of war, as well
2 G ay M orris and J ens R ichard G iersdorf
as war as a subject matter of dance, they are more broadly concerned with the
complex structural relationship between choreography, war, and politics. We
ask: What work does choreography do in a world dominated by war, a world in
which war appears to be less a tool of politics than a driving force?
Viewing war through the concept of choreography is significant because
it shifts the focus of study away from the abstractions of political and mili-
tary theory to corporeal agency. At the same time, rethinking choreography
through a comprehension of the complexity of contemporary wars requires a
reconceptualization of what choreography does and is, while building on past
definitions of choreography as an organizational and meaning-â•‰making system.
In light of the shifting character of 21st-â•‰century wars, we ask how choreog-
raphy relates not just to wars themselves but to the politics of today’s wars. If
the 20th century was marked by the power of the nation-â•‰state, where the state
held a monopoly of power to make war, and if dance, and by extension chore-
ography, was governed in the 20th century by its relationship to the state as a
source of identity (Manning 1993, 1996; Franko 2012; Morris 2006; Kant 2007;
Kowal 2010; Giersdorf 2013),2 what does choreography do in the face of war
when the state loses its grip on the monopoly of power, or when the state fails
altogether—â•‰that is, in what Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt call the new
“global state of war”?3 Further, will the old models of choreographic analysis,
created to account for the power of the sovereign state, still hold?
In order to explore these questions we will first lay out some of the major
issues surrounding 21st-â•‰century wars, then move on to an investigation of
choreography as an organizational and meaning-â•‰making system in an envi-
ronment of constant war, and finally discuss how the individual chapters relate
to both 21st-â•‰century wars and critical choreographic analysis. The sixteen
chapters included in Choreographies of 21st Century Wars are geographically
diverse, ranging across the Middle East and Africa, Europe and the Americas.
They deal with violent conflict through the means of field notes, case stud-
ies, participant observations, and photographs, as well as in essays reflecting
on war issues and their relationship to choreographic practices. Thus, the
approach is interdisciplinary; contributors come from the fields of dance and
theater, performance and media studies, anthropology, sociology, and history.
Such broad geographical perspectives and viewpoints from a variety of disci-
plines move readers across localities and place them in relationship to bodies
that are engaged in or responding to warfare.
WAR
Much English-â•‰language commentary on contemporary war was writ-
ten in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Here
Introduction 3
Islamic-fundamentalist terrorism was sometimes transformed into a gen-

eral theory of 21st-century war. So, for example, Philip Bobbitt in Terror and
Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century (2008) defines contempo-
rary war in terms of terrorism and primarily as Islamic jihad. Like Walter
Laqueur, Bobbitt places special emphasis on the dangers of terrorists obtain-
ing weapons of mass destruction (Bobbitt 2008; Laqueur 2002, 2006). We
sought a broader, more nuanced theory of contemporary war than Bobbitt
and Laqueur offer, one that could account for a range of conflicts, and in
which terrorism might become a part of the picture rather than its totality.
Political theorists such as Mary Kaldor and Herfried Münkler offer such a
view, as well as accounting for how contemporary wars differ from those of
the 20th century. Kaldor characterizes the evolution of what she calls the “old
wars” as being closely linked to the development of nation-states beginning
in the 15th century, eventually evolving into the total wars of the 20th cen-
tury and the “imagined” Cold War, which were wars of alliances and blocs
(2006, 16–17).4 Although these wars differed over time, they generally were
linked to the development of rationalized, centralized, hierarchically struc-
tured modern states with territorial interests. They conformed to Clausewitz’s
famous dictum of war being politics by other means. While such wars have
become an anachronism, according to Kaldor they still have a firm grip on
perceptions. She argues that violent conflict has changed, blurring the dis-
tinctions between war, organized crime, and large-scale violations of human
rights (2006, 2). New wars, rather than being between nation-states, are often
private and conducted for private gain, and they are frequently aimed at civil-
ians rather than soldiers.
Kaldor uses the general term “globalization” to help explain the worldwide
interconnectedness she finds in contemporary conflicts (2006, 3–5, 95–118).
These links are made possible by the development of cell phones and computers
that can instantly relay images and messages throughout the world, but they
also describe technological developments that allow for methods like drone
attacks. In the new wars there is a global presence in the form of mercenaries,
military advisors, private security businesses, diasporic volunteers, interna-
tional press, NGOs, and peacekeeping troops (2006, 5).5 Funding may come
from global sources as well, ranging from outside states to diasporic organiza-
tions and individuals. Kaldor speaks of a privatization of war in which weak
states cannot retain a monopoly of power, encouraging autonomous factions
to create and maintain conflicts (2006, 96–102). Privatization is aided by the
ability to make war with inexpensive weapons and transport (the pickup truck
loaded with men carrying light arms). She argues that there has also been an
increasing privatization of violence as states lose their ability to enforce laws
and as regular armed forces disintegrate.
Münkler, like Kaldor, emphasizes the privatization of war, but he also

stresses the increasing asymmetry of conflicts (2003, 7–â•‰9; 2005, 25–â•‰30). These
wars contrast with those of the 20th century, which tended to be symmetri-
cal in the sense that power was more or less equal between adversaries. Now
the level of force is more unequal, whether it be the United States fighting
against Saddam Hussein’s forces in Iraq or Libyans fighting against the army
of Muammar el-â•‰Qaddafi.
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt deepen the discussion of 21st-â•‰century
wars through the linked concept of imperialism and empire. The old impe-
rial model that dominated the modern period was based on sovereign nation-â•‰
states that extended over foreign territory. This has given way to Empire, a new
order of networked power consisting of states, corporations, and institutions
that must cooperate to insure world order. However, the network is rife with
hierarchies and divisions that cause continual war, diminishing the difference
between war and peace. War has “flooded the whole social field” (Hardt and
Negri 2004, 7), eroding the old idea of war being an exception, when constitu-
tional rights are temporarily suspended, between periods of peace. Drawing on
Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, Negri and Hardt assert that war now domi-
nates all social relations, becoming a means of social control. Wars are thus
rendered indeterminate in time and space. Since they are a means of social
control, they cannot be won, and thus war and policing merge. Biopower not
only involves the ability to destroy on a massive scale, for example, through
nuclear weapons, but can be individualized. In its extreme individualized
form biopower becomes torture (19).
Roberto Esposito similarly references Foucault for a concept of biopower
that stresses immunization and autoimmunity as hallmarks of past and pres-
ent social conditions (2013). Modern nations have long attempted to immu-
nize themselves from danger outside their borders through various defensive
means, including war. This was successful enough during the 20th century,
but with globalization and the breakdown of boundaries through commu-
nication and economics it becomes impossible for nations to isolate them-
selves. The border between outside and inside is now porous. Although the old
immunization processes no longer work, nation-â•‰states do not seek new solu-
tions. Instead, they increase attempts at immunization, particularly through
“security” measures such as sending armies and machinery, including drones,
to fight conflicts outside the nation’s boundaries and instilling anti-â•‰immigra-
tion laws and walls aimed at keeping out intruders. Eventually this results in
what Esposito refers to as “autoimmunity,” when the body turns on itself. As
we saw in the American suspension of habeas corpus and the Geneva conven-
tions for enemy combatants during the Iraq War, as well as the invasions of
privacy by the US National Security Agency revealed by the Snowden papers,
Introduction 5
increasing attempts at immunization become threats to democracy. Political

analyst Christopher Coker, agrees: “Governments today have had to go into
the deterrence business no longer against states, but against their own pop-
ulation. The Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay, and the whole apparatus of the
Department of Homeland Security, is about holding the citizen at bay, as well
as some external enemy. The battlefield used to be outside a country, in the-
atres of operation beyond one’s shore. ‘Theatres of external operations’ they
used to be called. Today, they are to be found in the metropolitan concentra-
tions at home” (2010, 120). Coker goes on to speak about the breakdown of
the civic contract between citizen and state. As individuals are increasingly
expected to look after themselves, society divides between those few who have
the means to do so and the majority who do not. Now, he says, insecurity is an
existential state (2010, 121–â•‰122).
Another vital aspect of current war is its mediatization. General Rupert
Smith calls today’s conflicts “war among the people,” in which “the people in
the streets and houses and fields—â•‰all the people, anywhere—â•‰are the battle-
field” (2008, 6). As such we exist in “a global theater of war, with audience
participation.” By this he means that “the people of the audience have come
to influence the decisions of the political leaders who send in force as much
as—â•‰in some cases more than—â•‰the events on the ground” (2008, 291). Smith
is primarily concerned with the global impact of the professional press, but
in today’s wars, every faction, from combatants, to the audiences across the
globe, to the civilians directly affected by the conflicts, is using media to tell
stories that support their views. The choreographies described in this book (a
large number of which can be seen on YouTube) are no exception to the global
profusion, nor are the chapters themselves, in an age when books are rou-
tinely produced or reproduced in digital form, making them instantly avail-
able worldwide.
CHOREOGR APHY
An extensive body of literature and visual records exist demonstrating how
choreography has aided in the training for war, in encouraging fighters and
warning enemies, and in celebrating victory in battle.6 Anthropologists have
recorded war and warrior dances among the Ndende of Zambia and other sub-â•‰
Saharan African peoples (Evans-â•‰Pritchard 1937; Turner 1957, 1967; Ranger
1975; Hanna 1977; Spencer 1985). In a Western context, the pyrrhike, pos-
sibly originating in Crete and later adopted by the Athenians, formed an ele-
ment of training for war among Spartan youths (Borthwick 1970; Sachs 1937,
239–â•‰240), while in Rome processional triumphs marked conquests of new
territory (Brilliant 2000; Bergmann and Kondoleon 2000). Dances, pageants,
and processions celebrating military victories were part of Renaissance and

baroque court life, as well as of the French Revolution (McGowan 1984;
Chazin-Bennahum 1981).
In the 20th century, dances that were once tribal transformed themselves in
urban environments: during the South African apartheid era, the traditional
toyi-toyi war dance was performed in black funeral processions, unsettling
whites seeing it on the evening news (Seidman 2001, Twala and Koetaan 2006),
while the kongonya dance that served Zimbabwean independence fighters in
the bush became a weapon President Mugabe has continued to use to reinforce
his dictatorship (Gonye 2013). As for 20th-century Western theatrical perfor-
mance, although surprisingly little research has been done on Futurist dance,
with its ecstatic embrace of war,7 there are numerous studies of Ausdruckstanz
and its relationship first to the antiwar Dada artists during World War I and
then to the Nazi regime (Richter 1965; Manning 1993; Karina and Kant 2003).
The turn to antifascist and patriotic subject matter in allied countries leading
up to and during World War II also has been studied (Warren 1998; N. M.
Jackson 2000; Foulkes 2002; Franko 1995, 2012). Choreography in relationship
to the Cold War years has begun to be examined (Prevots 1998; Morris 2006;
Kowal 2010; Ezrahi; 2012; Giersdorf 2013). Sally Banes discussed anti–Vietnam
War choreography by Steve Paxton (Collaboration with Wintersoldier) and
Yvonne Rainer (WAR) (Banes 1977, 15, 63–64), while artist Chris Burden has
commented on his own antiwar performances, the most famous of which was
Shoot (1971), in which he had himself shot with a .22 rifle.
Choreographies of 21st Century Wars adds to this literature through a focus
on contemporary war. At the same time, we move beyond what is tradition-
ally defined as dance to take a broader view of choreography. Since the 1960s,
Western artists, often working across media and boundaries of different per-
formance disciplines, have explored and expanded the definitions of dance
and choreography.8 More recently, performance studies scholars, in conver-
sation with cultural studies, have called for the questioning of disciplinary
boundaries to analyze performances across all disciplines and outside theatri-
cal institutions (Schechner 1985). Dance studies has expanded dance by high-
lighting choreography as a structuring system for any kind of movement with
inherent political potentiality and by rethinking it as a methodological tool
(Foster 1986, 1995; Franko 1993, 1995; Martin 1998).
While incorporating these broader concepts that move choreography
beyond the often narrowly confined definitions of dance, we try to avoid uni-
versalizing these strategies by centering attention on localized and cultur-
ally specific uses of choreography within the context of warfare and politics.
Thus, choreography can include soldiers participating in a mock battle on the
Indian/Pakistani border, as a reminder of state rivalries; arranging hostage
Introduction 7
videos in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territories to demonstrate to audi-

ences through comportment and movement the vulnerability of prisoners and
the might of captors; or videogames that develop embodied skills in players
in the United States that prepare them for real war under the guise of virtual
entertainment (while also promoting a romanticized idea of a painless war).
As these examples illustrate, for our conceptualization of the relationship
between contemporary war and choreographed movement we recognize cho-
reography as an organizational, decision-making, and analytical system that
is always social and political. This incorporates established definitions of cho-
reography as purposeful stagings of structured, embodied movements that
aim to communicate an idea or create meaning for an actual, conceptual, or
purposefully absent audience for aesthetic and social reasons. Important for
this definition is the acknowledgement of training, technique, rehearsal, per-
formance, and reception as intrinsic parts of choreography, not only to reveal
labor and agency but also to examine discipline and resistance to it (Foster
1986). For this reason, choreography is situated outside any specific technique
and thus is not necessarily tied to dance. In other words, we see choreography
as an operational concept in addition to a spatial and temporal one.
Equally important is the understanding of choreography as a knowledge sys-
tem. With such an understanding, both term and practice become an explicit
methodology and a theorization in dance studies (Foster 2010, 5). Here, chore-
ography allows scholars to structure both historical and social traces of dance
and the scholars’ contemporary position to this material in relation to each
other. Such a comprehension of choreography attempts to emancipate both
dance and choreography from a Cartesian grip that establishes a clear binary
between, and hierarchy for, disembodied thinking and embodied practice.
Without erasing the distinctions between the written, the theorized, and the
choreographed, the understanding of choreography as a knowledge system
establishes both dance and choreography as thought and theory, and thus
broadens the permanent realm of writing and other textual and artistic prod-
ucts toward it. Choreography as a knowledge system no longer focuses exclu-
sively on performance and thereby addresses the issues of ephemerality and
disappearance, which have haunted dance and choreography in both theory
and practice (Schneider 2011).
Choreography as a knowledge system does not eliminate the problem of
its practice and theory as universalizing instruments, which do not always
acknowledge their ties to a specific cultural materiality. We are aware of this
problem and the seeming neutrality of choreography. There is no such sys-
tematic neutrality, as Michel Foucault demonstrated, and it is important to
recognize the possibility that such a concept of choreography can enable, or
at least be complicit with, colonial, postcolonial, and economically globalizing
projects, as much as it can resist such projects (Foster 2010; Giersdorf 2009;
Savigliano 2009).
All these reconceptualizations of choreography need to be applied to the
use of choreography in relation to contemporary warfare. The rethinking of
permanence, continuity, and social ordering and organization, as well as the
political potential of choreography, is thus at the center of the investigations
performed by the essays in this anthology, and we want to reassess the rela-
tionship among these issues in the following considerations.
Dance scholarship historically has recognized choreography as an organiz-
ing principle related to social order. The Renaissance has been established as
the period where dance and warfare literally crossed paths in the training and
performance of both pursuits. Gerald Siegmund and Stefan Hölscher empha-
size the ordering capacity of dance and warfare, stating that “warfare, dance’s
notorious partner in the eternal duet of order and chaos, was to defend and
to safeguard the order of the state towards its external enemies, dancing was
designed to establish and keep an inner order by forging alliances and safe-
guarding the order by its playful work towards reproduction” (2013, 9). Rudolf
zur Lippe highlights the complex reordering and controlling of society, self,
and embodiment through dance and choreography in his socioeconomic anal-
ysis of early Italian merchantry and absolutism in French noble society (1981).
Similarly, Mark Franko sees choreography and dance technique at that time
as constitutive practices that affected political and social structures directly
(1993). All these scholars share an understanding of the extension of the pro-
ductive potential of choreography into social and contemporary practices.
Choreography is a Western concept whose name combines the Greek words
for dance and writing. Raoul Auger Feuillet created the term for his scoring of
dances around 1700. His dance notation depicted the structure and layout of
dance in relation to social standards and techniques of upper-class conduct,
but the term later came to connote the original creation of dances. It is impor-
tant to stress that the terminology and practice of choreography functioned
as a textual organization that works primarily to reinforce a particular kind
of order in society. Bodies were literally trained and arranged in space and
in relation to each other to move in a harmonious way to reflect and instill
order, manifested through notation of geometrical horizontal patterns and an
expected emphasis on vertical posture. The choreographer ostensibly created
such choreographies through artistic musing and divine inspiration. With
the institutionalization of choreography and specifically dance as a theatri-
cal practice, the arrangements of steps and gestures in a staged space and to a
musical or seemingly natural rhythm served primarily as a mirroring device
for an emerging bourgeois society. The material for these choreographies was
drawn from an established academic vocabulary and technique, which the
Introduction 9
choreographer manipulated into varied arrangements. With the development

and eventual dominance of ballet as an institution, choreographers became
concerned with narrative and expressivity, which, it was assumed, permitted a
direct and universal communication with an audience present in the theater.
To accomplish all of this for spectators, the executing dancer had to be com-
petently trained and able to follow choreographic instructions in the rehearsal
process (Foster 1998).
With dance conceived as a mastery of technique in the middle of the 19th
century, Western choreography in ballet, and later in modern dance, engaged
with movement derived from nature and the vernacular, something folk forms
had always done (Garafola 1989; Daly 2002). In concert dance, choreography
expanded its capacity to influence society by incorporating female choreogra-
phers and by engaging with the newly defined psychological sphere (Tomko
1999; Daly 2002). The conscious, if unacknowledged, incorporation of non-
Western or indigenous dance techniques and structures as primitive or exotic
Other was still considered a product of the choreographer’s genius rather
than of skillful borrowing. It was not until the middle of the 20th century
that practitioners and historians began to acknowledge the incorporation of
non-Western and indigenous forms and structures into the movement pool
and process of choreography. This acknowledgment of multiple influences, as
well as a focus on improvisation and process, allowed for a departure from
the idea that it was the individual choreographer’s genius that propelled dance
forward (Savigliano 2009; O’Shea 2007; Novack 1990). With this shift, chore-
ography of the so-called postmodern era became a varied decision-making
process concerning all aspects of performances and social structures rather
than a safeguarding and structuring of steps or gestures for a performance.
However, even though the process could involve group or individual decisions,
reconstruction or revisiting of traditional material, or rearrangement of exist-
ing structures, it still acknowledged choreography as an organizational prin-
ciple, though often a critical and resistive one.9
It is also significant how in its changing incarnations choreography has
always been a social endeavor—a lbeit with shifting objectives—at the inter-
section of the aesthetic and the political, and did not emerge only with the
rise of the bourgeois public sphere as has been argued (Hewitt 2005, 17). To
understand that necessary social element means to acknowledge choreogra-
phy as text and metaphor, yet most importantly as embodied, and thus the
need to analyze it first and foremost from that perspective. All the authors in
this anthology share this conviction, even though they come from diverse dis-
ciplinary backgrounds and engage in a variety of methodologies. A significant
aspect of this understanding of choreography as above all embodied is a criti-
cal stance toward the above-mentioned preoccupation with an ephemerality
and disappearance of dance and performance (Schechner 1985; Blau 1982;

Phelan 1993; Lepecki 2006). Both Rebecca Schneider and Shannon Jackson
have revealed the institutional and disciplinary politics of these discourses
(Schneider 2011, 94–99; S. Jackson 2004, 2011). Building on Schneider and
Jackson’s questioning of the value of the discourse of ephemerality and inter-
secting it with a rethinking of the critical and organizational capacity of cho-
reography in 21st-century warfare, we want to identify how both ephemerality
and a focus on resistance in choreography might limit an understanding of the
politics of aesthetics.
In considering the issue of the ephemerality of dance and performance in
relation to politics, André Lepecki differentiates between Giorgio Agamben,
who sees every artistic practice as inherently political, and Jacques Rancière,
who postulates the need—a lbeit confined to modernism—of a moment of dis-
sensus for art to become political (Lepecki 2013). To use Rancière’s terminol-
ogy, for art to become political it must include a moment that “disconnects
sensory experience away ‘from the normal forms of sensory experience’ ”
(Lepecki 2013, 22). Such politics “has no proper place nor any natural subject”
(Rancière 2010, 39). In other words, art is political and productively disruptive
only when it establishes a discourse that undermines the norm or at least dem-
onstrates a difference outside the normative. Even though such demonstra-
tions of difference or dissensus can occur anywhere and can be performed by
anyone, and Rancière understands the political as corporeally constructive, he
also defines it as temporally ephemeral because dissent is always on the verge
of sinking back into the norm and thus is made invisible as dissent: “A political
demonstration is therefore always of the moment and its subjects are always
precarious. A political difference is always on the shore of its own disappear-
ance” (Rancière 2010, 39). Thus, the politics of the aesthetic is reduced to a
dissenting and resistive moment. Rancière emphasizes this reduction even
further by pointing out that a consensus on the nature of the relationship
between the political and the aesthetic might undermine precisely the poten-
tial of such fleeting resistive moments because they re-establish them as the
norm (Lepecki 2013, 24). In simpler terms, if we all agree on the potentially
creative politics of aesthetic moments that undermine the status quo, then
these moments simply don’t undermine anything, because they themselves
become the norm. For those who argue for the ephemerality of dance, that
very ephemerality allows dance to be resistive and thus political.
We take issue with two aspects of the politics of aesthetics outlined above,
if we are to adequately investigate how choreography and 21st-century war
not only share important structural and operative principles but inform each
other. The first is that the political can only appear as dissent or resistance, and
only in an ephemeral moment; the second is the emphasis on a (re)ordering of
Introduction 11
society through aesthetics exclusively in terms of organizing principles.10 We

want to outline how the chapters in this anthology complicate such assump-
tions by highlighting what Shannon Jackson calls “places where questions of
social contingency meet those of aesthetic contingency” (2011, 39). In other
words, we theorize the necessary framework for an understanding of how
the predominantly social structure of war impacts choreographies’ aesthetic
structures and when choreography executes a social and political agenda.
Even though Rancière has outlined a radically equalizing vision that dis-
mantles polarities in his work on spectatorship (1991, 2011), in his more general
investigations of politics and aesthetics he distinguishes between politics and
police (2010). While politics occurs in the resistive moment discussed above,
the police ensure the dominance of normative structures. Rancière gives an
example of police action when he says that police intervene in public spaces
not by asking questions of demonstrators but by breaking up demonstrations
(2010, 37). Even though adherence to the police is not necessarily passive, it
isn’t constructive or transformative either. Only the interruption of the police
by truly dissentist politics initiates change. Being troubled by this neoliberal
or romanticized reduction of the connection between politics and aesthetics
to momentary resistances to the normative, we want to imagine choreography
as ontologically political and thus question the antagonistic binary of norma-
tive versus resistive. This doesn’t mean that all choreography is political in the
same way, but all choreography is political, albeit in very specific ways and
through different mechanisms. So, for example, when rebel fighters used the
war dance, kongonya, in the 1970s to gain support for Zimbabwean indepen-
dence, it was political and productive (Gonye 2013). But so is Robert Mugabe’s
use of the same dance to threaten his enemies and solidify his power as presi-
dent of Zimbabwe. Mugabe’s use of kongonya may be abusive, but it serves a
political purpose and is productive in that sense.
Such ontological significance of politics for choreography engages with the
historical definition of the concept of politics, but also expands it into other
structures of social community. In other words, our investigation of chore-
ographies of 21st-century wars requires the traditional application of politics
as relating to citizenry and its governance through the state. However, as we
established above, states and national entities are no longer the exclusive pro-
tagonists in contemporary warfare. This omnipresence of 21st-century war
forces us to expand even Foucault’s famous inversion of Clausewitz’s dictum
in which he states that “politics is the continuation of war by other means”
(2003, 15) by seeing politics itself as determined by the structure of contem-
porary war. For the purpose of our analysis, politics is still attached to state
sovereignty, yet at the same time it can define reallocations of power and value
not necessarily determined by state governmental structures but rather by
alternative communal entities. Recent revelations regarding the private secu-

rity companies Blackwater and G4S are examples, illustrating the need for an
expansion of the concept of politics. Both companies operate worldwide and
offer security services for private businesses and governments.11 Yet even when
such companies seem to operate in a civilian or corporate capacity, their con-
duct for the allocation of power is defined by warfare.
Based on this new understanding of politics detached from state power, we
also need to reconsider the ontology of choreography. We postulate possible
new ways of comprehending what choreography institutes in the 21st century,
which differ from concepts of choreography solely as a structuring device.
As established in the first part of this introduction, at the end of the last cen-
tury, warfare morphed from a temporary conflict between sovereignties for
the reorganization of social structures in the interest of these sovereign enti-
ties into an amorphous and semipermanent state of engagement between
numerous fluid entities, including media, that no longer permit an assump-
tion of organizing goals. Given this change in the character and objective
of warfare and the close association of choreography and warfare, the ques-
tions are now: Has choreography also changed in character and objective?
Does choreography necessarily empower mobilization, ordering, and resis-
tance (Martin 1998; Franko 1995; Foster 2010)? Or is there perhaps a need
to adjust our understanding of choreography to also incorporate a tempo-
rally, spatially, and conceptually metamorphous disorganization that might
include disorder not simply as an obstacle leading toward an end result or
enlightening a process but as an ontological state? Such choreography might
evade the consensus-resistance binary, or, in Rancière’s terminology, police
and politics.
As the authors in Choreographies of 21st Century Wars work through the
complex engagement of choreography and contemporary warfare, they all
negotiate the shifting balance between the historical function of choreogra-
phy as an organizing principle and its inability to always make organization
coherently visible, or even to work within that paradigm. Although there have
always been aspects of choreography that functioned against established orga-
nizing structures, the chapters in this book speak to a lack of confidence in the
state that translates choreographically into disorder. Not only do the contribu-
tors suggest that states no longer protect citizens as they may have done in
the past; they often show a loosening of the ties that bind citizens to state, as
Christopher Coker asserts (2010), as well as states that fail citizens altogether.
As such, these essays offer a critique of present conditions. Equally important,
in demonstrating that choreography makes visible the disorder of the current
moment, they call into question analytic models that pose resistance as the
ultimate element of critique or, even more extreme, the single moment when
Introduction 13
art becomes political. We argue that choreography critiques present condi-

tions not through disturbing the norm, since the norm is a global state of war,
but by engaging with the disorder of the present moment, in which states fail
to act on behalf of their citizens.
As Gerald Siegmund vividly explains in his multifaceted analysis of
William Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies, the choreography is not so
much what is visible onstage as what is left open and unintelligible by the
space and gaps that are created between the bodies, images, texts, translation
process, and audience reception of the events onstage, which all refuse to con-
verge into a coherent product or story. As Siegmund points out, even though
in Three Atmospheric Studies choreography is present in the traditional sense
as a structuring of movements and bodies onstage for the duration of the
piece, that is no longer its ontological purpose. Rather, choreography pur-
posefully shows a loss of control over bodies, notation, language, translation,
imagery, and perception, because only through this determined loss of orga-
nization can choreography have meaning within the context of 21st-century
perpetual war.
All the essays in the anthology speak to different aspects of the urgent need
to rethink choreography in relation to warfare. Alessandra Nicifero, in her
essay on Rachid Ouramdane’s Ordinary Witnesses, demonstrates how the cho-
reographer comes to grips with the subject of torture, not by attempting to
impose order on it but by engaging with its very confusion and incompre-
hensibility. Like Forsythe, Ouramdane employs movement to disrupt both the
organizing narrativity of language and the structuring function of choreogra-
phy. He uses the empty stage and darkness to counter audience expectations
of comprehension and of what dance is in a theatrical setting, then goes on to
create movement that becomes ever more indefinable through its simultane-
ity of radically different modes of embodiment. Evoking the complex shared
spaces of dance performance, spectatorship, witnessing, dance analysis, and
criticism, Nicifero makes the point that critics and audiences need to rethink
their own strategies and functions, as choreography does when it begins to
critically address a world ruled by war.
Ruth Hellier-Tinoco echoes a complex understanding of contemporary cho-
reography in relation to warfare by highlighting the narrative jumble, frag
mentation, in-betweenness, bordering, overlap, and incongruities of the global
war on drugs and the ongoing border conflicts between nation-states. Rather
than reducing dichotomy and contradiction in the Mexican/American copro-
duction Timboctou to fit within a coherent analytical frame, Hellier-Tinoco
takes the multiplicities created by the discrepancies between bodily gestures,
spoken words, and staged imagery as a formal instigator for her fragmented
vignettes. Thus, in her chapter the form purposefully evades organizational
coherence and highlights the disorder so important for choreography’s engage-

ment with 21st-century war.
Sarah Davies Cordova examines disorder in her discussion of the South
African work Every Year, Every Day I Am Walking, which concerns the dis-
placement of refugees in central and southern Africa. She reveals how the work
conveys chaos or disarray through both narrative and movement structures
that are broken apart and confused, with fragments of those structures, like
shrapnel, often reappearing at a later time and in new locations. Choreography’s
ability to make events or ideas comprehensible through organized movement
patterns is refused. What is shown are the shattered remains of the refugees’
lives and their experience of what Achille Mbembe calls the “necropolitics” of
failed states.
Both Nicifero and Cordova also deal with memory in relationship to dis-
order, a recurring theme in the book. They each elucidate how the past never
entirely dies, nor simply influences the present, but keeps violently interacting
with it. For Ouramdane, the purpose of Ordinary Witnesses is not to expunge
the past but to convey its psychological and emotional effects on those who
experienced it. In the Magnet Theatre’s Every Year, Every Day I Am Walking,
the past recurs most delicately but persistently in embodied traces—the way
a woman wraps a pagne, how she lifts food to her mouth. For the mother and
daughter protagonists, those traces are, with their memories, what endures of
their stable lives. In other instances, the past is ossified in the physicality of
objects, which once had a clear meaning and function but are now strewn over
space and resist repurposing or even recognition.
Janet O’Shea takes up the failure of choreography to reorder society in the
midst of conflict in her study of bharata natyam in the Sri Lankan civil war.
Tamils, particularly in the diaspora, used bharata natyam to mark cultural
difference and support the ongoing conflict with the Sinhalese majority. At the
same time, however, the dance has brought Tamil and Sinhalese rivals closer
together through its performance on both sides of the divide. Bharata natyam
acts as a reminder of cultural affinities and provides an opening for dialogue.
However, O’Shea notes that although tenuous strands of reconciliation have
been created through bharata natyam, they exist in an arena where war con-
tinues to smolder and erupt, and where choreography can be used by forces of
either side to enflame and perpetuate violence as well as to encourage peace.
Choreography participates at distinct and often conflicting areas in contempo-
rary warfare in Sri Lanka, and its impact resides not so much in its structuring
of social space as in the many contradictory intersections it generates within
war. This contradictory element of choreography permits O’Shea to remain
hopeful about choreography’s power to intervene, a stance she shares with sev-
eral other authors in the anthology.
Introduction 15
If Tamils in the diaspora used bharata natyam as a propaganda device to

garner support for war, several other essays in the volume take up the use
of choreography for propaganda purposes. Yehuda Sharim demonstrates how
choreography can be used as propaganda through technology that reaches
global audiences. Hamas, in a video of the captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit,
crafted Shalit’s comportment and movement to increase Israeli sympathy for
the prisoner in order to push the Israeli government to make an advantageous
hostage exchange. Yet, as Sharim argues, the exchange was also carefully cho-
reographed by the State of Israel to reflect ideas of a national masculinized
identity, embodied through military training, exercises, and drills. Israel’s
shifting approaches to training and participation in war thus determine
changing corporealities for its citizen body.
Derek Burrill deals with propaganda and the military, here with the US
Army’s variety of training forums aimed at instilling an enthusiasm for war
and a desire to join the military in (primarily) boys and young men. Embodied
movement is basic to these methods, which center on digitized games but
include other forms of “militainment” where participants can engage in
training-as-play through simulations of war. Yet these games can lead to par-
ticipation in actual warfare and, as Burrill shows, create a catastrophic dis-
juncture between the alienation from embodiment while gaming and the
destructive physicality of war. Here it is not the choreography of the games
or of organized warfare per se that is of crucial importance. Rather, it is the
obscuration and incomprehension of the relationship between these choreog-
raphies that define its impact on contemporary war.
Like Burrill, Harmony Bench addresses themes of technology and militain-
ment. However, she does not do this through choreography directly pertaining
to war. Rather, she argues her case through television dance shows and video-
games, demonstrating how they conform to wartime-a ll-the-time, instilling
insecurity as an existential state of contemporary life. As Bench demonstrates,
contemporary war, civil technology, and entertainment media structure each
other and create distinct physicalized temporalities for contemporary society
that rely on the anticipation of threat as an important modus operandi. That
war invades all aspects of life in the 21st century resonates with Sharim’s essay,
in which Israeli anticipation of war becomes embodied in citizens through
physical choreographies of training and drill.
Maaike Bleeker and choreographer Janez Janša investigate the inter-
face between entertainment and warfare in a different way, focusing on two
interventionist theater works that address UN peacekeeping and contempo-
rary dance. P.E.A.C.E. is both satirical and serious, consisting of a proposal,
actually made to military and dance organizations, to provide contemporary
dance as entertainment for UN peacekeepers. The conceptual work argues for
a relationship in the lives of peacekeepers and dancers in that both are what
Susan Foster calls “hired bodies” who are asked to do jobs that do not accord
with their training: peacekeepers are trained to fight, but are not allowed
to do so, while dancers are asked to be creative, yet their instrumentalized
training encourages homogenization. WE ARE ALL MARLENE DIETRICH
FOR: Performance for Peacekeeping Soldiers Handbook is at once a serious
consideration of the kind of entertainment provided for soldiers, a comment
on the theory that UN peacekeepers exist in part as entertainers (since they
are forbidden to fight), and, in its purposeful vulgarity, a dance performance
that riffs on the tension between the desire to create peace and the desire for
excitement that soldiering represents. Here again it is not the choreographic
structure or its context that create meaning, but rather the inability to do so
coherently in the context of the contemporary oxymoron of the “peacekeeping
soldier.”
Neelima Jeychandran’s essay on the Lowering the Flags ceremony at the
Indian/Pakistani border crossings of Wagah and Hussainiwala resonates with
others in the collection in several ways. While the ceremony acts as a colorful
form of entertainment for audiences, at the same time, the past inhabits the
present, where conflicted memories are embodied in movement. The ritual-
ized drill of the border guards plays out the intractability of the conflict that
has gone on since partition, vying with a recognition, evoked in those same
movements, that the two rivals were once one. However, while spectators may
participate in a nostalgic remembrance of unity, they also witness an embodi-
ment of past wars and, even more importantly, a ritual that acts as a surrogate
for actual warfare, keeping alive the prospect of continuing conflict. That the
specter of war, as Jeychandran calls it, hovers over the borders is demonstrated
by ongoing eruptions of violence, including a 2014 suicide attack at Wagah,
which reinforces the idea that contemporary war never ends.
A recurrent theme throughout the collection is a marked lack of confidence
in the state and its relationship to its citizens, which can be seen whether the
state is failed or long established and stable. This speaks to the fluid, amor-
phous, and often contradictory dispersal of power in a globalized world,
which choreography transmits but cannot reorganize and make coherent. The
African refugees in Every Year, Every Day I Am Walking leave behind the dev-
astation of a country in collapse, but the democracy they flee to and discover
at the end of their harrowing journey is hardly reassuring. At the same time,
the violence and corruption of the US-Mexico border wars, which is the focus
of Timboctou, implicate both democratically elected governments and drug
cartels that operate worldwide.
Nicholas Rowe calls the state into question in his chapter, which centers on
Access Denied, a dance work he facilitated as choreographer in the West Bank
Introduction 17
during the Second Intifada. Here the state is viewed on the one hand as occu-
pier and on the other as altogether absent, in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian
Territories. Access Denied was created for a local audience to make visible the
chaos and routinely encountered hardships during the Intifada period. At the
same time, the work did not flinch from addressing tensions within Palestinian
society itself. This complex relationship of choreography to occupation and the
state makes it a valuable case study of the intersection of dance and contempo-
rary war. Rowe demonstrates how art and politics are inextricably entwined in
a society under siege, and examines his own role as a privileged outsider nego-
tiating local and global distributions of power in relation to asymmetrical war.
Rosemary Martin deliberates on citizens’ relationship to the state through
an investigation of different strategies used in the face of civil unrest and
censorship in the years surrounding the Arab Spring uprisings in Cairo in
2011. Her chapter centers on how dancers participated in and were affected
by the revolution that ostensibly brought democracy to the country. However,
as Martin relates, only a few short years after the uprising that swept Hosni
Mubarak from power, Egypt finds itself again under the sway of a military
strongman, bringing new violence to the country and leaving choreographers
and dancers to wonder what will happen to the freedoms they were just begin-
ning to enjoy.
In their chapter, Dee Reynolds and choreographer Rosie Kay explore the
intersection between art and politics, looking at the Iraq War through Kay’s
5 SOLDIERS: The Body Is the Frontline. They discuss the dance work’s focus
on the body of the soldier, and audience reaction to it, within the context of
the political disaffection of the British public in the face of the war. Kay and
Reynolds argue that choreography can embody a critique of war that engages
audiences who are otherwise politically apathetic. At the same time, the work
made an impact on soldiers who saw it, encouraging them to reflect on the
costs of war and the infliction of pain that war brings. This chapter, like many
others in the book, indirectly addresses the issue of the state’s inability to rally
support any longer on the basis of nationalism and patriotism. The soldiers
discussed by Kay and Reynolds did not mention fighting for country, in this
sense disconnecting themselves from the state. Rather, they emphasized loy-
alty to those small “bands of brothers” who fight together and whose lives are
in each other’s hands, something that 5 SOLDIERS stresses both in its title
and in the work itself; thus the choreography not only allows a liberal audi-
ence to see its antiwar stance reaffirmed, but additionally provides a platform
for soldiers who might have a contrary attitude toward warfare. The chapter
supports the idea that as confidence in the state falls away or is entirely absent,
individuals turn to nonstate sources for identity and support—family, friends,
colleagues, like-minded individuals and groups—or dance.
In a deeply personal meditation, Bill T. Jones traces his journey from a pub-
lic accounting of war to a more private sphere in his work. At the height of
the Iraq War, Jones made Blind Date (2005), a major antiwar piece. It was his
response to pent-â•‰up anger over the Bush presidency and the US promulgation
of that war. Structurally and thematically, Jones’s work has always been con-
cerned with political and social issues, from race and gender to human rights.
However, since Blind Date, he has increasingly turned inward, toward exam-
ining, in his words, “the nature of a life well-â•‰lived, courage, and what is worth
fighting for.” Echoing O’Shea’s hopefulness about choreography’s ability to
at least search for positionings—â•‰of the artist, the dance, the citizen—â•‰inside
an increasingly undetermined society, Jones turns back and toward composi-
tional strategies.
Ariel Osterweis affirms the constructive potential of choreography grap-
pling with contemporary warfare by broadening the term into what she calls
geo-â•‰choreography. Understanding choreography as not only a reordering of
vocabulary in time and space but an actual shaping of space itself, she ana-
lyzes Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula’s choreographic work in
conjunction with his conscious reordering of the chaotic spaces left by sev-
eral wars in the society and landscape of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Linyekula does not attempt to make sense of past mass killings and the still
violent present. Rather, he reappropriates and salvages popular yet violent
dances such as the ndombolo for his choreographic work and abandoned
spaces for his teaching and training. Here again, choreography does not order
or make sense; its potential stems from the embracing of disorder and chaos.
Mark Franko concludes this anthology with wide-â•‰ranging comments con-
cerning choreography and politics in the context of 21st-â•‰century war. He contin-
ues Gerald Siegmund’s conversation on William Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric
Studies by centering attention on the citizen’s relationship to the state in this
time of war. His analysis of the Forsythe work brings into focus several argu-
ments raised by the authors of the previous essays. Citing Cathy Caruth, Franko
argues first that trauma cannot be fully perceived when it is occurring. Thus,
the fog of war makes the act of translation into critical debate nearly impossible.
In Franko’s analysis, Forsythe addresses the problem of the powerlessness of
civil society in the face of traumatic war. Certainly Siegmund’s contention that
Three Atmospheric Studies admits of no salvation would support Franko’s view.
The impossibility of translation is the code through which the work “depicts”
trauma, yet the broader implications of translation’s impossibility are also at
the root of 21st-â•‰century war itself. As Franko observes, this inability to trans-
late renders traditional choreography as a part of civil society powerless in the
face of contemporary wars where armies are no longer bound by states and
civilian casualties are the norm. Only choreography that “operates outside any
Introduction 19
symbolic practice of social order or organization” can create citizens critically

engaged with contemporary war.
Like the majority of the essays in Choreographies of 21st Century Wars,
Franko’s chapter reflects a dark view of our times. We have argued that what
choreography generates at this moment is disorder, the scrambling and dis-
assembling of old orders. The old answers, it would seem, are as useless in
states that rule by control as they are in states that fail to control on any level.
Protest, so hoped for as a way to initiate new beginnings with the Arab Spring
revolutions, the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, and the mass demonstra-
tions in Iran, Bahrain, and Israel, has had disappointing results. If, as theorists
proclaim, the answers no longer lie in appeals to the state but in the forming
of global communities, we are uncertain how to create such communities or
make them work. If there is any light in the assessments seen in this collection,
it comes in the embodied nature of choreography. These essays suggest that
connections between people are effectively made through the body in motion,
where some real understanding occurs of how pain is inflicted and suffering
relieved. In making these connections visible, choreography gestures toward
the decisions humanity must make in the 21st century if it is not to perpetuate
endless violence.
NOTES
1. Accordingly, for the purposes of this book we define war as any armed conflict
involving, or having the potential to involve, a significant loss of life.
2. Mark Franko notes that 20th-â•‰century choreography was marked by themes and
subject matter associated with national identity (1995, 2012), that is, choreogra-
phy concerned itself with the power of the nation-â•‰state, whether it was Martha
Graham, who sought a definitive American dance, or ballet companies and folk
troupes throughout the world that sought to embody national styles.
3. See also Dudziak (2012).
4. Kaldor may have been the first to use the term “new wars” in New and Old Wars
(originally written in 1998, with a second edition in 2006), although how new
“new” wars are has been widely contested by historians (see for example, Strachan
and Herberg-â•‰Rothe 2007, 9, Holmqvist-â•‰Jonsäter and Coker 2010, and Strachan
and Scheipers 2011).
5. Although contemporary wars are sometimes compared to premodern wars that
continued for long periods, such as the Thirty Years War of the 17th century,
what separates today’s wars from earlier ones are the elements of globalization,
privatization, and often a lack of nation-â•‰building aims. In addition to Kaldor, see
Münkler (2005), 32–â•‰34, and Hardt and Negri (2004), 3–â•‰6.
6. For an overview of this subject see McNeill (1995).
7. F. T. Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurist Dance” (Marinetti 2009) was published in
1917. For essays on futurist dance, see Brandstetter 2015; Veroli 2000, 2009.
8. Scholars took a broader approach toward dance and choreography even earlier
by incorporating anthropological and eventually ethnographic methodologies
(Mauss 1934; Sachs 1937) to account for choreographies of everyday movement.
9. It should be noted that the importance of the critical capacity of choreography
did not necessarily change public perceptions of choreography or overturn the
domination of ballet, modern, or even folk dance, which still functioned as affir-
mative nation-â•‰building institutions worldwide.
10. These organizing principles of choreography can be detected throughout history,
beginning with the symmetry of court dances, through a canonicity of ballet and
modern dance, to the resistive motions of the so-â•‰called postmodern dances. They
are of course also visible in social choreographies of all kinds.
11. A recent New York Times article revealed the power of Blackwater when it reported
that the top Blackwater manager in Iraq threatened the life of a US-â•‰government
chief investigator, who was attempting to report on the company’s killing of civil-
ians. State Department personnel in Baghdad backed Blackwater, rather than the
investigator, and he left the country immediately, fearing for his life. See James
Risen, “Before Shooting in Iraq, A Warning on Blackwater,” New York Times,
June 29, 2014, http://â•‰w ww.nytimes.com/â•‰2014/â•‰06/â•‰30/â•‰us/â•‰before-â•‰shooting-â•‰in-â•‰iraq-â•‰
warning-â•‰on-â•‰blackwater.html?emc=eta1&_â•‰r=0. For information on the little-â•‰
known, worldwide influence of G4S in private and public arenas see William
Langewiesche, “The Chaos Company,” Vanity Fair, April 2014, http://â•‰w ww.vani-
tyfair.com/â•‰business/â•‰2014/â•‰04/â•‰g4s-â•‰global-â•‰security-â•‰company, both accessed July
12, 2014.
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1
Access Denied and Sumud

Making A Dance of Asymmetric Warfare
N I C H O L A S R OW E
THE SECOND INTIFADA

We are standing with our faces a few inches away from the wall for about
a minute when I think, “Why the hell am I doing this?” and turn around.
Maher looks at me, a short, sharp look, as I turn to face the steep,
darkened valley of Ain Musbah. The soldier shines his torch back in my
face and snaps a command in poor Arabic, indicating that I should turn
back around.
Maher turns his face back to the wall, but I can see he is looking to me
through the corner of his eyes, his lips tight and pulling down. I have not
seen that expression on his face before, and I suddenly feel the gulf between
our histories.
In January 2004, the aspirations of the Oslo Peace Accords were being memo-
rialized by a towering wall that cut through and around urban spaces in the
West Bank, and cities that had become autonomous under the Palestinian
Authority were back under Israeli military occupation. At the same time,
the growing influence of Hamas in municipal electorates in the Palestinian
Authority areas was having a significant impact on the public performance of
dance in Palestine, through the censorship and cancelation of dance events
(Rowe 2010b).
26 N icholas R owe
Addressing this salient juncture in Palestinian political history, Ramallah

Dance Theater premiered the multimedia production Mamnou al-â•‰Oubour
(Access Denied) at Al Kasaba Theater, in Ramallah, Palestine. This hour-â•‰long
dance production involved a montage of scenes exploring the physicality of
human relationships under military occupation. As a visceral response to the
surrounding political environment, Access Denied inevitably presented com-
mentary on both the asymmetric warfare of the Second Intifada (Münkler 2005,
25–â•‰26) and underlying schisms within Palestinian national culture and politics.
Almost a decade later, I am continuing to distill the blend of creative
and political decision-â•‰making that underscored Ramallah Dance Theater’s
approach to choreography. As a foreign but long-â•‰term resident in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories1 and a choreographer and dancer within Access Denied,
over the following pages I reflect on my experience of its choreographic pro-
cess and the final production. This involves a particular consideration of how
dance was used to explore the meanings of “contemporary” in local cultural
identity, and how this in turn extended the Palestinian political ideal of sumud,
or steadfast resistance (Nassar and Heacock 1991), within the uneven battle-
ground of the Second Intifada.
CONTEMPOR ARY DANCE AND POLITICS

Access Denied might be the first contemporary dance production in the West
Bank, in the sense that the scenes being performed were set in the current
era, the costumes reflected present-â•‰day street clothing, the eclectic score was
drawn from current and past music, and the movement vocabulary referenced
embodied reactions to the 21st-â•‰century sociopolitical environment of the West
Bank. The hour-â•‰long production described itself as
a collage of scenes from Occupied Palestine. Created during the years of the
Second Intifada, it reflects the experiences of the artists involved. Some of
the images are presented live onstage and others projected as pre-â•‰recorded
dance videos. (Program note, Ramallah Dance Theater, 2004)
Access Denied was by no means the first political dance production made
locally. Evening-â•‰ length dance productions by El-â•‰ Funoun Popular Dance
Troupe and Sareyyet Ramallah Group for Music and Dabkeh, such as Wadi
Tofah (1982), Mish’al (1986), Al-â•‰Sheiq (1986), Marj Ibn ‘Amer (1989), Jbaineh
(1992), Al-â•‰Bijawi (2000), and Haifa, Beirut wa Baed (2003)2 all presented alle-
gorical narratives that made direct and indirect reference to the political perse-
cution of Palestinians by Israel (Rowe 2010b). In all except the last production
(which was set in the context of the 1948 Nakba),3 these political references
Access Denied and Sumud 27
were generally cloaked in folk legends. All were set in historic times and used
folkloric music and costumes. The stomping movements of dabkeh, a rural
folkdance, were the main source of inspiration. Similar to the development of
national folkdance in other regions (see Shay 1999), these dance productions
extended the politicized revival of traditional rural culture that had accompa-
nied competing national identities in the region in the earlier part of the 20th
century (Kaschl 2003; Rowe 2011).
The popular value of this folklore revival among Palestinians was subse-
quently enhanced by Israeli censorship policies that restricted verbal criti-
cism of Israel in public forums (Abu Hadba 1994; Boullata 2004; Rowe 2010a,
2010b). Through danced metaphors, these productions engaged a marginal-
ized and politically dispersed population in acts of political resistance, foster-
ing political solidarity and constructing a collective cultural identity based on
a shared cultural heritage. While many of the dance artists involved were ulti-
mately imprisoned by Israel for these political acts, they had secured folkloric
dance as a central icon within Palestinian national identity under occupation
(Abu Hadba 1994).
Prior to 2004, presentations of short pieces of contemporary dance had
also taken place in the West Bank. Within these, the costumes, music, move-
ments, and concepts all referenced the contemporary sociopolitical environ-
ment. These were presented as closed studio showings for family and friends
in the late 1990s, as a fringe performance in a university hall within the 1999
Palestine International Festival, and as experimental fragments held in a series
of “Improvisation Nights” at al-Kasaba Theater in 2001. These short pieces
included Hob (“Love”), a duet about a political prisoner separated from his
wife, and Hawayat (“ID cards”), a protest dance in which the dancers faced the
audience and, with a series of rhythmically punctuated gestures, showed defi-
ance at having to continually present ID cards to soldiers (Rowe 2010b). Such
performances mostly involved younger dancers from El-Funoun and Sareyyet
Ramallah, who were encouraged to explore contemporary dance by the direc-
tors of these established folkloric companies. Among these companies there
was at the same time a concern that the Palestinian public would not want a
full-scale production of contemporary dance—that it would be perceived as
symbolic of Western hegemony, undermining the local political relevance of
dance as a performed art (Rowe 2008a 2009, 2010a).
In early 2003, several dancers from the Sareyyet Ramallah and El-Funoun
groups formed the collective Ramallah Dance Theater, to explore how dance
might be made locally relevant through reference to the cultural present rather
than the cultural past. Over the following decade, the idea of contemporary
dance would become celebrated in the West Bank, through regular perfor-
mances and annual festivals. Reflecting this shift, the Sareyyet Ramallah Group
28 N icholas R owe
for Music and Dabkeh changed its name in 2005 to the Sareyyet Ramallah Group
for Music and Dance, and advanced an agenda for contemporary dance in the
region. In 2003, however, Ramallah Dance Theater’s creation of Access Denied
had to navigate a militarized environment and a shifting temporal perception
of Palestinian cultural identity from the collective past to the collective present.
Maher and I reached the wall fifteen minutes earlier. Or, rather, we reached the
hillside corner that the garden wall shields. Laughing as we turn the corner, we
see the Israeli jeep, which had pulled over another car near the crest of the hill. It
is 9:00 p.m., the curfew has left the streets deserted, and our boisterous arrival at
the corner disrupts the cool night. The tires on the jeep spin slightly as it lurches
around in our direction, silhouetting us against the wall in its headlights before
pulling up alongside us. Two soldiers spring out with their guns pointing at us,
and Maher and I just stand there pensively.
DANCE BRIDGES AND BARRIERS

I made my first trip to the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 1998, to teach a
ten-â•‰day contemporary dance workshop in the Popular Art Center in Al-â•‰Bireh.
That workshop had focused on partnering techniques and led to the creation
of nine short duets, which were performed in the studio on the last evening for
families and friends of the dancers.
I returned twice over the following year to teach more workshops, before
moving to Ramallah for a longer residency in April 2000, to work as a dance
teacher and choreographic consultant on El-â•‰Funoun’s Haifa, Beirut wa baed
and Sareyyet Ramallah’s Al-â•‰Birjawi. I had previously taught workshops for
various Israeli dance organizations and remained curious as to the potential
for cooperative relationships between Israeli and Palestinian dancers. This was
at the tail end of the era that had been defined by the Oslo Peace Accords, and
despite the political failure of that process, an economic boom in the West
Bank had fostered a generally optimistic cultural atmosphere.
Among the dancers and dance organizations that I was working with, there
was a firm commitment not to engage in any “normalization” activities with
Israelis. This had stemmed from concerns that earlier collaborative artistic
productions between Palestinians and Israelis had been used by the Israeli
government to present a veneer of normalcy regarding Palestinian-â•‰Israeli rela-
tions in front of the international community, whitewashing ongoing injus-
tices associated with the colonization and military occupation of Palestine by
Israel (Rowe 2000, 2002a).
Maintaining a belief in intercultural dialogue and wanting to move
beyond this position of refusal, I sought to understand what it would take for
Palestinian dance organizations to be willing to work with Israeli dance artists

and organizations. From this came expectations that the Israeli dance artists
would refuse to do annual service in the Israeli military (“How can we dance
with them one week then be held at gunpoint by them the next?”), and that
the artists would publically condemn the ongoing Israeli military occupation
of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the detention of Palestinian political pris-
oners without charge or trial, and the Israeli law refusing to allow the non-
Jews ethnically cleansed from the region in 1948 and 1967 (Pappe 2006) the
right to return to their homes and properties (“How can we dance with them
if they believe they should have greater civil rights because of their religion/
ethnicity?”).
I subsequently took these requests to Israeli dance artists who had
expressed to me an interest in artistic interactions with Palestinians, and to
other directors of contemporary dance companies, schools, and festivals in
Israel. Unsurprisingly, all of those I approached considered the requests of the
Palestinian dancers untenable. What became clear through my discussions
with these Israeli artists was not that they were insensitive or unethical but
that their experience and education within the Israel-Palestine conflict had
constructed a political reality and understanding of history that bore little
resemblance to that of the Palestinian dancers (Rowe 2002b, 2005).
I was already familiar with the Israeli national discourse;4 it paralleled my
own Western education of Israel/Palestine and my own personal experience of
being part of a colonial population in Northern Australia. This Israeli national
discourse was clearly at odds with the reality that I had experienced in the West
Bank, however, and I felt little interest in trying to reconstruct an understand-
ing that would validate both versions of local history. At that point my political
journey as an artist took a turn toward Palestine, as I sought to understand
more deeply the political experience of Palestinians and explore the different
ways that this might be effectively realized and communicated through dance.
The Israeli military actions of September 2000, the outbreak of the Second
Intifada, and the subsequent Israeli military’s reinvasion and destruction
of Ramallah and other areas under the Palestinian Authority in 2002 more
clearly highlighted the asymmetric nature of Israeli/ Palestinian relations
(Hass 2002a, 2002b, 2002c; Usher 2003; Baroud 2006). Local dance artists
were not immune to the violence that this brought; they were sometimes spe-
cifically targeted and sometimes just part of the collateral damage of the inva-
sion. Mohamad Atta and Khaled Ellayan, choreographers for El-Funoun and
Sareyyet Ramallah, were both arrested and held without trial in Israeli prisons
for several months. Omar Barghouti, another El-Funoun choreographer, had
his home destroyed by a stray Israeli tank shell. Eight months later he and his
young family were driven out of their new rented apartment by Israeli soldiers
30 N icholas R owe
who wanted to use it as a base camp. Khaled Qatamish, artistic director of

El-â•‰Funoun dance troupe, was pulled out of his home in his pajamas at 2:00
a.m. and used as a human shield by an Israeli military patrol as they raided
the neighborhood, while his wife and children watched from the window. The
elderly mother of Lana Abu Hijleh, another El-â•‰Funoun choreographer, was
shot and killed by an Israeli patrol while sitting on the verandah of their family
home during curfew. The dance studio of the Popular Art Center, where El-â•‰
Funoun rehearsed, had its floor and mirrors smashed by Israeli soldiers (Rowe
2010b). Young men disappeared from rehearsals, some not to return. Jihad
Al-â•‰Rumi, who danced with us in El-â•‰Funoun Popular Dance Troupe, is still
serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison for holding a gun in his hand when
foreign soldiers invaded his hometown.
Maintaining a positive, creative mood within dance studios became a
challenge, and eventually a resolute act of defiance. In this context, dancing
extended the political notion of sumud. Over the previous decades, sumud had
become idealized among Palestinians as a means of nonviolent resistance to
the Israeli Occupation, and referred to actions that might sustain and advance
a Palestinian sense of community within the land of historic Palestine (Nassar
and Heacock 1991; Kimmerling and Migdal 1993; Barghouthi 1994). Through
the notion of sumud, creatively supporting the autonomy of the local arts
scene could be seen as an indirect assault on the Israeli military occupation.
Not just any choreographic act might be seen as supporting autonomy in the
local arts scene, however, and concerns over foreign hegemony were integral to
local discussions on creativity and contemporary dance (Rowe 2008a, 2009).
In navigating a pathway to sumud through contemporary dance, Ramallah
Dance Theater had to reflect on what might be perceived as locally relevant
and what might be perceived as selling out to foreign ideals and thus under-
mining a local Palestinian culture and community.
I remain facing away from the wall, with the Israeli soldier gazing expectantly,
waiting for me to turn around. I have a sudden, bizarre flashback to twenty
years earlier in Australia. Grade 9: Milton Smith and I are sent out of French
class for talking. Our French teacher, Mr. Fehy, is in the corridor giving us an
extended lecture on his expectations of classroom behavior. I am adopting what
I presume is the required pose of contrition, facing Mr. Fehy with my hands
folded across my crotch and head slightly bowed. Milton instead has folded his
arms and turned away from Mr. Fehy and is staring at the ceiling, nodding as
though he has heard it all before. I occasionally look across at him in awe, specu-
lating on how his belligerence might lead to some grave collective punishment for
us both. It doesn’t. Mr. Fehy’s lecture trails off in despair. Milton and I return to
class, Milton somehow taller and me clearly reprimanded.
R AMALLAH DANCE THEATER

Ramallah Dance Theater was formed in early 2003 by two dancers from El-â•‰
Funoun Popular Dance Group, Maysoun Rafeedie and Noora Baker; two danc-
ers from Sareyyet Ramallah Group for Music and Dabkeh, Maher Shawamreh
and Raed Badwan; and myself. As a group of friends who hung out together
and played around with dance ideas in the studio, our small group included
differing political factions, technical dance trainings, and socioeconomic
backgrounds.
I was navigating an insider/â•‰outsider role in the group (Naples 1996), as
Maysoun and I had married the previous summer. As a foreign dancer car-
rying the cultural capital of a professional who had worked in different parts
of the world (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990, I was an outsider who could be per-
ceived as inherently hegemonic (Fanon 1986; Rowe 2008a). As a dancer who
had worked within community contexts and choreographic environments in
the West Bank and Gaza Strip for several years to support the creative goals
of local groups, I had also been afforded an honorary “insider” status. While
maintaining this honorary status required constant cycles of enquiry and
reflection, my presence within the group inevitably rendered it a location of
intercultural discourse and a revisiting of meanings of contemporary within
the local cultural context (Rowe 2008a). In this sense, our choreographic labo-
ratory mirrored the local political negotiation of Palestinian cultural identity
within Eurocentric processes of cultural globalization.
Our collective intention was a one-â•‰off project, the contemporary dance pro-
duction Access Denied, which might bring to the public the dance ideas we had
been exploring in more closed settings for several years. During the period of
its creation about twenty other dancers (mostly from El-â•‰Funoun and Sareyyet
Ramallah) participated in rehearsals, contributing choreographic ideas or just
joining in for fun. We promoted a philosophy of inclusion, keeping the studio
door open and suggesting anybody who wanted to could join in. The choreo-
graphic process became a social event, in which different people in the com-
munity would drop in, add some movement ideas, or just learn a dance for the
exercise. This deprivatizing of the creative process was, in a way, encouraged
by the besieged political environment. It was very clear that how we made this
dance production was of as much value to the community, and an extension of
sumud, as the final production itself.
Maintaining a consistent group of performers for rehearsals was, however,
challenged by the chaotic political environment. Persistent curfews and mili-
tary checkpoints closed down parts of the city. Getting to and from rehears-
als in the Popular Art Center was often laborious and dangerous, frequently
punctured by gunfire from Israeli military patrols and the Israeli settlement
32 N icholas R owe
of Pisagot on a nearby hill (Rowe 2008b). As the premiere of Access Denied

approached, we had formed a core group of thirteen dancers. Most were from
Sareyyet Ramallah and El-â•‰Funoun, but the group also included a ten-â•‰year-â•‰
old girl, Ruba Awadallah, and Hamzeh Mousa, a martial arts teacher from a
nearby village who had always wanted to dance.
From the outset, we also determined that this would be a dance production
created for local audiences, which liberated us from the burden of political
representation. Local political circumstances were familiar to any who would
watch. As we would not need to contextualize, historicize, or declare a par-
ticular political viewpoint within our dance scenes, we had more space for
critical introspection, satirical reflection, and diverse interpretations of famil-
iar events. This extended the notion of sumud within local dance production,
moving from a sustaining of local histories through dance to the use of dance
to engage in a critical discussion on embodied aspects of the contemporary
environment.
Part of this critical discussion meant confronting local beliefs that to be
modern or contemporary in dance meant to be Western. Palestinian national
identity had been constructed on visions of a precolonial past, with unify-
ing symbols stemming from an idyllic, premodern time. Was there a collec-
tive identity in the present that could be explored, expressed, and celebrated
onstage? Did this contemporary identity include ways of moving that were not
defined by European contemporary dance techniques? These queries pushed
us to seek a movement vocabulary and aesthetic that was informed by the
experience and social values of life in 21st-â•‰century Palestine (Rowe 2009).
Maher, standing against the wall, has a wiry muscular frame, his legs thin-
ner than his body. The Israeli military had imprisoned him in “administrative
detention” several times; the longest period for six months. He has never been
formally charged with any crime, but has experienced hours of beatings and
depravations. He makes light of it when he tells me the stories, turning his expe-
riences as a political prisoner in an Israeli detention cell into a Tom and Jerry
cartoon. That humor now evaporates, and his immobility against the wall looks
like a wince in slow motion. I do not wince myself, because I cannot anticipate
what Maher is anticipating.
I feel nauseated by the pity that is bubbling in my stomach. This is not how
I want to see Maher. This is not how Maher wants me to see him.
THE PROCESS
The contemporary life that we were exploring in Access Denied was over-
whelmingly defined by the surrounding military occupation. While the
occupation had been a steady feature for over a generation, the onset of the
Second Intifada had brought it much more into the foreground of daily life.
The predominant and distinct features that we as dancers had experienced
included military checkpoints around, between, and within urban environ-
ments in the West Bank, at which all travelers were expected to present their
legal identification papers. Waiting in line at these checkpoints made even
short journeys take hours, and checkpoints regularly closed for extended
periods. Such checkpoints sometimes resulted in the closures of towns and
whole cities, periods in which nobody was allowed into or out of that town
for a day, week, or sometimes longer. The checkpoints were also locations for
detention by Israeli soldiers. We had all experienced being held at the road-
side or within military vehicles for extended periods, uncertain of the soldiers’
intentions. Several of the men in Ramallah Dance Theater had further experi-
enced imprisonment in larger detention facilities, without charge or trial, for
months. Both within prisons and in public spaces, they had undergone forms
of endurance torture and physical beatings by Israeli soldiers.
We had all also experienced restrictions on physical movement through
curfews. Imposed across whole cities, such curfews meant that shops, schools,
and public spaces could not open and everyone was required to remain in
doors. These sometimes lasted for several months, with several hours’ respite
in the middle of the afternoon for essential activities such as grocery shop-
ping. Such a sense of curfew extended to a national level, as all of the dancers,
as Palestinians, were required to gain permission from the Israeli government
to travel abroad. This bureaucratic requirement could take months, and was
often arbitrarily denied without justification.
Surrounding this was the constant violence of asymmetric warfare. Our
bodies literally shook from the bombardment and gunfire in dense urban
areas, from Israeli helicopter gunships, tanks, and patrols.
Our bodies passed through and around the urban spaces and public inter-
sections in which pitiful clashes took place between heavily armed Israeli sol-
diers and Palestinian youths with slingshots. As dance artists we sought to
move beyond symbolic representations of these features of local life, and to
instead reveal tensions existing within them. This involved digging into the
more intricate kinesthetic events taking place within the above scenarios,
which, in turn, inevitably involved an enquiry into gendered bodies and rela-
tionships. While the role of women in the Palestinian political and military
struggle was widely acknowledged (Jad 1990) and their symbolic presence in
political art was encouraged (Al-Awwad 1983), the presence of the female body
in public and its relationship with male bodies had become increasingly sub-
ject to local cultural censorship through the influence of the Islamic reform
movement (Hammami 1990). The folkloric revival of Palestinian dance had
34 N icholas R owe
generally addressed this tension by positioning women onstage as either

equally masculine in their physicality as the men or in secondary, supportive
roles to the more vigorous actions of men (Kaschl 2003).
Exploring the kinesthetic aspects of these gendered bodies and relationships
in the context of military occupation provoked movement themes of proxim-
ity, remoteness, intimidation, impediment, and sedentariness. Maintaining a
connection between these kinesthetic realizations and the social context they
emerged from was a continual challenge. While we wanted to avoid simply
miming familiar scenarios, we did not want to lose the local social relevance
of these movement themes through abstraction. The choreographic process
thus involved a tandem conceptual process, in which dramatic narratives
and kinesthetic revelations were being moved forward in parallel. As a result,
physical theater scenes satirizing detention, checkpoints, and curfews were
interspersed with more abstract dance sequences exploring the “aesthetics of
humiliation” (Rowe 2003).
As dancers we had each experienced these scenarios and relationships in dif-
ferent ways, so in reconstructing physical narratives of these events we sought
to focus on our more peculiar experiences. To prompt and disturb these move-
ment explorations, we engaged larger set pieces that could be manipulated and
reconfigured in the space. Tables, chairs, benches, poles, walls, cloths, road
barricades, carts, and tires were important in transforming the flat studio
space (which by design encourages unrestrained and independent movement)
into a location of obstacles and dependence.
To extend this disruption of the choreographic space, we sought different
sites in which to create, perform, and film dances. We created dance pieces in
lounge rooms, bedrooms, parks, schools, demolished buildings, and construc-
tions sites. This allowed us to provide clear contexts for the danced scenarios.
These dances for the camera also allowed us to more clearly juxtapose public
and private locations, differences between which had been redefined by the
militarized environment.
From the beginning we determined that there would be no overall narra-
tive structure, but a collage of scenes that might allow dramatic and aesthetic
threads to be loosely transferred from one scene to the next. The filmed dances
would be projected onto a screen, interspersed with the live scenes, with char-
acters moving between the two.
Maher and I come out for cheesecake. Moments before, Maher and I had been
sitting with Maysoun, Noora, and Raed in Noora’s living room, talking and act-
ing out ideas for Access Denied. Noora’s apartment is in a basement at the back
of a building, with the feeling of a bunker. We gather there after rehearsals or on
days when the curfew will not let us reach the Popular Art Center dance studio.
This night, as we brainstorm ideas, we decide on a whim that we want cheese-
cake. So Maher and I set off across town to a late-â•‰night café that keeps a quiet
door open, even under curfew.
Now we are shuffled by the wall, with the two other men who have been
stopped in their car by the Israeli jeep. We exchange brief nods with these timid-â•‰
looking young men, associates in the crime of breaking curfew. We have sur-
rendered our identity documents to the soldiers, and know less about each other
than even those documents describe.
THE PERFOR MANCE

Access Denied begins with four dancers resting limply against a large concrete
wall, which cuts diagonally across the back right-â•‰hand corner of the stage.5
They move restlessly to a Sufi chant, hands bound, waiting for the next stage
in a journey that they have no control over. The stage darkens and a video is
projected on a screen. A young man, bound, barefoot, and blindfolded, sits on
a stool in the middle of a dank cell. The perspective shifts to within the blind-
fold, as a partial view allows the young man to see a soldier enter. The follow-
ing scene is a duet of interrogation, swinging between the visceral viewpoint
of the partially blindfolded prisoner to wider shots of the duet.
The video projection ends and the lights onstage pick up the four against the
wall again. As the Sufi chant takes up a drumbeat, they dance with an acro-
batic violence against the wall. Slowly each dancer drifts away from the wall
until one is left onstage, caught in car headlights against the wall, moving from
a gesture of surrender to contrition.
On the other side of the stage, a woman and what appears to be her young
daughter are sitting patiently on a bench. They look across to an official seated
at a desk in a downstage corner, who appears indifferent to them. Pitching
the weight of the bench, they slowly try to manipulate it across the stage
(Figure 1.1). Other people come and join the bench as it makes its journey
closer and closer to the official at the desk, until the bench is eventually over-
crowded and the people on it are fighting to maintain their order in the line
that has formed. The movement within this scene has been continuous but
tensely restrained, repetitively building a momentum that suggests the stuffi-
ness of an overcrowded room. The official now waves them back, brings his
table to the center of the stage, and begins seeing each person and their prof-
fered papers one by one. Patiently engaging in a series of contact partnered
duets with the official, they are physically manipulated by him as they seek to
pass beyond his table. Some are allowed and some are refused. One young man
36 N icholas R owe
Figure 1.1 Maysoun Rafeedie, left, and Ruba Awadallah in Access Denied, Ramallah
Dance Theater.
seeking to pass is given a position beside the table and instructed to observe.
The official departs, delegating his place to the young man, who then refuses
another woman’s passage. This young man and the woman go into an extended
confrontational duet, using the table as a barricade and weapon to push and
pull each other. The light fades down on the two, who remain unresolved and
still struggling around the table.
A video projection reveals empty streets, classes, and playgrounds. A young
girl is sitting restlessly in her bedroom, while her older sister mutters alge-
braic formulas at her desk, preparing for an exam. The girl begins to physically
explore the intimate and open spaces of the bedroom, acrobatically climbing
the walls and rhythmically clambering through every passage in the small
two-person bedroom. She ends by staring out through her window bars at the
empty streets.
A vendor’s cart rolls to the center of the stage. A man’s head pops out of it.
He swiftly looks around and then slips around the cart without touching the
ground, rolling the wheels as best he can while trying not to be seen. He is
making good progress across the stage until he bumps into the concrete wall,
which is still there from the first scene. He repeatedly tries to butt the cart into
the wall, but there is no way past it.
The lights fade onstage and a video projection shows a person facing a large
concrete wall playing a game of chess, with half a chessboard pressed against
the wall. Another person is shown doing the same, facing the opposite way,
moving the chess pieces in turn. A topographical view of the setting is then
shown, with the two chess players seen sitting on either side of the wall. One
player then makes a move and tosses a piece over the wall. The other player
catches it and places it on the board.
Five women race onto the stage and dance energetically until they reach the
wall in the corner. Bouncing toward it and away again, they appear impassive
and graceful, resolute in their intention yet resolved to the lines they form.
The light fades and others drift onto the stage as a ney blows mournfully.
A young man and woman begin to dance slowly in parallel but at a distance
from each other.
A video projection shows two young men and a woman dancing around a
cloistered living room engaged in a domestic argument.
Onstage, two young women begin to move to the sound of a lute, slowly pro-
gressing from crouching, darting movements across the floor with close explo-
rations of the space around them to a timid standing sequence that breaks
occasionally from their apparent restrictions, allowing them to leap about the
stage. They eventually return to being bound and crouched again.
The lights come down once more, and a short video reveals a woman in
shadows, partially visible and looking out through bars. A young man now
appears at the top of the proscenium arch, hanging inside a cocoon high above
the stage. Slowly the cocoon unravels and he descends to the stage, twisting
and rolling across to another cloth hanging from another corner of the stage,
which he becomes bound up in again.
Three women lie curled in a fetal position on the stage, as three men enter
dragging two-meter-long poles. The women hold the poles and are manipu-
lated around the stage by the men, until just one couple is left. Their pole stands
upright on the stage, held by the man, and the woman is curled at its very top
(Figure 1.2). They engage in an extended partnered duet without touching,
manipulating each other’s weight through the pole.
A video projection shows the same woman in a vibrant red dress, playing
chess against a dank concrete wall. Her body brushes gently, then violently,
against the wall.
As young men hurriedly roll tires across the stage and begin to stack them,
the same woman and child that had been on the bench earlier poke their heads
out from behind a barricade. They race across the space with others until the
stage is filled with people swiftly crossing in anticipation. This shifts into a
rhythmic pounding on the floor, in which the performers charge provocatively
and defiantly between the wall in the corner of the stage and the audience
38 N icholas R owe
Figure 1.2â•‡ Raed Badwan and Maysoun Rafeedie in Access Denied, Ramallah Dance
Theater.
(Figure 1.3). The performance ends when the dancers make a human pyramid
in the corner, which the young girl ascends, holding both hands over the wall
with fingers in the V-â•‰shaped peace sign. She then curls her fingers twice, to
make the “quotation marks” sign.
As a collage of moments under occupation, the hour-â•‰long performance of
Access Denied introduces characters, movement motifs, and open-â•‰ended sce-
narios. By continually transitioning between locally familiar contexts, the
performance stops short of presenting any episodic narratives with resolved
conclusions. There remains a sense that these performances are half-â•‰told
stories.
I stay looking at the soldier. He swallows and turns away. I can see now that
he is barely more than a boy, camping out inside his hefty green body armor.
Emboldened, I ask for my passport back. It is an arrogant declaration of my
distinction, that I am a foreigner and have a “passport,” not a local with a
“hawiya,” or ID card. Beside the darkened, curfewed valley of Ain Musbah, the
word “passport” speaks of international treaties and civil rights that have not
been rationalized away by generations of military domination. In declaring my
Figure 1.3â•‡ Access Denied, Ramallah Dance Theater.
status as a foreigner in the region, I am simultaneously declaring my distinc-

tion from Maher and his ID card. It was not my intention, but I realize it as the
words come out and feel ashamed. When the soldier returns from the jeep with
my passport, I ask him for Maher’s ID card. He laconically turns back to the jeep
and returns with it, and the ID cards of the others. He wants us to know that we
are not the most interesting game of the night.
Maher has now turned around and is looking out across the valley with me.
The soldier gives back each ID, reading out the names from the cards rather than
going by their photographs, as though the three of them gathered there are an
indistinguishable multitude. He tells us all to go back inside, then gets into the
jeep with the other soldiers, and they drive off.
AN IRREVERENT DISREGARD
My description of Access Denied above inevitably emphasizes the dramatic arc
of the work and provides less detail on its kinesthetic essence, which is much
harder to render in words and appears as an aimless stream of adjectives when
I type it onto the page. Some of the images make reference to ideas that a local
audience at the time might understand, but which may not have such a uni-
versal meaning: rolling tires indicate a forthcoming clash between Palestinian
40 N icholas R owe
youth and Israeli soldiers; vendors’ carts are used at checkpoints to transfer
goods when the people accompanying them are denied passage; lining up is a
daily ritual. Less narrative moments like the duet with the wooden pole and
the two women darting and retreating across the stage reflect tensions over
women’s physical presence. This examining of local ideas without explaining
them is central to the work’s intention to speak in a local way, to address a local
audience in order to develop a localized contemporary movement vocabulary.
Access Denied was performed four times, to full houses each night. It was
recorded by four television cameras over two nights, and the mix was subse-
quently broadcast on local television. The individual dance videos were also
broadcast separately, and for months afterward popped up on television as
two-â•‰minute fillers between programs.
While the actual production itself had a relatively short life span, Access
Denied can be seen having a significant impact on local dance production,
and on local perceptions of “contemporary” Palestinian cultural identity. The
subsequent productions of El-â•‰Funoun Popular Dance Troupe (Resala Ila …)
and Sareyyet Ramallah Group for Music and Dance (Ala Hajez)6 were both
set in a contemporary context and explored contemporary movement ideas.
In 2006, Sareyyet Ramallah held the first Ramallah International Festival for
Contemporary Dance, which has been held annually since then and grown
substantially. The impact of Access Denied might therefore be seen as affirm-
ing that local people wanted to see their contemporary (and not just ancestral)
society celebrated onstage in dance.
While Access Denied was designed for a local audience, over the follow-
ing year I presented the video recording of it several times at international
dance conferences and workshops in North America and Australia, alongside
lectures on dance in Palestine. The feedback from these screenings provided
interesting points of difference from the feedback we had received in the West
Bank. At one of these screenings an Israeli dance academic was critical of the
fact that Access Denied did not feature any scenes of Palestinian suicide bomb-
ers. This, in her opinion, left the production imbalanced as a political repre-
sentation of the conflict. Her comment introduces contentious issues and is
perhaps the starting point for another article on how the dominant party in an
asymmetric war might expect the other party to dance. Should minority rep-
resentations be considered inherently biased because they reflect a minority
view? Does creative practice research require a veil of intercultural sensitivity
in order to appear legitimate as an expression of research? In the context of this
Access Denied, the Israeli academic’s comment raises a poignant issue about
sumud and how liberating a choreographic process can be. Within the context
of a military occupation, the occupiers have so much power in determining
the minor day-â•‰to-â•‰day decisions of the occupied. This can lead the occupied to
habitually anticipate what the occupiers might want and to fall into either sub-
missive self-â•‰monitoring or perpetual opposition. Either way, this mindfulness
can make it very hard for the occupied to make creative artistic decisions that
are not in some way influenced by the perspectives of the occupiers, ultimately
undermining the sense of cultural autonomy that the artistic acts are striving
to achieve.
The sustaining of sumud can thus require an irreverent disregard for the
perspective of the occupiers. Within Access Denied, the decision to create for
a local audience, and only a local audience, was very liberating. Free from the
need to represent the asymmetry of political power in the region and seek
solidarity from outsiders, our creative process could reflect on the banality of
local life and begin to satirize it.
Maintaining an irreverent disregard for the perspective of the Israeli mili-
tary was a creative discipline itself, however, manifesting in often the smallest
decisions within the rehearsal and conception process. Banal as it may seem,
this discipline even extended to our choice of dessert during a late-â•‰night brain-
storming session.
At first Maher and I shuffle quietly back up the road to Noora’s. Then he says
“We forgot the cheesecake!”
We laugh and turn around, this time hugging the shadows as we go down
through the valley and up the hill on the other side. We re-â•‰enact the scene a
couple of times on the way, in practice for how we will retell it back at Noora’s.
The irony develops each time, along with our mocking responses to the mysteri-
ous power of a foreign passport.
My own sense of being an untouchable foreigner will be shattered five months
later, in a far more brutal encounter with Israeli soldiers and local dancers near
Hebron. But right now, as we pass through the valley of Ain Musbah, Maher and
I laugh as we reimagine our humbling moment of difference against the wall.
NOTES
1. Extending a professional career as a choreographer and dancer with contem-
porary and classical dance companies in Europe and Australasia, I moved to
Ramallah in 2000 to work with El-â•‰Funoun Popular Dance Troupe and Sareyyet
Ramallah Group for Music and Dabkeh as a dance teacher and choreographic
consultant. I continued working with these groups and resided in Ramallah until
2008, during which time I also conducted historical and ethnographic research
leading to the publication of Raising Dust: A Cultural History of Dance in Palestine
(Rowe 2010b).
2. These productions can be translated as “Valley of apples” (Wadi Tofah), “Lantern”
(Mish’al), “The lover” (Al-â•‰Sheiq), The plains of Ibn’ Amer (Marj Ibn’ Amer),
42 N icholas R owe
“White cheese” (Jbaineh), “The peddler” (Al-â•‰Bijawi), and “Haifa, Beirut, and
beyond” (Haifa, Beirut wa Baed).
3. The Nakba (“catastrophe”) is the popular label for the military events of 1947–â•‰1948
that resulted in the creation of the state of Israel, the dispossession of Palestinian
land, and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem (Zurayk 1956).
4. Perhaps most romantically and pervasively captured in From Time Immemorial
(Peters 1988).
5. Video extracts of Access Denied and commentary on its production can be seen
on YouTube at http://â•‰w ww.youtube.com/â•‰watch?v=RMDooLiQly8.
6. These translate as “A letter to …” (Resala Ila …) and At the checkpoint (Ala
Hajez).
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2
Questioning the Truth
Rachid Ouramdane’s Investigation of Torture in Des Témoins
Ordinaires/Ordinary Witnesses
A L ESSA N DR A N IC I F ERO
Inhumanity does not exist, except in the nightmares which engender fear.
And it is just the calm courage of the victim, his modesty, and his lucidity
which wakes us and shows us the truth. Alleg underwent torture in the
darkness of night; let us get closer, to look at it by daylight.
—â•‰J ean-â•‰Paul Sartre
The world is too dangerous to live in—â•‰not because of people who do evil,
but because of people who sit and let it happen.
—â•‰A lbert Einstein
In the vast literature on the horror of wars, where abominable violence occurs
and the meaning of humanity is called into question, there are often two
recurrent images that are representative of crucial, contemporary discourses
in the understanding and the making of our world. Those images are in a way
synthesized by the two oft-â•‰cited, still relevant quotes above. The former, from
Jean-â•‰Paul Sartre’s renowned introduction to Henri Alleg’s La Question (the
first account of the French government’s use of torture during the Algerian
war), involves a metaphorical change of light: the unknown, hidden darkness
of violence becomes revealed, the truth brought into light by the courage of
46 A lessandra N icifero
the witness. Einstein’s quote is a call for action, for movement against the pas-
sivity, the stillness of the observer. Both simply evoke the need for a constant
reconsideration of the concept of evil, which remains at the core of our moral
questions on violence.
Although torture has been declared illegitimate since the mid-â•‰20th century,
the fear of terrorism has long functioned as a major justification for its prac-
tice. If, for instance, its “illegal status was circumvented through the use of
euphemisms” (Maran 1989, 81)1 during the French war in Algeria, in the post-â•‰
9/â•‰11 era imaginary machinations to prevent disaster have reached new levels.
Roberto Esposito in his Immunitas (2011) has eloquently pointed out how the
increasingly ephemeral, global sense of threat, the constant risk of disrupting
previous equilibria, is deployed to redesign and reconstitute. In theory, immu-
nity protects communities, but when it exceeds its own defensive purposes
and like an immune system that has gone haywire and attacks its host starts
altering laws, interfering with, and reducing civil liberties, attacking the rights
of others, then immunity negates rather than protects life. Esposito identifies
a blurring zone, an in-â•‰betweenness where alterations occur:
Whether the danger that lies in wait is a disease threatening the individual
body, a violent intrusion into the body politics, or a deviant message enter-
ing a body electronic, what remains constant is the place where the threat is
located, always between the inside and the outside, between the self and the
other, the individual and the common. Someone or something penetrates
a body—â•‰individual or collective—â•‰and alters it, transforms it, corrupts it.
(Esposito 2011, 2)
In this essay I intend to explore the use of questioning—â•‰literally the act

of asking questions by interviewing people—â•‰as an acute political and aes-
thetic tool that French choreographer Rachid Ouramdane uses to examine
the destructive power of torture, an element of our “immune” system that has
run amok. Ouramdane’s in-â•‰depth interviews are conducted with both the
rigor of the ethnographer who collects observational material for his analy-
sis and the openness of the oral historian who listens to and records peo-
ple’s experiences. The performative use of interviews onstage, coupled with
Ouramdane’s artistic vision, creates a powerful dialogical discourse with the
audience. In deciding to bring the individual voices of the witnesses onto the
setting of the stage, Ouramdane enhances a “nomadic mode of remember-
ing,” a concept that Rosi Braidotti borrows from Deleuze, where individual
nonlinear “minority” memories are directly linked to imagination as a tool
to resist the monolithic “dominant” memory, and to broaden and support a
sense of community:
Questioning the Truth 47
Figure 2.1â•‡ Lora Juodkaite and Wagner Schwartz in Ordinary Witnesses. Photo by Erell
Melscoët.
Like a choreography of flows or intensities that require adequate framing in

order to be composed into a form, intensive [minority] memories activate
empathy and cohesion between their constitutive elements.â•›… Memory
is fluid and flowing: it opens unexpected or virtual possibilities. It is also
transgressive in that it works against the programs of the dominant mem-
ory system. (Braidotti 2006, 168)
Specifically, in Ordinary Witnesses, using recognizable contemporary aes-

thetic canons, and through a powerful re-â•‰enactment of torture victims’ mem-
ories and experiences, Ouramdane creates a highly charged (in contrast to
an “obscenely neutral”)2 transitional space where performers and audience
connect empathically, and potentially disrupt the frame built by mainstream
media for understanding torture in the “age of terror.”3
QUESTIONING THE TRUTH, OR IN SEARCH

OF LUMINOUS DATA
A French choreographer of Algerian descent, Rachid Ouramdane was born in
1971 and grew up in the south of France. Early on he became aware of histori-
cal discrepancies: the mismatch between official history taught at school and
the stories narrated at home.4 If initially he perceived those differences as con-

tradictory or incoherent, he later embraced the experience of being part of two
worlds more consciously, understanding that, in Edward Said’s words, a “plu-
rality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions” (Said
2000, 366). As a teenager, during the first big explosion of hip-hop in France,
Ouramdane recalls enjoying dancing as a social activity, as a way of belonging
to the local youth community, a role that sports—such as boxing, kung fu, and
soccer played as well. It was only when persuaded by a classmate to take dance
lessons, because of his athleticism, that he was exposed to the potential of the
medium. Dance, he realized, was about much more than gathering, social-
izing, and partying, and he immediately saw it as a powerful expressive tool.
Ouramdane consequently entered the Centre National de la Danse in Angers,
then directed by Alwin Nikolais and Viola Farber, and had a multidisciplinary
training in ballet, modern dance, and choreographic composition.
In the 1990s Ouramdane collaborated with some of the most prominent
choreographers and artists of his generation in France, such as Alain Buffard,
Christian Rizzo, Julie Nioche, Emmanuelle Huynh, Odile Duboc, Hervé
Robbe, Meg Stuart, Catherine Contour, and Jeremy Nelson. Those were par-
ticularly prolific years in France for contemporary dance, which since the
1980s had started receiving support from both the private and public sectors,
and engaging a larger and more heterogeneous audience than in the past.
The success of contemporary dance in those years was in part the result of
an “intensified dialogue” between dance practitioners and dance spectators,
a sign that interests, preoccupations, and desires were more closely and col-
lectively shared (Louppe 2010, 5).
Ouramdane’s aesthetic canons and approach to dance performance are
common to those of other choreographers of his generation. His insistence,
for example, on calling his works stage performances as opposed to dance
performances is part of a broader movement in France, mostly influenced by
American postmodern dance and contemporary conceptual art, where dance
performance is no longer seen as a final project but as a collective, open-ended
process, in which the media involved onstage are not hierarchically organized.
Set and lighting designs return to assume a crucial role onstage that is neither
merely decorative, nor employed to multiply visual effects; instead these two
theatrical elements provide an immersive environment, contributing to the
creation of a dramaturgical imaginary (imagerie) that frames space and punc-
tuates time (Roux 2007, 140).
When Ouramdane was invited in 2004 to create a choreography for the
Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon, he realized in simply conversing with the danc-
ers and getting to know them that although they were all talented and well
trained, able to perform similar tasks and exchange roles across a wide swath
of the most famous classic and contemporary choreographies in the company’s

repertory, they were all also uniquely connected to the countries they came
from. International in scope, the company included members from the former
Soviet Union, Israel, Canada, and the United States, in addition to Europe, and
their views of the world, ideas, and identities were geographically oriented,
shaped by their origins. Ouramdane opted then to create a series of what he
calls portraits, bringing the dancers’ individual stories onto the stage, in what
later became Superstar.
After Superstar, Ouramdane continued his interest in creating complex por-
traits of diasporic subjects who are investigating their nomadic identities, often
dealing with unsettling, if not traumatic, pasts. He brought onto the stage sub-
jects as diverse as shy teenagers, children of immigrants who play sports in
the suburbs of big cities (Surface de Réparation, 2007), exiles reflecting on the
idea of being foreigners (Loin … /Far … , 2008), and individuals around the
world who experienced torture (Des Témoins Ordinaires /Ordinary Witnesses,
2009). What initially seemed to be simply a spirit of inquiry, almost a personal
drive to let the subjects speak, later became a more politically conscious and
sophisticated methodology of questioning, emerging as his more recognizable
signature.
A trip to Vietnam while working on a project made him realize that the
perception that locals had of him was that of the “French as the former colo-
nizer.”5 For most of his occasional encounters there, his name Rachid made
little or no difference; it did not signal a more complex subjectivity. Being a cit-
izen of France and a native speaker of French were the most evident elements,
and the resentment toward the former colonizers was still perceptibly strong.
On his return to France from Vietnam, a conversation with his mother
disclosed a completely unknown chapter of his father’s life, never before dis-
cussed in the family. Ouramdane heard a disturbing biography of his Algerian
father, who as a career soldier had fought for the French Army during the
Second World War, and afterward in what was then Indochina (now Vietnam,
Laos, and Cambodia). But when he was ordered to participate in the war
against Algeria, he refused to fight “against his own brothers,” in Ouramdane’s
words, and decided to desert.6 As a consequence, he was imprisoned and tor-
tured by the French Army. Later he was assigned to work as a pharmacist in a
military camp, without being allowed to leave or communicate with anyone.
Consequently, for about two years his own family believed he was dead. At the
end of the Algerian war, Ouramdane’s father found himself both treated as
an outcast by the French army—no longer permitted to resume his career as a
soldier—and considered a harki by the Algerians because of his past service in
the army. He therefore decided to leave Algeria with his second, much younger
wife—Ouramdane’s mother—starting a new life and family in the South of
France. Hearing his mother’s story led Ouramdane to create the project that
became Far … , which eventually instilled the seeds for Ordinary Witnesses.
Arriving in Vietnam, and following his father’s path from sixty years earlier,
Ouramdane realized how the wounds of the Indochina war were not com-
pletely healed; people recounting their experience of being tortured was a far
more common experience than he had imagined. In the meantime the infa-
mous photographs of American soldiers abusing, humiliating, and torturing
civilians in the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib had been published, reconfirming
that torture was not a dark matter of the past, but an active and expanding
practice of the present.
Whereas Far … seems a more personal, semiautobiographical investigation
of the experience of exile, in Ordinary Witnesses the issue of torture becomes
explicitly political, the product of a more complex process. As Ouramdane
traveled to different countries for various projects, he tried to make contact
with people who had experienced torture When asked how he had selected
people for his interviews, Ouramdane answered that he had not found a
method yet, he had created instead a “random network.”7 He produced what in
ethnography is called a snowball sample: starting with a seed—â•‰the snowball—â•‰
he found others through referrals.
In Ordinary Witnesses, the subtle web of connections between Ouramdane’s
family story and the shadowy histories of countries that had perpetrated
torture in the past resonated with the turmoil caused in our collective con-
sciousness by the exposure of the photos from the prison in Abu Ghraib (in
retrospect, the tip of a more scandalous iceberg), turning the stage work into a
magnifying lens to read our present.
Ouramdane had one clear idea in mind in selecting people to be inter-
viewed: he wanted to speak with individuals who had somehow been able to
accept and analyze their experience of being tortured, with a gap of some time
between the horrific events and the interviews. It seemed possible that when
emotions such as rage, rancor, fear, and desire for revenge had been partially
placated and better understood, if not yet resolved, a certain clarity could
emerge. The only exception to this rule was a teenage gang member from the
Brazilian favelas, imprisoned when only thirteen years old, tortured by the
police, and eventually liberated four years later, who was interviewed soon
after being released from prison (2010).
The initial, more standard approach to ethnographic fieldwork, as described
by Jack Katz, is to produce effective descriptions of how social life proceeds,
organized into a coherent narrative. Then through the analysis of recurrent
paths in the data a transition is made from the descriptive, analytical “how” to
the theoretical “why” things happen (Katz 2001, 443–â•‰473). The ethnographer
is always in search of what Katz calls “luminous data,” information that has the
capacity to shed light, to reveal hidden patterns and clarify behavioral recur-
rences, in order to provide clues for a better understanding of specific subjects.
Yet ethnographers run the risk of being seduced into using causal explanations
to create functional narratives, sometimes manipulating or forcing “luminous
data” to align the context with a specific theoretical frame. In contrast, in
Ordinary Witnesses, Ouramdane provides through the performance a space
for subjects to be, to have a chance to phrase, articulate, mobilize a “why,” con-
stantly destabilizing by contextualizing the embodied memory archive, (re)
producing knowledge in a dialogical mode with the spectators’ presence.
TWILIGHT
With Ordinary Witnesses, Ouramdane materializes Agamben’s idea of the
contemporary (2011, 10–â•‰19)—â•‰that is, “someone who can firmly hold his gaze
on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness.” I read
Agamben’s darkness as what is hidden and therefore unknown. In order to
explain what it means for a contemporary to be able to see the darkness of
our time, Agamben borrows the concept of “off-â•‰cells” from neurophysiology,
those peripheral cells in our retina that get activated in the absence of light,
challenging our common sense of visibility, and allowing partial discernment
even in unlit situations. “To perceive in the darkness of the present, this light
that strives to reach us but cannot” is a rare and paradoxical condition. In the
attempt to travel across and grasp the opacity of our present, the contempo-
rary must also create a special relationship with the past:
The contemporary is not only the one who, perceiving the darkness of the
present, grasps a light that can never reach its destiny; the contemporary is
also the one who, dividing and interpolating time, is capable of transform-
ing it and putting it in a relation with other times. He is able to read his-
tory in unforeseen ways, to “cite it” according to a necessity that does not
arise in any way from his will but from an exigency to which he cannot not
respond. (Agamben 2011, 18)
For a few years after recording the interviews, Ouramdane and his col-
laborators confronted the difficulty of not knowing how to make use of such
burdensome and somber material. How could it be possible to share docu-
ments on atrocious experiences, without simply adding more noise to what
was already circulating in our mainstream media, without running the risk
of sensationalizing violence and thus anesthetizing our sensibilities? One of
Ouramdane’s thoughtful decisions was to maintain the anonymity of the wit-
nesses, thereby not turning the victims of trauma into celebrities.
Figure 2.2 Mille Lundt in Ordinary Witnesses. Photo by Patrick Imbert.
Psychoanalyst Steven Reisner8 has written about how the concept and per-
ception of trauma has changed in recent times, in the public as well as in the
private sphere:
Trauma has become not simply a story of pain and its treatment, but a host
of sub-stories involving the commodification of altruism, the justification
of violence and revenge, the entry point into “true experience,” and the
place where voyeurism and witnessing intersect. Trauma is today the stuff
not only of suffering but of fantasy. (Reisner 2003b, 381)
In two important articles Reisner has emphasized the need to distinguish

clearly between the more commonly adopted (especially with the escalation
of events after 9/11) strategies of “trauma avoidance,” manifested through
acts of nationalism, religious fanaticism, and violent revenge, and those of
“trauma transformation.” In the latter an “exchange of revenge for memory,”
echoing Martin Bergmann, is evoked in order to create an “outlet that is cre-
ative instead of destructive.” Reisner believes that, among the arts, theater can
offer a protective space to explore trauma in a public sphere that transcends
the individual character of therapeutic practice—its confidentiality and/or
pathologization—to become collective and symbolic (Reisner 2003 a, 5–9).
In Ouramdane’s final editing of the witnesses’ interviews, one senses his
deep understanding of the contemporary discourses on torture. One of the
recurrent themes in torture survivors’ narratives is the need to remember as
much as to forget, to preserve their memories, and at the same time to let
oblivion lessen their severity. Priscilla B. Hayner, in her study of truth com-
missions around the world, kept asking her interviewees: “Do you want to
remember or to forget?” Whether she was speaking to Rwandan government
officials in late 1995, a year after the genocide that had left over half a million
dead, or to farm workers in El Salvador during the twelve-year civil war, or to
a South African woman in a Port Elizabeth township whose activist husband
had disappeared during the antiapartheid activities in the 1980s, the answer
was always the same: the need to remember what happened in order to keep it
from happening again was as strong as the need to forget the feelings and the
emotions that were associated with the painful experiences (Hayner 2010, 24).
Balancing the two seems to be what enables trauma survivors to go on. The
tension between remembering and forgetting recurs in Ordinary Witnesses,
not only in the spoken words and silences of witnesses but in the movements
of the dancers that symbolically represent a dramatic scale of opposites: the
routine of daily walks and the unsettledness of extreme movements.
The most common theme of survivors’ narratives has always been the
incapacity to articulate and describe their experiences, the impossible
search for words that seem not to exist. Elaine Scarry has claimed that
because physical pain does not have an external referent, it is impossible
to translate into verbal form: pain resists objectification in language. If
fears or desires, in some ways more abstract and less related to the physical-
ity of the body, can be better expressed verbally because of their ability to
be objectified, pain cannot. Physical pain, according to Scarry, shares the
same anomalous condition, although in reverse, with imagination. While
the former state is unusual for existing entirely without objects, the latter
is uniquely made of objects that materialize only in the abstract world of
our mind. Pain and imagination are located for Scarry at the extremities of
the human condition (Scarry 1985, 162–â•‰163). In rereading Scarry’s chapter
“The Structure of Torture,” Nicholas Onuf has rightly pointed out that tor-
ture does not necessarily begin, as Scarry claimed, with “a primary verbal
act, the interrogation,” since interrogation is simply a pretext or a pseudo-â•‰
rationalization for the infliction of pain on someone’s body (Onuf 2009, 72).
The search for truth indeed is as fictional and unreal as the revelation of
truth extorted with torture.
The ideological apparatus of institutions and governments that perpetrate
and justify torture requires a complex, multilayered organization: abstract
theories of their missions, and documented, detailed instructions to justify
sophisticated methods and practices of so-â•‰called enhanced interrogations,
which require specialized training for torturers, supported and supervised by
scientific and medical expertise. The ultimate site where power strives to oblit-
erate humanity through torture, especially during times of war, remains the
body, although in order to complete its project of annihilation, the apparatus
needs to silence those bodies, to turn them into innocuous corpses. If inflict-
ing death is the most obvious, final solution to torture—â•‰not always or eas-
ily applied by so-â•‰called democratic regimes—â•‰controlling public opinion, and
more powerfully the public imagination, is the key to justifying and perpetrat-
ing such illegal operations, rendering them more acceptable by introducing
linguistic changes, inflating collective fears, controlling and solidifying what
Judith Butler has called “frames of war.”
In order to understand how to be ethically responsive to the suffering of
others, Butler has proposed an analysis of the frames in which suffering is pre-
sented to us. In Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag,
Butler refers specifically to the photos of Abu Ghraib, in their timeless and
spaceless circulation, engaging in a dialogue with Sontag’s pivotal essays
On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others. In these works Sontag
argues that photographs, because they are abstracted moments in time, need
captions—â•‰a narrative—â•‰to provide interpretation. Absent this narrative, pho-
tographs can only “haunt” us. Butler argues that the frame, in its double
function of containing and structuring an image, provides a narrative. “If the

image in turn structures how we register reality, then it is bound up with the
interpretative scene in which we operate” (Butler 2009, 71).9
The field of perceptible reality changes on many levels when we talk about
performances rather than photos. The theatrical frame is more permeable
than that of photos, and the space in the present tense where performers and
spectators share their experience is more malleable and co-â•‰created. For these
reasons, the dancing body becomes the most powerful element of resistance to
the frame. It has the potential to erode the distance between physical pain and
imagination. The stage becomes the ideal, transitional site where it is possible
to better understand and negotiate the two different conditions. The perfor-
mance gives the witnesses a chance to creatively transform and symbolically
suspend their painful memories, and at the same time it makes the idea of suf-
fering for the spectators both more comprehensible and less acceptable.
TRANSITIONAL STAGE
The stage in Ordinary Witnesses is bare and dark. The only source of light
throughout the performance is a lateral grid of spotlights, in front of which
lies an electric guitar, initially as inert as a corpse. The performance begins
when the guitar is switched on, creating a metallic, white noise. Then the light
fades completely, and the irksome sound becomes close to imperceptible.
The first challenge for the audience is to deal with a prolonged moment in
a pitch-â•‰black theater. Left in the dark, questioning their expectations about
dance performances, the spectators are subliminally forced into taking the
first action, moving onto the stage with their wandering imagination, search-
ing for potential signifiers, alerting their other senses. Like the blind men in
paintings described by Derrida, spectators face a certain “apprehensiveness
about space,” being challenged to explore temporality differently as they “seek
to foresee there where they do not see, no longer see, or do not yet see. The space
of the blind always conjugates these three tenses and times of memory. But
simultaneously” (Derrida 1993, 6).
The audience’s anxiety is amplified by the absence of the expected dancing
bodies. Gerald Siegmund has explored the idea of the empty stage in contem-
porary dance performances as a site where absence, desire, and the dancing
subjects connect. In his rereading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
Siegmund challenges the prevalent interpretation of the “Fort-â•‰Da” game, in
which the child simply becomes the active agent of his/â•‰her own suffering
caused by the disappearance of the mother. In that case the child, by orches-
trating the entrances and the exits of the objectified mother, symbolized by
the spool attached to a string, secures control and gains empowerment. In
Siegmund’s new analysis, the “Fort-Da” game becomes a dance scene, where
the spool no longer represents the mother but the child’s own desire of the
subject-to-be. The emphasis is on the movement that sways between loss and
separation, lessening the binary presence/absence, as an effort to create the
necessary distance for the subject to understand and act upon his/her own
desires:
Movement creates this distance while at the same time filling it with imagi-
nary bodies. Absence therefore carves out a space for the subject to be, to
develop a relation towards the world, to perceive, to imagine, to speak and
to act. (Siegmund 2007, 79)
A disembodied voice cuts through the emptiness and dimness of the stage.
Several vintage-looking microphones, set in a straight row, close to the ceiling,
initially perceived as unidentifiable objects, begin to create the illusion of mor-
phing into reticent, open mouths. For the first ten minutes of the performance
the audience only hears individual voices in the dark. The complete dark-
ness and the initial absence of dancing bodies in Ordinary Witnesses creates a
reflexive womb where spectators have to rewire their perceptive expectations,
overcoming the claustrophobic sense of being—literally and metaphorically—
in the dark, mirroring the need for the subject to be, longing to see, to know,
to experience more, to develop a relation towards the world.
Mladen Dolar has analyzed the functions of the voice as the uncanny ele-
ment at the intersection of body and language, phone and logos, and the exten-
sion of private thinking into public accounting. More importantly, he has
proposed a third role for the voice: in addition to being the vehicle that confers
meaning on words, and the receiver of aesthetic admiration and recognition,
the voice can be simply “an object which functions as a blind spot in the call
and as a disturbance of aesthetic appreciation” (Dolar 2006, 4). In Ordinary
Witnesses the voices of the trauma survivors unfold with the same mysterious-
ness as the unconscious. At first the voices describe an album of fragmented
images as they slowly flip through memories, with long silences when compre-
hension escapes them. If the unconscious, in order to be unfolded, needs to be
heard, and therefore needs to find words that can be structured into a language
that conveys meanings, the witnesses’ memories in the first part of Ordinary
Witnesses, having to rely on the voice as their only outlet, keep moving back
and forth between being a vehicle of meaning and an object of disturbance.
The oscillation between silences and difficult descriptions of destroyed land-
scapes, the fear of being in front of armed enemies, or the desire to commit
suicide leaves blank spaces for the spectators to exercise their capacity to con-
nect, understand, imagine, and desire.
The first act of resistance takes place with the haunting presence of the timid
voices in the dark. The witnesses speak calmly and clearly in French, their
different inflections and fragmented stories giving hints about their diverse
provenances and their countries’ histories and horrors Toward the end of
the performance the voices—now no longer alone, but with the performers
onstage—seem to be almost in an interactive conversations with each other,
creating the perception that they have gained more confidence, their sense of
despair soothed. A community seems to be formed.
The dark, empty stage becomes populated by performers, and by the appear-
ance onscreen of close-up black-and-white portraits that only toward the end
move their lips in sync with the voices. Initially, the performers walk tirelessly
across the stage, their pace carefully calibrated, without interacting with each
other. Their normalcy in occupying the stage, as if in an urban setting, becomes
more and more unexpectedly strange. As the performance unfolds, their
movements—bending backward and falling in slow motion, precariously bal-
ancing on one shoulder—are increasingly more demanding on the performers’
bodies, to the point of becoming extreme and extraordinary. Gradually bodies
become unrecognizable as such, creating the optical illusion of melting in an
anatomic disintegration. The body, as the voice described by Dolar, becomes
an object of disturbance outside the sphere of what is understandable as either
organically functional or aesthetically admirable. The performers’ bodies in
Ordinary Witnesses, initially engaged in everyday movements, progressively
steer away from all recognizable gestures, whether they are quotidian or asso-
ciated with codified dance vocabularies. If the experience of torture cannot
find words and resists linguistic articulation, then the corporeal in Ordinary
Witnesses becomes a metaphor of the subjects disfigured by such atrocities.
The climax is reached when one of the performers, Lora Juodkaite, is engaged
in vortex-like spinning that displays the virtuosity and the endurance of a der-
vish dancer: her body loses its human connotations; her limbs seem precari-
ously attached to her torso, whirling in different directions.
The physicality of the performers challenges the expectations of what is con-
sidered tolerable to experience in a theater and what is describable. As with
physical pain, words alone seem to be reductive and limited. The dance in
Ordinary Witnesses calls into question the role of the dance critic, in need of
new writing strategies and perhaps rethinking, if one of the major tasks of
journalistic criticism is to report descriptively and impressionistically what is
visible on stage.10
After seeing Ordinary Witnesses, the daughter of one of the Brazilian wit-
nesses, even though she had studied the horrific history of her country at school
and had listened numerous times to the story told by her mother and similar
stories told by her friends, and friends of their friends, thanked Ouramdane
Figure 2.3â•‡ Mille Lundt in Ordinary Witnesses. Photo by Patrick Imbert.
for making a real understanding of torture possible by discovering a language

in movement to communicate what is otherwise lost to the imagination. The
performers indeed embody the real (bloodless, unwounded, athletic), sym-
bolic (able through virtuosic contortions to represent the destructive experi-
ence of torture), and imaginary body (reassembled by the survival instinct).
Simultaneously.
With Ordinary Witnesses, Ouramdane powerfully engages—â•‰and engages
us as an audience—â•‰in a dialogue with the contemporary (in the Agambenian
sense) discourse on torture, by creating a transitive space where the norma-
tive opacity in which torture is wrapped by the mainstream media is shaken.
He achieves this both by transgressively employing minority memories and
through the use of corporeality as an entity of disturbance. Such an entity is
not simply a more e/â•‰affective way to understand torture; it also confirms that
dance is an eloquent and theoretical contributor to political discourses, chal-
lenging the presumption of what dance is, or should be. André Lepecki has
argued that the “perception of the stilling of movement” should not be consid-
ered a betrayal, a threat to the future of dance (inevitably linked to movement,
and being-â•‰in-â•‰flow by certain dance criticism), but a critical act of deep onto-
logical significance (Lepecki 2006, 2). When dance becomes hard to describe
and disrupts our expectations, we should use that opportunity to rethink the
ontology of dance.
NOTES
1. In her book Torture: The Role of Ideology in the French-â•‰Algerian War, Rita Maran
(1989) investigates three areas of discourse focusing on different kinds of docu-
ments left behind by the government in the so-â•‰called mission civilisatrice, by the
military, the perpetrators of torture, and by French intellectuals. The rationale
behind torture practices remains shockingly similar in terms of language and
the deceptive strategies adopted to make information more obscure for civilians.
Obscuring information structures civilians’ readings by creating frames such as the
“war on terror,” “exporting freedom,” and so on, and simultaneously makes it easier
for claims of legality to be sustained. See more recently Jaffer and Singh (2007).
2. In “Zero Dark Dirty: Hollywood’s Gift to American Power” (Guardian, January
25, 2013) Slavoj Žižek argues rightly against the “neutral” depiction of torture,
claimed by director Kathryn Bigelow, as “already a kind of endorsement” in the
attempt to normalize torture. Žižek notices how the subtle changes in language—â•‰
for instance, the replacement of the word torture with the pseudo–â•‰politically
correct “enhanced interrogation technique”—â•‰aims to portray torture as a more
publicly acceptable operation.
3. The presence of scenes of torture on American primetime network television
has exponentially increased, as Lisa Hajjar reports in Why Are We (Still) Talking
about Torture?, from only twelve scenes in the 1990s to 897 between 2002 and
2007. This increment is a sign not only that media producers are responding to
what seems captivating to viewers, but that the jump in torture scenes on TV
must have entered and impacted the collective consciousness if the idea that tor-
ture can be “often” or “sometimes” justified, according to public opinion polls,
has also increased from 36 percent in 2006 to 53 percent after the tenth anniver-
sary of 9/â•‰11 (Hajjar 2013, 2–â•‰3).
4. In this essay I will be referring specifically to two conversations between Rachid
Ouramdane and myself: one occurred via Skype on March 10, 2010, and a sec-
ond took place at the Columbia University Maison Française on October 17,
2011; this latter conversation can be seen on YouTube, http://â•‰w ww.youtube.com/â•‰
watch?v=x_â•‰rYnY5qe_â•‰8.
5. Conversation with author, March 10, 2010.
8. Steven Reisner, president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility and founding
member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, has actively worked to revise
the policies of the American Psychological Association, which in the past decade
has supported doctors’ and psychologists’ participation in unethical military and
intelligence interrogations in places such as Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and

other CIA “black sites.” A former theater director and actor, Reisner has worked
recently as director of Theater Arts against Political Violence, creating theater
works with Tibetan, Chilean, and Kosovar survivors of torture and exile in
New York and in Kosovo. See his bio on the Physicians for Human Rights website,
http://â•‰physiciansforhumanrights.org/â•‰about/â•‰experts/â•‰steven-â•‰reisner.html.
9. Butler, in her collections of essays, investigates the more blurred, ideologically
constructed frames in which wars are carried on, and how technology operates
on “our field of senses,” both visual and discursive (Butler 2009, ix).
10. Alastair Macaulay, chief dance critic of the New York Times, in a positive review of
Ordinary Witnesses, still could not resist using the names of recognizable steps to
label what he had difficulty otherwise describing. He wrote in parenthesis: “(You
want to give these turns a ballet label: a manège of chaînés renversés, perhaps.)”
(Macauley 2011).
WORKS CITED
Agamben, Giorgio. 2011. “What Is the Contemporary?” In Nudities, 10–â•‰19. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Butler, Judith. 2009. “Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Susan
Sontag.” In Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, 63–â•‰100. London: Verso.
Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Memoirs of the Blind: Self-â•‰Portrait and Other Ruins. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Dolar, Mladen. 2006. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Esposito, Roberto. 2011. Immunitas: The Protection and Negations of Life. Cambridge,
UK: Polity.
Hajjar, Lisa. 2013. Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights. New York:
Routledge.
Hayner, Priscilla B. 2010. Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity,
2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Jaffer, Jameel, and Amrit Singh. 2007. Administration of Torture: A Documentary
Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Katz, Jack. 2001. “From How to Why, On Luminous Description and Causal Inference
in Ethnography (Part I).” Ethnography 2(4): 443–â•‰473.
Lepecki, André. 2006. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement,
Louppe, Laurence. 2010. Poetics of Contemporary Dance. Translated by Sally Gardner.
Alton, UK: Dance.
Macaulay, Alaistar. 2011. “Expressing Trauma in Words and Spins.” New York Times,
October 12, http://â•‰w ww.nytimes.com/â•‰2011/â•‰10/â•‰13/â•‰arts/â•‰dance/â•‰rachid-â•‰ouramdanes-â•‰
ordinary-â•‰w itnesses-â•‰review.html.
Maran, Rita. 1989. Torture: The Role of Ideology in the French-â•‰Algerian War. New York:
Praeger.
Onuf, Nicholas. 2009. “Rules for Torture?” In War, Torture and Terrorism: Rethinking
the Rules of International Security, edited by Anthony F. Lang Jr. and Amanda
Russell Beattie, 25–38. London: Routledge.
Reisner, Steven. 2003a. “Private Trauma/Public Drama: Theater as a Response to
International Political Trauma.” Public Sentiments 2(1): 1–9.
Reisner, Steven. 2003b. “Trauma: The Seductive Hypothesis.” Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association 51(2): 381–414.
Roux, Céline. 2007. Danse(s) performantive(s): Enjeux et developpements dans le champ
choreographique francais, 1993–2003. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Said, Edward. 2000. Reflections on Exile, and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1958. “Introduction.” In The Question, by Henri Alleg. New York:
George Braziller. 13-36.
Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain, the Making and Unmaking of the World.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Siegmund, Gerard. 2007. “Experience in a Space Where I Am Not: Staging Absence in
Contemporary Dance.” Discourses in Dance 4(1): 77–95.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2013. “Zero Dark Dirty: Hollywood’s Gift to American Power.”
Guardian, January 25, http://w ww.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/
zero-dark-t hirty-normalises-torture-unjustifiable.
3
“There’s a Soldier in All of Us”

Choreographing Virtual Recruitment
DER EK A. BU R R I L L
Logging onto the America’s Army online website—â•‰a portal to the videogame,
as well as an info site for all things military—â•‰I am immediately immersed
in a data-â•‰rich environment with advice, specs, background information, and
chatboards circulating around the game itself. Once inside the gamespace, I’m
led through a series of briefings regarding the mission at hand—â•‰in this case
“OPORD 320903 Burning Sentinel—â•‰Task Force Griffin; Situation,” with the
description as follows: “The city of Travnizeme has recently been occupied
by Czervenian forces. The civilian population has been trapped in the region,
and U.S. forces are escorting refugees from the region to U.N. refugee camps.”
After my squad makes ready, checking equipment and engaging in idle chatter,
our mission begins. We find ourselves in a city alley, three stories high on each
side, dimly lit and vaguely foreign, reminiscent of spaces broadcast by embed-
ded reporters in a variety of Middle Eastern theaters of war (as well as count-
less war films—â•‰The Hurt Locker, Green Zone, Blackhawk Down, American
Sniper, etc.). My team must move stealthily through the alley and toward the
target (the city itself and the refugees within it), clearing houses and targeting
“combatants” while protecting “friendlies.”
Crouching low, peering around a corner, I notice a muzzle flash from a
balcony ten meters up, forty meters to the left. The bullet ricochets off the
wall a meter in front of me. “Watch your six,” a team member reminds me,
64 D erek A . B urrill
and so I do a quick sweep of my rear, noticing two glowing eyes peering

out from behind a trash pile, barely noticeable in the smoky air of dusk.
I quickly bring up the sight fixed to my assault rifle and, after a cursory
inspection, notice that it’s a small boy. Lowering my weapon, I (also myself,
sitting in a chair in front of my computer) breathe a sigh of relief. Killing
a “friendly” in America’s Army can end the mission. Darting quickly for-
ward and again crouching behind a wooden palette, I then turn my atten-
tion back to the balcony target and wait. Again, there is a muzzle flash, and
the sound of an AK-47 rifle rings through the alley. The rest of my team is
twenty meters ahead and safely shielded from the sniper. “Get your ass up
here, D-rok,” my squad leader reminds me. “Holding for target. Balcony,
10 meters east of your position,” I reply. Waiting for what seems like an
eternity, watching my scope bob gently according to my breathing, I wait
for the next muzzle flash. Pop, pop. I then pull my trigger (pressing the right
“trigger” button on my controller) and watch as the sniper falls lifelessly to
the cobblestone street. Performing another cursory sweep of my rear, I then
pace forward slowly in a half crouch, rifle in ready position, looking to join
the rest of my squad.
While there are many aspects of this gameplay sequence that are meaning-
rich and problematic, I want to focus on a few aspects that relate to the topic
at hand—choreography and movement in online, multiplayer war video-
games. The virtual movement that I employ in the above scenario is entirely
pragmatic—the game itself calls for it, whether it’s the threat of injury or
the necessity of stealth. Act like a “soldier” and you’ll succeed: be careful, be
smart, use cover, move stealthily, protect your team, know when to pull the
trigger, and remember your training. And while these rules are applicable to
war videogames in general, this game—a game produced by the US Army—
engages in such realism, such detailed and sometimes “boring” choreography
(including the training) that one begins to sense the purpose of the game isn’t
just to entertain or engage, but to train and award those masculine behaviors
so many equate with patriotism, dominance, and control.
America’s Army, a stand-a lone game where the player logs on to join others
in simultaneous online gameplay, is one of hundreds of war-themed video-
games, an extremely popular genre of videogames called first-person shoot-
ers, or FPSs, with America’s Army also functioning as a MMOG, or massively
multiplayer online game.1 MMOGs like the World of Warcraft or Call of Duty
franchises are online games where hundreds (sometimes thousands) can play
at the same time, inhabiting the same world simultaneously, creating an entire
online sociology and culture where aliases are created, allegiances formed,
enemies identified. They are, in a larger sense, a part of the media configuration
known as “militainment”: films, TV, and videogames that offer a realistic but
“There’s a Soldier in All of Us” 65
idealized portrait of war and violent conflict. Other contemporary examples

include the film Act of Valor (2012), a big-budget Hollywood film produced
with the aid of the US Navy that features real Navy SEALS as American emis-
saries of freedom and foreign policy.2 Band of Brothers and Generation Kill are
both television shows chronicling the trials and tribulations of US soldiers in
WWII and Iraq, respectively. And Homefront a recent videogame written by
John Milius (Apocalypse Now, Red Dawn), features a band of insurgents fight-
ing invading North Korean forces in the western half of the United States in
the future.
The above cursory description of a segment of my in-game play serves
a definite purpose: I am using an interactive product that stages play and
interactivity as a type of virtual “enlistment” in order to achieve several
things. The first is to remind readers that a great deal of what we now call
digital technologies owe their existence to government and industrial info-
tainment and militainment dollars. We should all be familiar with the US
Department of Defense institution DARPA (Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency—largely responsible for the development of what we now
call the Internet) and the numerous other science and technology arms of
government and university labs, agencies, and task forces that have processed
and manipulated information into a simultaneously clandestine and market-
based technosphere. What is important here is the shape and quality of war
as representation, as performance, and as cultural imaginary. For this piece,
I make a basic statement—a statement that this volume, Choreographies of
21st Century Wars, is making in a polyvalent manner—t he way bodies move
when they are trained, managed, threatened, and wounded says a great deal
about what we think about bodies in general, how we value them and what
they are worth when nation-states enter into conflict or conduct insurgency
or guerilla warfare. This is particularly true when we deliberate about young
boys who are learning what it takes to “be a man,” and how the process of
physical, psychological, and social indoctrination of games in general (and
war games specifically) manufactures a particular type of nationalist, aggres-
sive masculinity that thinks of life as conflict and fighting and of war as labor,
expression, and desire.
Dance studies often focuses on what the body is and what it is doing—yet for
this essay, what the body isn’t and the active designation of “not doing” is just
as important. Much of contemporary body and movement studies also focus
on the subject/object divide and what is at stake in maintaining or problema-
tizing this divide. The discursive, rhetorical, and representative strategies of
the body in motion and the body as material for expression tend to be central
to the discourse. I want to open up this discourse somewhat to include digi-
tal representations and their relationship to real moving bodies, particularly
in the form of interactive games, where the subject/object divide can be a bit
promiscuous.
So, why war videogames as a topic for this collection? Games as cultural
signifier and movement practice are useful because the players operate and
move through the avatar, so it serves as a philosophical microcosm for
subject/object debates, as well as for representation and mimesis. The virtual
characters that serve as digital representations of the player, or avatars, simul-
taneously function within war games as puppets, projections, extensions,
prosthetics, agents, and ultimately cannon fodder or drone bait (without real
pain or death). The strategic violence witnessed and enacted in the games is a
stand-in for what institutionalized bodily discipline can result in: the manip-
ulation of subjects to the extent that they become objects—material in the
hands of an ubersubject operator, the military. In the case of videogames, the
player (the subject) maneuvers the avatar (the object) so that agency, identity,
and (specifically in the case of America’s Army) ideology are extended and
simulated in a photorealistic, representative space occupied by other players’
avatars.
Thus, I argue that by adhering to the narrative institutional and ideological
dogma of America’s Army, the player’s repeated and absorbed maneuvers in
the game (i.e., the choreography) flow back to the player and his or her body, so
that the player becomes subjected to the point of objectification, a ready-made
soldier, complete with foreknowledge of military strategy and tactics (and the
accompanying choreography of the soldier in battle).
The sociopolitics here are problematic. Do we rethink how we approach
the body in order to assert the importance of the body as subject, or do we
continue down the road that leads to the body as material, potentially on the
way to yet another series of visual, ideational, and corporeal steps that leave
us in the precarious philosophical position of regarding the body as object?
This should also force us to question what ideologies we reinforce in order to
maintain our dominion over the object world so that maintaining a carefully
constructed divide between the two allows us the illusion of being able to do
two things: (1) mold discourse so that the subject always ends up on top, and
(2) oversimplify how we order our worlds, and thus more easily denigrate and
destroy our environment by turning everything and anyone into an object. At
issue here is the illusion. Technologies like videogames seem to challenge the
above divide by inundating us with what appears to be real, so that we may act
out our desires as simulations. The avatar functions as a stand-in for the body,
an object that is an extension of our subjectivity, imbued with what bodies
may not have. This flow can substantially objectify our real bodies by seducing
the player into desiring the virtual movement and functionality at a level that
exceeds our desire of embodied experience. However, a game like American’s
Army operates at the ideological level in an even more pernicious manner.

Slavoj Žižek asserts:
The subject’s elementary, founding, gesture is to subject itself—voluntarily,

of course. … If, then, the subject’s activity is, at its most fundamental, the
activity of submitting oneself to the inevitable, the fundamental mode of
the object’s passivity, of its passive presence, is that which moves, annoys,
disturbs, traumatizes us (subjects): at its most radical the object is that
which objects, that which disturbs the smooth running of things. Thus the
paradox is that the roles are reversed (in terms of the standard notion of
the active subject working on the passive object: the subject is defined by
a fundamental passivity, and it is the object from which movement comes.
(Žižek 2006, 128)
The way that Žižek flips the assumptive subject/object structure is useful for
my argument. While the game gives the player the illusory notion of control of
the avatar through movement and expertise, the avatar surreptitiously func-
tions as “that which objects,” a prosthetic for the body that seems to be “fun-
damentally passive”(Žižek 2006, 128). Yet the avatars in America’s Army are
instructional agents of the military that refashion players into soldier-citizens,
objectifying them by way of digital choreography and propaganda.
While a game like America’s Army is not real warfare, or about real wars,
it is entirely potent as a representation of how war functions as subject-group
discourse/performance that naturalizes the insidious normalcy of the trans-
formation of analog subjects (living, breathing beings) into digital representa-
tives of an object-ideal—in this case, the perfect soldier-citizen. Here the body
as avatar becomes devoid of any value outside of itself as pure force, violence as
logical extension of state sanctioned, globalized violence. The politics of cho-
reography share a great deal with the politics of war. Choreographic systems
of meaning, or, put another way, systems of meaning-making as products of
physical force and labor (like war and violence), operate similarly in virtual
spaces. There is a kernel at the core of physical representation that can tell
us how much we value the body in less overtly physical spaces, the spaces of
the games.
That said, the central object of study for this article, America’s Army (and its
later versions and tie-ins), forms a multifaceted media machine that is devel-
oped, managed, and promoted by the US military, where real bodies in real
space can play the game virtually and cooperatively, or visit the traveling, real-
world theme park (the Virtual Army Experience) and shoot at onscreen oppo-
nents from an actual (albeit stationary) military vehicle, or they can play with
one of the Real Heroes action figures, all while learning about the US military
as a “force for good” (or being recruited through links to official US military
websites). So here is a situation where the concept of war-â•‰as-â•‰game is literalized
to the extent that it is a direct component of state and military policy, where
young men are able to rehearse a type of sanctioned violence on their way to
the ultimate state-â•‰sponsored geopolitical game, armed conflict.
RULES AND REGULATIONS

Before looking more closely at America’s Army and the psychological and
physical choreography that it teaches and indoctrinates, I would like to trace
out some general trends and concepts found in the discipline of games stud-
ies. This, I think, will serve as a background for readers less familiar with the
virtual world of play, but also as necessary ammunition for my central argu-
ment. Games studies is well into its second decade of growth and specializa-
tion, nearing the kind of maturity critical dance studies achieved in the late
1990s. Games research typically focuses on several areas of gaming: console
games played on the Xbox, PlayStation, etc.; online gaming where multitudes
of players congregate and engage in real-â•‰time play in virtual, complex worlds;
mobile gaming practiced on the Nintendo Gameboy or other mobile devices;
casual gaming like Angry Birds or Words with Friends; and serious gaming,
where games and game-â•‰like structures and rubrics are used in applications
ranging from medicine and the military to ecology and economics. Given the
wide range of games and gaming spaces/â•‰experiences, it is not surprising that
a number of methodologies have been applied from preexisting disciplines
(sociology, film studies, television studies, performance studies, digital stud-
ies) to games and gaming objects of study, while several discipline-â•‰specific
methodologies have evolved in relation to the evolution of games and gaming.
Two significant approaches are ludology and narratology. The ludologist tends
to focus on game structures (rules, parameters, order of play, etc.) and play
itself as the most essential aspects of study, while the narratologist tends to
focus on the textual aspects—â•‰the story, characters, and scenarios of games. To
some extent, there has been a natural friction between these two approaches,
often leading to extended debates in journals and at conferences. Another
important area of games studies that is gaining traction is a body-â•‰centered
approach, where methodologies and theory from dance studies and perfor-
mance studies are applied to bodies at play in the gamespace and in front of
the screen. Yet like so many other media studies disciplines, embodiment and
corporeality are often ignored or debased in favor of a more sociological, cog-
nitive, or visual approach. Considering that technological advances in body
mapping technology (motion capture, accelerometers, altimeters, etc., found
in the Nintendo Wii or the Xbox Kinect) have become more readily available
to the gaming consumer, aspects of performance studies and dance studies are
critical to this approach in that the body is activated in a way not previously
seen in domestic space throughout the history of videogaming, nor in more
longstanding media.3 Additionally, genre functions in games studies in much
the same way it does in other media, with an important caveat: videogames
often feature multiple play modes, typically a single-player mode (much like
the traditional Atari or Nintendo games for the home and arcade popularized
in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s) and a multiplayer, online mode
(as in America’s Army), where groups of friends can play together against the
game program, in closed competitive tournaments, or in massive, multiplayer
arenas with friends, acquaintances, and strangers from around the world. For
instance, two games that are paradigmatic of war-gaming (and the FPS genre
in general) can operate as two different gaming experiences—while the war
game Homefront can function as a single player FPS or as a multiplayer, online
game its story and plot are arguably envisioned as a single-player mission, and
while Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is available as an FPS for a single player,
it is much more popular as a multiplayer game (indeed, all of the commercials
and advertisements for the game promote it as an MOG). Arguably, the com-
petitive and violent nature of war games desires/requires these kinds of play
and game structures, where the sides are clear and “killing” a friend can bring
as much pleasure as blowing up a stranger, mirroring acculturated, normative
(particularly masculine) prerequisites and rites of passage for competition in
sports, business/labor, and relationships.
So it should be clear that games studies has changed greatly in relation to
its objects of study and the technologies that support the games and how both
of these factors engender certain kinds of play, much the way dance studies
has created new vocabularies and approaches to digital or telepresent dance,
borrowing from computer science and media studies to explain the new rela-
tionships between the live, present body and the virtual, disembodied chore-
ography of avatars and digitized bodies.
Rikke Toft Nørgård argues that the body in motion—fine motor skills,
in particular—serves as an essential component of games studies, writing,
“From the perspective of corporeal locomotion and craftsmanship, gaming
is perhaps more akin to activities such as practicing karate, playing a musical
instrument or dancing than to reading a book, listening to music or watching
a movie” (2011, 202). Using World of Warcraft as an example (an MMOG),
Nørgård traces out previous and existing approaches to the study of this
hugely influential game (influential both to gamers and to researchers) and
finds them lacking. The author identifies five existing frames or stances that
are solely focused on when approaching the game—sociality, identity, percep-
tion, cognition, and textual—so that, unfortunately, too many researchers
treat “gaming as corporeally detached rather than corporeally engaged” (2011,

205). Similarly, in an earlier essay (Burrill 2006) I theorized the movements of
avatars in gamespace and how this system of signification stems from the lived
body and its understanding of its own possibilities and limitations. I argued
that the four essential attributes of digital choreography are stability, repeat-
ability, invention, and virtuosity.4 These four traits are found not only in digi-
tal space in the form of the avatar’s movements but in the players themselves,
as palimpsests of their own lived experiences, as well as a proprioceptive and
physical apparatus that can be witnessed literally in/on/through the body of
the gamer during play (but also in the reorganization of the real spaces where
the games are played).5 In defining choreography this way, I don’t mean to
ignore or disparage other foundational definitions of choreography that more
closely focus on dance-centered movement (including definitions that aim to
address more pedestrian and/or expanded notions of dance), which highlight
the creative and productive relationships between authorship, representation,
and the body. My digitally focused definition can be thought of as poten-
tially allied with Susan Foster’s conjoined terms choreography, kinesthesia,
and empathy (2010), where the psychophysical connection assumed to exist
between the dancer and the observer is, in fact, highly mediated and cultur-
ally and historically situated and sensitive. What I want to do, by offering this
definition, is emphasize how power works in lived choreography, but also how
that power is transferred and transformed into virtual space (and then back
out again into the bodies in the real world), particularly in videogames that
use war as a governing logic. In this sense, choreography exists as a formal,
regimented use of the body as signifier that is meant to directly represent a
goal or desire of another vested with greater ostensible power. This is a facet
of my more general theory of bodies and gaming, what I have termed hap-
tic theory, a framework that seeks to recast the player-avatar relationship as
something less about prosthesis and extension and more about a kind of dual,
synchronized (albeit highly mediated) embodiment, where moving (instead
of “being”) is the central constituting factor in digital and real embodiment.
A corporeal approach to games, particularly war games, is key, because while
endemic, highly violent and aggressive content in games is a regularly cited
concern, an issue of equal concern should be how the player is learning, and
how a game like America’s Army indoctrinates a kind of fine and gross motor
(s)killset highly prized by the US government, other governments, and various
global factions and groups. Nina B. Huntemann writes:
Contemporary videogames, particularly war-themed games, offer a tactical

way of dealing with terror, focusing on the technical details of how we fight
and reducing extremely complex global and local tensions into red versus
blue. It is significant that these games spaces present virtually all-male envi-
ronments within which players can try on powerful and empowering roles.
(2010b, 234)
A particularly polyvalent example of this militainment, or what James Der

Derian calls MIME-NET (“the military-industrial-media entertainment net-
work”), is America’s Army (the first version, for the PC, was released in 2002),
comprising a series of games on multiple platforms, online “educational” and
“informational” tools, and interactive environments that function as an elabo-
rate recruitment tool for the US military.6 Funded and published by the US
military and managed by the US Army’s Office of Economic and Manpower
Analysis, America’s Army is configured to act as a legitimate game in its own
right, falling into the genre of tactical first-person shooter (but, of course, there
is a link on the game’s website to the Go Army US military recruitment web-
site). In the game, the recruit completes basic training, fights in squad-level
firefights, and can advance to Special Forces training, field medicine, vehicle
operation, and marksmanship
Gameplay is tense and realistic (as far as FPSs go), with squad cooperation
and tactics emphasized over all-out aggression. What is particularly novel and
problematic about this specific war game is the relatively long, in-depth, and
intense training period the player must undergo in order to “graduate” to
mission-ready status, in addition to the highly detailed, fictionalized geopo-
litical conflict scenarios and an enormous amount of buttressing information
and detail (technical specifications on specific missions, weapons information,
character profiles, etc.). Indeed, most of the chat boards and discussion forums
focus very specifically on the game as game, instead of as an outreach and
recruitment tool for the army. This points to the relatively high level of realism
of the game, and shows how savvy the US military has become at cloaking its
intentions. In fact, several players’ posts on discussion boards give the military
credit for being “upfront” and “honest” about its purposes, signaling that the
website, gamespace, and surrounding information illustrate an approach that
is simultaneously clear about its intentions while operating rather seductively
in the murky ideological field of nationalism as play and game.
So, how does this game “play”? Largely, because of the training that the
“recruit” receives online before engaging in specific missions, America’s Army
can play one of two ways. The first is a lone-wolf, Clint Eastwood method,
where the player largely ignores the squad, and either breaks off or charges into
battle, sometimes to the detriment of his squad. The introductory paragraphs
in this chapter are a reflection of one of my first incursions into America’s Army,
and is based on behaviors and choreographies that I had learned from other
FPS and war games. So, in a sense, I had been indoctrinated by the pragmatics
of the genre—â•‰the joystick cowboy in me sometimes desires to roam free and

reject more structured play tactics and narrative structures. However, after
playing for hundreds of hours, over the course of several years, a new set of
strategies set in, particularly in relationship to those with whom I played. For
instance, the “Red Rum” squad was a group that often played together and
would log on at set times in order to play through missions as a team. This was
a group where I needed to “prove myself” in order to be included, so I made
a point of quickly learning their style—â•‰a carefully and tightly choreographed
group movement that included US Marine squad tactics (one of this squad is
an ex-â•‰marine). When I asked (through my headset—â•‰we can all talk to each
other while we campaign) where I could brush up on these skills, one of the
squad recommended that I watch the UK/â•‰US TV show Strike Back. What
I watched and later performed are a meticulously planned series of group
maneuvers: tight, networked group movement consisting of three main fea-
tures: (1) discrete, carefully timed forward advance with two soldiers pointing
their weapons forward, a third sweeping left and right, and a fourth cover-
ing the rear (this, of course, varies with the number in the squad, but generally
the front, middle, and rear act as distinct zones); (2) short, rapid strides timed
to match the others near you, so that the unit stays tight-â•‰knit; (3) a constant
verbal communication—â•‰while moving—â•‰resulting in team members switching
positions fluidly in order to strengthen the unit’s defensive and offensive posi-
tions. While this choreography, as practiced above, applies directly to close-â•‰
quarters, urban engagement, it has clear applications for a number of venues,
such as exterior urban environments like the alley described at the start of this
chapter and open areas where cover is more limited. When performed on the
show Strike Back, this choreography appears fluid and honed, so that the actors
seem highly trained in military maneuvers. When it is practiced effectively by
our squad in America’s Army, I shift between feeling as though I’m watching
an online version of Strike Back (or other military entertainments) and ela-
tion, as if the performance has clicked, the unit functioning efficiently, fluidly,
dynamically. Of course, when one turns on the news and watches footage of
street battles in Syria or Afghanistan, the nature of these conflicts is decid-
edly less organized, each side battling in an improvised and messy manner.7
This points to how sanitized war is made and replayed in America’s Army. The
unfriendlies don’t moan or spasm when shot, the “good” side always (eventu-
ally) wins, and this rehearsed squad choreography functions as a stand-â•‰in for
discipline, righteousness, and America’s global infallibility. And, just as my
team leader admonished me to “get my ass” up there during the alley firefight,
a key aspect of gameplay is following orders, operating as a “band of brothers”
(I only played once with a player that identified herself as female, much to the
squad’s chagrin), and playing war “for real.” To break ranks is to court demise,
of your avatar and of the team, and because many of the players that I spoke
to during play are serious gamers (with many mentioning that they were/â•‰are
seriously considering a military career), to not follow the choreography closely
is to break the fourth wall, and all the verisimilitude comes crashing down.8
Additionally, I always sensed that Red Rum squad suspected that I wasn’t “for
real,” a charlatan, a poser, not a real man. They let me play with them because
I could get the job done (by that I mean that my hand-â•‰eye coordination is
good, I don’t fall apart under pressure, and my combat vocabulary is accurate),
but I never engaged in the type of name-â•‰calling, insults, and racial and homo-
phobic slurs that are typically slung around in these games. Thus, my mascu-
line enactment was out of step. And so it seems obvious that when I mention
nationalism and patriotism, man-â•‰building and gender-â•‰normative formation
are imbricated in these spaces.
FR ANCHISING WAR
The game has been lauded by critics, trade magazines, and other organizations—â•‰
all seemingly sincere—â•‰ and has been awarded Best Use of Tax Dollars,
2002 (Computer Games Magazine) and Best Advergame of 2005 (Digital
Entertainment and Media Excellence Awards), and was a finalist in 2006 for
the Innovations in American Government Award (given by the Ash Center,
part of the Kennedy School at Harvard University). It seems clear that this
crossover gaming experience is part and parcel of a larger cultural emphasis
on media synergy, and while the game has come under fire from cultural and
media critics, one has the sense that the level of critique itself has been ham-
pered by what I call the “patriot purge” of the 2000s in the United States, where
if one doesn’t “support our troops,” one isn’t a “real American.” However,
I want to emphasize how America’s Army and the game’s publishers managed
to create an experience that is reinforced by a variety of media tie-â•‰ins that lead
to the kind of real-â•‰world choreography we see on the battlefield.9 I want to turn
now to a discussion of three examples of real-â•‰world, physical manifestations of
the simulated war of America’s Army and how each tie-â•‰in works to construct a
patriotic (if not downright jingoistic) national identity, which then teaches and
nurtures a carefully rehearsed and technical choreography10 of violence and
warfare. These three out-â•‰of-â•‰game examples are important since they provide a
link between the online world of the game and the choreographies, behaviors,
and attitudes that it fosters and the external identity of the citizen as potential
recruit.
The first example, the America’s Army Real Heroes program (launched in
2006), features the stories of actual combat veterans through blogs, videos,
and interviews, as well as action figures featuring real soldiers’ likenesses. The
figure I have in front of me as I write is of Sergeant Tommy Rieman of the

Fifty-First Infantry Long Range Surveillance Company, who was awarded the
Silver Star, a commendation for gallantry in action. The words “This ACTION
FIGURE is of an actual soldier who has rendered distinguished service in the
Global War on Terrorism” are written on the package below the America’s
Army game logo. A picture of him in dress uniform graces the ID badge,
alongside an “in-game render” (digital picture) of his gaming avatar. Inside the
package are the action figure dressed in fatigues, a baseplate molded to look
like desert scrub and rocks (presumably representing Iraq or Afghanistan) and
a trading card with Sergeant Rieman’s picture on the front and vital statistics
on the back, much like a baseball (or other sports) collecting card. On the back
of the package are pictures of the other soldiers/figures in Series 1, as well as
official statements from the US Army (“The Warrior Ethos”—a manifesto of
military conduct), information on the Silver and Bronze Star, and the URL of a
website where a child (presumably) can learn more about America’s Army, the
Real Heroes Program, and the US Armed Forces in general. On the website,
detailed accounts of each of the Real Heroes are available, as well as lengthy
biographies (including awards and commendations, pictures of the soldier at
work and with family, skill sets, etc.) and links to Facebook pages and YouTube
videos. Returning to the figure, there is a warning in the lower left regarding
choking hazards for children three and under, although “Ages 13 and up” is
written in the upper right corner. So the actual age of the target user is mal-
leable, as is the age recommended for the America’s Army videogame by the
ESRB, “T” for Teen, which means thirteen years of age or over.11 The action
figure is made in China. Presumably, children who play with these action
figures can use them as a fetish to meld their digital selves (having already
played the videogame) with the Real Hero materially and psychologically, so
multiple forms of play in multiple spaces offer chances to rehearse and perfect
the choreography of the warrior. Additionally, the toy seems tailor-made for
masculinity-molding, where the young boy idolizes the Real Hero and can
act out those missions and exploits using an imagination already tempered
and ossified by videogames, commercials, sports, and other boy-bonding exer-
cises and rites of passage. In this sense, recruitment begins early, and not just
toward military service but toward “masculine service,” so that fighting and
soldering become lionized as the ultimate male performance.12
The second example is the Army Experience Center, a $12-million, 14,500-
square foot facility that was squeezed between a skateboard park and an
arcade in Philadelphia’s Franklin Mills Mall. The Center, now closed, featured
over seventy consoles and PCs, various motion simulator rides, conference
rooms, and a replica of a command-and-control room. When I took a virtual
tour through an online portal in August 2009, I counted at least ten soldiers
dressed in khakis and black polo shirts conversing with patrons and playing
alongside the kids and adults at the game screens, and in general the space
reminded me of the Sony PlayStation Store in the Metreon interactive mall
in San Francisco, where the sales associates wore the same casual uniforms,
blending in and playing with the gamers as they tried out new wares. All of
the soldiers at the center were trained recruiters, yet actively denied that the
Center was itself a recruitment center.13 Instead they maintained that the pur-
pose of the center was to inform the public about the “changing nature” of the
US military, namely, that it has gone high-tech and that these kinds of tech-
nologies are a part of the “Army experience.” “Through market research, and
proven outreach tools like the ‘America’s Army’ game and the mobile ‘Virtual
Army Experience’ … the Army learned that the best way for people to become
acquainted with their Army was for them to be able to touch, feel and see the
Army in a non-threatening environment.”14 However, more than 250 young
men and women were recruited as a direct result of the Center. Under intense
local pressure from protestors and community activists, the Center closed on
July 31, 2010.
In their compelling book Games of Empire, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Grieg
de Peuter write, “America’s Army is but one among an arsenal of simulators
that the militarized states of capital—preeminently the United States—depend
on to protect their power and use to promote, prepare, and preemptively prac-
tice deadly operations in computerized battlespace” (Dyer-Witheford and de
Peuter, 2009, xv). So America’s Army—the game, the Center, the action figure—
are not simply recruitment tools, but tools of indoctrination and participation
so that war becomes a naturalized labor choice for young Americans. And that
choice becomes less a function of agency and more one of state ideology in
that America’s Army serves as a form of mentorship or apprenticeship, where
technique and specialization are taught through repetitive, embodied learn-
ing. And whereas commercial war games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4
and Homefront are games produced by private companies with a familiar busi-
ness model—advertising to bring players in, action to keep them glued, and
merchandise and sequels to keep them coming back—America’s Army oper-
ates in the open as an extension (and sublimation) of US military recruitment
strategy (recruitment centers, advertisements, tie-ins, virtual content), with no
vested interest in traditional profit streams. Instead, the recruitment of new
soldiers guarantees that business is “in the black.” Colonel Casey Wardynski,
director of the US Army’s Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis and
originator and director of the America’s Army project, states, “We can deliver
it into pop culture, we can structure it in a way that is designed for teens 13 and
above. So no, we’re not going to get there last, we’ll get there about the same
time as other ideas for what to do with your life” (Huntemann 2010a, 179).
The third example is the Virtual Army Experience (VAE), a traveling exhi-
bition engineered to resemble a virtual reality theme park ride, where par-
ticipants can experience virtual battle using air-â•‰powered weapons, perched in
stationary military ground vehicles and Blackhawk helicopters. The 19,500-â•‰
square-â•‰foot space enclosed by an inflatable dome travels the country in four
versions, stopping at state fairs, NASCAR events, music festivals, air shows,
and Six Flags Amusement Parks (the one I visited was deployed at a former
military airfield).
Asking its participants to “employ teamwork, rules of engagement, leader-
ship and high-â•‰tech equipment,” the Experience packs a full schedule into a
twenty-â•‰
to-â•‰
thirty-â•‰
minute encounter, including preparatory briefings at the
Joint Command Center, the mission itself, and, finally, a debriefing and evalu-
ation at the After Action Review area (at a rate of about 240 participants per
hour). Before and after the briefing, game play and debriefing itself, visitors
can talk to enlisted men and women around the space, including (at “select”
locations and times) Sergeant Tommy Rieman, one of the America’s Army Real
Heroes and the model for the action figure mentioned above. The Experience,
like the videogame and the Army Experience Center, is free and open to the
public, although participants must register with the VAE if they wish to use
the motion simulator. This information is then passed on to army recruiters
for tracking and long-â•‰term analysis.15 The scenario that “recruits” experience
is as follows:
A well-â•‰armed genocidal faction in the notional city of Nradreg has sur-
rounded a group of humanitarian aid workers and refugees, who face star-
vation and imminent attack. This enemy faction has rejected all diplomatic
efforts to negotiate safe passage of relief supplies. As part of international relief
efforts, a combined US Army air, sea, and ground task force has been ordered
to use appropriate force to reach the remote compound. The Army will employ
artillery and electronic warfare assets to suppress enemy air defenses while a
Special Forces team parachutes deep into enemy territory. Then, AH64 Apache
attack helicopters will destroy hostile coastal defenses to permit the entry of an
Army Theater Support Vehicle (TSV) into Nradreg’s harbor. The Army ground
task force, mounted in Strykers and HMMWVs, will come ashore and fight
through fierce resistance to rescue the trapped aid workers and refugees and
deliver vital supplies.16
Clearly, the above encounter has two key parts. The first is the kind of nar-
rative often found in war films or games, where action is sanctioned as nec-
essary and benevolent because of the “genocidal” motivations of the enemy
faction (instead of territory, resources, injustice, etc., factors that can more
forcefully expose war causes to debate and scrutiny). Add to this that “aid
workers” are in danger and that this military action falls under “international
relief efforts,” and this overwhelmingly closed narrative operates as a kind of

normalized, virtuous necessity. Additionally, the VAE markets the kind of
technical planning and skills it romanticizes for actual recruits (and soldiers)
in the second part; the participant “will come ashore and fight through fierce
resistance,” effectively spelling out exactly how exacting the US military can
be. “Leveling up” to the next stage, the body learns the choreography that it
has been assigned to execute in advance (with the added bonus of guaranteed
success!). The recruit then hops aboard one of several different mock vehicles
(one of several stationary attack helicopters or six armored vehicles) and, along
with their “team,” carries out the scripted mission with realistic-â•‰looking guns
(“M4 Rifles or M249 SAWs”), firing away at targets on screens in front of them.
VAE is nearly identical, as far as gameplay, graphics, scenario, structure, and
theme are concerned, to the America’s Army videogame, yet clearly is meant to
serve as a sublimation of it. Players can actually hold a weapon with feedback
mechanisms (recoil, reload functions) and sit in an attack vehicle, putting their
previously rehearsed choreography and tactics to the test in a real-â•‰world (albeit
simulated) environment.
BOOTS ON THE GROUND
Recruitment games are not specific to the United States. Special Force (2003),
developed and published by Hezbollah, operates from the point of view of
a Palestinian insurgent fighting the Israeli Defense Forces, admonishing its
players: “Be a partner in the victory. Fight, resist and destroy your enemy in
the game of force and victory.”17 Like America’s Army, the game is available for
free. Additionally, in Under Ash (2001), the gamer plays as a Palestinian youth,
Ahmed, fighting against “Zionist” occupation. Representatives of Afkar Media
(a Syrian publishing company) have said that Under Ash and its sequel, Under
Siege (2005), are a response to games like America’s Army. In a 2005 interview,
Afkar Media’s executive manager, Radwan Kasmiya, said,
They [Arab players] saw that Under the Ash offers a true perspective. The
player community is interested in games which offer a different point of
view, whereas all the games here, like Delta Force, involve you shooting
Arabic-â•‰speaking enemies.â•›… The Arabic players felt that something was
wrong, after completing such a game you feel some bitterness, you feel
like … like being guilty a bit, do you understand?18
So Kasmiya is pointing out here that identifying with the character/â•‰avatar

and its contextual relationship to the themes and scenario of the game is a
central issue for the player. For him and his company the activity of gaming
is a negotiated process involving gaming not only in and for itself but as a
meaningful and compelling representation of real-â•‰world conflict. Similarly,
while America’s Army clearly functions as a game that gamers “see” as a game,
they are also willingly engaging in a recruitment process, effectively embrac-
ing an active performance of indoctrination, presumably leading to conflict,
both personal and global. A troubling example (for the cultural critic, but
certainly not for the military) of “soft” recruitment leading to an embodied
and applied choreography can be seen in the words of Sergeant Sinque Swales
of the 276th Engineer Battalion (US Army), speaking of an early experience
under fire in Iraq: “It felt like I was in a big video game. It didn’t even faze me,
shooting back. It was just natural instinct. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! The
insurgents were firing from the other side of the bridge.â•›… We called in a heli-
copter for an airstrike.â•›… I couldn’t believe I was seeing this. It was like ‘Halo’
[a combat videogame]. It didn’t even seem real, but it was real.”19 Swales goes
on to say that since he returned home, war games have been a constant source
of enjoyment and, in a way, comfort, mirroring the uncanny scene from The
Hurt Locker where Jeremy Renner’s character finds himself lost in the aisles of
a grocery store, longing to return to his “normal,” the battlefield. When one
is raised on these games, goes to war to try the real thing, and then returns,
those behaviors—â•‰those embodied techniques—â•‰are ingrained in an even more
pervasive manner. In the case of Sergeant Swales, the real may lack the realism
of the games, so that the soldier’s ontology is formed from the simulacrum.
In a larger cultural sense, playing war games—â•‰identifying the simulation
as referent—â•‰is a form of rehearsal for the rigors of competition in the ideo-
logical warzone of “technological capitalism,” economies where digital devices
form the central means of establishing value, exchange, and accumulation,
so that the consumer is both buying and spending through the devices, but
also through use of and interaction with them, maintaining and expanding
capital’s growth and ubiquity. Videogames are one of the central modes in this
system. And, important to the topic of this collection, they are at root interac-
tive, and therefore performative, which then doubly interpolates the subject
as citizen-â•‰soldier in the daily battles of accumulation and consumption, as
well as co-â•‰creator/â•‰drudge of the capitalist state and its attendant cultural and
political agendas.
In materials science, the term asperity refers to a surface’s roughness or rug-
gedness. When surfaces are polished so that they appear smooth to the eye and
the touch, closer microscopic investigation will show asperity. Thus when two
surfaces come in contact with one another, they meet at points of aspecrity
or the peaks and projections that, over time, can become worn down from
friction or compressive load. I borrow this term to illustrate what theoreti-
cally and practically occurs during points of contact between player and game,
particularly propaganda-â•‰driven war games. Regular and intense play (friction)

coupled with the compressive load of cultural, ideological and nationalist dis-
course creates a media-â•‰saturated subject that has been “smoothed out,” as it
were, made more compliant and recruitable for various meta-â•‰projects, execut-
ing choreographies designed by men in suits and uniforms. Moreover, in the
America’s Army maelstrom, the player’s asperities become correspondingly
“leveled out” through embodied practices offered through the game itself,
VAE, the Army Experience Center, and the action figures, ensuring a more
“trainable” young (presumably young, male) player. Furnished with general
issue tactics and strategies, the prerecruits can then rehearse and learn the
material choreographies they will need to defend themselves, their families,
and their country, without the moral or ethical complications of firing real
bullets into a real body.
POSTSCRIPT
Since 2004, I have followed the lives of an America’s Army player group that
I joined as a fellow player, but also as a researcher (I informed them of this
when I asked to join). They were called “Welcome to the Suck”—â•‰a phrase refer-
ring to the lousy conditions of war in general, made infamous by US Marines,
and coined sometime during the Vietnam War. I asked to join these eight men,
at that time between the ages of sixteen and twenty-â•‰three, because they seemed
to be one of the more organized, serious, and thoughtful player groups and,
most significantly, because they were all interested in the validity of what they
were doing in the game, since all intended to join the military. This is where
I first became interested in the direct applicability of digital movement and
choreography to real-â•‰world bodies, particularly in relation to state-â•‰sanctioned
violence and the indoctrinated maneuvers of soldiers in training and battle.
Of the eight men, six did in fact enlist in the US military. Since returning
from active duty, two have committed suicide, one in 2011 and one in 2012. Of
the remaining four, three suffer from PTSD—â•‰nightmares, suicidal ideation,
anger issues, drug and alcohol problems—â•‰and one has gone “off the grid” to
the extent that nobody in his immediate family has heard from him in two
years. Questions that I continue to ask: Did their time “in the suck” (in actual
military duty) do this to them? Were they served well by their “training” in
America’s Army? Did playing America’s Army effectively recruit them? Would
they have enlisted if they hadn’t played? Was the choreography they learned in
the game useful? “Truthful” or accurate? And, finally, is there a continuum of
embodiment from digital war games to real war? For the men who came back,
particularly the two that took their own lives, it seems clear that choreogra-
phies of war can lead to suffering and death.
These suffering and dead bodies perhaps make more of an impact when con-
sidering scale; war choreography can result in the movement, diaspora, and
extermination of whole populations, to the extent that these bodies become of
equal or lesser value to the disposable avatars we play through in virtual space.
But we were warned, so many years ago, by Walter Benjamin:
“Fiat ars—â•‰pereat mundus,” says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects

war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been
changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour
l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for
the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-â•‰alienation has reached such
a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure
of the first order. (2007, 242)
In this essay, I’ve tried to write about a technological apparatus that pro-
motes a profound sense of alienation from our own bodies while marketing the
pleasures of kill choreography and inciting a kind of erotic nationalism. This
chapter is intended to extend notions of the body and movement, and to com-
plicate the myriad spaces where bodies live and work and fight. In America’s
Army, the invisible choreographer is the state itself. That this mirrors current
technocratic, hypercentralized approaches to the surveillance and monitoring
of real-â•‰world subjects should serve to invigorate all of our bodies toward a state
of amorphous, chaotic, and desirable mutation.
NOTES
1. While war videogames may seem to be a genre in themselves, a consideration
of point of view is important here, as there are many war-â•‰themed videogames
that fall into other genres—â•‰strategy, action, etc. There are well-â•‰established genre
divisions in games studies, so the most accepted genre for games like Call of
Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is FPS, largely because so many violent games are played
from a first-â•‰person point of view, where the only trace of the player’s avatar seen
on screen is usually the barrel or end of a weapon, a combative, percussive, and
penetrative visual phallus.
2. Act of Valor began as a recruitment video for the US military’s Naval Special
Warfare Command, and the US Navy reserved rights to a final edit of the film.
The trailer was shown on the official website of the videogame Battlefield 3, which
included free downloadable dog tags to be used within any version of the game.
The game was heavily advertised during the closest thing that US culture has to
gladiatorial combat, NFL football games.
3. The Xbox Kinect and the Nintendo Wii both feature wireless play modes, and,
in the case of the Kinect, no handheld controller at all, so that the entire body
becomes part of the interface, an enormous leap toward more embodied virtual
gaming and away from the limitations of the joystick or controller.
4. Several theorists have attempted to create new vocabularies in order to theorize
the digital body of the avatar and its movement, as well as the body in real space
playing a game with the Xbox Kinect, such as Dance Dance Revolution (Konami),
where the system maps players’ bodies and their choreographed movements, ana-
lyzing them and scoring them as real-time dancers. See Burrill (2006).
5. See Burrill (2008).
6. This is neither a new nor isolated instance—the first film to win the Academy
Award for Best Picture is the silent film Wings (1927), produced with the aid of
the US military, not to mention the Disney shorts aimed at children during World
War II, or the four films produced in concert with the US Navy in 2012 (Battleship,
Captain Philips, Lone Survivor, and Act of Valor). See Der Derian (2001).
7. While military training typically involves a high degree of repetition and “act-
ing without thinking,” improvisation is necessary and valued, particularly when
fighting against an insurgent, guerrilla, or disorganized opponent. Yet impro-
visation is constantly framed in the game and in real military skirmishes as an
extension of training. So, in terms of dance, while choreography and improvisa-
tion are significantly different in their temporal arrangement, they still rely on
some type of practiced or trained knowledge.
8. I use a theatrical metaphor here to draw attention to the player as performer
and spectator, as well as co-creator of the game narrative, action, and dialogue.
During intense firefights, there is often little talk or acknowledgment of the game
as a game. Breaking this performance would potentially yank the entire team out
of the flow of the moment, and thus undermine our tacit, shared suspension of
disbelief.
9. On November 23, 2007, while driving down a highway in North Carolina,
Paxton Galvanek was able to provide first aid to injured accident victims, skills
that he claims he learned from the America’s Army premission medical training
segments.
10. That is, organized, collaborative patterns of movement and systems of ideological
meaning-making.
11. According to the ESRB, “These games contain content that may be inappropri-
ate for children under 13 years of age. The content is moderate to fairly strong in
impact. However, people 12 and under may buy them without parental approval.
Titles in this category may contain violence, suggestive themes, crude humor,
blood, simulated gambling, and/or frequent use of vulgar language.”
12. Writing in the mid-1990s, R. W. Connell warned that European and US gender
arrangements have replaced a “diversity of gender orders” around the globe, and
that “Western homophobic and missionary puritanism” have destroyed differ-
ing gender traditions. America’s Army then functions as a tool in service of this
unwritten goal, so that the naked nationalism and imperialism of the United
States seem to be constantly standing in for a more insidious monoculture and
monothought. See Connell (1995).
13. There was audio on the virtual tour, so I was able to ask questions.
14. Carrie McLeroy, “Army Experience Center Opens in Philadelphia,” September

2, 2008, http://â•‰w ww.army.mil/â•‰article/â•‰12072/â•‰army-â•‰experience-â•‰center-â•‰opens-â•‰in-â•‰
philadelphia/â•‰.
15. http://â•‰w ww.armyaccessionsnewsroom.com, retrieved June 9, 2012.
16. http://â•‰w ww.armyaccessionsnewsroom.com, accessed July 10, 2012.
17. Special Force (2003, Hezbollah), game package.
18. Interview with Radwan Kasmiya by Vit Sisler, http://â•‰w ww.digitalislam.eu/â•‰article.
do?articleId=1418.
19. Jose Antonio Vargas, “Virtual Reality Prepares Soldiers for Real War; Young
Warriors Say Video Shooter Games Helped Hone Their Skills,” Washington Post,
February 14, 2006.
WORKS CITED
Games and Media
Act of Valor. 2011. Relativity Media.
America’s Army series. 2002–â•‰present. US Army.
American Sniper. 2014. Village Roadshow Pictures.
Band of Brothers. 2001. HBO/â•‰BBC.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. 2011. Activision.
Generation Kill. 2008. Company Pictures.
Homefront. 2011. THQ.
Special Force. 2003. Hezbollah.
Strike Back. 2010–â•‰present. Left Bank Pictures.
Under Ash. 2005. Dar al-â•‰Fikr.
Under Siege. 2001. Dar al-â•‰Fikr.
BOOKS AND ARTICLES

Benjamin, Walter. 2007. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken.
Burrill, Derek. 2006. “Check Out My Moves.” Social Semiotics 16(1): 17–â•‰38.
———â•‰. 2008. Die Tryin’: Videogames, Masculinity, Culture. London: Peter Lang.
Connell, R. W. 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Der Derian, James. 2001. Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-â•‰ Industrial-â•‰
Media
Entertainment Network. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Dyer-â•‰Witheford, Nick, and Greig de Peuter. 2009. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism
and Video Games. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Foster, Susan. 2010. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. New York:
Routledge.
Huntemann, Nina B. 2010a. “Interview with Colonel Casey Wardynski.” In Joystick
Solders, edited by Nina B. Huntemann and Mathew Thomas Payne, 178–â•‰188.
———. 2010b. “Playing with Fear: Catharsis and Resistance in Military-Themed Video

Games.” In Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games, edited by
Nina B. Huntemann and Mathew Thomas Payne, 223–236. New York: Routledge.
Jurgensen, John. 2011. “Hollywood Tries a New Battle Plan.” Wall Street Journal,
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Nieborg, David B. 2010. “Training Recruits and Conditioning Youth: The Soft Power
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edited by Nina B. Huntemann and Mathew Thomas Payne, 53–66. New York:
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Nørgård, Rikke Toft. 2011. “The Corporeal-Locomotive Craftsman: Gaming in the
World of Warcraft.” Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 3(3): 201–218.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
4
African Refugees Asunder in South Africa

Performing the Fallout of Violence in Every Year,
Every Day, I am Walking
S A R A H DAV I E S C O R D O VA
–â•‰refugee n. Origin: late 17th century. From French “réfugié” gone in
search of refuge, past participle of (se) réfugier, from refuge.
—â•‰Oxford Dictionary of English
–â•‰hospitality n. Origin: 12th century. From Latin “hospes” (guest-â•‰master)

which is made up of “potis” master of self, master of the house and
“hostis” [hôte m. & f. in French] host and guest (invited or visitor), later
(14th century) enemy.
—â•‰Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality” and Le Petit Robert
–â•‰xenophobia n. Origin: early 20th century. From Greek “xenos” stranger,

foreigner and “phobos” fear.
—â•‰Adapted from Le Trésor de la langue française
Since the downfall of the South African apartheid regime, refugees from all
over the African continent have sought asylum at its southern tip. Many of
these seekers of a safe haven are escapees from conflicts, genocides, and unsta-
ble governmental structures. Yet their desires are frustrated as they encounter
violent rejection at the hands of the police, the Department of Home Affairs,
86 S arah D avies C ordova
and the South African citizenry. In this chapter I examine the Magnet Theatre’s
performance piece Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking, which stages the
harsh travails that refugees encounter as they journey forth and seek a place
of refuge.
Cofounded in 1987 by Mark Fleishman and Jennie Reznek, the Magnet
Theatre settled definitively in Cape Town in 1994 at the end of apartheid. Its
aim was to develop Reznek’s physical performance style and to collaborate
with other practitioners in addressing the linguistic diversity of South Africa
through the primacy of the body in performances that shift assumptions,
feelings, beliefs, and understanding.1 Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking
exemplifies the Magnet Theatre’s politics of embodied activism with its pro-
duction of movements and pauses choreographed as an “assemblage of bodies
in movement, linguistic material, music and scenographic elements, [light-
ing,] and images ‘dancing’ together in the space.”2 The award-â•‰winning work
premiered on November 10, 2006, at the annual Festival Africain du Théâtre
pour l’Enfance et la Jeunesse (Fatej) in Yaoundé, Cameroon, and its evoca-
tive symbolism, physical images, painterly mimetic music, and vocabulary
of everyday movement have since affected a multiplicity of audiences of all
ages across the globe.3 The dramatization of the violence perpetuated against
a mother and her daughter serves to create awareness of the legitimacy of the
plight of refugees. The work continues to be relevant in the critical tug of war
for limited resources—â•‰jobs, food, water, housing, raw mineral ores, energy,
knowledge—â•‰that trigger the late 20th and early 21st centuries’ wars between
those who have weapons and those who do not and find themselves on the go
or in camps, on the margins of settlements or living in democracies struggling
to develop a middle class for all.
The socio-â•‰political situations that Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking
evokes are complex, opaque, and enduring, for the piece represents the untold
and unspeakable experiences of refugees, be they the events that cause their
flight from their war-â•‰ravaged home countries, the trauma and difficulties of
insecure travel and of crossing borders, or the unknowns of a destination
point where their very security and legal status as migrants are uncertain and
difficult to ascertain. Sowetan Neo Muyanga, who composed the score for the
Magnet Theatre production, evoked the danger refugees can encounter, in this
instance writing in a blog entry after South Africans engaged in a particularly
violent set of attacks and reprisals against foreigners from elsewhere on the
African continent in 2008. Starting in the Western Cape, the violence spread
to Durban and Johannesburg:
i didn’t have any proof of [the] … claim [that] south africans have “lost their
common purpose” … until about 12 days ago now, when some of us south
African Refugees Asunder in South Africa 87
africans began maiming, raping and killing black people under the pretext
that they are “foreigners” who don’t belong here. this, by the way, is not the
first time this sort of cruel, callous and shameful rhetoric has been spouted
here. we have done this many times over, since instituting our democratic
revolution…â•›.
… these are not merely xenophobic attacks—â•‰these are flames of intoler-
ance aimed against anything or anyone perceived as “different.” there can
be no excuse for this behavior. there is no amount of righteous anger about
the rampant inequality in our society that can justify what has happened.4
Muyanga’s blog entry captures the beat of the social asymmetries that pro-
pel the violations and transgressions of his society’s laws of hospitality.
Those same asymmetries were exposed in the very structure of the pro-
duction when Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking was staged in 2007 at the
Baxter Theatre Complex at the University of Cape Town. In the small Golden
Arrow Studio Theatre spectators were arranged on two sides, boxing the stage
into a corner of the square space. The theater’s location on one of the slopes
of Table Mountain and the spatial design created for this production assumed
the asymmetry of power relations and the transgressive violence that aggres-
sions perpetuate. This physical rhetoric of space aptly sets the stage for a cho-
reography that corporealizes refugees’ flight from war and their consequent
points of contact with the social and political protocols of reception. The two-â•‰
person cast—â•‰depicting refugees escaping from a war-â•‰torn African homeland
who finally arrive in an all too crowded Cape Town—â•‰encountered the block-
age that the 172 seats represent, a barrier that theatrically simulated South
African xenophobia and the procedural miasma that refugees encounter at
the Department of Home Affairs. In a society still encumbered by racialized
struggles, the imposition of reciprocity with the Other African seeking refuge
lays bare the host’s fears and erodes the principles of hospitality.
SOUTH AFRICA: HAVEN, CONSTITUTIONALLY PROMISED

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the largest
number of undecided refugee cases in the world, whether at the first instance
or on appeal, was reported by the Republic of South Africa: 131,000 at the
end of 2006, and 144,700 by 2008.5 South Africa harbors foreign nation-
als and asylum seekers fleeing predominantly from Angola, Burundi, the
Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mozambique,
Rwanda, Somalia, and Zimbabwe, who fear individual persecution or human
rights violations as a result of conflict in their home states. As refugees, many
are the survivors of massacres perpetrated by what Achille Mbembe calls
“necropower,” the deployment of instrumentalized violence that creates spaces

of death worlds—â•‰forms of social existence that approximate living death
(2003a).
Permitted safe haven in accordance with the South African constitution, the
foreigners are left in limbo for years, waiting to establish their official refugee
status.6 Rather than surviving in assigned, segregated camps, they merge and
coexist with the poorer South Africans in the inner cities and townships. They
face discrimination even once they have obtained refugee documentation as
they compete for scarce jobs and seek access to basic services such as banking,
education, medical treatment, and housing (Meersman 2007, 10).7 Women ref-
ugees register greater vulnerability and encounter the power relations asym-
metries of “abusive treatment at the hands of government and health officials
and landlords,” ranging from “disparaging remarks based on women’s physi-
cal appearance and grooming, to rough handling during childbirth, to con-
tinuous sexual harassment and vicious repercussions for women not willing
to grant sexual favors for ‘special assistance’â•›” (Hicks 2009, 241).8 Adding to
the trauma that many women carry with them after having suffered rape as
a weapon of ethnic and cultural genocide in their homelands, South African
officials tend to hold the “misinformed perception that refugees are illegal
aliens fueling crime rates, HIV infection, unemployment and drug dealing,
[which] only serves to deepen [their] xenophobic response” (Hicks 2009, 252).
Acting on such perceptions, they exercise and foster among their communities
the very necropower that the refugees seek to escape in settling within what
they hope is a South African safe haven.
THE FALLOUT OF VIOLENCE: “NECROPOLITICS”

AND “HOSTIPITALITY”
As Muyanga writes, many South Africans, like numerous nationals the world
over, feel overwhelmed and held hostage to those who cross the threshold of
their home(land). The South Africans’ recourse to acts of violence to repulse
the foreigners reflects the double bind that an economy of hospitality insti-
tutes. As hosts, they increasingly fear loss of economic and situational power,
and so the exercise of violence becomes routinized, while killing increasingly
supports the distribution of power and its claims on territorial dominance.
This form of sovereignty, of “necropolitics,” shreds the already stretched social
bond and activates relations of dissociation. This tear engenders breaches in
civil access to one another. It interrupts the contract of hospitality and breeds
enmity, just as the etymological roots/â•‰routes of host (hospes, hoste) and enemy
(hostis) cross when strangers and foreigners—â•‰barbarians—â•‰become those to
exclude with weapons of war, with necropolitics.9 Rather than retaining the
one-ness of hôte—the host and the guest (still present as one and the same in
the French lexeme and in the root of hospitality)—the fallout of necropolitics
animates fear of the other. Such xenophobia, or what Jacques Derrida calls
hostipitality,10 is born from the impossible proximity of hospitality and hostil-
ity, and is driven by the contradictory strains placed on the communities in
sociopolitical configurations of survival and development. Intimately close,
this proximity opens the door to massacres and closes it to settlement in locali-
ties where anxieties about the other as hoste and/or hostis condense around
economic insecurity and physical survival.
Since the era of independences from European rule of the late 1950s and
early 1960s, and well into the 21st century, changes in leadership at national/
state levels and/or the establishment of international organizations—whether
governmental or nongovernmental—have rarely led to the establishment of a
peaceful state of affairs in the formerly colonized African territories. Colonial
violence and technologies of subjection have mutated in certain areas into what
were previously unimaginable forms; as such states have lost their monopoly
over the means of violence. Loci of armed conflict have increasingly spilled
over and spread to the habitus, to invoke Pierre Bourdieu, of civilians, who
are then socialized to become aggressive and fearful through the airwaves,
through twists of cultural traditions and values, and through indoctrina-
tion. Armed formations operating within or without state purview in various
guises—militia, gangs, entrepreneurial or public armies, and police units—
occupy and/or flush out threshold zones at the frontiers of states, urban and
rural agglomerations, and internal or international spaces of refuge. Running
with the premise that only death, whether by murder, assassination, disease,
or illness, interrupts the hold of those in power, such armed groups acquire,
organize, and distribute human and material resources to exact (mass) death
in the exercise and imposition of their will. And this necropolitics makes life
and death determinations based on expenditure, and defines life as the nexus
of deadly power (Mbembe, 2003b).
With the fear of death and the will to survive together informing these
politicized power struggles, the rhetoric that accompanies the various groups’
exercise of power relies upon such weapons as internationally disseminated
purging vocabularies that match in violence their physical imposition of fear.11
As brokers of corruption and ethnic tensions, power abettors use the jargon of
environmental pollution and destruction, together with other rhetorical ges-
tures of moral defense that draw on ideological, religious, and/or indigenous
reasoning, to justify and amortize their own destructive campaigns (Mbembe
2003b, 160). Such a gamut of political legitimations of perpetrated violence
transfers to asymmetrical war practices that destroy, mutilate, and displace
communities, gender and generational relations, and the corporeal integrity
of the human being. With refugees refusing interment within the womb of
the motherland, their own dislocations result from such violence and become
manifest in such physical responses as abandonment, escape, and relocation or
remaining undercover, visa-â•‰less, silent in time and space.12 As they flee, their
bodies—â•‰estranged from personal codes of safekeeping and enacting the sac-
rifices of survival—â•‰design muscular patterns and movement structures that
track embodied memories of traumatic violations.
EXCRUCIATING INEVITABILITY: A PIECE THAT

WAS NOT MEANT TO BE
Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking initially responded to a number of aggres-
sions toward Somalis living in and around Cape Town that highlighted a
growing crisis for refugees in South Africa and anticipated the violent expres-
sion of anxiety directed toward the “amakwerekwere”13 seeking safe haven
in the Republic of South Africa that flared particularly perniciously during
the last half of May 2008.14 For fourteen days, roving mobs composed of the
mostly youngish male residents of some of South Africa’s poorest and most
marginalized communities and settlements attacked African neighbors, based
on their foreign (or supposed, or even wrongly imposed) identity. By the time
the police, backed by the army, finally suppressed the mayhem and doused the
fires, at least 342 shops had been looted, 213 of which had also been burned, as
had 143 shacks, of which 99 were also looted; thirty thousand people had been
displaced (twenty-â•‰five thousand in the economic hub of Gauteng Province);
sixty-â•‰five people were murdered (of whom twenty-â•‰one were South African
citizens); thousands had been injured; and 1,384 suspects had been arrested
(Coplan 2009, 65). Fear of continued reprisals kept most refugees away from
their temporary homes until late June 2008, and others still longer as the
attacks gradually subsided.
Whereas refugees were very much in evidence during their “flushing out”
in 2008, during the protracted private guards’ strikes in 2007,15 the refugees,
who could not strike because of their precarious status, hid from their South
African coworkers and wore plain clothes rather than their uniforms in order
to hide the fact that they were working. They no longer traveled daily to and
from their jobs; instead they slept in empty garages close to their workplaces,
with wives, friends, and family smuggling changes of clothes and food to
them. Fear stalked the strikebreakers and their families, the latter of whom
were as likely to be stabbed for helping the strikebreakers as the strikebreak-
ers were for continuing to show up for work. The same anxieties of retribution
rose again among the refugee communities in the lead-â•‰up to the 2010 World
Cup, when they endured a protracted wait-â•‰and-â•‰hold pattern in obtaining their
legal status. And at the end of May 2013, the security forces of the Department
of Home Affairs and the South African Police Services dispersed asylum seek-
ers and refugees at the Customs House in Cape Town with pepper spray and
power hoses, injuring many, in another asymmetrical showdown that pitted
state-sanctioned forces against patience-stretched, long-suffering paperless
men, women, and children.
In opening up the discourse around refugees in South Africa, Every Year,
Every Day, I Am Walking connects the fallout of contemporary warfare with
the collateral impact of asymmetrical war and successive acts of retribution on
civilians. To create the piece, Mark Fleishman, Jennie Reznek, and resident per-
former Faniswa Yisa worked with Judith Rudakoff (York University, Canada)16
through her Common Plants Project’s creative workshops, to incorporate into
the narrative source materials drawn from the press about Somali refugees
in Cape Town and from interviews with the women at the Bonne Espérance
Refugee Shelter for Refugee Women and Children in Philippi (Cohen 2007, 9).
They also found inspiration in Glynis Clacherty’s 2001 psychosocial art therapy
project the Suitcase Project and its publication of The Suitcase Stories: Refugee
Children Reclaim Their Identities (2006), which contains photographs of the
constructed suitcases and transcriptions of the stories recounted by refugee
children living precariously in the inner city of Johannesburg, in and around
Hillbrow Street.17 One of the autobiographical texts, “Aggie’s Suitcase and
Pasco’s Suitcase,” provided the name for one of the two daughters in Every Year,
Every Day, I Am Walking. In The Suitcase Stories, Aggie, living in fear of rape,
does not feel she can accept any kindness lest it create expectations of sexual
favors; she yearns to return to her maternal aunt in the Congo. She remem-
bers her friend Sandra from Zambia, who taught her to write and to whom she
now sends letters, like Aggie writes to her sister Ernestine in Every Year, Every
Day, I Am Walking. Another story, “Tigitsu’s Suitcase,” from a sixteen-year-old
Ethiopian, asks the question “So when am I going to stop travelling through
borders?” and includes the phrase, “Every year, every day, I am travelling,”
which inspired the title of the Magnet Theatre’s production.
Directed by Fleishman, with props and sets devised by Julia Anastasopoulos,
lighting by Daniel Galloway, and choreography by Jazzart Dance Theatre’s Ina
Wichterich,18 the seventy-minute piece is viscerally physical, with minimal
spoken dialogue. The production draws on Wichterich’s experience with Pina
Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal and Reznek’s training in the pedagogy of the
École du Théâtre Jacques Lecoq and its Laboratoire d’Étude du Mouvement,
which seeks to capture the world stage’s incessant movement.19 Every Year,
Every Day, I Am Walking also borrows from Augusto Boal’s “Theatre of the
Oppressed” in its engagement with communicative agency and its connec-
tion to the body politic and power relations.20 Reznek explains her concept of
physical theater as one in which the audience is asked to read the body and “to
engage imaginatively with the images they see in the space.”21 Fleishman fur-
ther notes, “A physical language of performance is informed by a belief that the
body, the gesture, and the image are the most effective and imaginative means
of communicating with a multilingual South African audience” (Fleishman
and Davids 2007, 152). In his review, Anton Krueger (2007) cites Fleishman’s
essay (1996), when he “suggests: ‘the written word on its own is woefully inad-
equate to portray or explain the full complexity’ of South African—â•‰or indeed
any—â•‰reality.” Krueger continues: “[Fleishman] places a particular emphasis
on gesture and movement, since dance contains ‘the idea of untranslatability,
of being able to house things that language can’t’â•›” (2007, 3).
The two performers, Reznek and Yisa, each play a number of different
characters. They are accompanied onstage by master guitarist and singer
Neo Muyanga, whose live acoustic sound score gradually, in iterative image-â•‰
inducing increments, overlays the work’s action. Muyanga’s haunting strains
give nuance to the choreographed sequences as the performers move among,
with, and through suggestive props that enable the mother and daughter to
transmute into other characters and that figure the stages of their journey.
Wichterich’s choreography draws much of its vocabulary from the pedestri-
an’s gait and from the vernacular movements of human practices and activi-
ties to include differently weighted steps ranging from skips, whirls, walks, and
runs to foot dragging or slow heaving and slogging; sways, bends, and rock-
ing; sweeping wraps of arms; and gripping, shaking, or shivering hands and
arms. At times, she adds circling hips and rolling shoulders. Mime gestures are
important too, which are generally set within a rhythmic context of repeats,
accumulations, and disjunctions. The assemblage of pedestrian movements
that function to signify loss of home and subject position combine to draw tra-
jectories that crisscross and circle the stage, conveying dislocation. These cho-
reographic phrases dialogue with the minimal verbal texts spoken, sometimes
in sequential bilingual translation, in a variety of languages, including French,
English, isiXhosa, and Afrikaans, as if to illustrate the difficulty of compre-
hending the other and the power differentials at work in the choice of verbal
and nonverbal language use. The intersections of these various artistic practices
that use the human body, sound, imagery, and light to produce movement and
pauses generate a visibility for the untranslatability of the fallout of wars.
EVERY YEAR, EVERY DAY, I AM WALKING

The performance opens in medias res; rain is heard falling, and it is dark.
A woman’s figure (Yisa) representing Aggie, a child, is running alone hold-
ing out an open umbrella. She is running, out of breath, around and around
the stage, both away from harm and in confusion, as if not knowing where
to turn, as the familiarity of her neighborhood transforms in a scandalous
flash of violence into dauntingly unforgiving enemy territory. Slowing down,
she is found by her mother (Reznek), who has been calling her name. In a
flashback, Aggie remembers her life with her sister, Ernestine. Reznek, now
as Ernestine, joins Aggie as they engage in leisurely succession in the quo-
tidian activities and playfulness of two young girls. They bathe in the river,
shivering as Reznek flutters a blue cloth over Yisa to signify the flowing water;
they watch birds take flight as they pull a blue origami crane from a pair of
shoes and Reznek extends the minimalist object into a human-sized bird by
spreading her arms to simulate its wings. Yisa reprises this gesture in silence,
before picking up a pair of flip-flop sandals and holding them at her back as if
they were the wings of a butterfly. Gently she opens the shoes out and brings
them back together, sole to sole, to figure the delicate insect’s flutter and
metonymically her own fragile precarity. The girls chant their numbers (un,
deux, trois…) out loud, and rhythmically clap hands; they play hide and seek
and pretend to be their mother, pinning cloths to dry on the line. They wave
as they pass each other, carrying large water bowls on their heads, and wrap a
pagne around their bodies in a sequence of movements that mark the outline
of a curvaceous woman’s body as they circle their hips and shake their upper
bodies. They go to school, where they vie for attention with self-portraits they
have made (Figure 4.1); and they joyfully prepare a meal, dancing around
each other before catching a clucking, wing-flapping chicken (Reznek), who
mutates back into Mother, now holding an imaginary bird at arm’s length as
she plucks it. The two girls eat with a series of repeated, exaggerated gestures
that mime bringing their hands together for grace with a wink of complic-
ity, picking up a bowl, scooping up the food with one hand, carrying it to the
mouth, licking each finger along with an appreciative “mmmm,” and wiping
the mouth with the back of the hand, a syntax that returns with less boldness
and in simplified form later when they eat again at the refugee camp.
Transitioning out of the flashback, darkness falls and whistling is heard,
sounding first like birds, then more ominously as a signal. Again Aggie picks
up the flip-flops representing the butterfly and spreads her arms as if to fly
away, only to drop the shoes by her side with a sense that she is being watched
from behind the clothesline-cum-wall. Agitatedly lighting a candle, Aggie
looks around and begins to say the Lord’s Prayer, before neighbors (Reznek
and Yisa switching hats and spectacles) come to tell in broken phrases and
loud exclamations of the pillage, massacres, snatching of children, and burn-
ing of homes that have occurred in the next village.
The news races along, announced by two animated speakers who move rap-
idly across the stage, their heads appearing from behind the hanging cloths
Figure 4.1 Flashback—w ith their (paper) home and the washing on the line in the
background, Aggie (Faniswa Yisa) and Ernestine (Jennie Reznek) play out their
competitiveness in school as they draw and paint their self-portraits. The simple
security of their childhood appears within the circumscription of the circular mat of
grain sacks. Photo by Mark Wessels.
(Figure 4.2). Their bewilderment is received with sobs and shrieks of desola-
tion as questions of justice and ownership are raised in the anguished outpour-
ing. Ending this transition, filled with ominous signs, Aggie and Ernestine
recount verbally along with large mimed gestures and a small beaded elephant
as a prop the story of the elephants of long ago who could roam freely every-
where in Africa, until one day the youngest elephant was separated from her
family (Lewis 2008, 95). Analogically, the animal, with its legendary memory,
stands in for the memories carried in the body. At the same time, it signifies
the absence of borders and ethnic tensions of long ago, and a childhood free
of cares. Allegorically, the layering rendered by the repetition across languages
and Aggie’s playful roaming about the stage with the elephant portend the loss
of freedom that the exiled person encapsulates as she struggles in uprooted-
ness, fearing the barriers and barbed wire of borders.
Interrupting the once-upon-a-time parable, the neighbors utter their anxi-
ety and fear in broken phrases as the music suggests the approaching assail-
ants with an ever louder sound of sharpening machetes. The attackers (Reznek,
wearing a black balaclava and wielding a machete in slow motion) ransack the
Figure 4.2 Reznek and Yisa, in perpetual motion, embodying both the neighbors
shrieking about the pillage and destruction they have just endured and the very
movement of the chatter along the road that borders their home. Photo by Mark
Wessels.
family’s home and set it on fire. Yisa, also with a machete, picks up the cloths,
candle, matchbox, and elephant in quick yet large, emphatic arm swings, as
if destroying them. Screaming out for Ernestine and for each other, the two
performers run crying to and fro, as if blinded. At last Mother finds Aggie
in the noise, darkness, rain, and confusion. The two scramble along on all
fours, until, looking up for an instant, Mother sees Ernestine. She turns to
cover Aggie’s eyes to spare her from witnessing Ernestine’s murder, even as she
stretches forward, grasping, to try to save her eldest child.
Darkness, the sound of pouring rain, loud crackling, rising flames, then an
ear-piercing ringing all signal the on-going attack. Mother and Aggie whisper
the days of the week passing by, as they hole up in the dark, bent over double
under the table serving as their shelter, until, finally, there is silence.
Emerging from their “death world,” they carry out a ritual near their
burned-out home. Standing upright and still, with arms at shoulder height,
they rub sand between their hands, letting it fall to the stage. They then set
off, their hands pushing pairs of shoes (Yisa’s are children’s cloth shoes while
Reznek’s are an adult pair of white pumps) up and down their own bodies
and the table’s legs to gesture their journey’s wear and tear on the body. They
walk away from their village, from the idyllic domesticity the mother and her
two daughters had constructed, which turned chores into games. Sometimes
sure-footed, other times slipping, they advance, still pushing their hands in
the shoes that mark their steps along the table top that turns into the pathways
and roads they walk along. Sometimes carrying Aggie, stopping, sitting, rising
to flag down a truck, throwing her arms out in anger when it roars by without
stopping, Mother shuffles on laboriously, interrupted by Aggie’s question: “Où
est Ernestine?” Headlamps blind them as they rhythmically raise their hands
in repeated gestures of shielding their eyes before walking on into the night.
When they do get a ride, they struggle to remain on the truck, bouncing up
and down and shifting jerkily from side to side (Figure 4.3).
Reaching a refugee camp, exhausted, they cry and in broken phrases tell
their story of the destruction of their village. Mother helps Aggie drink water
drawn from an imaginary tap, before eating with the same gestures, now
speeded up, that Aggie and Ernestine once used back home. They draw on
the ground basic English words (“I am Aggie”) as they repeat in their native
French, “je m’appelle.” Aggie, scrawling her message in an ever larger child’s
Figure 4.3 Mother (Reznek) and daughter Aggie (Yisa) in flight, struggling to stay put
on a truck’s flatbed (the table), bouncing and swinging from side to side as if flung by
the truck’s rough progress. Photo by Hennie Coetzee.
handwriting on her arm, mimes and speaks her letters to her sister: “Chère
Ernestine, where are you?” She repeats in English the counting rhyme she used
to sing in French while tracing with her shoes the three-step dance that she
liked so much. Suddenly a pair of large, black paramilitary boots hand-held by
Reznek walk over Mother’s chest. Pushing her to the ground, they represent
her rapist and the slow motion of her fall, the seeming eternity and suspen-
sion of time that the perpetration takes, and the violation’s lasting trauma. In
silence, with her back to the audience, Mother, head bent over, chokes up the
painful invisibility of her shame with spine-shattering shivers and crumbling
knees as she grips the table. In silence, after an exchange of loaded glances,
Aggie takes the mother’s pumps between her two shoes, and together they
turn with slow short heavy steps before bending forwards from the hips to
hoist themselves up onto the table that stands in for a bus. Swaying back and
forth, they journey onward, before having to continue on foot, ever more tired,
hunched over each other, hiding, more fearful, and constantly on the lookout.
At a border crossing, questions are fired off and repeated: “Nom? Prénom?
Adresse? Where are you from? Où allez-vous? Where are you going?” While a
sequence of sideways and cross-over steps along a counter registers the push-
ing and rough handling in waiting lines, being shunted from window to win-
dow, a simultaneous iterative press and roll of forefinger and thumb for the
required ink fingerprinting attaches its synchronic phrasing to the border
controllers’ questions. At the sound of a seafaring boat, they scuttle toward
the table, which they upturn and rush to ensure their place onboard, leaning
over the side to look at the water, until Muyanga’s loud cries and song shout
out: “Welcome to Cape Town.”
The alternation of movement patterns on and across the stage, ranging from
running diagonally or in circles to shifting weight from foot to foot, carrying
the child on the mother’s back, and slumping or crawling on all fours, figure
the corporeal efforts demanded by imagined topographical and climatic ter-
rains, as well as fear, violence, hunger, exhaustion, and occasional moments
of arrested flight in a camp or in hiding. The performers’ comportment, body
shape, and degree of motility register the level of danger and threat as the
two figures onstage switch from rapid to slow, halting steps, from standing
to crouching or to moving the shoes they carry up and down their bodies or
along pathways traced onto the multivalent table with various degrees of pres-
sure. Such asymmetry positions the refugees’ situation at the crux of necrop-
ower’s warrant, between near-certain death and as-of-yet unknowable Cape
Town. Where in Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking the village of origin is
unidentified and intentionally blurred,22 seemingly indicating the territorial
fault lines that necropolitics install topographically and inflict in material and
bodily aggressions, the place of arrival is explicitly Cape Town.
The arrival of the characters in Cape Town some thirty minutes into the
piece situates the position of asylum seekers: they are only halfway through
their ordeals. Continuing to embody a number of roles, Reznek interprets the
trades and comportment of the “coloured” hustlers, while Yisa shouts the isi-
Xhosa taxi calls and sales pitches. Sharp gibes and forward shoulder thrusts
and pullback of upper bodies accompany the hustlers and hawkers’ noisy bus-
tle in Afrikaans, isiXhosa, and English, commingling with the ironic melody:
“Cape Town, what a lovely place to be.” They lean in confrontationally, pull
back solicitously, and, with the rapid-fire of routinized verbal and gestural
patter, aggressively assert their streetwise sovereignty. As the two articulate
bodies onstage play host to, and vie with, a multiplicity of characters to situ-
ate themselves, they relay the communication barriers that polarize host and
guest into enemies and mete out the hostipitality that refugee amakwerekwere
at the Cape of Good Hope exacerbate. Such oppositional strains placed on
space and speech evince the fallout of necropolitics. Relating corporeal space
to that of speech, the rapid switching between aggressive and retiring body
stances, overlaid with languages cutting the airspace to threaten and question
who can stand where, or speak and be heard, evinces performatively the tra-
jectory that still awaits Mother and Aggie.
Asunder, the two refugees, seeking the Home Affairs office, ask their way
in French only to encounter the city’s aggressiveness, the officials’ impatience,
and their own invisibility. Being forced to abandon one’s home under violent
duress and to travel the length of southern Africa to reach a safe refuge severs
notions of territorial allegiance and the ties of belonging. Like the refugee chil-
dren of the Suitcase Project, Aggie and Mother carry with them the heartache
of loss of familiarity and family. In their performance, Yisa and Reznek trans-
fer the inspiration of the book to the body, retracing the refugee children’s
passages south, and their careful shaping of the cased depositories that hold
the fragile materiality of their dislocation.
A wire prop of the Capetonian skyline (which doubles as a counter at the
Home Affairs office and as a teacher’s desk) acts as a spatial yet transparent
division on the stage, calling up the opaque borderlines that register access and
inaccessibility to services, to education, to hospitality (Figure 4.4). Xenophobia
becomes a new complex terrain to negotiate in language, place, and mobility.
With their rehearsals of basic situational phrases and vocabulary accompa-
nied by simultaneous gestural writing and pointing to the parts of the body—
nose, ear, eye, mouth, cheek, foot—mother and child embody the language
barriers that French-speaking African refugees encounter at various admin-
istrative bureaus. In the schoolroom, Aggie’s eyes wander in shyness, and she
wriggles facing her classmates while the teacher (Reznek), looking beyond
Aggie to the audience, asks everyone to welcome her. After a weak response
Figure 4.4 Aggie’s tentative, fear-fi lled steps in the “Mother City”, with Cape Town’s
skyline outlined in wire mesh and attached to the table, as if it were Table Mountain.
Photo by Mark Wessels.
from the spectators in the theater, she asks again, and the second welcome
comes through more resoundingly. The engagement of the audience in this
scene implicates them in the African child’s well-being, and the teacher’s ensu-
ing lecture emphasizes the point. With much forceful chest pointing with her
index finger, she makes it clear that she does not want to hear the stigmatizing
and taunting word “amakwerekwere” in her classroom, and reminds the audi-
ence members about their participation and stake in the politics and issues of
hospitality that the production raises.
Without a place to call home, the two refugees move often. Mother slowly
shakes out two garbage bags, before climbing into them as her only home on
the streets of Cape Town. Tossing and turning, rolling back and forth, she
sleeps uneasily. Visits to the Home Affairs office resonate with the earlier bor-
der crossing, with shouted, repetitious questions in Afrikaans and isiXhosa
and the repeated sequence of the inking and fingerprinting. Mother rolls off
balance and bounces along and against the wire mesh panel depicting Cape
Town, corporeally registering, like harsh lashings, the pushing and shov-
ing and recurrent hostipitality encountered every step of the way in seeking
information and legal status from Home Affairs. Returning to Aggie month
after month with no news, her pumps scrambling along the wire- mesh
Capetonian-scape, Mother calls out the passing months in French as she had
during the attacks on their village. Aggie continues to break her heart with
constant questioning about Ernestine’s whereabouts and an incessant stream
of letters to her sister that she asks Mother to mail. In short, extracted sen-
tences, Aggie, more and more immobilized, writes repeatedly of their experi-
ences of moving from place to place, lost in the big city.
Longing for Ernestine, Aggie walks the city and imagines her sister (ghosted
by Reznek) following behind her. Then the darkness of the night sends Aggie
reeling back to the night their house was burned and Ernestine disappeared.
She is alone, and filled with fear on the streets of Cape Town, when she encoun-
ters a leering and menacing man who mimes cutting her throat (polyvalent
Reznek), a movement that is echoed in the score by sounds that again bring to
mind machete blades grinding against each other. Aggie rolls up in a ball on
the floor and covers her ears. The insecurity of the situation draws in the traces
of the violence they have known ever since the attack on their home. Pushed
by her mother, who rushes to pack their few belongings for yet another move,
Aggie discovers at the bottom of a bag the stash of letters, which have never
been posted. Devastated, crying, “Ernestine? Mama?” she hits her mother,
who, hand to mouth to silence her own cries, tries to hold her. Aggie spins out
of reach before grabbing the black umbrella and running out. Bearing layers
of meaning, the reiterated gestures of the mother’s self-silencing and holding
her child and of the daughter’s use of the black umbrella portend and enact the
untranslatability of their journey’s starting point.
Aggie runs away, running around and around, back and forth in the dark-
ness just as she had that fateful night back home. Her mother, looking for her,
calls out for her, before the two performers retell like a chora in French and
English the story of the elephant, separated from her family by a large bar-
rier. In a patterning sequence reminiscent of the disposition of the clothesline
scene, Mother walks to and fro behind a barbed wire fence while her child
moves in circles, turning upon her upended umbrella. Aggie gradually real-
izes that the spreading of sand as they departed from their home was a burial
ritual, one that she repeats as she sets her letters to Ernestine alight, as if also
to bury their home that was set on fire. Forcing herself to come to terms with
her irrevocable loss and with her new home, she inscribes herself on the streets
of Cape Town with a long trace of sand that represents her journey.23 Marking
her place, her endpoint, she says:
My name is Aggie. This is my story. I had a sister called Ernestine. This is

her story. I came from there. Now I am here. I don’t know much about here.
I don’t remember much from there.
Every year, every day, I Am Walking, walking with you. (Lewis 2008, 95)
With the sand, so easily blown away, she underlines both the insecurity
of even the pretense of a home and the determination to be recognized and
received by the “Mother City.”24
The gentleness of the mother-daughter relationship, reinforced by the soft
tempo of an accompanying song, structures the schematic, open-ended nar-
rative of Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking and encourages the audience’s
empathic specularity. The intimacy of the family drama and the collective
tragedy of hostilities interpenetrate, confound, and mutually enlighten each
other, placing the audience in situ and seeking to initiate in them a sense of
hospitality for the refugee as stranger.
As the two performers move into and out of their different roles throughout
the performance, meaning is embedded into and operates on multiple layers
between the characters and for the audience. Their structural and transfigu-
rative embodiments also open up both characters to a plurality of states of
being as their conditions change. Flashbacks that register past happier family
moments with the mirth of a skipping, hopping, and jumping sequence are
inserted into passages of tenderness that make tangible the hope that under-
girds the journey.25 The patterns and rhythms of wrapping the pagne, the
butterfly’s fluttering, and the stretch of the crane’s wings, together with the
elephant allegory, all return, shrunken in length, height, and breadth, once
the mother and child are in Cape Town. Yet, like promissory notes, such per-
formative acts catch the two of them in possibility, imagining what might be.26
The two transregional migrants articulate the poignant plight of refugees
and displaced persons working at existing and resisting, in steps that struggle
to advance. Shoes figure recurrently throughout the work: sometimes the
women wear them on their feet; other times they hold them in their hands or
insert their hands into their shoes (Figure 4.5). Representatively symbolic and
yet realistic, the shoes stand in as metonymies for human bodies and turn
as metaphors of the geographical and emotional distances they traverse27.
Hand-held, the shoes trace imaginary pathways of locomotion on the wom-
en’s bodies and in space; worn, they take narrow and dodgy steps along invis-
ible tracks across dangerous terrain. At one point the child’s shoes, overcome
by weariness, refuse to take another step, and the shoes on the hands of the
mother come and lift them up in a gesture of embrace that carries the child
onward. Whether worn or hand-held to embody the journey and emphasize
the absence of community and family, the shoes liaise with the work’s ver-
nacular lexicon of movement. At times, the tense movement of the arms and
hands gripping the shoes down the front of the performers’ advancing tilted
and convulsing bodies returns and choreographs the fallout of war on the
body. Other times, the shoes, alongside and in tandem, modulate the journey
with steps different from those of the women’s own ambulation to convey
Figure 4.5 The pedestrian shoe choreography of steps taken in time, in fear,
in lassitude over physical and emotional distances. Photo by Mark Wessels.
the passage of time, the frailty and brittleness of safety, treasured memories,
and the physical and emotional distances traversed, even as they dance the
journey’s untranslatability.
The choreographic structure of Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking is
enhanced by ingeniously simple props. The texture and diminutive size of
the home and settings—as against the two performers’ bodies—confuse scale
and spatial relationships. As such they deploy minimally and in miniature
an intimate body politic on the one hand and the fallout of necropolitics on
the other. The basic colors—red, blue, green, yellow, black, and white (those
of the rainbow nation they seek to reach?)—of the fabrics allow them to be
used as various items of clothing, as a stream of water, or with structures of
string (a washing line and pegs) to create the privacy that delimits a home.
In contrast, the props are used to indicate the perpetrated aggressions that
the refugees endure, including the paper home set alight onstage, the rapist’s
paramilitary boots, and the closed umbrellas that register the unwelcoming
environment of Cape Town. The physical rhetoric that the transformations
of the props into various kinds of objects institutes overlays a complex set of
relations to body, space, and a vernacular-based movement that sets out the
poles of hostipitality and draws in the destruction that necropolitics puts into
play. Such figurations, Fleishman indicates, resemble Bakhtin’s grotesque real-
ism. “Refashioning and re-inventing the material body … can unsettle ‘given’
social positions and interrogate the rules of inclusion, exclusion and domina-
tion which structure the social body” (1996, 179).28 These instances of focused,
physical performative gestures and stressed movement velocities coupled with
the objects onstage communicate, almost by pointillism, with multilingual
audiences in South Africa and around the world, and elaborate the paradoxi-
cally muted yet resounding ellipses of the human rights crimes that refugees
walk with every day.
The circular staging of the work reflects the ongoing passage of time, as
does the characters calling out the days of the week or months while wait-
ing to escape from their destroyed home or for their papers at Home Affairs.
A circular reference to time is present, too, in the piece’s title, with its rejoinder
of the calendar’s own revolution. The return figures the incompleteness of a
wholeness and l’innommable—the unnamability—of the refugee’s situation.
Such circularity, together with the allegorical story of the elephant, circum-
scribes the resultant material contingencies of necropolitics and pinpoints the
hostipitality that territorially peripheral refugees encounter.
The portability of the production coheres with the exigencies of the refu-
gees’ mobility. Like them and their belongings, it can be moved and assembled
quickly. The props are small, the costumes few. There are no behind-the-
scenes set changes and no drawing of a front curtain. Instead, the recycled
transnational waste used onstage (a radio made of Coke cans, discarded grain
sacks, the paper house, a scarred table) shapes passageways and delimitations,
whether as information conveyers or as border markers of interdiction and
points to regional and global economic networks of exchange that, in part at
least, serve to support necropolitics.
Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking signifies as a rupture in the perfor-
mance of 21st-century warfare. Neither realistic, photojournalistic, nor spec-
tacularly violent, the physical theater piece nevertheless identifies hostipitality
as the fallout of necropolitics. Having escaped bellicose acts in their home
country, the survivors encounter other situations and forms of violence as they
flee, travel, and seek safety. Forced to hide from Home Affairs for legal reasons;
from security forces and (para) military groups, mercenaries, gangs, and rival
groups; from local inhabitants for fear of xenophobia, refugees live promiscu-
ously with invisibility, loss of agency, and threats to their persons and liveli-
hoods. In and with movement, Reznek’s and Yisa’s “non-factual truthfulness”
(Cox 2012, 124) implicitly exposes prejudice and breaks up the stereotypes that
support ambient xenophobia. Their corporealization of the refugee’s perpetual
struggle with displacement performs the politics of engagement that defines

the performative for the Magnet Theatre.
Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking acts as a form of transitional justice.
With the location of the violence that caused the mother and daughter’s ini-
tial flight remaining unspecified, the work saliently points out the nefarious
effects of the necropolitics of globalization and trans-â•‰regional networks of
exchange on refugees around the globe. The stage’s space—â•‰continually rede-
fined by the use and placement of the minimal props—â•‰along with the sound
score, lighting, and minimal dialogue, manifest imaginatively choreographic
entities of the performance. The stylized sequences that the polyvalent bod-
ies of the two women perform as they repeatedly switch into and between
assailant and victim, figures of power and refuge seekers, metonymically
symbolize the perpetual movement of refugees’ displacement. The perform-
ing body registers the host’s double bind, even as it moves audiences toward
empathetic responsiveness to the plight of refugees. Key to the work’s rele-
vance and representability in different performance spaces around the world
are the segments of pedestrian activities, spoken words, and steps, the dif-
fering dynamics of effort and tension in the torso, arms, and extremities as
well as facial expressions that render legible narratives of the mental and
physical trauma that so many refugees endure. With the tendering of ges-
tures extended, repeated, and so transformed, Every Year, Every Day, I Am
Walking challenges audiences everywhere to critically engage with displaced
persons hospitably.
NOTES
I extend my appreciation, as Senior Research Fellow to the Faculty of Humanities,
University of Johannesburg for its recognition of research in the humanities, and
my thanks to the Center for International Education at the University of Wisconsinâ•‰
Milwaukee for its fellowship support in 2012–â•‰2013.
I wish to express my deepest Ubuntu gratitude to Archbishop Desmond Tutu,
because … and to Judy Mayotte, who knows why.
1. For the Magnet Theatre’s goals and mission, see its website, http://â•‰w ww.magnet
theatre.co.za/â•‰, and Lewis and Krueger’s Magnet Theatre : Three Decades of Making
Space (forthcoming).
2. See Fleishman’s use of Rudi Laermans’s term “dance in general” for this notion of
assemblage of human and nonhuman movement performance (2015, 19–â•‰20).
3. Every Year, Every Day I am Walking has been presented in theatrical and festival
settings in South Africa, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland,
Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Argentina, Brazil, India, Japan, Germany, England,
Sweden, the United States, and France. In 2015 it was the company’s longest-â•‰
running production. The work was nominated for Best Foreign Production of
2009 in the Argentinian Theatre Awards, and Jennie Reznek and Faniswa Yisa
jointly won the Best Actress Award at the 2009 Aardklop Festival in South Africa
for their performances in the production.
4. Neo Muyanga, “chaos & crisis of identity fuels our compassion,” blog entry,
May 25, 2008, https://neomuyanga.wordpress.com/2008/05/25/chaos-crisis-of-
identity-f uels-our-compassion/.
5. Reports in 2013 and 2014 give conflicting information, with some asserting ever
increasing numbers of refugees whereas South African sources indicate a decrease
in the number of new asylum applications. Nevertheless, between 2008 and 2012
more than 778,000 new registrations were filed with South African authorities
according to UNHCR’s December 2013 report. For regular updates, see the press
releases of the Scalabrini Centre at http://w ww.scalabrini.org.za/press-releases/.
6. One family from Rwanda finally received permission to request permanent resi-
dent status twelve years after arriving in Cape Town and after having spent six
years fleeing the genocide of the Tutsis in their homeland. In early 2014, twenty
years later, the two daughters were first granted permanent residency, then their
father. Their mother is still waiting (personal communication).
7. For further facts and the situation of refugees, see World Refugee Survey 2008:
South Africa http://w ww.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,USCRI,,MWI,,485f50
d2c,0.html. For a summary report on the 2008 violence perpetuated against
refugees in South Africa, see World Refugee Survey 2009: South Africa http://
www.refugees.org/resources/u scri_ reports/a rchived-world-refugee-surveys/
2009-w rs-country-updates/south-africa.html. World refugee figures amounted
to nine million, with an additional twenty-five million internally displaced per-
sons in 2004; by the end of 2010, according to a Voice of America story, there
were 43.7 million displaced persons worldwide: Lisa Schlein, “Number of World
Refugees and Displaced People Highest in 15 Years,” Voice of America, June 18,
2011, (http://www.voanews.com/content/number-of-refugees-and-displaced-globally-
highest-in-15-years-124165269/141015.html).
8. Janine Hicks reports on the situation of women refugees and how they might
access democratic spaces and agency to change the precariousness of their
existence. She cites Thabisa Dumisa, a member of the Commission on Gender
Equality, who states that “if black South African women are triple-oppressed,
refugee women are in an even worse situation with regard to the vulnerability of
their status” (Hicks 2009, 247).
9. Mbembe defines the contemporary form of sovereignty that he calls necropoli-
tics as the complete power to disregard the law of the land and to give death. He
explains how the term necropolitics more appropriately expresses the notion of
sovereignty when referring to an entity (state, militia, local army, gangs, warlords,
etc.) that has power of life and death over people and controls space with killing
machines (2003a).
10. Mark Westmoreland gives an overview of Jacques Derrida’s notions of hos-
pitality (2008, 1–10). With “hostipitality” Derrida problematizes the notion of
hospitality (in particular in relation to Kant’s sense of it as perpetual peace)
when he suggests, following Émile Benveniste, that the host can become the
visitor’s/stranger’s hostage, and that the etymologies of hôte—host and guest in
French—(hospes—g uest-master) and (hostis—stranger and, by extension, later

enemy) are linked in Sanskrit and Greek through the distinct elements: “Hosti-
pet-s” with pet or pot meaning ‘master (of self)’ which will yield ‘despot’ ” (Derrida
2000, 3 and 13–14).
11. See, for example, how the use of hate rhetoric in Rwanda that was propagated
over the course of some three years before the downing of the president’s plane
on April 6, 1994, ensured that the ensuing massacres were part of a programmed
ideological genocide.
12. Already in 2005, Baruti Amisi and Richard Ballard (2005) were looking at the
largest group of refugees in South Africa, the Congolese who had fled the so
called: ‘Africa’s world war,’ and their protest efforts to be heard, especially regard-
ing sustained xenophobia and their frustration with the Department of Home
Affairs’ processing of their applications and documentation. “In the face of xeno-
phobic hostility, Congolese refugees respond with defiant pride in their culture”
and in effect refuse to assimilate or conform as a political gesture of rejection of
South African society (15). See the Congolese’s experiences of marginalization
and xenophobia in appendix 2 (20–23). Further complications occur when dif-
ferent groups of refugees (from Rwanda, Burundi, the DRC, Kenya, the Republic
of Central Africa, Somalia, etc.) find themselves in violent power struggles in
the camps and in asylum situations. Similarly, European and UN forces have at
times supported the flight of thousands of killers to frontier zones where they can
reform, retrain and regain a position of power.
13. Foreigners, particularly African foreigners, are often referred to as amakwere-
kwere, an isiXhosa word made up of the prefix ama (person) and kwerekwere, an
onomatopoetic word for an incomprehensible sound. Often used pejoratively by
South Africans, it highlights and reinforces the common practice of using the
various South African regional languages to marginalize refugees seeking to be
understood in English, one of the eleven official languages of South Africa.
14. This section’s subtitle is taken from the “Director’s Note” in Every Year, Every Day,
I Am Walking’s printed program for Fleishman’s reflection captures so eerily the
situation of so many refugees in South Africa, Europe, the United States and else-
where: “This was a piece that was not meant to be. It was not planned, thought about,
wrestled with over time. It arrived unannounced … with … the urgency of its call… .
there was little to be done but to trust the story, its excruciating inevitability.”
15. In 2007 the employees of the various private security guard companies went on
strike when their wage demands were not met. However, the refugees working as
guards (on private estates or in banks, supermarkets, office buildings, etc.) who
were even more poorly paid than their South African unionized coworkers knew
they would lose their jobs if they did not arrive on time to work.
16. According to Robyn Cohen’s review in the Cape Times, Judith Rudakoff’s
Common Plants Project sought to explore notions of “home” through a collab-
orative process. “The project brought together researchers from around the world
who looked at the notion of displacement, e.g., the relationship between the Inuit
in Canada; their urban existence versus their natural habitat; black people in SA
who have cultural links outside the city and the dislocation that may occur when
cultural connections are severed or disrupted” (Cohen 2007, 9).
17. See the book by Glynis Clacherty (2006), wherein she explains how, in 2001
she initiated the psychosocial art therapy project that grew out of her partici-
patory work with refugee children from Ethiopia, the DRC, Burundi, Rwanda,
and Angola. The project was cofacilitated by Anurita Bains and shared with art
teacher Diane Welvering and Jessie Kgomongoe. Children were free to participate
or not. Stories unfolded over three years. Some were taped and then transcribed,
so as to keep the texts close to the children’s spoken words. Editing occurred only
for sequence and readability and according to the choices that the children made,
including confidentiality. “None of the children want to be labeled as refugees in
their present lives, so they have chosen to remain anonymous. The names they
chose to replace their own all have significance for them; they are the names of
lost parents or special friends from their home countries” (6).
18. Ina Wichterich trained in Cologne and Rotterdam in ballet and contemporary
dance, as well as theater. She danced with the Aurinkobaletti in Finland and
with Carolyn Carlson. She also performed with the Folkwang Tanztheater and
L’Esquisse and was a member of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal. In Cape
Town since 1999, she has taught, directed, and choreographed with Jazzart Dance
Theatre, Remix, and Magnet Theatre, often collaborating with the Sowetan com-
poser and musician Neo Muyanga.
19. Fleishman reiterates in his Physical Images in South African Theatre that for
Jacques Lecoq “the world is a theatre of incessant movement and to be true, the
theatre … must capture this movement complete with all its color, rhythm and
complexity” (2007, 173).
20. Boal (1979) owes much of his theatrical pedagogy to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, particularly in terms of the manifest political implications of human
activity.
21. Interview with Reznek, Fleishman, and Yisa, plus excerpts from Every Year, Every
Day I am Walking, “Magnet theatre.mov,” YouTube, https://w ww.youtube.com/
watch?v=LSAXvFvzN-s. For Reznek’s practice see Reznek (2012).
22. Although the French spoken does seem to indicate that the two refugees are from
a Francophone Central African state, the women are not clearly associated with a
specific country in the piece.
23. In another version of the performance, Aggie outlines her footprints in chalk on
the pavement outside her new home, thus pointing out the insecurity of such a
pretension (chalk rubs off or washes away) and the determination to be recog-
nized and received by the South African city.
24. Cape Town is still affectionately called the “Mother City” for having once
been a safe haven for foreign travelers making the journey around the Cape of
Good Hope.
25. Small signs, events, and objects mark the journeys of displaced persons. Odette,
a refugee in Cape Town, has kept a drawing made by Alice, one of her daughters,
of the large armoire in their home in Rwanda. At one point on their journey Alice
pulled out the drawing, saying that they did not need to worry about all their
things since she had brought their armoire with her.
26. Della Pollock writes “Performance is a promissory act. Not because it can prom-
ise possible change but because it catches its participants—often by surprise—in
a contract with possibility: with imagining what might be, could be, should be”
(2005, 2). Béatrice Rangira Gallimore uses this understanding of performance as
an instrument of resistance to frame her discussion of Rwandan women survi-
vors’ strategies (2009, 15).
27. In his front page review, Brett Adkins writes: “The symbolism comes in all shapes
and sizes but most poignantly in the use of shoes–â•‰often not worn–â•‰which are con-
stantly used to underline both the physical and emotional distance which must
be traversed to insure survival” (2007, 1).
28. Although Fleishman is speaking about physical theater and Jazzart’s dance rather
than about this piece in particular, he stresses the deeper political import of the
use of the changing physical body and its plural meanings in South African
theatre.
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———. 2003a. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15(1): 11–40.
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5
From Temple to Battlefield

Bharata Natyam in the Sri Lankan Civil War
JA N ET O’SH EA
THREE IMAGES OF DANCE AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION

IN SRI LANK A AND THE SRI LANK AN TAMIL DIASPORA
Toronto, 1999
On a summer evening in 1999, I made my way through a throng of hundreds
into the auditorium of a suburban high school. The entryway was decorated
with LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) imagery: the red revolutionary
flag with a roaring tiger set in a blazing sun and two rifles crossed behind it, a
soldier in semi-â•‰silhouette with an explosion of red, yellow, and orange behind
him, and a map of the putative nation of Tamil Eelam (Figure 5.1).1 I passed by
vendors who stood behind tables selling books, CDs, and videos about the con-
flict and joined a local Tamil Canadian family in the auditorium. I seemed to
be the only non-â•‰Tamil in attendance, and an usher paused before handing me
a program in Tamil. I took it from him and sounded out the words on the page
as a companion helped me translate. Activists and organizers offered speeches,
musicians sang revolutionary songs, and an ensemble of young dancers per-
formed Vilangukal Sidaiyum Kalam (“When the chains are broken”), 2 a short
dance drama that narrated the history of the Tamils through waves of occu-
pation and toward liberation at the hands of the LTTE. Dressed in fatigues,
one group of dancers, playing the Sri Lankan Army, strutted across the stage,
112 J anet O ’ S hea
Figure 5.1â•‡ LTTE Iconography, including a map of the putative state of Tamil Eelam.
Photo courtesy of Eelamwallpapers.com.
scattering another group who played the Tamil villagers. A third group, clad
in the black fatigues and berets of the Black Tigers, leaped from the wings.
With their loud, fast footwork and fierce arm gestures, they swiftly overtook
the Sri Lankan soldiers. The piece closed with the ensemble celebrating their
victory.
Held in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough, this event was part of the
annual celebration of Karumpulikal Nal, or Black Tigers Day, a commemo-
ration of the LTTE’s suicide commandos. Sponsored by the Tamil Eelam
Society, a local social service organization that provided assistance to Tamil
immigrants and refugees but that also embraced a revolutionary nationalist
position, the event foregrounded this diasporic community’s allegiance to a
would-â•‰be nation-â•‰state and their acceptance, as a group, of a military solution
to the conflict that had driven them from their homeland. It signaled a belief
in the counter-â•‰state (Bose 1994) nationalist perspective of the LTTE and of the
power of forms of representation, such as dance, in legitimizing claims to ter-
ritory and autonomous rule.
From Temple to Battlefield 113
Jaffna, 2004
Veerasingham Hall sits at the southwest edge of the Sri Lankan city of Jaffna,
the capital of the primarily Tamil Northern Province. A large proscenium
theater, it stands directly across from an old Dutch fort. At the time of my
research, in the summer of 2004, the fort lay within the high-â•‰security zone
controlled by the Sri Lankan army and was off-â•‰limits to civilians. Next to the
hall were the ruins of the Regal Cinema, pockmarked by bullets and shrap-
nel, its name still emblazoned in chipping paint, the faded remnants of a film
poster visible on broken cement. This is the beginning of a Jaffna neighbor-
hood that was particularly hard hit by two decades of Sri Lanka’s civil war
(1983–â•‰2009).
When I entered the hall in July of 2004, I found a performance at odds
with the devastation outside. An audience of over three hundred viewers
had gathered to watch the bharata natyam arangetram, or debut concert, of
a thirteen-â•‰year-â•‰old girl. A classical dance concert in the midst of destruction
and rehabilitation would be striking enough without the dancer having trav-
eled from New Zealand to perform before the friends and family of her emi-
grant parents.
The choreography displayed only the most conventional, postrevival
bharata natyam choreography, focusing on Hindu religious figures and narra-
tives. The performance by an accomplished but clearly nonprofessional young
adult seemed to embody the process that dance scholars have referred to as the
amateurization of the arangetram (Gorringe 2005, Greenstein and Bharadvaj
1998). It eschewed the contemporary interpretations of the form common in
India and the Indian diaspora. The choreography bore little relationship to the
daily lives of its performer or its viewers, the latter of which had lived under
military occupation for over twenty years, having survived invasion by the
Sri Lankan military, a forced evacuation, and the paramilitary control of the
peninsula by the LTTE.
Colombo 2013
In September 2013, an article appeared in the online version of the national
daily broadsheet Indian Express extolling the efforts of Miranda Hemalatha,
a Sinhalese bharata natyam dancer to propagate the dance form and ren-
der it of interest to her Sinhalese audiences. Hemalatha, the author notes,
was met with indifference and occasional hostility when in the 1960s she
first began performing bharata natyam in Colombo. However, by incorpo-
rating Buddhist mythology and Sinhalese folklore, as well as by shifting the
language of the sung poetic texts that accompany the dance, she gradually
found a receptive audience. The article credits Hemalatha for a larger phe-
nomenon that is indeed striking: bharata natyam, associated with the minor-
ity Tamil population, has achieved popularity among Sinhalese girls and
women, despite decades of ethnic conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese in
Sri Lanka. Moreover, the article represents such efforts as a possible coun-
terbalance to atrocities against Tamils following the official end of the civil
war in 2009: “Amid reports that the Sri Lankan government is systematically
wiping out Tamil culture from the island, a Sinhalese Bharatanatyam guru
is treading a different path by adding Sinhalese flavour to the dance form”
(Balachandran 2013).
In each of these three examples, bharata natyam intersects with contempo-
rary life in the context of the Sri Lankan civil war. However, they diverge in
both their representation of the conflict and in their understanding of what
dance can do in relation to it. In the first of these instances, bharata natyam
forms part of a revolutionary strategy. The dance form operates as a tool for
crafting ethnic identity through a common experience of subjugation. In the
second, the dance form cultivates a curious neutrality; it is a seemingly apo-
litical statement in the midst of devastation. In the third, bharata natyam
becomes a space for cross-ethnic reconciliation, a symbol of the endurance of
Tamil cultural traditions even as it becomes available to members of the com-
munity positioned as the Tamils’ opposite.3 These examples seem to represent
a move from radical to apolitical to conciliatory functions for the dance. This
chapter is an attempt to both understand and complicate that trajectory.
I witnessed pro-LTTE, separatist-themed dances like the one described
above in Toronto, Canada, live and on Tamil-language news programs. These
pieces deployed conventional bharata natyam footwork, body positions, and
hand gestures to narrate the struggle of the Tamil people to free themselves
from subjugation and to form the separate nation-state of Tamil Eelam.
Dancers in fatigues portrayed invading Sri Lankan troops and the Tamil
Tigers’ paramilitary soldiers. Frequently set to the tune of existing folk songs,
these pieces adapted the existing bharata natyam vocabulary and introduced
new mudras, or hand gestures, to invoke the implements of modern warfare,
such as automatic weapons and helicopters. The rhythmic components of
bharata natyam, typically used in the classical form for abstract, nonrepre-
sentational phrases, here signified combat. Some of these dances invoked par-
allels between ancient Tamil literary and religious figures and recent military
struggles.
When the LTTE gained control of Jaffna in the mid-1990s, its leadership
strove to cultivate a Tamil identity through the promotion of southern Indian
classical and local folk arts. The revolutionary government sponsored dance
and music competitions, commissioning revolutionary dance compositions.
These pieces were not only performed by civilians who supported the LTTE,
or who sought their patronage, but also by female cadres of the rebel forces.4
This use of bharata natyam as the basis of revolutionary dances seemed fur-
ther evidence of the thesis I explored in my research on this South Indian
classical dance form: that it was a site of contention where dancers expressed a
range of political affiliations and through which they explored divergent possi-
bilities for choreography. Indeed, it seemed like the furthest possible extension
of this idea. Having seen these performances, I thought it essential to travel to
Sri Lanka to see these dances in their home contexts where, I assumed, they
would express the fraught, complex, and deeply troubled process through
which Tamil identity was formed as separate and oppositional to the domi-
nant Sinhalese identity, a process that was neither straightforward nor rooted
in essential difference but was a product of recent political circumstances.
In 1998 and 1999, however, research in Jaffna would have been both difficult
and dangerous. It was a time of active warfare (Eelam War III) in the northern
region of Sri Lanka, in which the Sri Lankan military fought the LTTE for con-
trol of the Vanni region and the Jaffna Peninsula (see Figure 5.2). The LTTE
held the Jaffna Peninsula in the early 1990s; the Sri Lanka military attacked
the paramilitaries not only through active combat but also through indirect
acts of war such as the destruction of infrastructure, cutting off the electrical
supply to the peninsula, blocking roads, and destroying railway lines. The Sri
Lankan military and the LTTE targeted civilians as well as military person-
nel. As such, my proposed research had to wait until the early 2000s, an era of
relative peace when both sides agreed to a “Memorandum of Understanding.”
Although the LTTE withdrew from talks in 2003, travel into Jaffna remained
possible in 2004: commercial flights resumed between Colombo and Jaffna,
and the A-9, the major highway connecting the northern peninsula through
the LTTE-held Vanni region to the rest of Sri Lanka, reopened. Active warfare
was limited to the eastern region of the country.
Nonetheless, I thought I would find evidence of paramilitary dance in
Jaffna, even if these dances were no longer publically performed. I attended
performances and watched videos of dance concerts, but no one showed me
revolutionary dances. I met with dancers, activists, playwrights, arts academ-
ics, and visual artists, and all told me the same thing: overt militaristic dances
were performed solely under the LTTE government during its control of the
peninsula (1990–1995). Dancers and viewers spoke of propaganda dances;
they recalled them and described them to me. But no one could find a con-
temporaneous example. Instead, they spoke of dance’s relationship to pub-
lic education, a means through which women obtained a steady income via
state-f unded teaching positions, and its relationship to training for children
and young adults, especially girls.
Figure 5.2 Map of Sri Lanka. Jaffna is the capital city of the Jaffna District.
Kilinochchi was the de facto capital of the LTTE-controlled region in northern Sri
Lanka. Photo courtesy of © Ruslan Olinchuk | Dreamstime.com.
Bharata natyam was important enough to Jaffna Tamils that dancers

offered performances before crowds of hundreds even during times of active
conflict, when the Sri Lankan government cut off power to the peninsula and
performances were lit by generators, even when theaters were hit by shelling.
Bharata natyam in Jaffna had been maintained even in situations of adversity,
repression, and shortage. However, by the 2000s the dance ceased to express
radicalized identities. Instead, it took on a soothing function: a distraction
from the harsh realities of war and its aftermath. The bulk of choreography
I encountered did not address the conflict at all.5
Cataclysmic events in the 2000s changed the course of Sri Lankan his-
tory, ushering in not a hoped-for reconciliation but an exacerbation of eth-
nic violence. Large-scale displacements caused by the tsunami of December
2004 resulted in a targeting of Tamil refugees by Sinhalese mobs. Moreover,
as Naomi Klein (2007) points out, unchecked commercial development in
the wake of the disaster aggravated ethnic tensions and mitigated attempts
at reconciliation. During the last days of the war, the Sri Lankan military and
LTTE committed atrocities against civilians, especially those trapped between
the two forces in the Vanni region. Likewise, when LTTE leader Velupillai
Prabhakaran was assassinated in 2009, it led to a ceasefire but also ushered in a
new era of terror, directed at the Tamil civilian population; reports of torture,
disappearances, and illegal detention continue.
The complexities of the political situation in Sri Lanka mean that bharata
natyam and its practitioners have had to adjust to an ever-changing, fre-
quently worsening situation. The dance form, in its Sri Lankan and diasporic
Sri Lankan Tamil articulations, expressed a range of seemingly unrelated
political and aesthetic positions. Its militaristic form reinforced my impres-
sion that bharata natyam could represent a multiplicity of perspectives, that it
was a site of debate and difference. The amateur yet highly public arangetram
I attended—and others like it I witnessed in Jaffna, live and on video in the
personal archives of dancers—seemed to undercut this assumption. The con-
trast I describe between bharata natyam—spectacularized and amateurized in
form with thoroughly noncontroversial content—and its context of violence,
destruction, and deprivation was typical. The association of bharata natyam
with gendered propriety and with the absence of contestation was so strong
that even Sinhalese women could perform it without suspicion of supporting
the LTTE or compromising their dominant ethnic identity.
Bharata natyam morphed from articulating counter-state nationalism to
performing a salving, comforting function in the aftermath of war. I suggest
that the reasons for this vacillation lie in the specifics of the civil war in Sri
Lanka, the history of bharata natyam on the island, and the changing nature
of warfare itself. Here, I uncover these historical trajectories as the means
through which bharata natyam came to express a separate—â•‰and separatist—â•‰

cultural identity and through which it came to serve a conservative gendered
function. I examine these interlinked histories in order to understand the rela-
tionship between bharata natyam and civil conflict in 21st-â•‰century Sri Lanka.
THE ARTS, “CULTURE,” AND ETHNIC CONFLICT

IN SRI LANK A
Sri Lanka witnessed close to three decades of active civil war from 1983 to
2009. While militants on both sides justify ethnic violence through refer-
ence to supposed “racial” difference, conflicts between the island’s majority
Sinhalese and minority Tamil populations only emerged in the 19th century
and became polarized in the 20th. In the late 19th century, the key points of
difference in Sri Lanka were caste, religion, and region rather than ethnicity
(Reed 2010, 130). In the early 20th century, the Sinhalese and Tamils were
both represented as majority communities, with less populous groups thought
of as minorities (deSilva quoted in Reed 2010, 130). Only in the 1920s did the
discourse shift toward one majority community—â•‰the Sinhalese—â•‰with Tamils
ranking as minorities. Although legitimized through reference to history
(Daniel 1997, Tambiah 1991), the division of the Sri Lankan population into
two, and only two, discrete “racial” groups is largely a 20th-â•‰century invention.
Sri Lanka is a demographically diverse island, typically divided into three
major “ethnic” groups: Sinhalese, Tamil, and Muslim. Although many of the
Muslims speak Tamil, they are considered a separate ethnicity. The Tamil cat-
egory itself subdivides into two separate groups, “Sri Lankan Tamils” whose
ancestors migrated to the island between the early centuries of the Common
Era and the 15th century (Tambiah 1991, 4) and “Indian Tamils” whose ances-
tors were brought from India to work as indentured servants on the coffee
and tea plantations of eastern Sri Lanka in the 19th century. Likewise, the
Sinhalese are divided into low-â•‰country and upcountry. The island’s population
includes the Burgher community of mixed European and indigenous descent
and recent immigrants from India and elsewhere.
Sinhalese and Tamil are distinct languages, Sinhalese being Indo-â•‰European
and Tamil Dravidian. In the discourse of the ethnic conflict, this distinc-
tion became racialized so that the Sinhalese are associated with a phenotype
of northern India—â•‰ tall, light-â•‰
skinned, with narrow noses and prominent
cheekbones—â•‰and the Tamils are assumed to be racially Dravidian: shorter,
with darker skin and rounded facial features. Even a casual observation of Sri
Lankan populations challenges this division. Indeed, Tamils and Sinhalese are
similar enough that, as in other civil conflict zones, those who would com-
mit ethnic violence seek out nonvisual markers of their intended victim’s
identity. This racialization of language is actually a four-way conflation of reli-

gion (Hindu versus Buddhist), language (Tamil versus Sinhalese), race (Aryan
versus Dravidian), and nation (ostensibly South Indian versus “authentically”
Sri Lankan).6 Under British colonization, elites in both Jaffna and Colombo
capitulated to colonial practices and norms of behavior, with elite Sinhalese
generally thought of as more Anglicized than their Tamil counterparts (Reed
2010, 131). Tamil cultural revivalist Arumuga Navalar (1822–1879) defended
Hinduism against encroachment by proselytizing Christianity but also urged
its reform, celebrating Tamil high culture through language and literature. In
the late 19th century, Navalar’s Sinhalese counterpart, Anagarika Dharmapala,
followed suit, valorizing an indigenous identity rooted in the Sinhala language
and Buddhism.7 Revivalists essentialized ethnic, linguistic, regional, and reli-
gious differences and reduced them to a set of binary oppositions between
two “racial” groups: Tamil (Hindu, northern) and Sinhala (Buddhist, south-
ern). Other minorities, such as Muslims, Christians, and the mixed-ethnicity
Burgher community, were strategically overlooked. Class, caste, region, and
religion folded into the supporting frame for the more “significant” distinctions
between “races,” creating what Salman Rushdie (1995) has called a “majority”
and “major-minority.” As a result, the 19th-century cultural revivalist move-
ments unwittingly set the stage for the ethnic conflicts of the late 20th century.
Although Navalar disapproved of temple dance and erotic sculpture on
temples, by the time his language-and religion-based revivalist movement had
blossomed into a full-scale cultural renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s, Tamils
elites came together in their support of and appreciation for bharata natyam
and Carnatic music (Reed 2010, 130–131; Russell 1982, 121; Tambiah 1991, 108;
Wilson 2000, 36). During this revival period, Bharata natyam emerged as a
marker of Tamil cultural achievement so that it could operate as a symbol
of high-culture Hindu Tamil ethnic identity. When Jaffna Tamils supported
bharata natyam and Carnatic music, they also did so through reference to a
shared culture with South India, an affiliation that, later in the century, would
prove volatile.
Sri Lanka achieved independence in 1948. The new nation’s earliest policy
decisions intensified ethnic polarization. Sri Lanka instituted a Sinhala-only
policy in 1956, replacing English as the official language of the country but fail-
ing to recognize Tamil. While the replacement of English was an anti-imperial
and potentially democratic move, the decision to exclude Tamil ensured
Sinhalese dominance in the public sphere. Tamils were also effectively barred
from military and police service,8 a decision that brought with it devastating
consequences when the civil war began in 1983. While this policy was gradu-
ally relaxed so that now Sri Lanka recognizes both Sinhalese and Tamil as offi-
cial languages, it ushered in a segregated education system in which students
were divided by first language. English-medium education, despite its colonial

underpinnings, brought together Sri Lankans of a range of ethnicities and reli-
gions, while first-language instruction separated Sinhalese and Tamil students
who had previously studied side by side (Tambiah 1991, 75–76).
This bifurcation of Sinhalese and Tamil identities was not exclusively
a language-based project. Through a process that Susan Reed labels the
Sinhalization of Sri Lanka, the nation-state became increasingly associated
with Buddhism and Sinhalese culture. Sinhalese nationalists celebrated the
upcountry region of Kandy for its resistance to colonial rule and, hence, its
“cultural purity” (Reed 2010); thus, Kandyan dance, a form associated with
Buddhist ritual, emerged as an ideal signifier of precolonial Sinhalese iden-
tity. While Kandyan dance had operated in the 1930s and 1940s as a symbol
of a “diffuse ‘indigenous’ culture”; after 1956, it came to represent national/
Buddhist/Sinhala culture (Reed 2010, 128).
At the time of my research in 2004, Kandyan dance was ubiquitous at public
events, including dance and music performances that had little to do with the
local dance genre.9 Kandyan dance frequently opened high-profile proceed-
ings, performed outside a venue to accompany the appearance of guests of
honor. By contrast, I never saw bharata natyam or Tamil folk dancers perform
at such public events.
The segregation that Stanley Tambiah identifies in schools through the shift
from English to vernacular instruction also occurred through dance instruction.
Dance is a required subject in state-school curricula in Sri Lanka (Reed 2010, 11).
Kandyan dance is taught in Sinhalese-speaking regions (Reed 2010), and bharata
natyam is offered in Tamil-speaking ones. As in the case of language, this move
serves to further delineate these communities, aligning Sinhalese students with
Kandyan dance and Tamil young people with bharata natyam.
The political and military dominance of India complicated an already
tense situation in Sri Lanka. Sri Lankans have long been subordinate to India,
culturally and politically. This perception of inferiority exacerbated ethnic
conflicts, with the Sinhalese nationalist fear of subordination to India yield-
ing what Tambiah has called “majority with a minority complex” (1991, 58).
Sinhalese militants identified a threat to Theravada Buddhism in Hinduism
and describe Sri Lanka as the sole source of Sinhalese language and culture.
There are also Tamils and Hindus in India, their logic runs, but there are
Sinhalese Buddhists nowhere else in South Asia; Tamils, according to this
argument, belong in and to India, while the Sinhalese “have nowhere else
to go.” That Tamils have been in Sri Lanka for over five hundred years and
that their culture remains distinct from that of Indian Tamils falls out of this
equation. Sinhalese militants thus fear Tamils as representative of India and
question their loyalty to Sri Lanka.
If the Sinhalese suffer from a minority complex, the Sri Lankan Tamils have,
in Tambiah’s (1991, 72) terms, succumbed to a politics of despair. Jaffna Tamils,
like Jews under European fascism and diasporic Chinese under various nativ-
ist movements in Southeast Asia were, from the 19th century onward, repre-
sented as clannish, resistant to assimilation, and exclusive. Like European Jews
and diasporic Chinese, Jaffna Tamils privileged education and were associated
with white-collar and mercantile employment as well as with frugality. The
recourse to education under colonialism was a virtue made of necessity in that
the Jaffna Peninsula offers little arable land and hence requires much of its
population to find alternate sources of income. Nonetheless, Sinhalese nation-
alists accused Tamils of benefiting from “undue advantages” (Tambiah 1991,
14). Jaffna Tamils, in turn, were accustomed to social dominance in their own
region and resented the inferior status that Sinhalese nationalists ascribed to
them (Tambiah 1991, 106).
Initially, Tamils resorted to conventional politics and nonviolent resistance
to express their concerns and to attempt to gain political equality. Sinhalese
chauvinists responded with anti-Tamil pogroms in 1956 and 1958. Tamil
militants launched intermittent attacks on military and police in the Jaffna
region, with Tamil paramilitary groups organizing themselves through the
1970s, ultimately leading to the formation of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam in 1976. Anti-Tamil violence escalated with a police assault on the
World Tamil Conference meeting in Jaffna in 1974, the 1977 anti-Tamil
riots, the burning of the Jaffna Public Library in 1981, and the catastrophic
1983 riots in which thousands of Sri Lankan Tamils (as well as Indians of a
range of ethnicities and religions) were killed or driven from their homes.
The collaboration of the government with Sinhalese mobs was apparent in
that, especially in 1983, the central government did little to stop the rioters
and worse, that the rioters were able to identify Tamil homes and businesses
via access to voting registries.10 Hostilities launched officially following these
riots. Moreover, these pogroms radicalized a Tamil population to whom mili-
tancy was previously marginal, with the LTTE and its demand for a separate
state gaining widespread support during the 1980s and 1990s.
The fraught relationship between India and Sri Lanka was augmented by the
contradictory policies of the Indian government in the late 20th century. In a
similar move to the American support of Islamic militants in Afghanistan,
India, under Indira Gandhi, funded and trained Tamil separatists in the 1980s
in an attempt to influence the politics of the island. India then sent forces
into northern Sri Lanka in the late 1980s when the civil war escalated. These
soldiers became notorious for terrorizing Tamil civilians. Thus, Sri Lankan
Tamils suffered persecution under the Indian army; at the same time, they
were accused by Sinhalese militants of being Indian.
One explanation, then, for the conservative function of bharata natyam in Sri
Lanka lies in this ongoing experience of violence. That aggression comes from
several sides worsens the fear of annihilation and perhaps further undermines
a hope in politics, radical or moderate. As Ahalya Satkunaratnam (2013) points
out, Tamils in Sri Lanka contend with an ongoing and very real fear of cul-
tural loss, which may explain their loyalty to a perceived tradition. As in other
situations where a minority group is imperiled, tradition becomes a way of
maintaining identity under threat. Rather than opposing resistance, tradition
becomes a form of resistance, even when that tradition comes from elsewhere.
BHAR ATA NATYAM IN SRI LANK A: A SEPARATE HISTORY

Despite Jaffna’s proximity to South India, the cultures and histories of the two
Tamil-â•‰speaking regions are distinct. Bharata natyam in Sri Lanka is explic-
itly acknowledged as an import from southern India. Throughout the 19th
and 20th centuries, Jaffna residents hired South Indian devadasis, courtesan
performers who traditionally danced in salons, festivals, and courts, to dance
in temple festivals. Indeed, according to dancer Krishanti Ravindran, Jaffna
residents promoted devadasi performance up until the 1970s. In Jaffna, I met
elderly women who had migrated from India in order to dance in northern Sri
Lanka and who eventually settled there. From the start of the civil war in 1983,
temple festivals and dance arangetrams were among the few types of public
gatherings that were not restricted, and thus they provided some of the only
opportunities where large groups could come together.
In the 19th century, reformers such as Navalar condemned dance prac-
tice, as well as eroticism in temple sculptures, as part of the debasement of
the Hindu religion. The solution proposed, as in India, was the eradication of
dance by women in Hindu temples. In Sri Lanka, unlike in India, however,
the Tamil public ignored this campaign and continued to promote devadasi
dance.11 However, the dancers and dance scholars I spoke with in Jaffna sug-
gested that a gendered conservatism restricted elite women’s performance of
bharata natyam during the period of its revival. For most of the 20th century
and into the 2000s, many Jaffna families permitted their daughters to study
dance but discouraged a performance career. During my research in Jaffna
and among the Canadian Sri Lankan Tamil community, I only saw video doc-
umentation of an adult woman’s dance performance once; the performance
was not a public event but was part of her teaching certification.
Tamil women in Jaffna contend with narrower gender restrictions than in
South India, among the Sinhalese, or among other Sri Lankan ethnic groups.
As Bryan Pfaffenberger (1981, 1148–â•‰1150) suggests, this gendered conserva-
tism comes out of a value on female “chastity” in Tamil tradition, in which
a woman’s spiritual power was tied to her fidelity and domesticity,12 but is
also linked to the dominance of the prosperous land-owning Vellala caste, a
community that championed gendered conservatism at the same time that it
had the economic resources to disallow women’s employment. In addition,
as Pfaffenberger points out, Jaffna Tamils were subject to Christian mission-
ary proselytizing and reformist Hindu demands that women uphold a strictly
domestic status. While bharata natyam aligned with Tamil cultural identity,
the demographic that had the resources to practice it—elite women—was
excluded from public performance.
As such, bharata natyam underwent a similar revival as in India, but its
performance was restricted to girls, younger elite women, men, and devadasis.
Assuming the Jaffna dancers’ accounts are accurate in their chronology, this
city experienced the three contradictory elements that consolidated classical
dance in India—a marginal courtesan tradition, a social reform movement,
and a legitimization of dance—but it contended with all of them at once. An
additional explanation for the conservative function of dance, then, lies in the
intersection of devadasi dance with gendered conservatism. It seems it was
not sufficient for Jaffna women to legitimize the form through reference to
tradition. An elite woman performing publicly remained scandalous, espe-
cially while devadasis still danced. Experimentation could add another layer
of contention; adherence to tradition seemed to be the only possible resource
for women who would involve themselves with dance.
Not only does Jaffna contend with gendered conservatism; the city also
struggles to maintain cultural identity in the face of devastation. Just as
Tamils in general encounter a fear of cultural loss, so too does the city of
Jaffna. Jaffna was once a cultural center. However, it has been hard hit by war
in ways that other Sri Lankan cultural centers, such as Colombo and Kandy,
were not. While the LTTE aimed terrorist attacks at prestige sites in Colombo
and Kandy, the cities continued to function largely uninterrupted. Certainly
there was no destruction of Colombo’s or Kandy’s infrastructures; the cities’
structures are not scarred by shrapnel; there are no bombed-out facades in and
among the rows of buildings.
In Jaffna, by contrast, much of the infrastructure was destroyed by occu-
pying forces. Once populated by large numbers of elites and professionals,
the city has confronted a “brain drain” far beyond that of even other cities in
the Global South. In comparison to Colombo and Indian cities, Jaffna lacks
resources to support artistic practice. The combination of a perceived cultural
lack with the dance form’s history of importation means that bharata natyam
cultivates feelings of loyalty at the same time that its belonging remains uneasy.
This sense that bharata natyam doesn’t exclusively or perhaps even primar-
ily belong to Jaffna Tamils may undergird the popularity of the dance form
among Sinhalese girls and women. Colombo has more resources for pro-
fessional performance than Jaffna does, but economic factors alone do not
explain why bharata natyam in Colombo draws adherents from both the Tamil
and Sinhalese communities. Attention to the Sinhalese tradition of Kandyan
dance suggests a different intersection of gender, ethnic, and class identities
than that provided by bharata natyam.
As Susan Reed (2010) indicates, Kandyan dance’s status as a marginal,
lower-â•‰caste practice ostensibly protected it from the colonial hybridity associ-
ated with the upper classes. However, Kandyan dance has traditionally been
a men’s domain. Notwithstanding a number of influential female Kandyan
dancers and dance teachers, the combination of the form’s “masculine” quali-
ties, such as its deep, wide stance and open, extended arm position, neutral
facial expression, and staccato movement, along with its affiliation with the
lower classes, rendered it less than acceptable for urban, elite women (Reed
2010, 198–â•‰201).13
Sinhalese women and girls have pursued training in Kandyan dance, with
a few notable women dancers emerging in the 20th century. Moreover, with
dance featuring as a core curricular item in schools, Sinhalese women have
turned to teaching Kandyan dance. However, Sinhalese women flock to bharata
natyam study and performance, especially in the private arena. According to
Jaffna dancers, Colombo residents, particularly Sinhalese women, predomi-
nate in the performance sphere. This seems to have been the case even during
times of active warfare.
The popularity of bharata natyam among Sinhalese women suggests that
its class and gender associations supersede its ethnic ones, even as ethnicity
intertwined with revolutionary discourse. In this instance, bharata natyam
adapted and became repurposed in the interest of feminine respectability
above and beyond ethnicity, language, and region. This adoption of bharata
natyam by Sinhalese women, while suggesting possibilities for cross-â•‰ethnic
communication, also signals an uneasy affiliation of bharata natyam with Sri
Lankan Tamil identity.
THE SRI LANK AN CIVIL CONFLICT AS A NEW OLD WAR

The Sri Lankan civil war—â•‰ and its violent continuation after the official
ceasefire—â•‰is at once an “old” or conventional war and a new one. It is an
“old” or traditional civil war in Herfried Münkler’s use of the term in that it
is aimed at remaking yet preserving the state (2005, 23). The LTTE’s iconog-
raphy emphasized loyalty and valorized sacrifice in the interest of creating an
imagined community.14 When the revolutionary army gained control of the
Vanni region, this iconography was channeled into the representation of the
state. The region featured a bureaucracy that reinforced its ability to function
separately from the government of Sri Lanka. For example, when I traveled
through the LTTE capitol, Kilinochchi, I saw a branch of the National Bank of
Tamil Eelam, a court house, and a police department, all flying the LTTE’s rev-
olutionary flag. The LTTE provided visas when entering and exiting the Vanni
and set up a customs inspection site.15 Following the LTTE’s defeat, Tamil
nationalists formed the Transnational Government in Exile of Tamil Eelam,
an effort to continue to foreground Tamil Eelam not only as a nation—an
imagined community—but also as a state, a functioning government. Indeed,
much of the ideological efforts of Tamil nationalists lie in establishing Tamil
Eelam as a state without territory as much as a nation without a state.
While the Sri Lankan civil conflict operated as an old war, it also aligned
with features that theorists of conflict see as central to new war, the privatiza-
tion of the military and an asymmetry of force (Kaldor 1999, Münkler 2005).
As a self-funded organization, supported by donations from abroad, the LTTE
operated as a privatized military. Its opposition to the Sri Lankan government
left the LTTE clearly outgunned. As a result, the LTTE turned to modes of
20th-century war that Münkler discusses: guerrilla warfare, conducted in
the north and east of Sri Lanka, and terrorism through attacks in urban cen-
ters such as Colombo. Nonetheless, the LTTE strove toward symmetrization,
raiding Sri Lankan military bases from which they procured tanks and other
implements of conventional war. The strategies of the LTTE, like their self-
representation, continually positioned the paramilitaries as both “old war”
and “new war” combatants.16
Lines between combatant and noncombatant blurred in this war, leading
to shockingly high civilian casualties at the same time that some segments
of the population lived in radical separation from the war. Throughout the
time of active hostilities in the north and east of the country, the Sri Lankan
government successfully promoted tourism in southern beach towns and
upcountry cultural centers like Kandy.17 In 2004, it was possible to spend time
in Colombo, Kandy, or the small coastal towns of the south and see little evi-
dence of war. And yet both the terrorist tactics of the LTTE and the atrocities
committed by the Sri Lankan and Indian militaries reminded civilians of all
ethnicities that this was, in fact, their war.
The continuation of atrocities after the ceasefire of 2009, the blurriness of
victory, the functioning of the LTTE as a “parastate and partially private orga-
nization” (Münkler 2005, 1), and the endurance of war-by-proxy (Mumford
2013) all illustrate the resolutely contemporary nature of the Sri Lankan civil
war. When ethnic violence continued after the ceasefire, it created a situa-
tion in which war became the norm. The LTTE was the only body putting
forward a goal within this war—the creation of the separate state of Tamil
Eelam—â•‰while the Sri Lankan military’s sole objective was to prevent the for-
mation of that state. Like the American war on terror, this position is a vague
and relational one that leads to a situation in which war can continue indefi-
nitely (Dudziak 2005).
The continuation of violence after the official end of hostilities corrobo-
rates the impression that the Sri Lankan conflict has no clear end. Indeed,
anti-â•‰Tamil violence and ethnic hatred have become habituated for some
Sinhalese, just as militancy has become habituated for some Tamils. Six
decades of anti-â•‰Tamil violence and twenty-â•‰six years of war means that con-
flict is all many Sri Lankans—â•‰Sinhalese, Tamil, or of other ethnicities—â•‰have
ever known. While ostensibly a war that hinged on national identity, the
Sri Lankan conflict is also rooted in a relatively new but embedded ethnic
hatred. In this sense, the Sri Lankan conflict is what theorists of war refer to
as war without end.
The sense that war was without end may have been obvious to Tamil civil-
ians long before the cessation of overt hostilities: without the LTTE, Tamils
faced an escalation of violence and possible annihilation; with them, they con-
fronted the prospect of indefinite warfare. The Sri Lankan government was
never likely to accede to demands for an independent state of Tamil Eelam: the
territory claimed as the Tamil homeland constitutes two thirds of the island’s
coastline. Yet, in light of ongoing violence against Tamil civilians, Sri Lanka
without the LTTE looks as terrifying as Sri Lanka at war. As horrific as active
warfare is, at least it offered the hope of a more equal society and of freedom
from subjugation.
Moreover, for Jaffna residents, by 2004 the war had already in a sense been
lost: while the LTTE controlled the Vanni region of the island and fought
for the eastern regions, the Sri Lankan government controlled the Jaffna
Peninsula. Thus, Jaffna dancers no longer sought liberation through dance, if
indeed this was their motivation for performing revolutionary dances (rather
than to please or receive patronage from the revolutionary government).18
Freedom, of any kind, may have seemed increasingly unlikely. Instead, danc-
ers created a space untouched by war. In this light, the appeal of an idealized,
“traditional” practice that avoided reference to the current political situation
is more understandable. The desire for a space outside war becomes impor-
tant in a context in which military occupation permeated every aspect of
daily life, active warfare was a recent memory, and there was no clear hope
of resolution.
Another explanation, then, for the conservative, soothing function of the
dance lies in the failure of the radical tactics of the LTTE. If their military
tactics, legendary for their daring and cunning, could not endure, what then
of their representational strategies? The suggestion put forward by these
dances—â•‰that revolution would save the Tamil people—â•‰no longer appears

credible. At the same time that the LTTE failed, they were, it seems, necessary.
The demise of the LTTE has left the Tamil people with little apparent recourse.
If, as Clausewitz famously asserted, war is politics by other means, what hap-
pens to politics when war fails? In such a context, it is perhaps no surprise that
dance would become apolitical, turning from loss rather than resuscitating a
political purpose.
BHAR ATA NATYAM: FROM R ADICAL TO CONSERVATIVE

AND BACK
However, the final explanation as to why bharata natyam appears to operate
conservatively in the context of this war is that it serves a masking function
and is perhaps not as restrictive as it first appears. Toward the end of my stay
in Jaffna, I encountered performances that offered a more optimistic interpre-
tation of the potential of art to intervene in war. Initially these experiments
seemed restricted to dramatic productions, where playwrights and direc-
tors created pieces that commented on the current political situation, por-
trayed the horrors of war, and strove to cultivate communal harmony. Then
dancer and teacher Shantini Sivanesan showed me a video of a dance drama
she staged at Jaffna University. This production depicts an episode from the
Mahabharata through bharata natyam choreography, dialogue, and theatri-
cal blocking. Shantini portrayed not the famous battle scenes or the moment,
captured in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna urges Arjuna to fight, but the
episode immediately following the great battle between the feuding Kaurava
and Pandava clans. In this section, the characters speak openly of the futility
of war, depicting their anguish as an ensemble in mourning removes slain
bodies from the stage. Shantini commented openly on the parallel that this
piece offered to the present-â•‰day situation.
This work depicts war as fruitless, a radical statement in a region under mil-
itary occupation where support for the LTTE remained high. That she staged
the piece at Jaffna University—â•‰a stronghold of separatist sentiment—â•‰augments
the choreographer’s critique. Likewise, the combatants in the epic are rela-
tives. By drawing a parallel between the Mahabharata’s battle and those of the
present day, Shantini unsettled the racialization of language in Sri Lanka and
reminded her viewers that Sinhalese and Tamil histories intertwine. At the
same time, however, in the Mahabharata, war is catastrophic but inevitable.
The Pandavas are heroes although they remain morally compromised. This
piece constitutes not so much a straightforward statement against violence as
a depiction of its tragic consequences, a portrayal that speaks effectively of and
to a populace exhausted by, yet accustomed to, war.
This piece enables me to rethink the examples with which I open this chap-
ter. When LTTE cadres danced out their resistance to Sinhalese hegemony,
they created their own orthodoxy, locating the ethnic conflict in essential dif-
ference and proposing military struggle as the only solution. They also invoked
resistance through dance. This opened the possibility of Tamil choreographers
like Shantini creating work that commented on the current political situation,
using choreographic practice to argue back to militants as well as to the Sri
Lankan government.
While dancers like the young New Zealander who performed her aranget-
ram in Jaffna appear to simply replicate a tradition (albeit a largely invented
one), such dancers create a space outside of war. This is a paradoxically pro-
gressive move in a context where government forces and militants alike infil-
trate all aspects of daily life. For that dancer and her emigrant parents, Jaffna
is a cultural center, not a hotbed of militancy or a site of atrocity. These per-
formers conjure what Jaffna once was: a home of arts and letters. That girl
and others like her who travel to northern Jaffna and witness firsthand the
devastation caused by war can challenge the “shadow globalization” (Münkler
2005, 10) that allows emigrant populations to fund militant groups in their
homeland while escaping the effects of war themselves.
While it may be gendered conservativism that encourages Sinhalese women
and girls into bharata natyam, their presence nonetheless allows for commu-
nication across ethnic boundaries. Typically, these Sinhalese women learn
bharata natyam from Tamil dance teachers. Their experience with the form
can introduce them to Tamil communities with whom, because of separate
education systems, they would otherwise have little sustained contact. The
experience of learning the dance provides an opportunity for interaction with
Tamil communities that could extend beyond the dance training process.19
Although dance seems in one sense to have failed in Sri Lanka, I wonder,
in a situation as complex and fraught as this one, what success would look
like. Although the suggestion that choreography could intervene in situations
of war and provide alternate versions of identity and political affiliation may
be optimistic, I find hope in the theatrical projects I saw in Sri Lanka, which
attempted to unite Sri Lankan Tamil and Sinhalese communities and in the
reconciliation projects that have begun to develop in the dance sphere. I also
continue to look for success in the smaller interventions I addressed here, in
the worldview of the Sinhalese woman who speaks Tamil because she has
learned bharata natyam and in the perspective of the Tamil choreographer
who makes an antiwar statement when violent insurrection appears to be the
only defense against annihilation. Although a political solution to Sri Lanka’s
ethnic conflict remains a distant hope, I nonetheless believe that dance enables
dialogue, offering the possibility of rethinking narratives of belonging, resis-
tance, and loyalty even where conflict has overtaken compromise.
NOTES
1. Eelam is the Tamil word for the island of Sri Lanka. The island was known as
Ceylon under British colonialism and was renamed Sri Lanka postindependence.
Thus, “Tamil Eelam” refers to the Tamil-â•‰speaking areas of Sri Lanka. However,
the term carries an association with the demand for the formation of a separate
state consisting of the northern and eastern regions of the country.
2. I have written in more detail about this piece elsewhere (O’Shea 2007). A short
essay that appeared in the British dance publication Pulse (O’Shea 2006) laid the
groundwork for this chapter.
3. The Sinhalese embrace of bharata natyam can also be understood as an appro-
priation of a subordinate culture’s practice; in the most pessimistic interpreta-
tion, Sinhalese dancers replace Tamil ones so that the form is retained without
the need for its earlier practitioners.
4. A musician and lecturer at a dance academy described such a situation: he cho-
reographed a piece narrating the nationalist struggle for a group of women sol-
diers. The guerrilla leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, not only attended rehearsals
but also contributed to discussion on the sound score.
I watched these dances primarily via Oliveechu videos, produced by the
LTTE for expatriate Sri Lankan Tamil communities.
5. Ahalya Satkunaratnam (2013, 95) also comments on the relative paucity of
choreographic representations of the war. However, as she points out, bharata
natyam in Sri Lanka of the 2000s was politically marked primarily by virtue of its
association with the Tamil population.
6. This conflation of Tamil identity with Hinduism and separatist nationalism con-
tinues among Sri Lankan and diasporic Tamils alike (David 2007).
7. As Susan Reed (2010, 130) and Jane Russell (1982, 119) note, Tamil and Sinhalese
revivalist organizations mirrored each other in their demands for a revival of
vernacular-â•‰language education and a resurgence of traditional religious practice.
8. Stanley Tambiah cites the virtual exclusion of Tamils from the military as a cause
of hostility during the military incursions into Jaffna immediately prior to the
1983 anti-â•‰Tamil riots in Colombo (1991, 15). He points out that this is a late-â•‰20th-â•‰
century phenomenon, with retirement-â•‰age officers (in 1984, when Tambiah was
writing) being more ethnically diverse.
9. Reed points out that Kandyan dance and other “symbols of Buddhism and
Sinhala tradition are [now] ever-â•‰present at state occasions” (Reed 2010, 135).
10. Tamils were not the only victims of ethnic violence in Sri Lanka. The first
“racially” motivated riot in Sri Lanka in modern times took place in 1915 and was
a Sinhalese assault on Muslims. The LTTE also targeted Muslims, most destruc-
tively in a 1990 deportation of more than seventy thousand Muslims from north-
ern Sri Lanka.
11. Indeed, Navalar’s disciple Thamotheran Pillai identified “natabhinanam,” or love
of classical dance, as a pillar of Tamil consciousness (Wilson 2000, 29). Tambiah
(1991, 108) also notes that early-â•‰20th-â•‰century Jaffna Tamils championed classical
Tamil, bharata natyam, and Carnatic music as part of a revivalist movement.
12. This value on sexual fidelity and domesticity is not, of course, exclusive to Tamil-â•‰
speaking regions. Neloufer De Mel comments on the value placed on women’s
“purity” in Sinhalese nationalist theater (2001, 214). Domesticity and restrictions

on women’s behavior are, however, more pronounced among Jaffna Tamils than
elsewhere in Sri Lanka or South India. These traditional restrictions on women’s
behavior contrast with the active roles offered by the LTTE and thus may explain
women’s willingness to volunteer for paramilitary service (De Mel 2001, 206).
13. The digge natum Sinhalese temple tradition is the one arena in which Sinhala
women danced prior to the 1940s (Reed 2010, 198).
14. Revolutionary states, perhaps even more than established ones, need to actively
cultivate the imagination of community. Perhaps this is why Benedict Anderson’s
classic study (1991) emphasized anticolonial and postcolonial nationalism.
15. I ran into difficulty because I traveled by air to Jaffna and by ground on my return.
Since I had no entry visas, I ended up in a long conversation with an LTTE offi-
cial in a checkpoint building trying to explain my presence in the region. Even
here, the trappings of bureaucracy and the valorization of sacrifice existed side
by side: images of fallen LTTE cadres emblazoned the walls as officials leafed
through documents.
16. Münkler (2005, 12) and Kaldor (1999, 7) both argue that the decisive battle is
a feature of old war, with new wars being so dispersed in space and time as to
lack such defining events. The Sri Lankan civil war hinged upon several decisive
battles: the First, Second, and Third Battles of Elephant Pass and the Battle of
Anandapuram, each of which altered the course of the war.
17. An Al Jazeera photo essay (Wall 2014) highlights the boom in tourism after the
official end of the war. The article discusses an even more striking phenome-
non: the Sri Lankan army has gotten into the tourism business, displaying rem-
nants of the war and of the Tigers’ military struggle to Sinhalese tourists.
18. The LTTE, despite its socialist ideology, opposed civilian rule in regions they
held, assassinating politicians affiliated with the more moderate nationalist
Tamil United Liberation Front and targeting Tamil authors and activists critical
of their policies. Nonetheless, there is no evidence that they coerced dancers or
choreographers into performing these militant dancers. Direct LTTE influence
also doesn’t explain the popularity of these militant dances in the Tamil diaspora.
19. Ahalya Satkunaratnam comments on such a situation, where a Tamil and
Sinhalese dancer performed their arangetrams together, but she also points out
that they did not continue to see each other after their performance (2013, 98).
Satkunaratnam’s new project investigates reconciliation efforts through dance in
present-â•‰day Sri Lanka.
WORKS CITED
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Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Balachandran, P. K. 2013. “Sinhalised Bharatanatyam.” Sunday Standard (The Indian
Express). September 1, 2013, http://â•‰w ww.newindianexpress.com/â•‰t hesundaystan-
dard/â•‰Sinhalised-â•‰Bharatanatyam/â•‰2013/â•‰09/â•‰01/â•‰article1761683.ece.
Bose, Sumantra. 1994. State, Nations, and Sovereignty: Sri Lanka and the Tamil Eelam
Movement. New Delhi, California: Sage.
Daniel, E. Valentine. 1997. Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of
Violence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
David, Ann R. 2007. “Religious Dogma or Political Agenda? Bharatanatyam and Its
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Women.
Dudziak, Mary. 2005. War Time. New York: Oxford University Press.
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edited by Hae-Kyung Um, 91–103. London: Routledge.
Greenstein, M. A., and Ramaa Bharadvaj. 1998. “Bharata Natyam: Translation,
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CA: Stanford University Press.
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———. 2007. At Home in the World: Bharata Natyam on the Global Stage. Middletown,
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6
Choreographing Masculinity
in Contemporary Israeli Culture
Y E H U DA S H A R I M
On the day that the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was released and
returned to Israel after five years of captivity, posters across the country wel-
comed home the nation’s “lost son,” a title bestowed upon him by public rela-
tions experts hired by Shalit’s family. Live coverage of his release received
record ratings. Activists, with the help of experts, had advanced a sophisti-
cated campaign to secure Shalit’s return, which included national and inter-
national rallies, appearances by celebrities, and wide-â•‰scale diplomatic efforts,
casting Shalit as the son of all Israelis.1 According to surveys conducted at
the time, 80 percent of Israelis supported the prisoner exchange deal that led
to Shalit’s freedom.2 I argue that the carefully choreographed staging of the
return of Israel’s lost son was not simply a case of life saving. It illuminates the
ways Israelis relate to their national corporeal history, with the military (male)
body at the center of an ever-â•‰expanding physicalization effort. By analyzing
the historical and contemporary impact of this military-â•‰trained body on civil-
ian physicality, I demonstrate how it serves as the defining adjunct of national
agency.
Using the Shalit affair as a crucial event in negotiating manhood, I exam-
ine Israeli society’s preoccupation with ideologies of war and military hero-
ism.3 I utilize three methodological frameworks to reveal how intense interest
in the construction of masculinity, as choreographed by and through Israeli
134 Y ehuda S harim
Army training manuals and the media, produces a complex sense of Israeli
manhood. I first conduct a historical reading of Israeli theories of embodied
masculinity to shed light on the racialized genealogy of the Israeli soldier.
Then I explore military codes of discipline, instilled through choreographed
movement exercises, and finally I investigate the spread of these mechan-
ics of discipline from the army to Israeli social, cultural, and political life.
I thus reveal the ongoing investment in these codes, and how the skillful
and deliberate use of Shalit by the media (and others) contrasted with that
imaginary of the heroic Israeli soldier. Such an approach lays the groundwork
for an analysis of Gilad Shalit’s release in October 2011. I read Shalit’s body
and image, similar to other Israeli soldier-â•‰civilian bodies, as a contested site
that challenges, resists, and advances existing concepts of masculinity and
nationality. Through an investigation of individual and social agency in the
embodiment of ideologies, this essay questions the role of nationalism in the
staging of Shalit’s heroism, and in performing a sense of Israeli national and
moral superiority
Utilizing the concept of choreography as my theoretical framework, I
deconstruct the political and national elements that coalesce in Israelis’ ongo-
ing concern with issues of masculinity. However, rather than viewing the ide-
ological and physical molding of Israeli manhood as dance, my interest lies
in conceptualizing the political and social constellations that authorize the
exchange of bodies and govern their meaning in the national sphere (Martin
1998; Hewitt 2005). I build on the work of dance studies scholar Susan Leigh
Foster, who envisions choreography as the intertwining of various choices and
decisions shaping movement, which reflect the production of cultural values
about the body. For Foster the choreographic process entails the staging of
identity codes that convey a certain worldview, embedded in movements and
sequences that are based on decisions made during the rehearsal or perfor-
mance phase (Foster 2011). In this chapter I endeavor to show how the soldier’s
body, exemplified by Gilad Shalit, becomes the site of particular choices and
decisions that come to bear upon it. Specifically, I investigate how the con-
struction of the Israeli soldier and the preoccupation of Israeli culture with
maintaining a clear sense of ideal masculinity reveal the politics surrounding
the mobilization of the male citizen body.
IN NEED OF FOREIGN MANUALS: THE NEW JEWISH BODY

With the emergence of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), including its early
incarnations during the British Mandate period (from 1917 to the creation
of the State of Israel in 1948), training of the Israeli Jewish soldier relied on
foreign manuals (primarily British).4 That meant that the first training, even
Choreographing Masculinity in Contemporary Israeli Culture 135
before actually regimenting the body, was in Western languages, especially

English, French, and German. Language, then, was the first drill, learning the
vocabulary that gave one access to a set of movements and practices that would
reshape the soldier’s body.
Access to the soldier’s body—not only as a corporeal, biological entity but
also as a representative of the Jewish national project in Palestine—was con-
strained by various social discourses such as education, class, and national-
ism. Against the backdrop of 19th-century European anti-Semitic sentiments
depicting the Jewish man as effeminate, passive, and physically and morally
defective, members of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) adopted
Western exercise manuals. Their aim was to finally produce “Jews of muscles”
who would be able to defend and work their land (Nordau [1903] 1995, quoted
in Presner 2007, 3). In the eyes of designers of the regenerated Jewish male,
the Zionist enterprise in Israel/Palestine offered an opportunity to transform
the “small and dwindling Jews, thin and malnourished, those Jews who are the
product of the ghetto who have no image of their body [tmunat guf]” into “a big
man filled with strength and vitality” (Yehoshua Ravnitzky, quoted in Peled
2002, 19).5 The initial model for the “regenerated Zionist man of muscles” was
the Oriental indigenous resident of Palestine/Israel.6 However, with the onset
of the British Mandate in Palestine and the increasing tensions between new
Zionist immigrants and the indigenous Palestinians, the Zionist romantic
view of Israel encouraged the creation of a new Jewish “Sabra” archetype that
stood in contrast to the exiled European-ghettoized Jewish type.
If recent work on choreography has enabled us to see the ways in which the
body participates in the constitution of the subject as a site that is culturally
located and constructed,7 much less attention has been paid to the production
and deployment of the soldier’s body within nationalist discourse. Given the
growing confidence in the Jewish national project in the first half of the 20th
century, a greater premium began to be placed on the corporeal abilities and
physical power of Jewish men in order to build and defend a growing Jewish
state. The words of one immigrant make explicit the shift in the image of the
new Jewish man: “We must not become, if our lives are of any value, like sheep
lost among a herd of wolves. … Our people … must acquire more of what is
needed to fulfill its goal [that is, that of the European Zionist immigrants to
Palestine]: strength, strength, and strength” (Peled 2002, 110, 98). The desire
for “strength” evokes Max Nordau’s ([1903] 1995) early articulation of muscu-
lar Jews (in Presner 2007, 3),8 and underscores the Zionist mission of liberating
the ghettoized Jew from his suffocating conditions. Thus, in the formation of
the nation the idea of the new Jewish man carried powerful symbolic freight.
The might of this new man emphasized the corporeal aspects of muscular-
ity and envisaged the Israeli male body as a site of progress and cultural and
136 Y ehuda S harim
racial difference (within and beyond the Jewish world). Above all, this vision
of the new Jewish man aligned corporeal prowess with a particular political
agenda. In that sense, masculinity, like heterosexuality, became a prerequisite
of “good citizenship” in the Jewish community in Palestine in the early 1920s.
At the same time, the soldier’s body appeared as the epitome of manhood.
One might ask: What training was devised in order to endow this interplay of
masculine and combative bodies with such intellectual, moral, and physical
might? Who led that military training? What was its effect in other spheres
of Israeli culture, education, and health? And beyond the disciplinary aspect
of technical training, to what extent should we read military drills as ways to
regulate societal consent?
The early foundations for regimenting the new Jewish man relied on the
knowledge and support of British officers to regenerate the Jewish body and
generate the Jewish soldier.9 Consider the activities of the British captain (later
major general) Orde Charles Wingate10 with the Haganah11 and the “Special
Night Squads” (SNS), the precursors of the Israeli Defense Force. Wingate
trained Jewish men—â•‰including many future IDF officers such as Moshe
Dayan, Yigal Allon, and Chaim Leskov—â•‰in counterinsurgency in Palestine
during the Arab uprising of 1936–â•‰1939. Wingate’s aim was clear: as he said
to his trainees, “We are creating here the foundations for the Jewish Army in
Zion” (Wingate’s speech at Ein Harod (1939) in Schiff 1974, 13).
Contrary to what one might expect of counter-â•‰guerrilla warfare, Wingate
did not pay much attention to exercises for strengthening the body. More
important, military training as a phenomenological experience of learning
new ways of moving through the Palestinian landscape did not rely on acquir-
ing or possessing physical strength. Instead, Wingate declared that the most
important characteristic of a soldier is not his body, but his level of discipline
and his will power. He assumed that what hindered the success of Jewish fight-
ers was their psychological passivity and inactivity. It was their mentality that
needed to be exercised and overcome. In other words, Wingate asked for a
strategy to change this resignation, a critique prevalent in anti-â•‰Semitic views
of the ghettoized Jewish communities in Europe of the mid-â•‰and late 19th
century.
Wingate’s mindset appeared crucial in shaping the training of the SNS,
three platoons each consisting of seventy-â•‰five members of the Haganah and
forty British soldiers. Led by Wingate, the SNS platoons did not have clear
dress or disciplinary codes. Military formalities and ceremonies were not con-
ducted. Instead, greater emphasis was given to militancy, a new kind of self-â•‰
awareness, and activism. The initial training focused on basic military skills
and field craft. The more important part of the training was devoted to battle
drills, night patrols, and diversionary tactics. Specifically, battle drill training
was based on simulating real events and blurring the lines between what might
happen and what was happening.
To draw attention to the relationship between movement and the body, I
am interested in reading the battle drill training as rehearsals, where the sol-
dier’s instincts are tested and his discipline is constantly challenged while he
faces great risk. These movement exercises served as a reminder of the immi-
nence of war. Trainees were given nothing but a compass, a flashlight, and a
topographical map to locate attacks and defend Jewish outposts. Always alert,
muscles tensed, the body is asked to be ready for an attack. Ultimately, these
drills sought to extend the frontiers of the battlefield.
Western authority played a crucial role in inventing the male Jewish body,
informing choices and decisions about how the new Jewish body should move
and look.12 With the intensification of nationalist strife between the Palestinian
and Israeli populations, the Jewish Israeli male body would become not only
an agent of authority but also a public site of changing ideals of masculinity
and heroism.
TR AINING FOR READINESS: REGULATING THE MOVEMENT

OF THE ISR AELI SOLDIER’S BODY
In Israel, where the army is basically civilian, continuous physical fitness
is an absolute necessity; on dramatically short notice a boy or girl of 18 or
a man of 50 might be called to battle. Physical training, therefore, becomes
an important part of the life of every potential soldier, male or female,
young or old.
The adult civilian, being accustomed to these exercises since his early
days, continues doing them after his discharge from the regular service.
When he is called to his reserve duties, he finds himself physically fit to
accomplish the most demanding of maneuvers. Experience has shown
that civilians who make these exercises a part of their daily lives are more
alert, more productive and in better disposition than those who neglect the
exercises. Should they be called to battle, their bodies are ready.
Preface to The Israel Army Physical Fitness Book (1967)
Attributing the victorious establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 to the new
Zionist man, IDF military training set out to produce the regulated body of the
Israeli soldier. As in the days before statehood, the IDF did not initially have its
own standardized training literature. Officers were encouraged to familiarize
themselves with foreign military literature. The IDF adopted the models of the
British and Swiss armies in organizing its battalions, commanders, drills, and
reserve units.
138 Y ehuda S harim
The war of independence (1948) and growing foreign military influences

recorporealized the image of the new Jewish man. By using the term “recorpo-
realized” I wish to pay special attention to the IDF’s emphasis on the physical
abilities of Israeli men to build and defend the young modern state. Beyond
tactics, a new body was needed to protect and represent the nation.
For that purpose, a new set of manuals was developed. Not only must this
body always be ready to “be called to battle,” but its ingrained notions of
alertness and productivity would impact civilian life as well. In that sense,
Wingate’s drills in strategy became part of an endless rehearsal of vigilance,
a practice that was not limited merely to the battlefield. IDF publications and
instructional handbooks promoted three specific aims of training the Israeli
soldier for readiness.
The first was to establish a set of exercises to support the prevailing slo-
gan in IDF training manuals during the 1950s and 1960s: “Sweat replaces
blood.” To attain this goal a new approach to creating the Israeli soldier was
conceptualized in Perakim be-Imun Gufani (“Chapters on physical training”),
a classified collection of training exercises published in 1957. Specifically, to
achieve readiness this officer instruction manual emphasized four parameters
for physical practice in the IDF: stamina, acceleration, strength, and general
fitness (5–7). For the first time, “morning exercise” became part and parcel of
the soldier’s routine to instill “physical and mental alertness” (8–9). It included
running (three minutes), 20–25 leaps to strengthen leg muscles, 10–15 repeti-
tions of pulling arms and shoulders back and forth, 10–15 turns of the back
to strengthen the backbone, 15 turns of the hands to the back to build up the
stomach muscles, 10–15 pushups, and 10–15 squats, and ended with games
that emphasized agility and speed (10–12). Along with establishing daily
training and annual and monthly competitions—including popular sports
like basketball and soccer—a standard set of exercises became part of the IDF
calendar. The goal was to extend this state of readiness and to “get as many
soldiers as possible involved in an intense activity” (13). Readiness, however,
implied not only an intense state of alertness instilled in the trained body but
also a body that was continually controlled. The IDF’s use of popular sports,
annual competitions, and a new training program enabled the extension of
control beyond the military sphere. These training exercises and their various
applications governed the soldier’s muscles and body, as well as the soldier’s
experience of space and time.
The second aim of training was to make the movement of the soldier’s
body conform to the European idea of the new Zionist man. In The Israel
Army Physical Fitness Book, published in 1967, a few months after the sur-
prise victory of the Israeli Army over neighboring Arab states in the Six Day
War, Max Nordau’s ideal of muscular Jews emerged as the foundation of the
Israeli soldier. Against the view of the effeminate exilic Jew, with “his weak
arm” and “soft back and belly muscles,” the Israeli soldier-citizen stands
“taller” with “broad shoulders” and stronger muscles (13). Through military
training, this new gendered body would represent the modern Israeli state
and its army. Male bodies, then, became crucial to nationalist discourse in
that they served as a site of national homogeneity and unification, and as
an embodied counter to the anti-Semitic sentiments that had dominated
the Jewish past and tradition. Modeled after the ideal European man, the
impressive physique of the new Israeli soldier not only proved the effective-
ness of disciplinary regulation but accounted for the “lightning victory of
the Israeli army” in 1967 (13).
A third aim of IDF military training was to constitute a physically and
culturally homogenized Israeli identity. The standardization of an ideology
of masculinity that produced a “homogeneous type” (1967 training manual,
13) not only involved bodies but also aspired to greater projects, including
the organization of social, political, and economic structures. The primary
goal here was to erase differences between the various Jewish communi-
ties and ethnicities by producing a regenerated kind of Israeli man. “The
Israeli Army is producing a new type of man in this young, energetic Middle
Eastern country,” the 1967 fitness manual declared, explaining how “by
means of tough, well-planned physical training, the army is contributing to
the change in the physiognomy of the modern Israeli and to the transform-
ing of the immigrants from the seventy different countries into one, homo-
geneous type” (13). Through the soldier’s body the citizen’s body became a
site of social, national, and cultural transitions. It is important to remem-
ber that compulsory military service has been mandated since the founding
of the Israeli state in 1948. This is a significant detail that bridges the gap
between the civilian and military spheres and helps explain why the Shalit
affair, which I will discuss in the following section, generated such emotion
in Israeli society. In countries like the United States where military service is
not compulsory, it becomes much easier for wars to be abstracted and sepa-
rated from daily life.
Through theoretical treatises and training manuals, various Israeli edu-
cators, who were writing contemporaneously with the IDF training manu-
als, stressed the importance of shaping the national body. In The Clash of
Cultures in Israel (Shumsky 1955), Israeli educator Abraham Shumsky,
one of a growing number of Israeli social scientists, asserted the central
role of the army in culturally and socially reeducating the Oriental Israeli
youth, whom he found to be dominated “by passivity and by limited tech-
nological knowledge resulting from centuries of life in the feudal Orient”
(Shumsky 1955, 3; see also Sitton 1959, 12–13). What I am suggesting is
140 Y ehuda S harim
linking the standardization of military training in Israel with the demarca-

tion of improper Arab/â•‰Mizrahi bodies. Simultaneously, the army service, for
Mizrahi males at least, embodied dreams of assimilation and possible escape
from their Arabic past and Oriental bodies. Moreover, because of protests
by Sephardic-â•‰Mizrahi Jews that erupted before 1948 and continued, gaining
greater momentum in the late-â•‰1950s to the mid-â•‰1970s with the formation of
the Mizrahi Black Panthers,13 the Mizrahi male historically appeared in need
of training and control. I stress the controversy surrounding the Mizrahi
body here because it highlights how the perception of the soldier’s body and
the construction of an ideal Israeli Jewish body contrasted with an Oriental
(Jewish and non-â•‰Jewish) body. Emphasis on physical hygiene and fitness in
IDF training manuals became the staples of the new racialized Israeli man,
whereas the Mizrahi body existed outside it. The military homogenization
process, then, remedied the cultural and physical deficiencies of the Oriental
body by producing a body that countered the exiled notions of the ghet-
toized Jewish body.
“SWEAT REPLACES BLOOD”: CHOREOGR APHIES

OF CONSENT AND CHOREOGR APHIES OF DISSENT
In Israel, perhaps more than anywhere else on earth, national security is

inexorably bound up with the state of physical fitness in society at large.
—â•‰The Israeli Fitness Strategy
By the 1980s, IDF training manuals shifted from the idea of a man of muscles
to training a “natural body” that would seamlessly segue from the battlefield
to civilian life.14 Unlike the muscular Jew, whose body made visible his regen-
eration, the natural body was meant to camouflage his readiness and skills.
Through choreography that challenged the distinctions between civilian and
military spheres, military training confirmed and reinforced the creation of a
healthy, gendered, and dutiful Israeli citizen-â•‰soldier. This male body was deemed
heroic due to its ability to sacrifice, and thus remain active under threatening
circumstances.
To this end, I propose to highlight some choreographic strategies that ren-
dered the naturalization of the dutiful soldier body intelligible. The Israeli
Fitness Strategy (1980), coauthored by Lt. Col. Amos Bar-â•‰Khama (former chief
physical education officer) and Dr. Yehuda Shoenfeld, advocated a more sci-
entific approach to disciplining the soldier’s body than in the past. The physi-
cal fitness that was required of the soldier was now expected from the larger
Israeli society. The new strategy endeavored to respond to various societal
and political tensions through exercises of “stamina and perseverance” that

demonstrated the efforts of the Israeli soldier-citizen (Bar-K hama, Shoenfeld,
and Shuman 1980, 20, 21). This shift was desirable primarily to naturalize the
blurred boundaries between civilian and military life.
In 1980, military and health experts advanced a new program of exercise
and diet (Bar-K hama, Shoenfeld, and Shuman 1980, 50). Exercises ranged
from walking, aerobic training, weightlifting, and various diets (with refer-
ence to healthy Israeli food). Here, again, readiness emerged as a central con-
cept, routinized through drills and exercises that needed to be adopted and
shared by all Israelis, regardless of their position vis-à-vis the military.
Naturalization meant acceptance of and compliance with a sense of superi-
ority embedded in the doctrine of Zionist manhood that in the 1980s did not
require any proof or physical evidence. To spell it out more precisely, natural-
ization also referred to a point where the dual identity of soldier-citizen was
synthesized into a body that was fit and, above all else, dutiful and vigilant.
Similarly, in the chapter “The Ways to Discipline Loyal Soldiers” in his book
Soldiers in Flesh and Spirit (2004), Colonel G. Barahi (retired) linked physical
training with “the development of [the soldier’s] consciousness” as the two
central tenets in forming the soldier’s sense of “ultimate discipline” (43, 252–
253). The naturalization of the soldier’s body disrupted the separation of the
Israeli military from civil society.
It is critical to note that the training of docile and regimented bodies is
always accompanied by the appearance of the resistive body. We need to stress
the capacity of movement to intervene strategically and tactically in the world
(Castaldi 2006, Daly 1995, DeFrantz 2004, Giersdorf 2013, Novack 1990) and
the fact that choreography can be both liberating and repressive, depending
on the circumstances and actors (Giersdorf 2013, Morris 2006). Taking these
notions of choreography into account, resistance does not exist outside but
rather within what I call “choreographies of consent,” trained movements that
become unquestioned and undetectable. More specifically, by choreographies
of consent I refer to rehearsed and repeated actions that become routinized
in the body, naturalized, seemingly instinctive—which are in fact trained
movements that become incontestable. They become irrefutable because, as
Pierre Bourdieu has pointed out, the body naturalizes trained movements
and embodies ideologies “even when the mind says no” (Bourdieu 1990, 167).
Consent is achieved and then promoted through military training, which is
then transferred as an ideology to the whole population. But beyond belief or
obedience there is more at stake.
Testimonies of Israeli soldiers since the beginning of the Second Intifada in
2000 show not only how atrocious the repercussions of this choreography of
consent were, but also the materialization of choreographies of dissent within
142 Y ehuda S harim
those oppressive structures. From the soldier’s vantage point, in the face of an
alleged enemy, naturalization of the soldier-â•‰citizen’s movement meant pos-
sible abuse of power:
Imagine how powerful I felt all the time.â•›… I could kick anyone in the head
and nobody would talk. I could do anything I wanted.â•›… You are no longer
controlled by the law; you feel that you are the law. As if the moment you
pass from Israel to Gaza you are the law, you’re God. (Elizur and Yishay-â•‰
Krien 2009, 255; my italics)
Above all, the conflation of soldier and citizen gave birth to godlike excep-
tionalism. To be the law meant that your movement is beyond any rule. Or, as
another soldier recalls his experience:
I went on my first scouting mission.â•›… The guys with me just were shoot-
ing like crazy, someone threw a stone or something and they just started
shooting. I also started shooting like everybody else.â•›… It was cool because
it’s the first time that you fire your weapon, not just for training or with an
officer telling you what to do. (Elizur and Yishay-â•‰Krien 2009, 255; my italics)
Beyond consent, the eagerness to test out how successfully one has internal-
ized the “appropriate” response is what makes shooting (and killing) cool. You
shoot and move without thinking. You think that you act independently, but it
is actually the direct result of orders and trained movements.
On the other hand, consent was questioned and at times even accompanied
by resistance to the abuse of power. As another soldier testified,
I kicked an Arab in the belly. He threw stones and I came at him with my
military boot. I kicked him very hard and he turned completely blue, but
I didn’t give a damn and didn’t think twice. Now, the thoughts keep coming
back: what a terrible thing I did, I could easily have killed him. (Elizur and
Yishay-â•‰Krien 2009, 260)
Confronted with shame and guilt, a growing number of soldiers were

determined to change their military reserve duty to avoid similar situations.
What contributed to the political and social visibility of these conscientious
objections to military service was the foundation of the organization Shovrim
Shtika (Breaking the Silence), which since 2004 has collected testimonies of
Israeli veteran combatants.
The central aim of Shovrim Shtika has been to dismantle the fusion of the
soldier-â•‰citizen entity. In their mission statement, Shovrim Shtika reminds us
of the gap between the two terrains, insisting on a clear distinction between
the civilian and the military:
Our testimonies portray a different, and much grimmer picture in which

deterioration of moral standards finds expression in the character of
orders and the rules of engagement, and are justified in the name of Israel’s
security.â•›… Discharged soldiers returning to civilian life discover the gap
between the reality they encountered in the Territories, and the silence
about this reality they encounter at home.15
References to “gaps” and “silence” upon the soldier’s “return to civilian life”
ask us to take seriously the larger social consequences of eroding the distinc-
tion between the civilian and military spheres. To point out the impact of such
“ready bodies” in Israeli civil life, Shovrim Shtika insists that movement must
become conscious. In thinking about choreography of dissent, the body does
not move in silence. Instead, bodies move to a position of authority beyond
orders and instilled choreography. Embodied movement transformed into
ideology is questioned, and interrupted. Thus, resistance here complicates the
axes of a conventional understanding of consent and dissent with fixed points
of docility and resistance. Instead, intervention details the layered doubts and
multiple losses, the painstaking struggles and internal wars that occur within
the demigod soldier’s body. As the members of Shovrim Shtika state, “In order
to become civilians again, soldiers are forced to ignore what they have seen
and done. We strive to make heard the voices of these soldiers, pushing Israeli
society to face the reality whose creation it has enabled.”16
The blurring of boundaries between civilian and military raises troubling
questions about the extent to which notions of the soldier’s docility might
be transferred to the social and political spheres. To put it differently, how
does the expansion of military codes act as a set of disciplinary techniques in
Israel’s political and social spheres, as well as in the imaginary sphere through
which society views itself? Moreover, how is this ideology used in the media in
representations of the Israeli soldier as Israeli citizen? And when a soldier does
not fit the current image of masculinity, as in the case of Gilad Shalit, how is
he still portrayed as heroic?
EXPANSION OF MILITARY CODES IN ISRAEL’S POLITICAL

AND SOCIAL SPHERES
When talking about “natural bodies” that are perpetually prepared to serve
and sacrifice for a “sacred” national effort (Caillois 1959, 172), scholars have
noted the expansion of military codes to the cultural, social, and political
144 Y ehuda S harim
spheres of Israeli society (Gor 2005; Kimmerling 2001; Sasson-Levy 2006;

M. Weiss 2002; Ben-Eliezer 1995; Yosef 2004; Roginsky 2006; Almog 2000).
The work of film studies scholar Raz Yosef, for example, sheds light on the
domination and production of what Yosef calls “the Zionist body master
narrative” in Israeli culture from the early 1920s to the late 1980s (Yosef
2004, 16). In effect, a central result of this merging between civil and military
domains in the Israeli imaginary was a particular kind of gendered heroism.
The Israeli male soldier and his sacrifice embodied collective ideals: always
ready to die. Particularly since the materialization of Jewish nationalism, nar-
ratives about heroes and role models became the moral and cultural basis for
national unity in the face of internal tensions—ethnic, class, or political—
that threatened to divide Israeli society (Yosef 2004; also Yair and Gazit 2010;
Yair et al. 2014).
The melding of military and civilian life during the 1980s was enhanced
by the normalization of military training programs in all spheres of Israeli
society. It is best illustrated by the dissemination of krav maga (“defensive
movements”], a fighting system that was developed by the IDF in the early
1950s. Krav maga became a popular fitness system during the 1980s and 1990s
in Israel. Its crossover into civilian life as a fitness regimen had much to do
with its military origin. Army training again became a model for the Israeli
population. David Kahn’s study demonstrates that economy of motion and
readiness are at the heart of this technique (Kahn 2012, 13). Kahn, who is the
chief instructor for the Israeli Krav Maga Association in the United States,
drawing on the experiences of former IDF soldiers, asserts that “the essence
of Israeli krav maga is to neutralize an opponent quickly” (13). To this end,
krav maga “training tries to place you in the most realistic training scenarios”
(13). Since “instinctive reaction is paramount,” exercises are always against an
opponent, defending against multiple threats. What is deemed heroic under
those circumstances is the ability to endure, respond, and act. While krav
maga brought military and civil society ever closer, the Shalit affair was the
next step in this process, emphasizing the idea of endurance and moving the
ideal of heroism from an active to a passive body.
The Shalit affair, which demonstrated the soldier citizen’s shift from an
active to a passive body, challenged how Israeli society and culture imagine
the role of manhood in constructing a distinct national and racial identity,
a central ingredient in modern Israeli warfare. Additionally, Shalit’s release
highlighted the effect of the conflation of the soldier-citizen in Israeli con-
sciousness and politics. To put it another way using very concrete terms, this
affair and its media coverage reinforced the political and social status quo,
since the affair was used in part to suppress political dissent and ensure the
docility of the Israeli population.
The media coverage and representation of the abduction and release of Gilad
Shalit demands a close examination of the centrality of notions of masculinity
in current Israeli culture. Here again, the choreography of the soldier’s body
played a major role in reinforcing a new linking of heroism and passivity,
as it did in the past construction of an active soldier-citizen. Choreography
became a political tool, convincing the Israeli people that all soldier-citizens,
like Shalit, needed to be rescued because they were not strong (or, in other
terms, active) enough to take care of themselves.
On June 25, 2006, a unit of eight Palestinian militants17 attacked an Israeli
army tank near the village of Kerem Shalom at the southern end of the Gaza
Strip. The assault ended with the killing of two Palestinian militants and two
Israeli soldiers, the wounding of three others, and the abduction of one Israeli
soldier, Gilad Shalit. Although Shalit was captured while he was on his army
patrol, using the term “kidnapping,” as the Israeli government and media did,
stressed Shalit’s status as a civilian, a passive soldier, and, more importantly,
a “son” of the Israeli state. The politically loaded terms (and their ideological
implications) used to describe the captivity of the nineteen-year-old Shalit dis-
close only part of the nationalistic drama that would soon unfold during the
attempts to free him.
From the time of his capture, Shalit epitomized the idea of the “natural body,”
in which soldier and civilian are merged into a single entity that appears natu-
ral, although it is achieved through training. One party in particular found it
expedient to blur the military and civilian elements. Perhaps skeptical of the
ways the Israeli government might try to use his captivity, early in 2009 Shalit’s
family secretly hired the services of the public relations firm Rimon-Cohen-
Shinkman in an endeavor to bring Shalit home as quickly as possible.18 The PR
consultants advised various aesthetic and discursive maneuvers, including the
use of billboards, slogans, and flags with Shalit’s face printed in the nation’s
colors (white and blue) and referring to him as “the son of all of us.” The aims
were to change the perception of Shalit’s body from that of a soldier (captured
by the enemy while on military duty) to that of an Israeli citizen, as well as to
exert constant pressure on politicians and the media to secure his release.
The staging of Shalit’s particular body as a “natural body” could not be more
apparent than in the terms of the initial prisoner exchange. On September
30, 2009, Israel released twenty Palestinian women prisoners in return for
“updated and unequivocal proof regarding the well-being and status of Gilad
Shalit.”19 The evidence came in the form of a one-minute video of the soldier
that was produced by Hamas. Unlike Shalit, whose affiliation with a national
sovereign power granted him a privileged subjectivity superior to “mere num-
bers,” the twenty Palestinian women remained nameless in most Israeli and
Western media coverage.20
146 Y ehuda S harim
The image of Shalit’s fragile, agonized body signified passivity, an incapaci-

tated soldier who needs the state to rescue him because he cannot take care of
himself. In the video of Shalit, the camera zooms in on Shalit’s pale face. He
is dressed in a clean, borrowed IDF uniform and appears against a gray wall.
His back is slightly bent and his gaze hesitant. Shalit recites in a dry mono-
tone a text scripted by his captors, “Shalom [Hello].”21 He grins nervously. His
movement is minimal. “I am Gilad, son of Aviva and Noam Shalit, brother to
Hadas and Yoel, who reside in Mitzpe Hila.” The words that were given to him
immediately inscribe him not only in a family but in relation to the greater
nation-â•‰state as well. Insofar as Shalit embodies social, national, and political
values, his personal misery reflects national distress, symbolic capital that
Hamas utilized to its advantage. Because Shalit’s status as a representational
subject humanizes him and situates him within a larger social constellation,
we are compelled to identify with him, an individual body, rather than reduce
him to a faceless number. The anonymity of large numbers, the kind of mass
of undistinguished bodies represented by the released Palestinian women, is
replaced by compassion, corresponding to the “emotional empowerment” that
Hamas, as well as Shalit’s PR agency, strove for in order to put pressure on the
Israeli government.
Holding a Palestinian newspaper dated September 14, 2009, Shalit becomes
slightly choked up as he speaks the next words: “I am reading the paper in
order to read news about myself, hoping to find some information that will tell
me about my coming release. I have been hoping and waiting for the day of my
release for a long time” (quoted in Volf 2011). As the camera angle widens, the
viewers can now see that Shalit is sitting in a chair—â•‰his hunched back suggests
discomfort or injury, and his eyes blink slowly. His immobility, blinking eyes,
and nervous smile emphasize the critical role Shalit’s body played in this “cho-
reography of sentiment.” His hunched comportment conveys fear and help-
lessness. His inability to act conveys distress and paralysis. This limited bodily
movement, crafted by his captors, was critical in portraying Shalit as in need of
rescue. If his comportment had been upright and exuded even a modicum of
energy, the impression might have been quite different. But it was his passivity
that was eventually used to transform Shalit into a new kind of hero.
Shalit’s helplessness becomes even more insistent as his words attribute
to the state the power and responsibility to release him from his imprison-
ment: “I hope that the current government led by Benjamin Netanyahu will
not now miss the opportunity to finalize the deal, and I will therefore be able
to finally fulfill my dream and be released” (quoted in Volf 2011). Here it could
be argued that Hamas was interested in presenting Shalit as needing rescue
simply to garner sympathy for him among Israelis in order to put pressure on
the Israeli government for an advantageous prisoner exchange. If this was the
case, it was successful, for as negotiations between the two sides resumed, the
Israeli government initially offered to release 450 Palestinian prisoners, along
with another five hundred prisoners at a later date, in exchange for Shalit.
Keeping in mind that the video was produced by Shalit’s Hamas captors, who
effectively choreographed the performance down to Shalit’s posture and smile,
what was at stake for Israel in this disproportionate performance of empa-
thy, which, at the same time, postulates national power? Or, to put it another
way, how, even when Shalit did not conform to the ideal of the victorious mus-
cular Israeli soldier, could he still be portrayed as a heroic figure, a national
martyr? What does the construction of Shalit’s heroism reveal and conceal?
CHOREOGR APHING MARTYRDOM

On October 18, 2011, after five years in captivity, Sergeant Gilad Shalit was
transferred from Gaza into Egyptian custody at the Kerem Shalom crossing
on the Egyptian-â•‰Gaza-â•‰Israeli border. In an early interview on Egyptian TV,
which angered many Israelis because of the Egyptian interviewer’s unsym-
pathetic demeanor, Shalit appeared exhausted and unfocused, often failing
to answer questions put to him. Unlike the interviews he would have in the
future with the Israeli media, here Shalit expressed his hope that his release
would contribute to a future peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.
In the early morning hours, Israel’s lost son arrived by helicopter at Tel Nof
Airbase in central Israel a free man. Again, a choreographed performance of
the passive hero was internationally broadcast. Loud cheers were heard in com-
munity centers across Israel, and banks suspended operations so that employ-
ees and customers could watch the televised arrival. As the wide doors of the
helicopter opened, one saw that Shalit had changed his clothing: he was now
dressed in the dark olive-â•‰green uniform of the Israeli Defense Force. Shalit,
an emblematic example of the soldier-â•‰citizen, had returned as the property of
the Israeli nation and its army. In front of a large screen in Shalit’s hometown
of Mitzpe Hila, thousands of supporters held their breath. The first person to
welcome Shalit was the “father” of the nation, Israeli prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu. Netanyahu rushed to greet Shalit, who saluted the prime minister,
then shook his hand. Amid this all-â•‰male gathering, which also included chief
negotiator David Meidan and Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak, the absence
of Shalit’s own parents was striking. It was only after a few more minutes of
chat and an embrace with Netanyahu that Shalit went to meet his parents.
However, only Shalit’s father was there to welcome his son.
Netanyahu’s pledge to the Shalit family to “bring their son home” had been
fulfilled. Later, during the press conference, Netanyahu highlighted his per-
sonal involvement and agency in freeing Shalit and in minimizing “as much as
148 Y ehuda S harim
possible the danger for the citizens of Israel” (Quinn 2011). Once again Israeli
citizens were depicted as dependent on the state for safety while at the same
time needing to guard against attack.
Emphasizing the staging of Shalit as the national body, Netanyahu used
a pluralizing discourse in his concluding remarks at the press confer-
ence: “We are all blessed today with the return of Gilad home.â•›… Our sons
have returned to our borders.â•›… The people of Israel are alive” (Quinn 2011).
The metonymic movement from Gilad—â•‰one son—â•‰to many sons and then to
the rest of the people of Israel demonstrates the production of the national
body that Shalit embodied. But this rhetoric also highlights the kind of politi-
cal impulse at work in conflating individual bodies with national identity,
and in emphasizing the role of masculinity as a means of veiling moments of
national disjunction.
The media representation of Shalit also reveals the shift in the relationship
of the soldier’s body to the power of the nation-â•‰state. It demonstrates how the
soldier’s masculinity and heroism are constructions that can be adapted to
various political and national pressures. Given his fragile physical condition,
Shalit’s appearance contradicted old ideas of the “Sabra” citizen-â•‰soldier: the
Israeli native who could work the land as well as the machine gun, known
for his chutzpah, sexual appeal, and a “remarkable display of human per-
severance and stamina” (Bar-â•‰Khama, Shoenfeld, and Shuman 1980, 20).
Nevertheless, the media treated him as a hero (and later as a celebrity). Like
terrorism, Shalit’s “heroism” quickly became an item for public consump-
tion, a political spectacle, and a commercial and political commodity (Nandy
1995, 23).
Shalit was not only used by the state of Israel to represent its ideal of the
national body; he was also put to international uses. In the war on terror, Shalit
represented a Middle Eastern democracy and a staunch ally of the West. On
December 12, 2011, Shalit’s heroic status reached new heights when, during
a meeting with Gianni Alemanno, the mayor of Rome, the latter informed
reporters that he would seek to nominate Shalit for the Nobel Peace Prize
(Braha 2011). A few months later, Shalit and his family met French president
Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris, where Sarkozy castigated Hamas and praised Shalit
for his “dignity in the face of the ordeal” (Sayare 2012). The question remains,
however, as to which elements Shalit’s heroism depends on and what this hero-
ism entails from the personal and national perspectives.
Clearly, Shalit suffered while imprisoned. His thinness was a clear result
of malnutrition and lack of sunlight. However, I argue that Shalit became a
hero and national celebrity primarily because of his docility, which affirms
the powers of the nation and the dependency of its citizens on the national
apparatus. In that sense, the media attention Shalit received during his cap-
tivity and after his release must be regarded as another tool of “community
building” and homogenizing the national body.22 This Israeli national body is
constructed to stand in contrast to, or, more precisely, in a moral and physical
clash with, an essentialized Palestinian body, designated primarily as terrorist
and lacking moral values.
CONCLUSION
On October 11, 2011, with the mediation of Egyptian security and intelligence
representatives, Israeli and Hamas officials announced that they had reached
a deal for the release of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Shalit.
This disproportionate exchange was a direct result of the sentimental stag-
ing of Shalit as a comparatively helpless individual by his Hamas captors, the
Israeli and international media, and the PR firm hired by Shalit’s family. But
the performance of passivity and Israel’s sense of national agency also have
a deep political resonance in Israel’s collective imagination. Hence, the idea
of the helplessness of the soldier’s body must be seen in relation to the strate-
gic disciplining of Israel’s population as citizen-â•‰soldiers. And, of course, even
though Shalit’s helplessness and passivity could be construed as “feminine,”
there seems to be an enormous investment among the IDF and Israeli society
in maintaining the image of Israel’s “national masculinity” (that is, its abil-
ity to cope with and overcome difficulties). But in order to appreciate the sig-
nificance of “managing” the Israeli collective imagination by mobilizing the
population’s support and thus ensuring their docility, we must first review the
events that led to the swap agreement.
The summer of 2011 was unlike any other in the history of the Middle East.
Masses marched in the streets in Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Saudi Arabia,
Bahrain, and Israel against their regimes and governments. For Hamas, the
Arab Spring that jeopardized the future of Syrian president Bashar Assad also
pressured the organization’s leaders in Damascus. In Israel, domestic protests
questioned the Israeli government and social structure.
On September 4, 2011, a month prior to the deal that resulted in Shalit’s
release, Israel experienced unprecedented domestic unrest. The “march of one
million,” part of the global Occupy Movement that began in the United States
with Occupy Wall Street in response to the ongoing global recession, was
Israel’s biggest ever demonstration, with about 430,000 citizens taking part in
rallies across the country.23 According to local polls, the movement and its ral-
lies had the support of about 90 percent of the Israeli population. This histori-
cal demonstration followed fifty days of protests demanding social justice and
150 Y ehuda S harim
a lower cost of living. Israeli media speculated whether a new social or political
movement could transform Israeli politics for the next generation. According
to David Meidan, a former Mossad agent and the chief Israeli negotiator of
the prisoner exchange, the “Israeli social protest movement was a factor in the
swap deal” (Ravid 2012). The protest narrative was significantly altered by the
prisoners’ exchange and the Israeli government’s interest in maintaining con-
sent and order in the nation-â•‰state. Indeed, the front-â•‰page stories in Israel and
across the world on Wednesday, October 12, 2011, changed the tone in the
country. Now, with the return of Shalit, national unity was back in place. But
amidst such global, regional, and domestic unrest, it is difficult not to see the
irony in celebrating a passive hero.
NOTES
1. In March 2009, Shalit’s family erected a nonviolent protest tent outside the prime
minister’s official residence in Jerusalem. The tent was frequented by thousands
of Israelis every month, including the president, local celebrities, foreign digni-
taries and diplomats, and members of the Israeli parliament (Knesset). See Volf
(2011), 4.
2. See “Poll: 79% of Israelis Support Shalit’s Deal,” Yedioth Ahronoth, October
17, 2011.
3. By “heroism” I refer to the representation of political leaders and religious mar-
tyrs in popular culture, which fostered an understanding of role models. Beyond
tracing the creation of national identities, I aim to examine how the formation
of such outstanding individuals represents an effort to preserve and main-
tain a sense of social cohesion in modern societies in the face of divisive forces
(Durkheim [1893] 1933). Unlike celebrities, who are the product of popular cul-
ture and consumer society (McRobbie 1994), heroes embody societal values and
ideals and thus serve as models for identification and imitation.
4. See Schiff (1974, 54–â•‰57).
5. Theorists of Jewish history and culture such as Daniel Boyarin (1997), Todd
Presner (2007), Sander Gilman (1986, 1991), Oz Almog (2000), Michael Gluzman
(2007), Mikhal Dekel (2010), George L. Mosse (1966, 1996, 1998), and David
Biale (1986, 1992), have traced representations of Jewish male bodies in European
(mainly German) culture, interrogating anti-â•‰Semitic ideas of the Jewish body as
feminine and emasculated. These authors have also investigated Zionist “regen-
erations” of Jewish masculinity that frame Jewish manhood primarily in terms of
European aesthetics.
6. By “Oriental resident” I refer to two groups that had a major presence in the
area under Ottoman rule: the Arab Muslims, and the Middle Eastern Jews of
Palestine, also known as Sephardic-â•‰Mizrahi Jewry. I employ the hyphenated term
“Sephardim-â•‰Mizrahim” to refer to those who claimed a unified political stance
(as Palestinian-â•‰Jewish) and not solely descent from Jews of Spain, Portugal, the
Middle East, and North Africa. By the term “Sephardim,” I signal the largely
Hispano-cultural communities, who retained the use of Judeo-Spanish and

resided in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans and Levant (largely the
Balkans, Anatolia, and prestate Palestine). For central contributions on the intel-
lectual and cultural history of Sephardic Jews in the 19th-and early 20th-century
Mashriq and Maghrib, see the works of Rodrigue (1992, 1993, 1995), Benbassa
(1992), Benbassa and Rodrigue (2000), A. Levy (1992), Goldberg (1996), Alcalay
(1993, 2003), L. Levy (2007, 2008), Campos (2003, 2005, 2011), Jacobson (2006,
2011), Stein and Cohen (2010), and Stein (2004). By the term “Mizrahim”—
literally, “Eastern Jews”—I am signaling a mélange of Middle Eastern and North
African Jewish communities. According to recent scholarship, including Shohat
(1988, 1989, 2003), Shenhav (2006), Khazzoom (1999, 2003, 2008), Massad (1996),
Madmoni-Greber (2009), and Chetrit (2010), the category of the Arab Jew was
equivalent to the “Mizrahi” category, to identify the “internal victim” of the
Zionist “Europeanized” project.
7. See Tomko (2000).
8. In 1898, during the Second Zionist Congress held in Basel, Switzerland, Max
Nordau, a German-born physicist and acclaimed literary critic and Zionist leader,
conceived the idea of the “muscular Jew” (Muskeljudentum) to stress the urgent
need for promoting physical fitness among European Jews: “We must think of
creating once again a Jewry of muscles” (Nordau [1903] 1995, 547). For Nordau,
the body had become a site of Jewish (mental and physical) inferiority. His grow-
ing interest in the Jewish (male) body and in particular with gymnastics called
for re-envisaging the Jewish body, where muscle building appeared to be related
to a reawakening of the Jewish mind and psyche.
9. Scholarly work has revealed how the Haganah’s intelligence officers were sup-
ported by the British forces, among them Captain Alan Strange, a strong critic of
“pro-Arab British policy” long before Wingate, and Lieutenant Anthony Simonds.
Simonds, an officer of the Royal Berkshire Regiment, was to become a close friend
of Wingate’s and would serve under him in Ethiopia (Eshed 1997, 25–26).
10. Born in 1903, Orde Charles Wingate emerged as fighter involved in various cam-
paigns of the British Empire in Palestine, Abyssinia, and Burma, where he died
in 1944. He arrived to Palestine in 1936, as a British expert in Arab affairs. Yet,
it was in 1936 and thereafter that he encountered his “true” calling: to lead the
Jewish Army into battle. His involvement with the Yishuv increased criticism by
British officers who were largely pro-Arab and against more Jewish immigration
to Palestine at this crucial time. See Sykes (1959), and Tulloch (1972).
11. The Haganah [“defense” in Hebrew], also known as the Jewish Defense
Organization, was founded in 1920 by major Jewish workers parties, following
Arab attacks that led to the killing of new immigrants. Part of Wingate’s vision
of counterinsurgency tactics, the Special Night Squads were another response by
members of the Yishuv to the Arab revolt of 1936–1939. In contrast to the Jewish
Settlement Police (1936), the SNS was an independent Jewish force. For more per-
spectives about this encounter between Wingate and his Jewish recruits see Allon
(1970, in particular 9–10).
12. Although I focus primarily on the male Jewish body, these decisions impacted
ideals of the female Jewish body in the Yishuv period. See Bernstein (1992).
152 Y ehuda S harim
13. The Wadi Salib riots that erupted in 1959 (Segev 1999; Y. Weiss 2007; Nachmias
and Spiegel 2009) and especially the emergence of the Black Panthers move-
ment (Ha-â•‰Panterim Ha-â•‰Shehorim) in the late-â•‰1960s in the United States. (Chetrit
2010) positioned Sephardim-â•‰Mizrahim in a political position similar to those of
African Americans: a minority struggling against racial inequality. The geneal-
ogy and processes embedded in the blackening of the Sephardic-â•‰Mizrahi entity
must be read in tandem with the transnational flow of racial ideas and theories,
and particularly with the whitening of the growing Jewish community in the
United States (Goldstein 2006). On the relationship between the question of eth-
nicity and protests in the Israeli context, see Bernstein (1979, in particular 65–â•‰79),
Y. Weiss (2007), and Chetrit (2010).
14. By “natural” I signal the difference between the disciplined mind/â•‰body of the sol-
dier that “seems” to derive from nature rather than from being imposed through
training.
15. Shovrim Shtika, “About Us,” http://â•‰www.breakingthesilence.org.il/â•‰about/â•‰organization.
16. Shovrim Shtika, “About Us,” http://â•‰www.breakingthesilence.org.il/â•‰about/â•‰organization.
17. According to various publications, Hamas, Izz ad-â•‰Din al-â•‰Qassam Brigades,
and the Popular Resistance Committees and Jish al-â•‰Islam [the Army of Islam]
claimed responsibility for the attack.
18. Recounting the goals of the Shalit family’s campaign, Tammy Shinkman, a lead-
ing member of the PR team, spoke of “the empowerment of emotions” in “the
strategy … to make everyone empathize with the terrible fear that his or her child
could leave and never return” (Volf 2011). See also and Medad and Pollak (2011).
19. Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs—â•‰Security Cabinet Communique, September
30, 2009.
20. Regarding the women released, the Israeli newspapers assured the public that the
group included “no prisoners with blood on their hands.” Eight of them, Kafah
Bahash, Rimat abu Ayisha, Nahad Farhat Daghra, Sana’a Tzalah Hagargah, Fatima
Yunus al-â•‰Zak, Jihad Abu-â•‰Turki, Najuah Abed Alghani, and Samud Abdullah
Halil, had been sentenced to prison, from six months to three years, on charges
of “membership in a banned organization,” “conspiracy,” “disturbing the peace,”
and “assaulting a soldier.” The remaining thirteen, Ayat Kisi, Mimouna Javrin,
Barah Malki, Lila Mohammed Tzalah al-â•‰Buhari, Nifin Halil Abdallah Dak, Shirin
Mohammed Hasan, Sabeena Ziad Mohammed Manal, Hiam Ahmed Yusuf Ba’id,
Zahoor Abed Hamdan, Linan Yusuf Abu Ghulma, Lila Mohammed Tzalah al-â•‰
Buhari, Haba Assad Halil Alantasha, and Rojena Riyad Mohammed Jinajira,
received prison sentence ranging from three to eight years for “attempted murder”
and “membership in a banned organization.” Moreover, nineteen were from the
West Bank and one from Gaza. See Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs—â•‰Israeli
Security Cabinet Communique, September 30, 2009.
21. Gilad Shalit video recording, September 30, 2009.
22. See Appadurai 1986, 6.
23. According to the Israeli police, the largest march took place in Tel Aviv, where up
to three hundred thousand took part. In Jerusalem fifty thousand protested, and
in Haifa forty thousand marched. Israel’s population is 7.7 million.
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7
Affective Temporalities
Dance, Media, and the War on Terror
H A R MON Y BENC H
Media scholars have long argued for a recognition of the strong link between
war, technological advancement, and representations of violence.1 Regarding
the so-â•‰called war on terror and conflicts throughout the Middle East folded into
that term, examples of the war-â•‰technology-â•‰media link include the “embedded
journalists” that accompanied US soldiers in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, drone
aircrafts remotely piloted by soldiers sitting as though in front of a videogame
console, and “war porn”—â•‰graphic images eliciting horror and disgust and/â•‰or a
sense of victory among its viewers—â•‰circulating the Internet. There is no doubt
that contemporary warfare is an entertainment industry. In this chapter, I sug-
gest that war, technology, and entertainment media work together to form a
unit that applies affective pressure on individuals’ experiences of corporeality,
temporality, and cultural belonging. As Andrew Hoskins, a researcher in new
media ecologies and radicalism, notes, the global connectivity established by
televisual media in the 1990s has shifted to “a constant stream of wars and
disasters” and other crises that the media affectively frame by representing the
events’ “immediacy, intimacy, and proximity” for viewers (2006, 453). If we
examine what I am calling affective temporalities ca. 2001–â•‰2011, we must seri-
ously consider not only the impact of the war on terror (in addition to global
financial crises and environmental disasters, which are beyond the scope of
this chapter) on the feeling of belonging to a nation, culture, or community
158 H armony B ench
during this historical moment, but also its impact on a collective experience of
time/timings in conjunction with the media landscape.2
By using the term “affective temporalities,” I mean to indicate that experi-
ences of time are informed by and reflective of emotional and sensory states,
and that pace and rhythm register consequences in the affective (or emotional)
domain. Collectively and cumulatively, the tempos of a person’s life experi-
ences, entwined as they are with technologies of work and leisure, assert a
“rhythmic conditioning” (Leroi- Gourhan 1993, 287) that offers rhythms
for movement as well as cognitive function. But the rhythms we live by,
which condition and discipline our bodies, are not just a question of speed.
Among other things, pacing facilitates a feeling of belonging. As queer theo-
rist Elizabeth Freeman argues, “Cultural belonging is a matter of affects that
inhere, in many ways, in shared timings” (2010, xi). For Freeman, shared tim-
ings refer not only to shared historical moments but also to the apparatuses
that structure experiences of time—whether seasonal cycles, clocks, violent
conflicts, era-defining events, serial television programs, or digital notifica-
tions and reminders. Though disparate, these and other heterogeneous tempo-
ral units and measures allow us to move into and out of sync with one another.
They collectively set a pace to which we attune ourselves, and a rhythm within
which we maneuver.
Take, for example, wartime. The word itself invokes time in a historical
sense—the period of time during which a war is or was undertaken, as well
as time in an ontological sense—the state of being a nation at war. In this
term “wartime,” the violence of war is linked to an experience of temporal-
ity. War has a time proper to it that differentiates it, presumably, from peace-
time. To be in a (historical) time of war is to experience the flow of time in a
way that has been conditioned by being-at-war. This time is layered with other
times and intermixed with their flows. Certainly those who are personally
engaged in violent conflict feel the temporal register of wartime most acutely,
but even those who experience war at a geographic remove from its atrocities
are impacted by its effects through political rhetoric and legislative action.3
President George W. Bush, whose administration was consumed with the war
on terror, presided over the emergence of a temporality that unfurled with
the events of September 11, 2001, carried into the invasion of Iraq and even-
tual discovery and execution of Saddam Hussein, and bled into the hunt for
Osama bin Laden and others designated as terrorists. In addition to instituting
a new temporality—wartime—President Bush initiated military interventions
against an affect: terror. Bush thus established an experiential temporal reg-
ister for a historical time and modulated it affectively: the time of the war on
terror is a terror time, a time of fearfulness, anxiety, and the anticipation of
threat.
Affective Temporalities 159
Though my interest is in affective experiences of temporality as they relate

to wartime, I explore the issue not among soldiers or those personally endur-
ing the reality of violent conflicts. Rather, I tackle the domestication of war-
technology-media’s affective temporalities in the form of home entertainment,
specifically the reality competition television show So You Think You Can
Dance and the dance videogames Dance Dance Revolution and Dance Central.
What could dance in entertainment media possibly reveal about cultural
belonging during a time of war? In his analysis of war and cinema, philoso-
pher Paul Virilio contends that during World War II “the songs and dances
of Fred Astaire became disguised calls for a new mobilization” (1989, 10), and
Randy Martin has compellingly asserted in his analysis of mobilization as that
which connects dance and political theory that “dance displays, in the very
ways that bodies are placed in motion, traces of the forces of contestation that
can be found in society at large” (1998, 6). What economic or political con-
ditions could those who positioned themselves in front of television sets as
early-21st-century spectators and gamers have been rehearsing or performing
leading up to during, and in the aftermath of, the war on terror? What type of
mobilization does dance in reality-competition and videogame formats imply
at home and abroad? In what ways does dance in popular media reflect larger
conflicts in social and political realms during a time of war?
Contemporary warfare, computational and communications technologies,
and broadcast media share in crafting dominant temporal and affective struc-
tures that choreograph cultural belonging in a post-9/11 moment, which thus
manifest themselves in the way dance is taken up by and circulated through
popular media. David Gross argues that “controlling a population’s sense of
time [is] not only a source of power but one of the most important ways of exer-
cising power” (1985, 65). I would not go so far as to suggest that dance in popu-
lar media is a weapon of the state, but as cultural analysts have argued in the
wake of Foucault and Deleuze, the exercise of power remains even as the state
as such recedes from view in a society of control. Following Richard Grusin’s
analysis of news and entertainment media in a post-9/11 context, I argue that
dance in television competitions and videogames took on the formal and affec-
tive structure of 9/11—even, in the case of Dance Dance Revolution, anticipat-
ing the global distribution of 9/11’s medial affects. After all, 9/11 was not the
first of its type, but rather part of a series of airline hijackings, bombings, and
scares. The scale of the event simply obliterated its precedents, taking it out of
the chicken-egg cycle of violence and technology in order to start the time of
terrorism at Ground Zero.
As a media event, 9/11 transformed catastrophe from a televisual genre into
televisual media’s default organizational principle. Grusin explores the role of
media in preemptively imagining the post-9/11 future, giving representational
160 H armony B ench
form to that which has not yet occurred, and which may never come to pass.
By anticipating the not-â•‰yet, the media—â•‰from television personalities to blog-
gers and Hollywood screenwriters—â•‰ contributed to the anticipation and
imagination of threats on the horizon such that if they were to come about,
they would not come as a shock. Grusin explains: “Premediation is not about
getting the future right, but about proliferating multiple remediations of the
future both to maintain a low level of fear in the present and to prevent a
recurrence of the kind of tremendous media shock that the United States and
much of the networked world experienced on 9/â•‰11” (2010, 4). Premediation,
according to Grusin, “bring[s]â•„about a kind of affective response to media that
helps to inure us to, or train us to endure, media events that produce frighten-
ing, shocking, fearful, or traumatic response” (2010, 18). In other words, pre-
mediation provides the occasion to rehearse psycho-â•‰emotional and physical
responses to possible futures and all their imagined catastrophes.
Through our media consumption, we become habituated to whatever norms
our media devices establish, crafting a sense of belonging and way of being
that plays into those norms. In distinct contrast to Hollywood’s escapist
response to a nation in crisis during the Great Depression or its softly mili-
tarized nationalism during WWII, turn-â•‰of-â•‰the-â•‰21st-â•‰century entertainment
genres did not overwhelmingly offer audiences and consumers a release from
generalized anxiety and fear, but instead amplified, packaged, and sold nega-
tive affects as commodities. Rather than assuage fear or offer a respite from a
harsh reality, early-â•‰21st-â•‰century popular media trains viewers in precarity as
it premediates devastation.
Dance competition shows intensify drama by pushing competitors to their
physical and emotional limits. Just as the drumbeat of nationalism increased
support for US troops who appeared (in highly selective fashion) on the
nightly news, recorded clips of dancers’ difficulties in rehearsal and televised
interviews with the contestants emphasize audience members’ affective iden-
tification with the dancers, building a fan base and support system for each
competitor. The dramatic value of the show increases with each elimination,
and audiences are kept on the edge of their seats awaiting the results of each
new round of cuts. Dance videogames, in contrast, draw gamers in through
mastery of dance movement as assessed by a gaming console and through vid-
eos circulated online to demonstrate the player’s skill to a wider audience. Such
games ask players to literally incorporate information as it streams past, but,
rather than being surprised, gamers are apprised of what will come next. Just
as President Bush ordered preemptive strikes on the basis of what were per-
ceived to be Iraq’s future actions, gamers can see into the future of the dance
so that they are able to anticipate their next moves. Although these approaches
are oppositional—â•‰cultivating empathic identification to amplify surprise and
upset versus anticipating and securing oneself against the future—â•‰both reflect
predominant strategies in the circulation of media after 9/â•‰11.
Because dance is foremost a bodily practice, it clarifies and concretizes the
otherwise subtle ideological effects of anatomo-â•‰political arrangements embed-
ded in affective temporalities.4 This essay thus forwards a few notions through
its analysis of dance in reality television competitions and in videogames: first,
that the historical co-â•‰occurrence of the war on terror and radical changes in
media technologies situate them as parallel forces in the contemporary struc-
turing of affective temporalities and therefore cultural belonging; second, that
the affective temporalities inculcated in contemporary wars fought through
and in order to prevent acts of terrorism appear in domesticated, aestheticized,
and commercialized versions in reality television and videogames; and, third,
that our culture of immediacy and information overload requires us to keep
time or keep pace with the flow of information, and that this too is a key com-
ponent of reality television, videogames, and contemporary warfare. Thus the
affective temporalities I investigate through dance in this essay are necessarily
framed by terrorism and the war on terror on the one hand and computational
and televisual media on the other.
THE AFFECTIVE PEDAGOGIES OF FOX BROADCASTING’S

SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE
Fox Broadcasting’s reality dance competition show So You Think You Can
Dance (SYTYCD) premiered in the United States in the summer of 2005 fol-
lowing in the footsteps of other recent talent programs, such as the singing
talent show American Idol, which premiered in 2002. Both shows are part of
a global wave of reality and competition programs that have swept through
television since 1999/â•‰2000—â•‰led by the success of the reality shows Big Brother
and Survivor. Along with Dancing with the Stars, America’s Best Dance Crew,
The X-â•‰Factor, and America’s Got Talent, among a host of others, such programs
also hearken back to talent and variety shows from earlier eras of television
history such as American Bandstand (1952–â•‰1989), Soul Train (1970–â•‰2006), and
Star Search (1983–â•‰1995).
The format of SYTYCD has continuously shifted since its premiere, but is
generally as follows: Prospective contestants audition around the United States;
many are eliminated, a few advance to another round of auditions in Las Vegas
from which twenty contestants are selected5—â•‰ten young men and ten young
women. Dancers perform solos in whatever style is their specialty, but they are
also required to perform in styles outside their expertise. The show pairs the
dancers’ skills with chance—â•‰the contestants draw their assigned dance forms
out of a hat, and they may or may not be prepared for the routines they are
162 H armony B ench
given. International and folk forms have been adapted for the show, providing
an exotic and somewhat educational element, but styles loosely categorized as
contemporary, hip-â•‰hop, jazz, and ballroom are better represented than other
genres in terms of both the choreographers’ and contestants’ backgrounds.6
While SYTYCD challenges dancers by asking them to perform in a range of
movement vocabularies, the show is not set up to reward contestants who
possess deep knowledge of just one or two movement practices. Contestants
embody what dance theorist Susan Leigh Foster has called the “hired body,”
which “homogenizes all styles and vocabularies,” and is “uncommitted to
any specific aesthetic vision …â•›: it trains in order to make a living at dancing”
(1997, 255).7 Guest artists are brought in from professional companies to fully
demonstrate what expertise in a single form looks like, while the contestants
are expected to demonstrate their versatility and adaptability across a range of
styles and techniques.
Following precedents established in reality shows such as Big Brother and
especially American Idol, contestants are eliminated weekly.8 In So You Think
You Can Dance, each season begins with the panel of judges choosing whom to
eliminate after weighing input from the home audience—â•‰submitted via tele-
phone and text message. Later in the season, the judges turn their authority
over to at-â•‰home viewers, who then fully determine who will continue in the
competition and who will ultimately be crowned “America’s Favorite Dancer.”
In this section, I attend to specific components of SYTYCD’s structure as a
reality competition: the affective framing of each contestant, including the
amplification of personal struggle and appeals for preservation, and the nearly
inevitable catastrophe of elimination followed by video memorials that mark
the conclusion of each contestant’s time on the show. The more successful con-
testants on SYTYCD are at eliciting empathy from viewers, the more those
viewers vicariously expose themselves to the threats of annihilation and defeat
experienced by their favorite contestants.
CULTIVATING AFFECTIVE INVESTMENTS

SYTYCD asks performers to negotiate the contradictory requirements of mov-
ing in concert with one’s competitors for aesthetic effect while also standing
out from the crowd for the purposes of competition. As in other dance con-
texts, partnered and group choreographies demand that performers sync up
with one another, that they feel each other moving and take their cues from
each other. SYTYCD’s judges expect competitors to uphold this unspoken
social contract of mutual support, and will critique the dancers if they fail
to achieve this aesthetico-â•‰political ideal. Choreographic demands for mutual
support thus carry over into other aspects of the competition: contestants
are frequently shown cheering on their competitors, and during elimination

rounds later in the season it is common for the camera to show “safe” danc-
ers shedding tears on behalf of those who are in danger of being voted out of
the competition. In contrast to other reality competitions where villains are
familiar characters, SYTYCD establishes a strong community of dancers and
then asks fans to both participate in building that community through sup-
port and in shrinking that community by championing individual dancers at
the expense of others.
As the contestants prepare to perform their routines each week, audience
members are introduced to the pieces with a series of video clips indicating
what each piece is “about” and which, moreover, spotlight the dancers’ failures
to achieve its choreographic and aesthetic demands. Dancers fall out of lifts or
drop their partners, miss cues, crash into each other, and struggle with steps
and styles. This information does not serve to undermine the performers,
however. Rather, it visually amplifies the difference between initial attempts
and (hopefully) the more polished performances to come by preparing the
viewers and judges with premediations of the contestants’ possible failure.
Displayed in this way, their struggles build a bridge of identification between
competitors and viewers, and also frame their efforts within a strong narrative
of personal triumph.
For example, in season 7, all-star tWitch (Stephen Boss) joined Alex Wong for
a routine by Napoleon and Tabitha D’umo (Nappytabs) that became one of the
best-loved routines from the show. A ballet dancer who had taken a leave from
Miami City Ballet to appear on the show, Alex was a favorite. But audiences
and choreographers alike were unsure how he would fare with other move-
ment vocabularies. Tabitha sets up the piece in the introductory video: “We
were so excited when we found out we had two guys, and then we found out we
had Alex.” Alex concedes, “I am very very out of my element,” and Tabitha and
tWitch coax him to “step away from the barre.”9 Rehearsal footage shows Alex
marking and struggling his way through the Nappytabs choreography to Lil
Jon’s “Outta Your Mind,” but when he gets onstage, he blows everyone away.
The audience was prepared to see Alex perform adequately at best, awkwardly
fitting his ballet-trained body into the choreography’s percussive groove. But
the distance between the incompetence shown in rehearsal and the expertise
shown onstage is profound. Prepared for the worst, viewers are astonished by
how well Alex dances a style that is supposed to be foreign to him. His suc-
cess in this routine was amplified by the narratives of failure and inadequacy
that preceded his performance—premediations that set audience expectations
artificially low.
Primed with all the possibilities for coming up short, viewers watch each
routine with increased anxiety, hoping that, having had their mettle tested,
164 H armony B ench
their favorite dancers will sail through the difficult choreography. As Grusin
notes, it is not the role of premediation to get the future right, but simply to
imagine and prepare viewers for any possible future. SYTYCD prepares its
viewers from the outset for each contestant’s elimination, even as the dancers’
own objective is mastery of the material and success in the competition.
From the very beginning, audience members are given responsibility for the
show and especially for the performers. After the opening number each eve-
ning, hostess Cat Deeley presents the dancers to the audience: “Here are your
guys, and here are your girls” (my emphasis). The dancers are not there solely
for entertainment—they need caring for, they need votes, and they need both
the judges and audience members to confirm that their talents are of value and
to invest in their success. Viewing the dancers’ struggle in advance builds up
audience members’ affective investment in the performers, which is crucial
to the overall success of the television program. Situating each choreography
within the performers’ own personal challenges adds value to the show and
meaning to each piece (Elswit 2012). It is the dancers’ charge, then, to make
home audience members care about them, to establish an emotional connec-
tion that will prompt audience members to vote to keep them in the competi-
tion (Figure 7.1).
In season 5, Jeannine Mason and Brandon Bryant—the ultimate winner
and runner-up, respectively, performed a Laurieann Gibson duet to the Jordin
Sparks song “Battlefield” during the top-eight show. Jeannine notes her trepi-
dation in the introductory video: “I’m probably going to sweat a lot, maybe
even cry.”10 And cry she does. Seeing Jeannine fighting back tears in a moment
of vulnerability, viewers are invited to feel for Jeannine and to support her in
her personal struggle to learn and perform the choreography. They are rooting
for her when she gets onstage, and she delivers an excellent performance. Her
success is not assured, however. She still needs her fans to vote.
Though the audience has the final say, one cannot underestimate the judges’
ability to modulate audience affect with their tearful or somber responses,
and, for the lucky ones, the scream of Mary Murphy’s “Hot Tamale Train” that
signals a dancer’s safety in the competition. But safety is, of course, a short-
lived luxury achieved at the expense of another contestant’s elimination, and
it is almost immediately replaced by the anxiety of the next round of cuts.
Contestants are thus suspended in a precarious state, knowing that their time
on the show will come to an end, but unable to predict their own departure. A
weak performance or, worse, a weak routine can quickly bring an end to their
participation in the competition. The dancers themselves never know from
which direction a threat might emerge: poorly matched partners, an unfamil-
iar dance form, a routine that lacks audience appeal, steps or patterns that
are difficult for the dancer, a lackluster performance, the judges’ responses
Figure 7.1 2013 Publicity poster for So You Think You Can Dance from the show’s
public Facebook timeline. The poster calls upon fans to vote for their favorite
performers, thereby ensuring their continuation in the competition.
that determine elimination early in the season or later sway public opinion, or
finally, the responses from home audiences who ultimately decide the winner.
Navigating a televisual space between neoliberal individualism and aestheti-
cized terrorism, SYTYCD gives its contestants no control over the conditions
of their performance, yet suggests that they alone are to blame when they do
not pass muster and then plucks them off the show one or two at a time.
The competition format involves an omnipresent risk that is uncomfortably
close to the threats of annihilation peddled by the Bush administration and
to those who have been impacted by the economic crises that followed the
9/11 attacks. All are left asking, “Am I next?” Will I be the next victim of a
terrorist attack? Will I be the next to lose my job or my house? Will I be the
next to be sent home? Reality competition shows are lessons in precarity—a
shared social condition of anxiety and vulnerability rendered as consumable
entertainment. With Americans reminded nearly every day of their exposure
to ambient threat on the street, in airports, and on the news, it is no wonder
that the entertainment industry likewise adopted threat as its own, modifying
166 H armony B ench
existing television game and competition formats to heighten anxiety and,

more importantly, to require more audience involvement through constant
polling while rendering the performers themselves more vulnerable to attack.
On SYTYCD, the stated objective of determining not the “best” dancer but
the “favorite” dancer is framed for audience members and contestants alike
in a high-â•‰stakes competition in which everyone awaits their fate, knowing
that skill alone will not ensure successful evasion or preemptive defeat of the
threats coming from every corner. Reality competitions simulate the violent
temporalities of war, focusing attention on the present moment and offering
viewers domesticated, consumable versions of a felt time that accompanies the
fatal possibility of failure. Drawn in by dancers’ charisma, good looks, per-
formance quality, technical facility, or some other intangible attribute, sym-
pathetic audience members vicariously experience the continuous threats to
their favorite performers and mourn when they are cut from the competition.
SAYING FAREWELL: GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

After an evening of performances and competition, television audience mem-
bers vote for their favorites via telephone or text message, and the votes are
tallied to determine which performers will be in danger of elimination. Rather
undemocratically, audience members may vote an unlimited number of times,
so well-â•‰organized fans and individuals engaged in “power voting” can stra-
tegically inflate the number of votes and sway the competition in favor of a
particular dancer. As I mentioned above, it is crucial for audience members
to support the performers, who stand sweating and out of breath next to the
resplendent hostess, Cat Deeley, each week. Vying for the top spot in the com-
petition, each dancer appeals to the judges and viewers to save them from,
or at least postpone, the catastrophe of elimination. Deeley is there for moral
support when the judges give their feedback, but it is also she who delivers the
bad news when the voting results reveal the bottom four.
Each week, performers dance under the threat of elimination. Any mistake
could be cause for dismissal; thus they are hypervigilant, pushing themselves
hard for the privilege of continuing to compete. On the results show, the con-
testants and the audience review the successes and failures of the previous
evening’s performances. Generally, two or three performers are brought out
to be told of their fate. Will they be safe, or are they in danger? Deeley offers
teasers to the dancers and to the home audience, heightening and prolong-
ing their anticipation. First, the bottom four—â•‰two guys and two girls—â•‰must
be determined. Barely able to contain their anxiety, contestants (especially
female contestants) frequently clutch one another, their knuckles turning
white as the pressure and excitement build. Deeley turns to one contestant,
reviewing his or her accomplishments the previous evening. “Was it enough

to keep you safe?” she asks. “We’ll find out,” she says, but only after a commer-
cial break, or after speaking with another contestant. The judges’ comments
are read or played back in sound-bite form—only the most effusive praise or
biting critique. Segments of the dancers’ routines are played back, the high-
lights of which, such as spectacular leaps or lifts, are frequently shown in slow
motion. “The judges loved it,” Deeley says, “but did America?” Deeley draws
out the wait before of each revelation, stringing the audience along, delaying
both disappointment and elation and the emotional resolution they bring.
The critical moment in which everyone watching is suspended, waiting, fills
with the sounds of Deeley’s fingertips finding the seams of the envelope, the
pop of its seal breaking, the rustling of paper as she pulls the fateful card
from its sheath; all these sound events slow time to a halt and amplify the col-
lective experience of temporality: acute anticipation. Performers’ and audi-
ence members’ held breath finally gives way to sighs of relief or resignation,
groans or tears, as one by one Deeley reveals which dancers are in danger of
being cut.
Because the format of SYTYCD requires that audience members invest in
the performers, eliminated dancers do not leave without a fond farewell. Their
departure is marked with what can only be described as a memorial service—a
farewell video montage plays, showing all their proudest moments. Andrew
Hoskins notes that modern media are fixated on commemoration (2006, 458);
they constantly memorialize events by marking their anniversaries or recycle
them as models for more recent crises. Such representations serve to displace
an event—or a person, as the case may be—in favor of a selective history fabri-
cated through powerful imagery that serves to “sequentially connect events,”
as well as “to speculate on and to promote the next in the series” (457). While
Hoskins is speaking specifically to the narrative power of television in dress-
ing current events in the cloaks of previous crises, the same impulse toward
memorialization is apparent on SYTYCD, and it serves a similar function of
offering viewers a summary of events while at the same time increasing the
stakes of the competition and preparing viewers for the next round of elimi-
nations. A video highlights all the good things that happened for the dancer,
from triumphs onstage to offstage friendships, and especially challenges sur-
mounted during the competition. Fixing each dancer nostalgically in viewers’
memories, the videos allow the show to dispose of its competitors affectively,
offering viewers and dancers a sense of closure before moving on with the
competition. The show requires the dancers’ disposability, yet also requires
that elimination be mourned, that each competitor be acknowledge for her or
his efforts in self-improvement as well as her or his contribution to the show
overall. Though the comparison seems crass, it is nevertheless apt for a show
168 H armony B ench
whose structure mirrors the post-â•‰9/â•‰11 environment: like soldiers who have
fallen in the war on terror, whose determined but hopeful faces are shown at
the end of the nightly news, the dancers who are eliminated from the competi-
tion are memorialized so as to not be forgotten.
As with other reality television shows, SYTYCD intertwines information
and sensation—â•‰a performance, critique, or elimination cannot be rendered
“in itself”; it cannot be pried from the affects that frame transmission. Each
moment is dramatized for maximum effect and entertainment. While televi-
sion programming exposes viewers to real and manufactured crises, playing
to and modulating viewers’ emotional responses for the purposes of enter-
tainment, videogames such as Dance Dance Revolution and Dance Central
ask gamers to physicalize—â•‰that is, to incorporate and respond to those crises
as bodily events. In other words, affective temporalities in reality television
operate through audience members’ empathic identification with contestants,
while in videogames affective temporalities operate through players’ enact-
ment of or direct engagement with competition.
K EEPING PACE: KONAMI’S DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION

AND HAR MONIX’S DANCE CENTR AL
According to Hoskins, our information age, saturated with threats of global
violence coursing through communication networks, demands a different
physicality and orientation to time than previous eras: “Rapid and flexible
responses are required to be adequate to the complexities of our networked
age,” which, in turn, demands “a greater orientation to the anticipation of the
near future” (2006, 461). Grusin likewise isolates anticipation as significant to
the experience of post-â•‰9/â•‰11 mediality, and by extension to everyday life in the
first decade of the 21st century. Grusin argues, “Anticipation names the tem-
poral state appropriate to premediation, as well as the affective quality fostered
by the proliferation of mobile social networks or the creation of an Internet
of Things” (2010, 129). The anticipatory gesture, he explains, includes “your
physical, embodied turn to the keyboard and screen to check your email or
Facebook page,” as well as the chimes and alerts of media devices notifying
their users of newly received messages or reminding them of upcoming events
(130). As an attitude, anticipation is both affective and temporal—â•‰eliciting
feelings of anxiety, apprehension, or desire for gratification and/â•‰or control in
awaiting the arrival of the future. Videogames are uniquely able to cultivate
an attitude and a posture of anticipation, as they call upon gamers to respond
quickly to new information, including virtual threats, and dance videogames
such as Dance Dance Revolution and Dance Central give corporeal shape to
both the production and dispersal of such information and threats. They
compose a player’s spatial and temporal orientations, physically instantiating

the anticipation Hoskins and Grusin describe.
As in the dance club environments that are their most immediate reference,
music plays a crucial role in guiding and supporting dance in each of these
games. Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) utilizes electronic dance music (EDM),
providing a complex set of electronic beats to coordinate gamers’ movements.
Underlying rhythms are sometimes foregrounded at unexpected moments to
increase the complexity of play, defying choreographic logic in favor of align-
ing players’ bodily movements with musical abstractions. Dance Central’s use
of popular songs is no less important to the structure and experience of the
game. Pop music has broad mainstream appeal, thus assuring gamers’ prior
familiarity with many of the songs in Dance Central, and the tunes chosen
have a strong beat and are easy to dance to. In complete contrast to the music-â•‰
driven movement scores for DDR, which seem to be related to the stress-â•‰
inducing ambient music of early videogames, Dance Central’s choreographers
provide eight-â•‰count phrases grounded in the symmetry of dance studio com-
binations that repeat movements on the left and right sides. Pop music offers
precise beats to organize gestural patterns, which can be counted out in twos,
fours, and eights by the choreographers and measured and evaluated by Dance
Central’s gaming system, and EDM offers a complex array of beats for DDR
designers to choose from in mapping out a set of cues. Neither game is set up to
recognize the way dancers might actually engage with music by floating over
or “milking” counts, for example, or by tapping into their own unique ways of
moving. From the perspective of the gaming system (if not always the players),
the emphasis is on the timeliness of execution rather than expression or inter-
pretation, which the games themselves cannot evaluate. In this section, I focus
on the demand to keep pace within dance videogames—â•‰a rigorous rhythmic
and gestural training through gameplay that syncs up with similar demands
in contemporary warfare. I argue that DDR and Dance Central orient gam-
ers toward the strategy of premediation and cultivate stances of anticipation
and preemption found elsewhere in the affective landscape of the post-â•‰9/â•‰11
United States. Whereas viewers of dance competitions vicariously experience
the threat of defeat on behalf of the dancers with whom they empathically
identify, players of dance videogames experience that threat directly, absorb-
ing, corporealizing, and performing gestures that replace the projectiles and
enemies of more traditional gameplay.
STEP IN TIME WITH DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION

DDR is a rhythm-â•‰action game that was first released as an arcade cabinet and
later followed by a home console version—â•‰both of which are available for one
170 H armony B ench
or two players. When playing DDR, gamers stand on a platform (arcade) or a

dance pad (home) facing a screen/monitor.11 Gameplay begins with the selec-
tion of a skill level, a character to represent the gamer onscreen, and a song.
At that point, the gamer readies him or herself on the platform or dance pad,
a floor-like gaming surface divided into a grid of nine squares, four of which
have pressure sensors and show an arrow indicating up, down, left, or right,
corresponding to cues (outlines of arrows) that sit at the top of the screen.
When the music begins, a set of arrows (sometimes called notes or step notes)
begins scrolling up the screen in a predetermined order, and the player tries
to step on the arrow on the platform/pad when the onscreen arrow reaches its
respective cue. Well-timed steps are awarded a “perfect” or “marvelous” score,
whereas missteps invite jeers from an unseen audience within the game space.
Many of the EDM songs have been composed in-house; some are remixes of
popular tunes, but all have been formatted to support the DDR gaming experi-
ence. The songs themselves are only one to two minutes long, and each skill
level crams an increasing number of steps into that short duration—the most
difficult tracks include twelfth-and sixteenth-note steps in songs that are three
hundred beats per minute or faster. Much like Hoskins notes of television,
“brevity and movement” (2006, 454) are of key importance to DDR, in con-
trast to the immersive games that were the gold standard of the gaming indus-
try in the 1990s and early 2000s. The game is not designed to be played for long
durations by a single individual. Rather, the short bursts of energy required to
play DDR lend the game to turn-taking, and consequently to participation in
a gaming community. This gaming community is global, and even though the
availability of home console versions of the game exponentially surpass arcade
machines, DDR tournaments featuring the machines are held annually across
the world so that gamers can reaffirm their commitment to both game and
community.
At one such tournament in 2006, a group of guys shares a course—a sequence
of songs that plays continuously so as to increase the length of gameplay—
made of what were then considered to be the most difficult songs.12 They lean
their upper bodies forward, separating their upper and lower halves and mak-
ing room for fine movements of the feet by sticking out their butts. Their arms
dangle loosely as forgotten appendages or hold tension from the effort of keep-
ing their feet moving in time. The dancers’ feet shift across the surface, the
soles of their sneakers squeaking as they skid across and between the illumi-
nating arrows. Onlookers cry out when competitors only get a “great”—not a
perfect or marvelous evaluation of their execution. The stakes are high, and
even though the dancers are having fun as they switch out between songs, it
is nevertheless a competition that comes down to precision. Great is not good
enough.
As is typical of the rhythm-action genre, players are first bombarded with

new information. Under the game’s pressure, players ask their bodies to keep
up with unfamiliar patterns of action as the arrows scroll up the screen. With
practice, players become accustomed to the pacing of the arrows. They can
increase the complexity of the sequences, and can even memorize the order in
which the arrows appear, thus predicting rather than reacting to the alignment
of arrow and cue. Part of mastering DDR is turning its initially unforeseen
threats, which result in missed cues, into threats that can be anticipated—
stepping on cue. Through repeated gameplay, gamers create their own experi-
ence of premediation, increasing their exposure to the next steps in a given
song, such that they can anticipate them with each successive attempt, eventu-
ally memorizing the sequence and timing. As with other videogames, DDR
players begin to see into each song’s future through trial and error; they see
what threats lie in wait in this virtual obstacle course. Although Grusin indi-
cates that premediation is not about “getting the future right,” for many DDR
gamers, getting the future right, and getting better at getting the future right
(i.e., accurately predicting or anticipating upcoming cues), is exactly the point.
To assist the project of premediating gameplay, gamers can look up arrow
sequences, or “step charts,” on the fan website DDR Freak (http://ddrfreak.
com) and learn the songs’ variously patterned sequences in advance of playing.
Consulting step charts, gamers can grasp a routine as a whole outside of time,
as it were, before attempting it at tempo on a DDR machine. In shooting and
fighting videogames, winning (or beating) the game means successfully neu-
tralizing threats through anticipation, deflection, and/or annihilation. DDR
asks gamers to neutralize its threats by stepping in time to its directives, and
the fan culture surrounding the game supports gamers’ efforts by providing
additional coaching assistance. Expectations for performance/play are thus
both defused and amplified by prior training: defused because, having prac-
ticed with a step chart, a “serious” gamer is not encountering a cue sequence
for the first time in front of his/her peers, and amplified because rehearsal
leads to higher expectations for performance overall (Figure 7.2).
Once players have reached a certain level of mastery, they may decide to
incorporate freestyling into their gameplay. Ironically, DDR freestyling is
usually choreographed rather than improvised. Although DDR establishes a
pressure pattern that logically corresponds to the movements of the feet, free-
stylers use all parts of their bodies to apply the necessary pressure on areas of
the platform/dance pad in the time given. They might include hand plants,
knee drops, spins, or bar flares. These players create choreographic composi-
tions from the structure and timing offered by DDR’s cues. They diminish
their ability to hit cues perfectly, however, by introducing a layer of spectacle,
ingenuity, and corporeal cunning that the game affords but does not require
172 H armony B ench
Figure 7.2â•‡Japanese Dance Dance Revolution player Takaske playing in “double” mode,

in which a single player utilizes both dance areas, drastically increasing the complexity
of gameplay.
from its players. If gamers play as a duo, these freestyle choreographies may
also incorporate a layer of narrative, for example of friendship or conflict or,
with the notably rare inclusion of a female gamer, a love scenario. This expres-
sion of creative agency within DDR’s strict structure offers a model for the
rapid and flexible responsiveness demanded of citizens in an age of mediated
terror, but the gamers have additionally prepared themselves by premediating
the game, finding many possible choreographic and improvisatory solutions
for well-â•‰timed strikes.
Dance videogames train their players to adopt an attitude of preparedness,
setting gamers’ anticipatory postures in full-â•‰body motion and shaping gamers’
physical orientation to visual and rhythmic information with the demand for
its embodiment. Dance Central, however, makes explicit what DDR leaves open
to interpretation: the position of a gamer’s body in space at a given moment
in time. Each game penalizes misalignments in space or time, but where
DDR emphasizes the “when” of movement by specifying a narrow window of
time during which a gamer should strike a spot on the floor, Dance Central
emphasizes the “what” of movement by specifying the shape of bodily motion

in time. In order to prepare gamers to perform Dance Central’s choreogra-
phies, the game’s designers include training in the gaming experience. Where
DDR fans provide each other with assistance in the form of step charts and
advice in online discussion boards, Dance Central models itself on dance as
a studio practice and thus incorporates the building blocks of learning steps,
moving on to combinations, rehearsing a phrase, and finally performing the
choreography as a whole.
PREEMPTING AND PREMEDIATING CHOREOGRAPHY

IN DANCE CENTR AL
Harmonix, the makers of such music-â•‰driven videogames as Guitar Hero and
Rock Band, released Dance Central for the Xbox 360 in 2010, followed by Dance
Central 2 in 2011 and 3 in 2012. Powered by the Kinect, a peripheral motion
tracking system added to the standard Xbox console, both of which were devel-
oped by Microsoft, Dance Central features onscreen characters whose move-
ments gamers follow. Where DDR gamers respond to arrows onscreen and
move their bodies according to the speed and direction of those arrows, the
onscreen characters in Dance Central have a pedagogical purpose: they teach
the gamer the choreography. Harmonix hired choreographers to create dances
for the videogame, the motion-â•‰captured performances of which animate the
onscreen characters. The Kinect detects the position and (dis)placement of a
gamer’s body, which is then measured against that of the data animating the
onscreen character.
Even though the experience of learning choreography in the game sug-
gests a dance studio rather than a social setting, a long introduction shows the
game’s characters gathering for a night at the club, and each routine is sited in
an urban social milieu, with the onscreen dancer surrounded by friends and
onlookers. Players begin by selecting a song and a mode—â•‰Perform It, Workout
Mode, Dance Battle, Challenge Mode, and Break It Down—â•‰along with a level
of difficulty: Easy, Medium, or Hard. Unlike traditional videogames in which
gamers direct an avatar in screen space via a controller, in Dance Central the
gamer’s body is itself the controller, but does not direct the movement of the
animated dancer onscreen. Instead, the animation performs the choreography
expertly regardless of a gamer’s skill at executing the dance movements. The
onscreen animation’s body parts turn bright red, however, when a gamer mis-
steps or falls out of sync with the dancing image. The objective of the game is
to match one’s own body to the image, creating the same shapes at the same
time as the animation. In other words, the gamer copies rather than controls
the onscreen character.
174 H armony B ench
The Break It Down mode in Dance Central allows gamers to learn each step
individually, at tempo or in slow motion. If a player struggles with a particular
move, he or she is offered the opportunity to practice it a few times, while a
voice prompts him or her with counts (5, 6, 7, 8) or instructions (step, together,
step, together). Gamers do not have to master each step in order to move on,
however, and the steps are put together in short combinations throughout the
Break It Down session, culminating with a phrase that includes all steps to be
encountered in the upcoming dance—though not in the exact order of their
appearance. Taught in such low-stakes environments prior to actual gameplay,
the choreography itself becomes less of a threat. During gameplay, onscreen
flashcards notify gamers which moves are coming up in the sequence, allow-
ing them to anticipate the choreography before performing it. Dance Central
teaches to the test, and no dancer is left behind in its form of dance pedagogy.
Dance Central inherits the dance-as-information-flow developed in Dance
Dance Revolution and other rhythm-action games, but rather than emphasize
the rapidity or ingenuity with which one can fulfill a minimal choreographic
score made of arrows corresponding to steps, Dance Central maps each of
the choreographies out in their entirety, with the exception of a freestyle (i.e.,
improvised) portion of each dance. The anticipatory posture cultivated in
Dance Central is distinctly different, however, from that in DDR. Whereas DDR
specifies which floor sensors must be activated and in what sequence, leaving
other compositional and stylistic choices to gamers, Dance Central offers gam-
ers composition, style, and physical placement as a complete unit. As a result,
Dance Central gamers can confidently put themselves into the positions called
for rather than developing their own choreography. Additionally, where DDR
gamers anxiously focus on keeping pace with the arrows onscreen, spending
time outside of gameplay to master the sequences, Dance Central players see
exactly which steps they will be asked to perform and can time each execution
accordingly.
Though anticipation manifests itself differently in each game, each preme-
diates the future such that players can render threats predictable, thereby pre-
emptively nullifying them. Mirroring what Grusin describes as the move from
anticipation to securitization on the part of US government agencies, both
DDR and Dance Central gamers are able to anticipate what is known and take
appropriate action, rather than fearing what is unknown. Anticipation leads
the gamers to secure themselves against future threats by preparing in advance.
Indeed, players secure themselves even further by posting videos online only
when they have achieved excellent scores on the Hard setting, thus limiting
the potential criticism that is otherwise rampant in YouTube comments.
Unlike the players of DDR, many of whom exert creative ownership over
the game by crafting routines, Dance Central players place no premium on
ingenuity, which is immeasurable within the game’s parameters. In a kinder,

gentler gaming experience, Dance Central sets its players up for success by
providing all the tools (movements) and criteria for evaluation in advance and
by generally withholding judgment of gamers’ freestyle dancing. As a result,
players can slide through the freestyle portion with little motion. Rather than
take advantage of the absence of anticipated threats against which gamers have
preemptively secured themselves, gamers frequently forfeit the opportunity to
be creative or expressive. At least this seems to be the pattern in videos posted
to YouTube. There is safety in choreography and vulnerability in improvisa-
tion. As the GameSpot reviewer Chris Watters notes of Dance Central’s free-
style sections, players “feel more suited to just doing weird stuff in front of the
camera than actually trying to record some legit moves.”13
Dance Central fan RiffraffDC has been posting YouTube videos of his suc-
cesses playing the game since late 2010. The split-screen videos show onscreen
gameplay alongside his dancing, allowing viewers to compare his image with
that of the game’s model (Figure 7.3). Online viewers can also see how his
dancing is evaluated by the game, with indications that his movements are
“nice” or “flawless” as stars and points accrue on a boom box at screen left.
But like other gamers who post videos of their gameplay online, RiffraffDC
shows only his best attempts. Although his mastery has clearly been developed
over time (he frequently notes how many hours of practice it took for him to
reliably get high scores), viewers only see the final product, not the previous
Figure 7.3 RiffraffDC dancing as “Miss Aubrey” in Dance Central 2.

176 H armony B ench
failed attempts or lackluster scores. Prompted by the onscreen flashcards,

RiffraffDC smoothly executes the choreography. When the freestyle portion
arrives, however, his certainty wanes. During one YouTube video he exclaims,
“I don’t know what I’m doing!”14 and at the conclusion of another he simply
comments: “Terrible.”15 Most of his freestyles are concluded apologetically,
with a self-â•‰effacing shrug or self-â•‰deprecating commentary. When RiffraffDC
upgraded to Dance Central 2, he turned off all the freestyles, and thus he was
able to confidently perform the choreography as it was given, rather than cre-
atively compose his own movement.16
Both gaming systems emphasize execution, success at which can be quan-
tified, rather than expression or interpretation, which the gaming platforms
cannot evaluate, and which many gamers shy away from or approach ironi-
cally. Neither Dance Central nor DDR evaluates players’ creativity, only
their achievement within a set of designer-â•‰defined and platform-â•‰restricted
parameters.
Whereas user-â•‰ generated choreography is a creative response to those
parameters in the case of DDR players, Dance Central seems to establish chore-
ography as a program—â•‰something to be successfully executed rather than cre-
atively interpreted as, one hopes, one would do in a social setting. Performing
the choreography as it is given, Dance Central players share no responsibility
with the choreographers or their fellow players for the aesthetic success of the
dance, as their only task is to ensure success according to measurable criteria.
Whereas participants in a social dance form would assert belonging in relation
to a mutual ethics of care in the development of that form through improvi-
sation, ingenuity, and reference to other practitioners, Dance Central players
learn a routine to a song with no further application of, or concerted attempt
to adapt, that knowledge to different circumstances. Games like Dance Dance
Revolution and Dance Central do not teach gamers how to dance; they instruct
gamers in the corporeal assimilation of audio-â•‰visual information, habituating
and training bodies for the anxious tempos of a post-â•‰9/â•‰11 United States.
CONCLUSION: ON DANCE AND THE AFFECTIVE

TEMPOR ALITIES OF WAR
In this chapter, I have suggested that living in a nation at war impacts our
collective experience of time, namely, through the domesticated versions of
these temporalities evidenced and consumed through entertainment media.
As Elizabeth Freeman remarks in her own analyses of the temporal registers of
belonging, “These bodies and encounters are, themselves, kinetic and rhyth-
mic improvisations of the social” (2010, 172). What kinds of kinetic and rhyth-
mic improvisations do we engage in as we watch television or play videogames?
What visions of the social do we participate in through our media consump-

tion? How does dance offer scholars an analytical frame through which to
access the rhythms that inform everyday life in a post-â•‰9/â•‰11 context? I have
looked specifically at the dance reality competition show So You Think You
Can Dance and the dance videogames Dance Dance Revolution and Dance
Central because their explicit deployment of dance and dancing bodies allows
us to see how the rhythmicities of the war on terror play out in commercial-
ized and aestheticized terrains. In particular, I have focused on the posture
of anticipation as an orientation that positions a subject in front of a threat—â•‰
whether that threat is one’s own defeat, a favorite contestant’s elimination
from a reality competition show, or failing to execute a series of steps in a
well-â•‰positioned and well-â•‰timed manner. Neither the posture of anticipation
nor the nature of threat has remained consistent throughout the war on terror,
and in dance videogames we see especially the movement from anticipation to
securitization that Grusin describes: whereas DDR bombards the player with
information to incorporate and to set in motion, Dance Central prepares play-
ers extensively in advance, notifying them as to what threats or challenges can
be anticipated and modeling how to successfully neutralize those threats by
fully assimilating movement information. In this way, even seemingly banal
entertainment media participate in the creation of choreographies for bodies
at war. Describing the impact of mediated and aestheticized warfare on the
pace of life “at home” is not intended to diminish the impact of warfare on
troops. It is, rather, to suggest that dance and media technologies are part of
a larger system modifying and deploying affect and temporality to mobilize
citizens and soldiers in a collective choreography of war.
NOTES
Many thanks to Melissa Blanco, Marcela Fuentes, and Kimberly Springer for their
helpful comments and feedback.
1. See for example Friedrich Kittler (1999) on computing during World War II and
the Cold War and Jean Baudrillard (1995) on the Gulf War as a simulation.
2. Although popularly known as the war on terror, the official name of Global War
on Terror (2001) was changed to Overseas Contingency Operations (2009) and
Countering Violent Extremism (2010) under Barack Obama’s administration.
The persistence of the “war on terror” label suggests that, in spite of name changes
or the proliferation of operations carried out under its various banners, the war
on terror is popularly understood as being a single, ongoing, continuous entity.
Throughout this text, my usage of “war on terror” reflects the more expansive use
of the term.
3. Sociologist Lee Jarvis has analyzed speeches given during the presidency of
George W. Bush around the events of September 11, 2001, and its aftermath and
178 H armony B ench
shows how the representation of time was a crucial component of the administra-
tion’s discursive shaping of the war on terror. “It was simply impossible,” Jarvis
argues, “for the [George W. Bush] administration, it seemed, to reflect on the war
on terror’s status and import without discussing—â•‰or imagining—â•‰its pasts, pres-
ents, and futures” (2009, 159–â•‰160).
4. Anatomo-â•‰politics is the oft-â•‰neglected side of Michel Foucault’s two-â•‰pronged bio-
power. As we have shifted from a disciplinary society to a society of control, cul-
tural commentators have focused more on biopolitics than anatomo-â•‰politics.
5. In season 7 (2010), executive producer Nigel Lythgoe introduced a wrinkle into
this format, and judges chose only eleven contestants, who were paired with a set
group of “all-â•‰stars”—â•‰favorite dancers from past seasons.
6. These featured styles apply only to So You Think You Can Dance in the United
States and not to other shows in the franchise.
7. Foster suggests that a preference for dancers who could perform across genres
was already evident in the mid-â•‰1980s.
8. Studio audiences have been called upon to participate in certain competition
shows, but Big Brother was the first reality television competition to include at-â•‰
home viewer voting by telephone in 1999. American Idol incorporated voting by
text when it established a partnership with AT&T in 2002.
9. “Season 7: Top Nine,” So You Think You Can Dance, FOX, June 30, 2010.
10. “Season 5: Top Eight,” So You Think You Can Dance, FOX, July 22, 2009.
11. Some players learn mirror versions of the sequences so they can face an audience
during gameplay rather than the screen.
12. “DDR Tournament—â•‰Hardest Songs in the Game,” YouTube, uploaded February
3, 2006, http://â•‰w ww.youtube.com/â•‰watch?v=PPDdultxBSc.
13. Watters, Chris. “Dance Central Review,” GameSpot, November 4, 2010, http://â•‰
www.gamespot.com/â•‰reviews/â•‰dance-â•‰central-â•‰review/â•‰1900-â•‰6283598/â•‰.
14. “Kinect Dance Central—â•‰Poison,” YouTube, uploaded December 11, 2010, http://â•‰
www.youtube.com/â•‰watch?v=u6IxL_â•‰2xmEc.
15. “Kinect Dance Central—â•‰ I Got You Dancing (Hard),” YouTube, uploaded
December 1, 2010, http://â•‰w ww.youtube.com/â•‰watch?v=sDt8760InG8.
16. In response to customer feedback, Harmonix now allows players to turn off
Freestyle in Dance Central 2 and 3, enabling continuous choreographed play.
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8
Specter of War, Spectacle of Peace

The Lowering of Flags Ceremony at the Wagah and
Hussainiwala Border Outposts
N E E L I M A J E YC H A N DR A N
Every evening at the Wagah and Hussainiwala border outposts, the security
forces of India and Pakistan perform a retreat ceremony to signal the close
of official transactions for the day. The lowering of flags ceremony executed
by the Border Security Force (BSF) of India and the Pakistan Rangers (PR) is
a choreographed display that includes chanting slogans, speed marches, high
kicks, foot stamping, and intimidating facial expressions (Figure 8.1). In a care-
fully crafted performance, the soldiers stride toward their counterparts swing-
ing their arms briskly and stomping the ground vigorously with their heavy
boots. Clad in parade uniforms with colorful fan-â•‰shaped turbans, the soldiers
are forceful and aggressive as they compete and threaten their counterparts
through a highly dramatized drill routine. The performance culminates with
the soldiers lowering the flags of both countries and slamming the border
gates shut. Indian and Pakistani nationals, celebrating from their respective
sides, enthusiastically cheer for their own soldiers and sing in praise of their
motherlands, while taking every opportunity to malign their opponents.
Even though the Indian state shares its geopolitical boundaries with several
other nations, including China, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh, a ceremonial
closing of the border gates is only conducted at Wagah and Hussainiwala. The
hour-â•‰long drill was initiated in 1971 as a celebration of peace between India and
182 N eelima J eychandran
Figure 8.1â•‡ A BSF jawan performing a shoulder-â•‰high kick during the retreat ceremony.
Photo by author.
Pakistan after a major war. Since that time it has been performed continuously,
and its popularity has soared. However, the ceremony’s function has proved
more paradoxical and complex than may have been intended, for over the years,
as tensions between the two nations have mounted over territorial intrusions and
militant infiltrations, the drill has become a public spectacle of national pride
and an arena for staging political clashes between the two countries through
an aggressive acting out of conflict and competition. At the same time, the drill
is also a colorful touristic display and a substitute for war. Finally, too, it is a
poignant reminder of the shared culture and history of two closely tied nations.
I first witnessed the ceremony in 2006 and over the next six years saw it
several times as a tourist with my family and friends. During these visits I was
seated on the Indian side as a regular spectator in different areas of the grand-
stands, and once standing behind the crowd near the entrance gate. Later, in
2012, I made multiple trips to Wagah and Hussainiwala to conduct research
on the ceremony.1 Over the years, I have seen an increase in the crowds as well
as security personnel. This essay is based on my observations of the perfor-
mances and my interactions with the BSF guards and the audiences. Because
I have watched and studied the retreat ceremony from the Indian side of the
Specter of War, Spectacle of Peace 183
performance arena, I focus on the choreographies of the Indian soldiers. As

a result, my arguments are structured from an Indian historical and cultural
perspective.
In what follows, a brief history of the India-â•‰Pakistan wars and the nature
of continuing political tensions between the two states are discussed in order
to present the context in which the retreat ceremony is performed. I will then
describe the drills at Wagah and Hussainiwala to show how the lowering of
flags ceremony acts as a theater of war and memory while paradoxically being
a substitute for direct combat. By mobilizing theorizations of body narratives,
hypermasculinity, and nationalism, I will show how the soldiers play out their
aggressions through bodily movements; showcase themselves as protectors of
the motherland; and employ the drill, not only as a substitute for cross-â•‰border
battles and military interventions, but as a platform for jingoistic nationalism.
THE HISTORY OF INDIA-â•‰PAK ISTAN CONFLICTS

The conflicts between India and Pakistan are rooted in the partition of the
Indian subcontinent in 1947, which created the two independent states. The
British colonial policy of divide and rule, the rise of religious fundamental-
ism, and ideological differences among Hindu and Muslim leaders were the
primary factors behind the partition. Indian nationalists have attributed the
roots of partition to the Indian Councils Act, or the Morley-â•‰Minto Reforms, of
1909 (Metcalf 1995, 222–â•‰223). The reforms granted separate electorates on the
basis of religion. These changes increased participation in the country’s own
governance, anticipating an eventual move to self-â•‰rule. However, as Thomas
Metcalf notes, by creating separate electorates for different religious groups,
the reforms “embed deeply in Indian life the idea that its society consisted of
groups set apart from each otherâ•›…â•›Most portentous was Minto’s conception
of India’s Muslims as a distinct community who deserved representation on
their own.â•›…â•›The result was the flowering of a new communal rhetoric, and
ultimately, of the Pakistan movement” (224–â•‰225). The idea of a separate state
was introduced by Sir Muhammad Iqbal, president of the Muslim League in a
speech in December 1930. The state that he envisioned included only Punjab,
Sindh, the North-â•‰West Frontier Province (NWFP), and Baluchistan.
The partition of the subcontinent caused a catastrophic outbreak of ethnic
violence in the states of Punjab, Bengal, and Kashmir. The division of Punjab
and Bengal left millions of people stranded on the wrong side, which led to a
stream of migration. Political theorist Ishtiaq Ahmed notes that the state of
Punjab witnessed one of the greatest incidents of ethnic cleansing, involving
the murder of 500,000–â•‰800,000 Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs (Ahmed 2012).
The complex division of the states of Punjab, Kashmir, and Bengal not only
created territorial conflicts between India and Pakistan, but also became the
root cause of the wars that ensued. According to John Vasquez, all Indo-â•‰Pak
wars, directly or indirectly, derive from territorial concerns at the time of inde-
pendence (Vasquez 2005). The conflict over boundaries remains the longest
unresolved border dispute with the highest record of interstate violence in the
world. India and Pakistan have fought four major wars since independence.
Consequently, a United Nations peacekeeping mission has been on continu-
ous watch in the region, resulting in the second longest monitoring duty in the
history of the organization (Wirsing 1998, 1).
The first war between India and Pakistan was fought in 1947–â•‰1948 over the
state of Jammu and Kashmir. After the partition of the country, Maharaja Hari
Singh, the ruler of the independent territory of Jammu and Kashmir, refused
to accede to either state. However, a faction that wanted to accede to Pakistan
raised an armed rebellion with the help of the Pakistani army. After an appeal
from Hari Singh and his agreement to accede to India, the Indian state sent
forces to Kashmir. As the state of Jammu and Kashmir borders China and
Afghanistan, it has great geopolitical significance. A bloody battle was waged
from October 24, 1947 to January 1, 1949. The fighting ended with a United
Nations–â•‰sponsored cease-â•‰fire (Ganguly 2001, 17), and Jammu and Kashmir
eventually became a state of India.
The countries went to war again in 1965 over the Indian occupation of
Kashmir.2 In early August, war broke out after Pakistan attempted to send
several thousand men into Jammu and Kashmir as part of a mission designed
to precipitate an insurgency against Indian rule (Wirsing 1998, 12). The war
lasted five weeks and ended after both sides had suffered heavy casualties and
the United Nations intervened.3 Six years later, India and Pakistan went to war
yet again, this time over a territorial dispute in East Pakistan.4 In a battle that
lasted two weeks, both countries employed massive ground and air attacks,
mostly on the western border. The war ended in December 1971 as Pakistani
forces surrendered, spurring the formation of the new state of the People’s
Republic of Bangladesh. This war had significant consequences, both because
it reshaped Asian political geography and led to the designation of a new line
of cease-â•‰fire in Kashmir called the Line of Control (LoC) (Wirsing 1998, 13).5
In 1999, India and Pakistan fought a war along the Line of Control in
Kashmir. In the spring of that year, Pakistani troops, along with insurgents,
crossed the LoC in the Batalik, Dras, and Kargil sectors in Kashmir (Ganguly
2001, 114). According to Sumit Ganguly, the significant difference between the
Kargil War and India’s earlier attempts to prevent incursions along the LoC
was the decision to use air power, which had not been employed since the 1971
war (Ganguly 2001, 117). The conflict ended after the Indian army turned back
the intruders and recaptured the territories under its occupation. Once again,
both countries suffered heavy causalities, and in this instance diplomatic ties
were also considerably weakened.
In addition to the four major wars that India and Pakistan have fought
over the past six decades, there have been instances when both countries have
used artillery for cross-â•‰border firing. After the Kargil War, they also started
strengthening their military and nuclear power (Ganguly 2001, 126). Although
the two countries have aimed at improving bilateral ties, the relationship has
soured due to insurgent attacks in Kashmir and also because of a series of bomb
attacks that took place in India starting in 2001. The relationship reached a
new low when India blamed Pakistan for supporting and harboring the terror-
ist organization Lashkar-â•‰e-â•‰Taiba (LeT), which orchestrated the Mumbai terror
attack in 2008.6 According to the Indian government, Pakistan’s intelligence
wing was responsible for funding reconnaissance missions for terrorists to
scout several key public locations and buildings in Mumbai.7 While Pakistan
and India are working to improve their relationship, both of the countries also
invest heavily in nuclear arms.
Although the border outposts at Wagah and Hussainiwala are now for the
most part peaceful tourist destinations, in the past they witnessed severe mili-
tary assaults. A major battle was fought at Hussainiwala during the 1971 war
after the Pakistani army unleashed an attack on the Indian infantry division
there. Intense artillery shelling ensued from the Pakistani side, lasting for two
days, and in retaliation India launched massive air strikes. As a result, both
sides suffered heavy losses (Singh 1981, 143). During the 1971 war, Indian
troops also stormed the border crossing at Wagah, attacking Pakistani forces
(Murphy 2002, 84). Since the turn of the millennium, India and Pakistan have
not engaged in the kinds of conventional wars that dominated the 20th cen-
tury. Rather, these full-â•‰scale conflicts have given way to limited shelling at the
periphery, terrorist attacks by nonstate actors, and insurgencies. This shift sup-
ports theories of asymmetrical wars, in which states, particularly those with
nuclear weapons, can no longer afford to engage in all-â•‰out conflict because of
the human and economic costs. But tensions remain from more limited con-
flicts, and the impacts are often manifested through the retreat ceremonies.
PERFOR MANCES AT WAGAH AND HUSSAINIWALA

Wagah is the only official border crossing that links India and Pakistan by
road. Established in 1949, it is located at the northwestern village of Wagah,
halfway between the cities of Amritsar in India and Lahore in Pakistan. Often
referred to as the Berlin Wall of South Asia, this border was created when
Cyril Radcliffe, who determined the territorial boundaries of the newly par-
titioned states, etched a line on a map. Situated on one of the key routes along
which millions of people migrated after the traumatic partition, the border at
Wagah has an iconic political and historical significance. The gates and the
tall, barbed-wire electric fences stand today as tangible evidence of this his-
toric event. Nevertheless, the retreat ceremony that was initiated after inde-
pendence has continued despite decades of political tension between the two
countries. At first, Indian and Pakistani armed forces performed a simple
flag-lowering ceremony, which was transformed into a coordinated drill in
the spirit of accord following the 1971 war (Wright 2010). Although begun as
a gesture of friendship, the ceremony has become not just a performance of
peace but is also a theatricalized substitution for war.
During the day, the border outpost at Wagah serves as a commercial cross-
ing for trucks loaded with goods, but at dusk, it is transformed into an open-air
theater. Just before sunset, the general public is allowed to enter the checkpoint
to watch the lowering of flags ceremony, which is administered under tight
security. Visitors are not permitted to carry bags, water bottles, lighters, or any
sharp objects. Like other visitors observing from the Indian side, I was allowed
to proceed toward the open-air gallery only after passing through security
checks. BSF jawans8 are employed to control the large crowd and escort people
to their seats. Along with BSF guards, fully armed military personnel are posi-
tioned at various points in case of attack.
The grandstands at Wagah are structured in such a way that the link road
cuts the galleries into two large halves, with Indian spectators on one side and
Pakistani viewers on the other.9 General visitors are accommodated on plain
concrete bleachers, which are positioned on either side of the road leading
to the border gates, while people with special permissions from the Indian
government are allocated seats closer to the gates (Figure 8.2). Both nations
constructed grandstands in 2001 as part of a collaborative venture to accom-
modate the increasing number of visitors. Although there are no accurate fig-
ures, it is believed that thousands of Indian spectators a day witness the flag
lowering ceremony at Wagah.10
As a prelude to the official drill, both sides set the mood for the performance
by playing patriotic songs from loudspeakers. The spectators also clap and
cheer while shouting slogans in praise of their country. La ihila illallah (“Glory
to God”) and Pakistan zindabad (“Long live Pakistan”) are chanted by the
Pakistani side, while Vande matram (“I salute you, my mother”) and Bharat
Mata ki jai (“Victory to Mother India”) are echoed back by the Indian audi-
ence. The most interesting part of the preceremony celebration is a sequence
of unrehearsed acts performed by the spectators on the Indian side to express
their nationalistic fervor. About twenty minutes before the actual ceremony,
a BSF officer walks into the performance arena and directs various events.
Indian viewers are invited to the link road, which is also the parade space, to
Figure 8.2 View of the border gates and the VIP seating gallery on the Indian side at
Wagah. Photo by author.
dance to Bollywood songs and perform speed marches with the national flag.
Along with the dancing, a few members of the audience are lined up to sprint
toward the border gates while waving the Indian flag. The BSF representative
acting as the program coordinator asks the spectators to cheer for the runners
as they dash toward the border. The Pakistanis respond by having members of
their audience run toward the gates. When the music stops, the impromptu
performance by the audience ends, and the road is then cleared for the security
forces to perform their drill. While this preperformance segment is designed
to encourage the audience to participate in the larger theatrical enactment of
animosity, it also serves as a transitional piece that creates the atmosphere for
the main event of the evening (Figure 8.3).
The choreographed drill begins with a long, piercing shout. BSF jawans line
up outside the border security post dressed in khaki-colored ankle-length
trousers with red-and-black-striped waistbands and turbans adorned with
red fans and golden tassels. The Pakistani soldiers appear wearing black tur-
bans with red trim and black shalwar kameez, a traditional garment with a
long knee-length shirt worn over flared trousers. The soldiers of both nations
wear heavy boots with metal taps that make a loud, sharp sound when they
walk or stamp. A few guards are also armed with automatic rifles. From the
Indian side, two unarmed women soldiers start the ceremony by marching
Figure 8.3 Indian spectators dancing to popular patriotic Bollywood songs before the
commencement of the drill in the link road that connects India and Pakistan. Photo by
author.
swiftly toward the closed border gates and then positioning themselves there,
after a vigorous execution of foot stampings and high kicks. In response, two
male Pakistani soldiers perform a similar routine with a slight variation in
their marching style.11 Next, two BSF jawans, pounding the ground with long
strides, hurriedly march toward the gate, where one of them briefly comes face
to face with a Pakistani Ranger to shake hands. With another loud command,
four armed jawans and a bugler assemble in front of the BSF post. After per-
forming high kicks and vigorous foot stampings, the party marches toward
the border gates.
Another choreographed sequence follows, in which soldiers take turns per-
forming high kicks facing the gate. Soon the gates are opened, and the sol-
diers do a similar routine facing their Pakistani counterparts. This time they
exchange silent threats by rolling their eyes, twirling their mustaches, and
puffing out their chests.12 One by one, the soldiers march up to their rivals
and demonstrate their valor through glares, aggressive head shakes, and swift
turns. The flags of both nations are then lowered with perfect coordination as
the Indian and Pakistani buglers play rhythmic tunes. The lowered flags are
folded neatly and handshakes are exchanged between the soldiers on the two
sides, after which the gates are slammed shut. The ceremony ends after the
flags are escorted back to their respective sides.
As a whole, the audience is relatively quiet and attentive during the cer-
emony. However, once it is over, many on the Indian side try to catch a glimpse
of the Pakistani space and audience through the border gates. A few even try
to make conversation and exchange greetings. At Wagah, one is reminded
that, despite a violent past and ongoing conflicts, the histories and identities
of Pakistan and India are intertwined. The similarity of a shared cultural past
is more apparent in the social behavior, attire, and language of the audiences
than in the politically propagated rhetoric of dissimilarity.
As at Wagah, a regular beating retreat is performed at Hussainiwala
Border. However, the ceremony at Hussainiwala is much longer and more
confrontational, making the performance particularly charged. Although the
choreographic routines of the two ceremonies are different, a few elements,
such as the music, chants, and costumes are similar. Hussainiwala is a small
village in the Ferozepur district of Punjab. Once on an important trade route,
this border crossing was closed in 1970. Hussainiwala at present is clearly
more politically sensitive than Wagah, with security intense around the area
surrounding the national boundaries. On the way to the performance arena,
visitors encounter trenches and camouflaged bunkers where Indian military
personnel are stationed. The ceremony at Hussainiwala is less popular than at
Wagah, not only because of its vulnerability to attack but also because of its
location in the interior region of Punjab. However, the recent suicide bomb
attack at Wagah Border on November 2, 2014, demonstrates the vulnerability
of that site as well. In this instance the popular showground for the symbolic
enactment of war was turned into a site of actual carnage when sixty innocent
people on the Pakistani side were killed and over one hundred wounded. The
majority of the dead were spectators leaving the retreat ceremony, as well as
local vendors and three security personnel. News reports noted that while
the aim of the suicide bomber was to target the audience and disrupt the
flag-lowering ceremony, due to intense security he had to detonate the bomb
about six hundred meters away from the main performance arena and closer
to the Pakistani Paramilitary checkpoint.13 The attack was orchestrated by
Jundallah, an al-Qaeda-a ffiliated militant group, which is a splinter organiza-
tion of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), along with Jamat-u l-A hrar, another
offshoot group of TTP. According to TTP’s spokesperson, the bombing was
in retaliation for the Pakistani military’s current operations against insur-
gents.14 Thus, the attack is a reminder of the larger threat of terrorism and its
impact on civilians. At the same time, it further complicates the function of
the retreat ceremony, as the spectacle of war becomes a space to generate a
new form of warfare.
In comparison to Wagah, the spatial dynamics and atmosphere at

Hussainiwala make for an intense choreographic combat, in which each
movement and action becomes an opportunity for the soldiers to demon-
strate which side is better. The retreat ceremony is performed in a shared
space, which is located between the border gates. The spectators of the
two nations are in close proximity, seated on concrete bleachers that are
positioned in a rough semicircle resembling an amphitheater. Since the
audiences and the guards are directly facing their counterparts, the per-
formance becomes confrontational, especially when spectators make pro-
vocative comments to the performers of the rival nation. Given the spatial
limitations, there is no actual parade. Instead, there are forceful speed
marches with vigorous leg extensions and nuanced bodily gesticulations
(Figure: 8.4). At Wagah, the theatrics performed by the soldiers are pri-
marily for the home audience, since the border gates and concrete walls
that separate the national boundaries obstruct the view of the soldiers from
the opposite side. However, since the Hussainiwala BSF jawans are facing
the Pakistani soldiers directly, they engage in an immediate response and
counterresponse.
Figure 8.4â•‡ An Indian BSF jawan doing a brisk march at Hussainiwala. Photo by

author.
DANCING WITH THE ENEMY
The lowering of flags ceremony is an adaptation of the beating-â•‰retreat cer-
emony, a colorful nightly parade initiated by the British army in the 17th
century (Beckett 2008, 86). This tradition was later introduced to the Indian
subcontinent during colonial rule, and today variations of the practice con-
tinue to be a part of Indian Republic Day festivities and other parades
organized by the Indian Armed Forces. In Pakistan the tradition has been
incorporated into the parade that is part of the Pakistan Day (or Pakistan
Resolution Day) celebrations. Although the retreat ceremonies at Wagah and
Hussainiwala are designed like a beating retreat, kinesthetic elements drawn
from varied sources including theater, dance, and local cultural expressions
are incorporated into the drill routine. The retreat ceremony bears no direct
resemblance to any Indian theatrical or dance tradition, although the robust
choreographic executions, foot-â•‰work, and body gestures are very similar to
Indian performance genres such as kathakali and chhau and the martial art
form of kalaripayattu. In critically studying the structure, training, and enact-
ment of kathakali, Philip Zarrilli argues that the performance methods and
training of kathakali artists are highly influenced by martial arts techniques
(Zarrilli 1984, 213). Such a borrowing and interweaving of diverse methods
can be seen in the choreographic style of the lowering of the flag performance.
To signify aggressiveness and battle readiness, the choreography of the
retreat ceremony employs hypermasculine gestures and body posturing.
Varda Burstyn, in her perceptive analysis of manhood and hypermasculine
behavior, defines hypermasculinity as “the belief that ideal manhood lies in
the exercise of force to dominate others” (Burstyn 1999, 192). According to
Burstyn, in contemporary society hypermasculine behavior is performed
primarily in sports and is popularized by sports culture and sports media.
Critically examining masculinized behavior and attitudes in the United States
and their impact on the Gulf War, Burstyn notes that there is a direct rela-
tionship between war, masculinity, sports, media culture, and politics (185).
Like Burstyn, Patrice Oppliger in her work on masculinity and sports points
out that wrestling in particular is a sport that rests on a blatant exhibition of
hypermasculinity (Oppliger 2004). Building on the arguments of Burstyn and
Oppliger, I argue that it is through hypermasculine gestures that Indian and
Pakistani guards exhibit hostility, using it as a tool to represent aggression in
war. Overt masculine cues such as puffed-â•‰out chests, threatening gestures, and
aggressive facial expressions, familiar in sports such as rugby, bodybuilding,
and wrestling, are appropriated to showcase valor and might (Figure 8.5). To
these are added other hypermasculine gestures typical of South Asian culture,
such as twisting mustaches and fist shaking. By combining hypermasculine
Figure 8.5 An Indian soldier puffing out and expanding his chest during
the ceremony at Hussainiwala. Photo by author.
gestures common in Indian and Pakistani culture along with vigorous move-
ments that demonstrate militarized masculinities, the soldiers showcase acri-
mony and belligerence for a local and global audience. Thus, with a barrage
of hypermasculine gestures that are built into the choreography of the retreat
ceremony, the soldiers compete with their rivals, displaying their martial abili-
ties and power.
As shown above, choreography is creatively deployed to convey the rela-
tionship between the two countries. Dance theorist Susan Foster notes that
choreography theorizes corporeal, individual, and social identity by placing
bodies in a kind of dynamic rapport that suggests a narrative trajectory as
their movements and relations unfold during a performance (Foster 2005, 96).
At the same time, while dancing bodies always gesture to other fields of mean-
ing, they do not simply pass meaning along but create “choreographies of signs
through which they discourse” (Foster 1996, xi). As Foster points out, a dance
performance could yield different interpretations depending on the decisions
made concerning vocabulary, style, and syntax during the choreographic
Figure 8.6 Pakistani Rangers responding to provocations from the Indian guards at

Hussainiwala. Photo by author.
process (2005, 96). In other words, it is the way these various elements are
structured within a whole that creates interpretive possibilities. Through the
choreographic structure of the retreat ceremony, narratives of the historically
strained relationship between India and Pakistan are played out. Various rep-
resentational codes and gestural idioms are used to convey both the acrimoni-
ous relationship between the two counties and their soldiers’ military prowess.
These codes and conventions range from facial expressions and aggressive
gestures such as clenching fists, staring, rolling the eyes, twisting mustaches,
and puffing out chests to less mimetic movements including emphatic stamps,
rapid strides, swift head turns, and upright comportment. I argue that the
sequential structuring of the guards’ gestures and movement patterns, which
make up the choreography, play a critical role in communicating and convey-
ing fraught histories (Figure 8.6). A narrative that hints at the historical and
ongoing political unrest is constructed through the orchestration of continu-
ous challenging gestures and counter gestures by Indian and Pakistani guards.
Another narrative suggested through the choreography of the retreat cer-
emony is what I call the “specter of war.” Both at Wagah and Hussainiwala,
the choreography, the spatial positioning of the performers and the specta-
tors, and their display of aggression during the ceremony work as a simulated
version of the historically traumatic and unresolved conflict between India
and Pakistan. Although the soldiers perform the drill on their respective sides
of the space and never make physical contact, the two are clearly in combat
mode, and every gesture is made to prove the power and military competence
of each nation. On the one hand, this performance of strength acts as a substi-
tution for war while functioning as a safety valve or outlet to release pent-â•‰up
animosity. On the other hand, the ceremony summons up the past history
and unresolved conflicts between the two countries, haunting what might
otherwise be a benign celebration of neighborly competition. The theatrical
narrative of battle begins to unfold once the soldiers are in close proximity to
their counterparts. Both at Wagah and Hussainiwala, soldiers take turns fac-
ing their rivals and challenging them through the choreographed drill. While
facial expressions such as stares and glares are used to provoke and threaten,
movements such as high kicks and vigorous stomping of the ground are uti-
lized to evoke militaristic might. In the narrative structure of the choreogra-
phy, marches, movements and countermovements, and facial expressions are
employed as lexicons and syntaxes to create a network of connotations that
allude to the complicated past and unsettled political issues between the two
nations.
THEATER OF PEACE, WAR, AND MEMORY

The retreat drill and the preceremony performances at Wagah and Hussainiwala
are events through which the soldiers, as well as spectators, display national-
ism. Richard Murphy has argued that the retreat ceremony is a “nationalist
theater” where the soldiers as principal actors and civilians as extras drama-
tize the political tensions between India and Pakistan (Murphy 2002, 185).
More recently, Jisha Menon has shown how the ritual at Wagah Border is a
hyperbolic display of nationalism that oscillates between high realism and
parody (Menon 2013, 45–â•‰47). I contend that the retreat ceremony cannot be
seen only as a patriotic performance of nationalism or a drama of present
political tensions; rather, it is at once a theater of peace, war, and memory.
Through the ceremony two vital actions are performed: first, an exhibition of
peace through a flamboyant and colorful display of choreography and, second,
a demonstration of political tensions between India and Pakistan that enunci-
ates the fraught history of partition.
The retreat ceremony reminds stake-â•‰holding audiences of the violent histo-
ries of wars through the well-â•‰rehearsed and meticulously choreographed drill.
Much like the jiao rites in Hong Kong documented by James L. Watson, the
flag-â•‰lowering ceremony is a display “during which violence, or the specter of
violence, is never far from the surface” (Watson 1996, 157). As in jiao rites,
the ceremony is replete with memories of violence and conflicts, and aims
to represent territorial control via orchestrated performance. According to

Yvonne Manzi, Watson’s analysis of the jiao rituals illustrates a form of perfor-
mative violence in which violence is not directly present, but in which aspects
of violence are part of the performance (Manzi 2014). Similarly, the retreat cer-
emony, though nonviolent in nature, is a performative violence in which mili-
tary aggression is illustrated through national symbols, patriotic chants, and
facial expressions and vigorous bodily movements of the soldiers (Figure 8.7).
During periods when cross-border tensions increase, the antagonism in the
flag-lowering ceremonies increases. The marches become more belligerent,
and audiences engage in verbal contests and sloganeering. After the Kargil
War, reports of the retreat ceremony becoming increasingly tense surfaced in
Figure 8.7 A BSF jawan doing a swift turn while staring at his opponents at
Hussainiwala. Photo by author.
the South Asian press. A report in the Times of India stated that after the 2001
attack on the Indian Parliament, a Pakistani jawan pulled out his weapon dur-
ing the ceremony at the Wagah border post and aimed it at Indian spectators.
The report further added that after this incident, the border security forces
of both nations directed the soldiers to empty their weapons before the per-
formance as a means of reducing risks.15 Again, after the Mumbai terrorist
attacks in December 2008, the performance became aggressive, with verbal
abuse being exchanged during the ceremony. Finally, in 2010 both sides agreed
to tone down the hostility, turning much of the jingoism and rage into a more
civil display of feelings.16
Although, the performance is now less aggressive, it is still contentious and
cannot be regarded as a regular beating-â•‰retreat ceremony. Cues relate the drill
to war and nationalism, thus transforming it into a clash between two rival
nations. A case in point is the playing of a chant from the Hindu holy book
Bhagavad Gita, which is recited by Lord Krishna to Arjuna before the start of
the epic Mahabharata war. Immediately before the guards walk into the arena
for the drill, the Indian side plays recorded verses from the fourth chapter of
the Bhagavad Gita. Loudspeakers from the BSF camp announce:
Yada yada hi dharmasya, glanirva bhavathi bharatha,

Abhyuthanam adharmaysya, tadatmanam srijami aham.
Praritranaya sadhunam, vinashaya cha dushkritam
Dharamasansthapnaya, sambhavami yuge yuge.17
These verses state: “Whenever there is a decline of righteousness and the

ascendance of injustice, then I will manifest myself in order to protect the
virtuous and destroy the wicked; and to re-â•‰establish righteousness, I am
reborn in every age.” Because of the popularity of the televised version of the
Mahabharata epic, most Indians are familiar with this chant and associate
it with the legendry war in which vast armies of the Kauravas and Pandavas
clashed and many heroes lost their lives.18 Since the territorial conflicts
between India and Pakistan are ongoing and unresolved, the chant clearly has
additional meaning in the given context.
A set of cultural representations and significations also play a vital role in
assigning larger meanings and connotations to the performers and perfor-
mance. For instance, the shrill, long command shouted by the soldier leading
the Indian parade is articulated like a battle cry. Shouted aloud immediately
after this command is the phrase Bharat Mata ki jai (“Victory to Mother
India”), which is the battle cry for many infantry units of the Indian Armed
Forces. It is also a popular line in Bollywood movies involving India-â•‰Pakistan
battles. The shout of Bharat Mata ki jai along with chants in praise of the
motherland by both the audiences and the soldiers helps stimulate a national-
istic fervor.
Within an Indian cultural context, the nation-â•‰state has always been per-
ceived in words and image in an anthropomorphic form as a goddess, Bharat
Mata. Sumathi Ramaswamy notes that in popular visual renderings of the
geopolitical space of India, the nation is often mapped in the form of a mother
goddess whose body envelops the cartographic space. She argues that such
mapping traditions have led to the convergence of the form of Bharat Mata with
the mapped form of the nation, which she calls the “geo-â•‰body” (Ramaswamy
2010, 8). Popular visual images of Bharat Mata often show freedom fighters and
soldiers battling to protect the country. Edward Mallot, in discussing nation-
alism and memory, claims that while the “bodyscape” of Mother India was
used to rally Indians for an anticolonial cause, in a postpartition nation such
representations work toward commemorating the past (Mallot 2012, 203). In
the flag-â•‰lowering ceremony, slogans and patriotic songs constantly refer to this
allegory, while urging the soldiers to protect Mother India. The Indian soldiers
as protagonists metaphorically and symbolically represent the children of the
nation, and their gestures and movements can be read as an emblematic act of
protecting the nation. Collectively, the vibrant choreography and the enthusi-
asm of the spectators and their active participation in the ceremony transform
it into a spectacle of nationalism.
Beyond nationalism, however, the performance also works as a mnemonic
apparatus to keep alive memories of the entangled pasts of the two nations,
particularly the traumatic partition of the subcontinent and its violent after-
math. Writing of the process of memory and memorialization, Pierre Nora
argues that places such as archives, museums, and memorials are lieux de
mémoire—â•‰ locations where cultural memories are preserved (Nora 1989).
Festivals, anniversaries, and commemorative practices such as Independence
Day celebrations are also realms of memory. Nora states that the purpose of
such performances is to halt the process of forgetting. Conceived in 1971 to
showcase the peaceful coexistence of India and Pakistan, the ritualistic drill is
a lieux de mémoire that plays a critical role in sustaining the memory of parti-
tion and the historic battles that followed.
CONCLUSION
While some spectators come to see the Wagah and Hussainiwala retreat cer-
emony for patriotic reasons, others visit purely for entertainment. Today, the
ceremony is a theater of war, nationalism, and memory, while also being a
spectacle staged to promote cultural tourism. It is a ritual in which memories
of the past are performed at the border that stands as testimony to the very
birth of the two nation-â•‰states. While for young viewers the drill may be as
thrilling as an India-â•‰Pakistan cricket match, for an older generation both the
performance and the space itself evoke powerful memories of the fraught but
shared histories of both nations. As such, these memories are both traumatic
and nostalgic.
The sad paradox is that the ceremony is enjoyed under the shadow of an
imminent militant assault or threat of battle. The border outposts at Wagah
and Hussainiwala remain potential targets for extremists and terrorist organi-
zations. Tom Wright, writing for the Wall Street Journal, noted that in January
2010 India reported that four rockets fired by suspected Pakistani militants
exploded near the Wagah outpost, to which the Indian side retaliated with
firing and shelling. Likewise in May 2012, the security at Wagah border was
tightened further after Pakistani intelligence received a report about a possible
attack being planned by the terrorist organization LeT to derail peace talks
between India and Pakistan (Sen 2012). And after the attack in November
2014, both nations have upgraded their security and deployed dog squads and
extra forces to attempt to prevent any future terrorist onslaught. The lowering
Figure 8.8â•‡ An armed commando standing guard as the ceremony begins at Wagah.

Photo by author.
of flags ceremony is conducted under the vigilant surveillance of armed forces

of both nations (Figure 8.8). Soldiers with automatic rifles carefully moni-
tor the audience and the performance arena from different vantage points
to watch for danger and if necessary eliminate any threat. At Hussainiwala
Border, the spectators are escorted during their entry and exit. Moreover, at
the checkpoint near the entrance, visitors are not only thoroughly screened
but are given a ticket with an entry number. Visitors are allowed to exit only
after they produce the stub. Such a system of crowd control is in place to ensure
that there is no attempt to cross the border in the guise of a spectator. Although
the ceremonies at Wagah and Hussainiwala are performed under tight secu-
rity, officials of both states have repeatedly emphasized that the ceremony is
a celebration of peace. It is difficult to state, though, whether the ceremony
diffuses tensions or is a site that perpetuates hatred. A possible explanation
is that through the performance disturbing pasts are not refused or rejected
but rather negotiated to achieve equilibrium in the present. The fact remains,
however, that the specter of war continues to hover nearby.
NOTES
1. As a research scholar from an American university, I was usually ushered to
the gallery set aside for foreign tourists, in which only international visitors are
seated.
2. Trouble started between the countries in 1964 after complaints of violations of
the cease-â•‰fire line (See Wirsing 1998).
3. The death toll of Indian soldiers was about three thousand, while the Pakistani
side lost approximately 3,800 men (See Wirsing 1998, 12). The two sides met in
Tashkent in the Soviet Union in January 1966, where they signed the Tashkent
Declaration, in which, among other things, they agreed to settle their differences
through peaceful means.
4. Although originally a part of Pakistan, East Pakistan was culturally and linguis-
tically very different from the western region, from which it was geographically
separated by approximately 1,300 miles. In 1971, in response to the atrocities
unleashed by the regime in East Pakistan, an uprising occurred under the lead-
ership of Sheik Mujibur Rahman. The rebellion was vehemently suppressed by
the Pakistani military. This caused a major revolt and extreme political unrest.
About ten million people fled the country seeking refuge in India. Seeing it as an
opportunity to settle scores with Pakistan, India intervened in the movement for
the liberation of East Pakistan (See Singh 1981, 7).
5. The Line of Control is the military control line in the state of Jammu and Kashmir.
A 550 km fence was constructed to try to prevent militant infiltration and arms
smuggling.
6. In December 2008, a group of armed terrorists launched a coordinated attack
at various locations in South Mumbai, including the crowded Chhatrapati
Shivaji Terminus railway station, luxury hotels including the Taj Mahal Palace
and Oberoi Trident on the Marine Drive, and at Nariman House and the Metro
Cinema.
7. See “Report: Pakistan Spies Tied to Mumbai Siege,” Associated Press, October 19,
2010, http://â•‰w ww.foxnews.com/â•‰world/â•‰2010/â•‰10/â•‰19/â•‰indian-â•‰report-â•‰pakistan-â•‰spies-â•‰
tied-â•‰mumbai-â•‰siege and Eric Schmitt, Mark Mazzetti and Jane Perlez, “Pakistan’s
Spies Aided Group tied to Mumbai Siege.” New York Times, December 7, 2008, http://â•‰
www.nytimes.com/â•‰2008/â•‰12/â•‰08/â•‰world/â•‰asia/â•‰08terror.html?pagewanted=all&_â•‰r=0.
8. Jawan is a Hindi term used to refer to infantrymen.
9. On crowded days, spectators arriving late have to stand at the entrance gates to
watch the performance.
10. BSF guards estimate ten thousand viewers attend each performance.
11. At the performances I witnessed in 2012, the Indian contingent included the
regular participation of women soldiers as part of the ceremony. The Indian audi-
ences loudly applauded their performance, most likely because there were no
women representing the Pakistani side.
12. In the Indian cultural context, twisting the mustache in public symbolically sug-
gests superiority, power, and masculinity. Puffing out or expanding the chest is a
gesture of strength.
13. Ali Usman and Rameez Ahmad, “Suicide Blast at Wagah Border Kills 55, Injures
120 Others,” Express Tribune, November 2, 2014, http://â•‰tribune.com.pk/â•‰story/â•‰
784976/â•‰cylinder-â•‰blasts-â•‰k ill-â•‰3-â•‰in-â•‰islamabad-â•‰injure-â•‰2-â•‰in-â•‰karachi/â•‰.
14. “Wagah Border Suicide Bomb Attack Toll Reaches 60,” November 3, 2014,
IndiaToday.in, http://â•‰indiatoday.intoday.in/â•‰story/â•‰wagah-â•‰border-â•‰suicide-â•‰blast-â•‰
pakistan-â•‰lahore-â•‰attack/â•‰1/â•‰398849.html.
15. “Wargames at Wagah,” Times of India, January 4, 2009, http://â•‰timesofindia.indi-
atimes.com/â•‰home/â•‰sunday-â•‰t imes/â•‰deep-â•‰focus/â•‰Wargames-â•‰at-â•‰Wagah/â•‰a rticleshow/â•‰
3932153.cms.
16. “Wagah Border Ceremony Aggression Toned Down,” BBC News, July 22, 2011,
http://â•‰w ww.bbc.co.uk/â•‰news/â•‰world-â•‰south-â•‰asia-â•‰10722514.
17. This verse is taken from Bhagavad Gita Â�chapter 4, verse 7, and Â�chapter 4, verse 8.
18. These verses were used in the theme song of the televised version of the
Mahabharata produced by B. R. Chopra and broadcast on the DD National chan-
nel from 1988 to 1990.
WORKS CITED
Ahmed, Ishtiaq. 2012. “Ethnic Cleansing and Genocidal Massacres 65 Years Ago.”
Asia Portal, September 14, http://â•‰infocus.asiaportal.info—â•‰/â•‰2012/â•‰09/â•‰14/â•‰ethnic-â•‰
cleansing-â•‰and-â•‰genocidal-â•‰massacres-â•‰65-â•‰years-â•‰ago-â•‰by-â•‰ishtiaq-â•‰a hmed/â•‰.
Beckett, Ian F. W. 2008. Discovering British Regimental Traditions. Princes Risborough,
UK: Shire.
Burstyn, Varda. 1999. The Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics, and the Culture of Sport.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Foster, Susan L. 1996. “Introduction.” In Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture

and Power, x–x v. London: Routledge.
——— . 2005. “Dance and Narrative.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 95–96.
London: Routledge.
Ganguly, Sumit. 2001. Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions since 1947. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Mallot, J. Edward. 2012. Memory, Nationalism, and Narrative in Contemporary South
Asia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Manzi, Yvonne. 2014. “Performative Violence: Conceptual and Strategic Implications.”
E-International Relations, February 28, http://www.e-ir.info/2014/02/28/performative-
v iolence-conceptual-and-strategic-implications/.
Menon, Jisha. 2013. The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, and the Memory
of Partition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Metcalf, Thomas. 1995. Ideologies of the Raj. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press.
Murphy, Richard McGill. 2002. “Performing Partition in Lahore.” In The Partitions
of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India, edited by Suvir Kaul, 183–207.
Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux des Memoire.” In
“Memory and Counter-Memory,” edited by Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph
Starn. Special issue, Representations no. 26:7–24.
Oppliger, Patrice A. 2004. Wrestling and Hypermasculinity. Jefferson, NC: McFarlan.
Ramaswamy, Sumathi. 2010. The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Sen, Sudhi Ranjan. 2012. “Pakistan Terror Alert for Wagah Border Checkpoint.” NDTV,
May 17, http://w ww.ndtv.com/article/india/pakistan-terror-alert-for-wagah-border-
checkpoint-211910.
Singh, Sukhwant. 1981. India’s Wars since Independence: Defence of the Western Border
Volume Two. New Delhi: Vikas.
Vasquez, John A. 2005. “The India-Pakistan Conflict in Light of General Theories of
War, Rivalry, and Deterrence.” In The India-Pakistan Conflict: An Enduring Rivalry,
edited by T. V. Paul, 54–79. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Watson, James L. 1996. “Fighting with Operas: Processionals Politics and the Spectre
of Violence in Rural Hong Kong.” In The Politics of Cultural Performance, edited
by David Parkin, Lionel Caplan, and Humphrey Fisher, 145–159. Providence,
RI: Berghahn.
Wirsing, Robert. 1998. War or Peace on the Line of Control?: The India-Pakistan Dispute
over Kashmir Turns Fifty. Durham, UK: International Boundaries Research Unit.
Wright, Tom. 2010. “Border Crossing Gives Visitors Quite a Kick: India, Pakistan
Clash About Toning Down Cherished Ceremony.” Wall Street Journal, July 30,
http://online.wsj.com/a rticle/SB10001424052748703292704575392951687206096.
html.
Zarrilli, Philip. 1984. The Kathakali Complex: Actor, Performance and Structure. New
Delhi: Abhinav.
9
A Choreographer’s Statement
B I L L T. J O N E S
( J U LY 2 014 )
“This had been almost as hard to obtain from the authorities as the
appointment of a general. She received the first of these croissants on
the morning when the newspapers reported the wreck of the Lusitania.
As she dipped it in her coffee, and flicked her newspaper with one hand
so that it would stay open without her having to remove her other hand
from the croissant she was soaking, she said: “How awful! It’s worse than
the most horrific tragedy.” But … the look which lingered on her face,
probably induced by the taste of the croissant, so valuable in preventing
migraine, was more like one of quiet satisfaction.”
—â•‰M arcel Proust, Time Regained
The above quote has always haunted me since I first read Proust’s great novel as
a young dancer/â•‰choreographer in the late 1970s whose day job at the time was
to pretend to be a masseur at a Jewish Community Center in Binghamton, a
provincial city in upstate New York. Most of the men who frequented this facil-
ity had little interest in massage, so in fact I became primarily the dispenser of
towels. This allowed me many hours to work my way through Proust’s sprawl-
ing masterpiece. When I was recently approached by the editors of this anthol-
ogy to consider writing on the aftermath of my 2005 work Blind Date, this
quote and its layers of painful irony came back to me.
Why?
204 B ill T . J ones
Because in comparing my mood as an artist and the mood of the country

at that time with this time, I must acknowledge that I fear that much art-
making about war—at least from my privileged position as a midcareer artist
unassailed by bombs falling, suicide bombers, and the more insidious mani-
festation of warfare sometimes referred to as “the fog of war”—a mounts to
little more than Madame Verdurin’s comfy, secure, settling into fluffed pil-
lows, biting into a freshly baked croissant, and taking a sip of a frothy café au
lait while reading about a disaster of war. Harsh? Self-flagellating? Maybe …
I go back to the period when Blind Date was being created by me, my associ-
ate director Janet Wong, my company, composer Daniel Bernard Roumain,
and violinist Nurit Pacht. It was the early days of the second term of the much-
dreaded (from the progressive point of view) George W. Bush as president.
The bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, was still fresh
and had allowed the most hawkish warmongering groups such as the neocon-
servatives surrounding the president to seize the moral high ground and give
warning to all antidemocratic dictators by the imposition of “regime change”
on Saddam Hussein while not so clandestinely attempting to reshape the oil-
driven world order as imagined by those still in love with the notion that the
United States was the policeman of the world.
As an artist, I could feel my ire rise almost daily with the sloganeering and
misinformation that seemed to fly directly in the face of the high-minded
ideals of the philosophes of the Age of Enlightenment. It was a moment that
was anti-intellectual, antiscience, in some ways antidiplomacy, and ultimately
antiprogress.
Blind Date’s title was derived from a possibly too-clever play on “dating”: the
high philosophers’ ideas meeting with the mendacity and manipulation of
what Dwight Eisenhower—the very symbol of the “greatest generation” sav-
ing the world—called the “military-industrial complex.” Like many in the arts
and outside of it, I saw a threat to everything that had shaped me since I was
a small child in an African American household where one’s national identity
and patriotism could supersede the outrages of racism. My consciousness of
the ever-morphing media as represented by the vibrancy of the new Wild West
of the Internet, Fox News—the de facto organ of the Right—and the strange
inertia of the traditional Left that, while vilifying an unpopular president and
protesting the war, was still being outmaneuvered at almost every turn and
was ultimately powerless to stop the misadventures scripted, stage-managed,
and sold by the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and so on. In reading
the smugly congratulatory liberal intellectual forum of the New York Review
of Books I came upon the following quote:
In broad terms, fourth generation warfare seems likely to be widely dis-

persed and largely undefined; the distinction between war and peace will
A Choreographer’s Statement 205
be blurred to the vanishing point. It will be nonlinear, possibly to the

point of having no definable battlefields or fronts. The distinction between
“civilian” and “military” may disappear. Actions will occur concurrently
throughout all participants’ depth, including their society as a cultural, not
just a physical, entity.1
Here was the near robotic, demonic dystopian voice that we employed as an
anticreed and a ghostly presence throughout Blind Date. This voice was the
media speaking to us and a sort of protagonist in the work that used video,
pop songs (Etta James’s hit Security), and an endless, ever-morphing pageant
of projected anonymous human faces gleaned from the Internet as a kind of
witness who stared unblinking at the audience throughout all the proceedings
of this sincere, raucous protest of a piece.
So how can I compare such an effort to that of Madame Verdurin’s smugly
sheltered comfort and self-regard? Uneasily, for sure …
And here I am not sure if the disappointment I felt once the work had run
its course was not in fact the letdown following any large outlay of physical
and emotional energy or simply the depression that comes to activists and self-
described mavericks when reaching middle age. And maybe it was nothing more
than a justified response to the world that followed the second Bush adminis-
tration: a black, progressive president who was unable to close Guantanamo
Bay, who was vilified and defied at every turn by the very conservative forces
who had brought on the debacle we are still reeling from and a legislature that
has become even more paralyzed by obstructionism and knee-jerk partisan-
ship. Yes, the rich get richer and the poor (and middle classes) get poorer.
Since Blind Date, I have had many opportunities to think about the ability
of art to really change things. John Cage, who has become evermore a source
of provocation and comfort to me over the past ten years, titled an important
collection of writings Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make
Matters Worse). To be sure this subtitle, “You Will Only Make Matters Worse,”
came from his ailing mother chastising him for believing that changing the
world was an acceptable goal for a sensible person. While I would not go so far
as to say that the world cannot be changed, I will admit that since Blind Date it
has been a struggle for me to answer the question “Why make another work?”
The only possible answers to this question are:
1. This is what I do!
2. It is the pretext that allows me to create and maintain a community of
talented artists and collaborators who thirst—as I have—for meaning
and a sense of empowerment that comes with taking an idea from the
nowhere place of the imagination into the harsh vale of experience
and setting it free in the terrifying world of public opinion.
206 B ill T . J ones
John Cage and his ideas about composition have, as I said before, proven to be
part of the solution to the question “Why make a new work?” He insisted that
of first importance to a creator is finding something new for him/â•‰herself. The
act of creation was not about changing the world, but about finding an oppor-
tunity for its creator to find “self-â•‰alteration.” This provocative idea sets one free
of concerns about what the work is saying to the audience. It does insist, how-
ever, that the creator let go of intention and personal taste through the use of
indeterminacy. This experiment with indeterminacy has provided an exciting
new vein of exploration in my company’s work exemplified in a piece called
Story/â•‰Time (2012). This dance/â•‰theater work relies on the random selection and
ordering of dance materials, music by composer Ted Coffey, and one-â•‰minute
stories I wrote. These stories can be ironic, direct, obtuse, sincere, and philo-
sophical, never taking a stand, but leaving the meaning of the kaleidoscopic
exercise squarely in the imagination of each audience member. This strategy
continues to be a part of my approach to the making of work. However, it was
obviously not the only way nor the most satisfying one. After its premiere, I was
confronted yet again by another nagging question: “What is my true interest?”
To answer this question honestly I have to say it is at present literary. The
literary experience is, by its very nature, nonpublic. Its meaning is conveyed
by words on the page being received or not in the recesses of the reader’s
imagination.
Having reread W. G. Sebald’s novel The Emigrants and returning to an oral
history I had conducted with a ninety-â•‰year-â•‰old survivor of World War II, Dora
Amelan, I took these materials as a starting point and frame of reference for
my company’s next work, Analogy (working title), a discourse about the nature
of a life well-â•‰lived, courage, and what is worth fighting for. Dora Amelan’s
story (an oral history) and Sebald’s character Ambrose Adelwarth (a quasi-â•‰
fictional creation) will serve as two parallel streams of investigation in search
of equivalences. The equivalences I am in search of are notions of personal
identity, duty, love, belief, and the instinct for survival.
In closing I will say the journey from Blind Date to Analogy is evidence
of an itinerary that has no destination, but is fueled by curiosity, pride, and
hopefulness.
NOTE
1.â•‡ Quoting Lind et al. (1989).
WORKS CITED
Lind, William S., Keith Nightingale, John F. Schmitt, Joseph W. Sutton, and Gary
I. Wilson. 1989. “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation.” Marine
Corps Gazette, October 22–â•‰26.
10
Dancing in the Spring
Dance, Hegemony, and Change
ROSEM A RY M A RT I N
The term “war” commonly includes concepts of hostility, conflict, and antag-
onism; however, understandings of what constitutes war have changed over
time (Kaldor 2005; Zisler 2009). It is argued that we now live in an era when
there is a decreasing difference between war and peace (Hardt and Negri
2004, 53). Violent conflicts may erupt, then smolder, only to erupt again. At
the same time, resistance does not end; it continues in various forms, violent
and nonviolent. Thus the uprisings that have swept across the North African
and Middle Eastern regions in recent years, while violent to varying degrees,
form part of what has been called the endless wars of the 21st century.
The Arab Spring1 uprisings began in December 2010 in Tunisia when a
twenty-â•‰
six-â•‰
year-â•‰
old street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself alight,
in protest against the confiscation of his produce cart—â•‰his livelihood—â•‰and
the harassment and humiliation that he endured from police and a munici-
pal official. However, it has been noted that rumblings had been occurring
well before this time across the southern Mediterranean region (Dabashi
2012; Ghonim 2012). From Tunisia, protests moved into Algeria and then, by
January 2011, into Egypt. On January 25, 2011, a holiday in support of the
national police force, tens of thousands of Egyptians poured into the streets,
denouncing the Mubarak regime and calling for a “day of rage.”2 The goals
of this popular uprising in Egypt were focused on regime change, however
208 R osemary M artin
they also addressed concerns around human rights, free and fair elections, the
state of emergency laws, police brutality, corruption, high unemployment and
freedom of speech. The methods and characteristics of the uprisings in Cairo
specifically involved civil disobedience and resistance, demonstrations and
marches, protest camps, Internet activism (most notably through Facebook
and Twitter), urban warfare and violent riots and clashes. The Egyptian upris-
ings led to the ousting of the Mubarak regime and elections that ushered in
Muhammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. Soon after, the military con-
ducted a coup, then backed Abdel Fattah el-Sisi for president. Sisi now governs
Egypt much as Mubarak did, suppressing dissent and civil unrest. However, in
keeping with contemporary conflicts, the uprisings are by no means over; these
events are ongoing and fluid. Therefore, it is of importance to clarify that this
chapter is not attempting to explain Egypt, its people, its dance, or the events
of the uprisings, rather it aims to construct a “layered account” (Clair 2003,
56) of dance, hegemony and change, articulating the voices of three Caironese
dancers who have experienced dance and the uprisings in diverse ways. This
chapter seeks to focus on the role of state imposed censorship within the expe-
riences of the three dancers. These reveal the diverse ways in which the state
of Egypt, under various leaderships, has used censorship as a weapon to fight
civil unrest. Examining censorship in this context allows an alternative way
of understanding state power and the resistance to it. The dancers, through
their experiences, illustrate how they relate to censorship in the environment
in which they are living and working, and their resistance to it or alternatively
collusion through self-censorship.
Dance does not often feature in current, dominant accounts of the upris-
ings that have been sweeping the southern Mediterranean region, yet dance
has been present in public protests—from collective dabkeh3 being performed
through the streets of Homs in defiance of the Assad regime, to dance as an
expression alongside theater, music, and visual art in locations that could
be considered hubs of the revolutions, such as Tahrir Square. Writer Rana
Moussaoui (2011) explains how the medium of contemporary dance is per-
haps particularly potent within these uprisings, enabling performers to echo
through their creative work issues that are pertinent to the political uprisings
taking place. However, it could be asked, within these recent events, how are
dancers creatively engaging with such extraordinary political moments, if at
all? How have the uprisings affected dancers’ lives and the work that they are
creating and performing? During the uprisings, how have dancers partici-
pated in public protests, and how have they seen dance incorporated within
these activities?
The dance practices occurring in Cairo (before, during, and after the upris-
ings) are varied and rich.4 They range from the Cairo Opera Ballet, with fifty
Dancing in the Spring 209
full-time dancers performing a repertoire of classical and modern ballets,5 to

touristic belly dance performances accompanying expensive dinners on boats
dotting the Nile, to avant-garde contemporary dance festivals6 combining ele-
ments of theater, sound, installation, and technology alongside contemporary
dance movement vocabularies.
Using an ethnographic research method this chapter focuses on the indi-
vidual narratives of three dance practitioners, one male—Mounier—and two
female—Amie and Dalia. In-depth interviews were conducted before, during,
and after the Egyptian revolution of 2011. These interviews took place in per-
son, over Skype, and occasionally by email. While the first interviews with the
dancers before the uprisings were focused on their dance stories and histories
generally, subsequent interviews specifically investigated the repercussions of
the political events of the Arab Spring on their lived experiences.
While the narratives of the three dancers might resonate with experiences
of others in a variety of settings, it was never my intention to produce a set of
standardized experiences. Rather, I was interested in how individuals experi-
enced dancing through the uprising in Cairo, and how the political landscape
affected their creative and performance work. Initially I was most interested
in investigating whether their collective experiences had a common ground;
however, as the fieldwork developed the moments of diversity and difference
caught my attention, bringing these to the foreground of the investigation.
When I first met Amie, Mounier, and Dalia in early 2010 there was no
apparent indication of the events that would unfold over the coming months.
At the time, Amie was a ballet dancer with the Cairo Opera Ballet Company
and also took part in independent dance performances abroad. Mounier was
an emerging independent contemporary dancer working between Cairo and
Europe; he was also completing his formative dance training at the inde-
pendent Studio Emad Eddin. Dalia had danced for a number of years with
the Egyptian Modern Dance Theater Company at the Cairo Opera and then
became a freelance contemporary dancer and choreographer who also taught
part-time at the Cairo Modern Dance School affiliated with the Cairo Opera.
I spent many hours interviewing each of them about how they learned
dance, their performance and choreographic work, the environments and
institutions they performed dance within, the challenges of negotiating famil-
ial and societal expectations, and the implications of practicing an art form
in relative isolation, often with little financial or social support. All three took
on multiple roles within their dance communities—as teachers, dancers, cho-
reographers, designers, curators, and arts administrators. I watched each of
them perform, teach, and rehearse, and I spent time with them in their homes,
with their families, and at social events. When I left Cairo in October 2010,
I never thought I would be desperately trying to make contact with them only
a few months later in January 2011, hearing how the political events had made
significant impacts on their lives in diverse ways.
AMIE
Tahrir Square turned into a theater; people who went down to the square
were tired of being kept in the dark, and even if it was their last day
on earth they wanted their chance to perform. For me this revolution
was about respect for self-â•‰expression, and I think dance is part of this
revolution.
—â•‰A mie
When I first met Amie in February 2010 she was a dancer with the state-â•‰run
Cairo Opera Ballet Company. One year later she had resigned from the com-
pany, refusing to support the pro-â•‰Mubarak propaganda the company dancers
were forced to participate in. Amie told me how the Egyptian dancers7 in the
company were called into a meeting with Opera House management. In this
meeting they were asked to only voice opinions on social networking sites such
as Facebook and Twitter that were supportive of the Mubarak regime. They were
not to participate in the public protests that had started to take place in Cairo, or
they would be fired. She explained that another decisive factor in her resignation
concerned a work by Maurice Bejart that the company was restaging in 2011.
The ballet (originally created in 1990 with costumes by Gianni Versace) was
entitled Pyramide—â•‰El Nour; she learned it was now being renamed Pyramids
and the Revolution! Amie expressed frustration at how this nationalistic ballet
preserved the notion of Pharaonism, which identifies Egypt as being a distinc-
tive and independent political unit in the world since the era of the pharaohs,
emphasizing just one aspect of Egypt’s culture. The demands to take a certain
political position and the pro-â•‰Mubarak propaganda the company was perform-
ing in ballets such as Pyramids and the Revolution! that led Amie to resign.
When I spoke to Amie prior to the uprisings of January 2011, she voiced her
continuous awareness of working within confines dictated by the Mubarak
government: “What happens outside of this box? The environment that we
work in is all about controlling our minds and bodies,” she said. For Amie these
boundaries were often defined by censorship regulations: “The concern is how
al-â•‰Musannafat8 might react. Once they came and stopped a performance I was
in; I still don’t understand what their reason was.” Government censorship
and surveillance is something mentioned by various artists across the south-
ern Mediterranean region (Rosemary Martin 2012). For example, Jordanian
performance artist Lana Nasser posed the question, “Does censorship actually
create more creative art, more innovative ways to say something? (personal
communication, December, 10, 2011). She cited Iran as a place where contem-
porary dance and theater makers such as Yaser Khaseb, Atefeh Tehrani, Crazy
Body Group, and Black Narcissus were exploring the boundaries of censorship
within their work.
Censorship in art is certainly not a new issue (see for example Carmilly-
Weinberger 1986; Childs 1997; Mostyn 2002; Negash 2007), and is by no
means confined to the southern Mediterranean region. As Girma Negash
states, “Censorship is universally condemned and yet commonly practiced
everywhere with various degrees of severity. … These blanket condemnations
are rooted in the Enlightenment understanding of censorship, which is insti-
tutional and primarily has to do with control of expression” (2007, 133). The
intricate relationship between censorship and dance is part of this old debate,
with diverse perspectives emerging from various cultural contexts and politi-
cal situations (see for example Cooper 2004; Hanna 2002; Randy Martin 1987,
1998, 2006; Nielsen 2008).
Censorship in Egypt prior to the 2011 revolution could be understood as
something imposed by the Mubarak government to control information and
ideas that reached the people. Under the emergency law that was put in place
in 1967, the Egyptian government was allowed to supersede the constitution,
which stated that censorship should not be applied to publishing, media, and
the arts.9 The Mubarak regime feared the power of independent art, since art-
ists were considered intellectuals who could stir rebellion. Under Mubarak,
artists appeared to have two options, either being coopted into serving the
desires of the state or practicing their art outside of state confines. In the latter
case they would have to impose censorship upon themselves or risk imprison-
ment or worse. A number of artists I met in Egypt said that both before and
after the Arab Spring events they felt it was necessary for artists to speak the
unspeakable. Many described how they were seeking to address social issues
through the arts and engage in performative acts such as protesting and occu-
pying public spaces (MacFarquhar 2011; Moussaoui 2011; Sultan 2008). Amie
reflected on the notion of performance, public space, and censorship, referring
to an earlier comment she had made and revisiting it in light of the uprisings.
She explained:
I mentioned in an earlier interview that there’s really not a lot of interac-

tion between the public and dancers, or even among dancers themselves.
I mentioned that I was curious to see how the public would react “if dancers
could march right into Tahrir Square and have a movement revolution”
and ironically you asked, “How would Amn el Dawla10 react?” About seven
months later we had our revolution, and sure enough state security showed
us their reaction! Just looking back at this section of the interview gives
[me] goosebumps.
The location of Tahrir Square emerged strongly within Amie’s narrative,

and she discussed her participation in improvised site-â•‰specific dance moments
that took place in Tahrir Square during late January and early February 2011.
Participatory dance in public spaces prior to these events was something dis-
couraged and even punishable. Amie referred to the occupation of Tahrir
Square, saying, “I think it might have been the first site-â•‰specific dance in the
history of Egypt!” She continued:
I saw invalids in wheelchairs carrying colorful signs, families who had

nothing to eat marching with flags, people who were threatened with losing
their jobs and who knew that there would be repercussions on their own
lives—â•‰they were all in Tahrir. Even as Mubarak refused to step down and
it became increasingly frustrating and dangerous, people were still taking
pleasure in coming up with more outrageous forms of self-â•‰expression—â•‰
slogans, costumes, graffiti, music, dance, and theater.
Amie’s memory of the participatory dance presented in Tahrir Square dur-

ing the uprisings reiterates how meaningful the moving, performing, and
creative body can be when it is used as a means of realizing, expressing, and
defining cultural and political directions and causes. Such notions resonate
with Randy Martin’s (2006) view that “gatherings in protest are also occa-
sions for the socialization of the body politic, moments when principles for
living together among strangers are put on display” (791). The events of Tahrir
Square also connect with Susan Leigh Foster’s (2003) contention that the mov-
ing body within public protest is “capable of both persuasion and obstinate
recalcitrance” (365) and that “the physical moving body can and does create
interference” (365).
DALIA
Walking into the dance studio at the Cairo Opera House for the first time in
mid-â•‰2010, I was struck by how similar it was to every other dance studio I had
been in during my dancing life. Dalia had invited me to watch the Egyptian
Modern Dance Theater Company’s contemporary dance class. She was teach-
ing the class and greeted me with a hug as I walked in, introducing me to the
dancers as “the dancing researcher.” Over the following weeks I interviewed
Dalia on several occasions. It was during these interviews that I realized that
although outwardly there appeared to be no explicit connection between
the work occurring in the dance studio at the Cairo Opera House and the
autocratic regime that was in power at the time, there were a multiplicity of
implicit political statements being made through the dancers’ work and occa-
sionally through the act of simply being a dancer (Wagner 2009). Mentioned
previously within Amie’s narrative was the role of censorship in relation to
dance and how this means being a dancer involves the negotiation of political
understandings and confines. The idea of navigating censorship as a dancer
was also raised by Dalia, who explained that censorship is “in the back of my
mind; I have to be careful of ideas or movements I choose. It’s artistic work
within boundaries, with self-censorship.” It appears that the censorship some
of the dancers experienced under the Mubarak regime played a role in their
approach toward choreographic and creative practices, contributing to their
artistic choices of what to present and express within their work.11
Among all that Dalia spoke of during the course of our interviews, there
was one particular detail that resonated with me. It was said quietly, in pass-
ing, and could easily have been overlooked had my attention been elsewhere.
She said simply: “They shut down my performance.” There was a small pause;
then she continued:
This was not the first time they, the cops, came and stopped a performance
I’ve been involved with. But it was the first independent performance I ever
did. For me it was really important that this performance went ahead, and
why it annoyed me so much that they stopped it. Even though the panel
that censors the work had seen our performance and said, “Yes, OK, you
can perform,” it ended up on the day of the performance we were told to
go home, that the performance wouldn’t be happening because something
about the theater not being safe. I think the reason is that they don’t like
independent theater, they are afraid that independent theater might create
a revolution or put evil ideas into people’s heads.
The experience of the police stopping performances was something that had
become commonplace for Dalia. She told me of the many times it had hap-
pened, and how she negotiated the issue. In Nehad Selaiha’s (2012) unpack-
ing of censorship and performance in Egypt, the complex layers of this
censorship—imposed by both state and society—are highlighted. Selaiha
states that censorship imposed by the state or society is concerning when each
operates independently, but it is most alarming when they work together, cre-
ating a totalitarian ideology. However, it could also be that the act of being a
dancer in a specific socio-cultural context can be political. In a society where
dance is perceived by some as haram (forbidden) or immoral, there is a degree
of suspicion around the act of dancing, whether it be Western dance or more
culturally specific dance practices such as dabkeh and belly dance (Karayanni
2004, 2009; Shay 1999, 2002; Sweileh 2011).
Dalia, like Amie, also participated in the Tahrir Square protests. Dalia
recalled the performances that were occurring in the space of Tahrir
Square: “It was a flurry of art pouring—â•‰dance, poetry, graffiti, theater—â•‰I
felt overwhelmed.” She explained that she saw social dance being performed
alongside hip-â•‰hop, and that those performing these dances were from diverse
facets of Egyptian society. The ideas shared by Dalia connect with Judith
Lynne Hanna’s (2002) notion that dances have the ability to “shock when they
depart from the conventions” (311), with these conventions being in relation
to themes such as relationships, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, presence, energy,
types of movements, and stories shared. The dance occurring in Tahrir strayed
from the conventional dance practices and performance within Egyptian soci-
ety in regard to the presence and energy of the space, the stories and move-
ments being shared, and also the relationships between people. Prior to such
an event there would have been little opportunity for a spontaneous dance
performance, or for young people to share their dance practices with an older
generation. It also perhaps reveals the possibilities that can emerge regarding
the sensory and corporeal value of spaces such as Tahrir Square, which acted
as meeting points and nucleuses of the uprisings.
Dalia noted that the Tahrir Square protests partly inspired a dance she cre-
ated in June 2012 titled Wesh w’Dahr,12 which confronted Egyptian society’s
suspicion of dance being presented publically, and its consequent censorship.
The performance piece critically interrogates through a presentational dance
performance (drawing on a contemporary dance vocabulary) the profound ide-
ological fissures in Egyptian society that she feels the revolution has exposed. In
the work, Dalia and fellow dancer Hala walk into a courtyard space, barefoot,
presenting the audience with stark contrasts. While Dalia wears a revealing
hot-â•‰pink dress, with shoestring straps and a knee-â•‰length skirt, Hala is com-
pletely swathed in black, with only her face, hands, and, in very occasional
glimpses, bare feet showing. A slow conflict of movement occurs between the
two dancers as Dalia takes small, sharp, and measured movements—â•‰a twist of
the hand, small bends at the knees and ankles—â•‰while Hala moves languidly,
taking turns and lunges, extending limbs and rippling her torso beneath a
swathe of black material. Dalia and Hala then each produce a large cardboard
box from beneath a table at one side of the space. After placing the boxes side by
side in front of the audience, they bring out various accessories, which they add
to their costumes. By the time they are finished, the initial contrast between
the two women has deepened. Dalia looks like a caricature, with a blonde wig,
brightly colored necklaces, and a red, lipstick-â•‰stained mouth. Hala dissolves
into the shadows of the performance space with a black scarf veiling her face
and black gloves and socks covering hands and feet. This act constructs anxi-
ety by creating two contrasting images that represent more than just specific
aesthetic ideals. Then the dancers add to the anxiety by reversing their actions.
This reversal is visually translated into a courageous act of stripping onstage
that perhaps should have left both dancers nude. However, the “reveal” stops at
a small skirt and tank top for each dancer, highlighting the limits to what risks
can be taken in a Cairo dance performance.
MOUNIER
Dalia’s dance was overtly political, but there were also instances where dance
was “speaking” of politics in the country well before the revolution, albeit in
a quieter voice. During an interview in early 2010 Mounier stated, “One of
the key things that motivates our work is censorship, the idea that we can get
around this, say things we shouldn’t, push the boundaries.” Mounier talked
about how “pushing the boundaries” might mean creating a duet between a
male and female dancer that involved touch—â•‰lifting, catching, embracing—â•‰
under the guise that their characters were brother and sister. It appears that
the restriction of artistic expression and choice that some of the dancers felt
at this time frequently left them feeling despondent and frustrated. Mounier
explained, “The bureaucracy, making work and then being told you can’t per-
form it even after it’s been through all the processes—â•‰it puts you off making it
in the first place.”
In an interview after the revolution, Mounier explained how dance perfor-
mance within urban spaces has continued morphing alongside the changing
political landscape in Cairo, shifting from spontaneous theater and participa-
tory dance in Tahrir Square to something purposefully constructed as pre-
sentational dance situating performance in various public spaces in Cairo.
Mounier noted how the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-â•‰Caf),
a site-â•‰specific public performance festival, was held in April 2012.13 The event,
created by independent theater director Ahmed El-â•‰Attar, was presented over
a three-â•‰week period, and included musical concerts and theater and contem-
porary dance performances, as well as a visual arts exhibition, artist lectures,
film projections, and workshops. The festival was dedicated to those who
had died for freedom after January 25, 2011. The event took place in multiple
venues in downtown Cairo, in front of the Egyptian Stock Exchange, outside
the Library of the American University in Cairo, and around Radio Theater.
Mounier choreographed a short work entitled Small Story for the festival. He
noted that “D-â•‰Caf is a first; before this there was no performance in the street,
no random art events. If there was a performance it would be approved by the
government.”
Mounier staged his performance in Borsa, a popular cafe area near the
Egyptian Stock Exchange. It began in the center of a pedestrian street and then
weaved in and around the cafes and shops in the narrow side streets. With
Mounier as the sole dancer commanding the paved pedestrian street with slow
movements—â•‰rippling from shoulder to fingertips, top of head to toes, back to
front, shoulder to hand, and knee to hip—â•‰people who were walking by seemed
to stop for a fleeting moment, look, then look again before continuing on
their journey. It was when Mounier’s movement became more vigorous, with
jumps, rolls to the floor, and turns that an audience began to gather, clustering
together initially until a circle had formed around Mounier and he had to break
through the crowd to begin his journey to the outside seating area of a cafe.
He sat down in a white plastic chair, crossing his left heel on his right knee and
began an intricate phrase of gesture. Once again Mounier built his movement
up from slow to violently fast, until he slapped his own face, and then slapped
it again. He carefully stood up from the chair and continued to take his audi-
ence down into a small side street where the performance continued. The sight
of someone dancing in the street drew a number of passersby. Shopkeepers
emerged from doorways; a truck driver stopped and began filming the perfor-
mance on his mobile phone, which raises the notion of the mediatization of
global events, an issue that has been frequently discussed within the emerging
scholarship of the Arab Spring uprisings across the southern Mediterranean
region (Dabashi 2012; Gelvin 2012; Noueihed and Warren 2012). A group of
police officers gave the show two thumbs up, a sight that would not have been
seen prior to the Arab Spring events. Mounier explained how he felt that he
was able to create work that spoke to the atmosphere, the context, and the
events that had unfolded over the previous months. He noted, “This perfor-
mance is based on the themes of silencing and freedom—â•‰that everyone has a
small story, a small part in this revolution.”
DANCING BEYOND THE SPRING

Since the events of the Arab Spring in Cairo the terrain for dance perfor-
mance in Egypt has shifted. Perhaps the most notable change has been the
emergence of visible independent contemporary dance performances at
various points over the past four years. Contemporary dance is not a new
practice in Cairo; however, during the Mubarak regime it was frequently
confined to performances in small gallery spaces, basements, or garages,
with a niche audience coming primarily from the liberal university-â•‰educated
middle class. During the Mubarak years the government often perceived
independently staged works as a threat, and artists were unable to receive
state funding or support to perform in more visible locations, such as public
spaces and theater stages. Since the events of the Arab Spring, independent
dance practitioners have taken on directing and teaching roles within state
dance institutions. This has occurred, for example, at the Egyptian Modern
Dance Theater Company and Cairo Contemporary Dance Center (formerly
called Cairo Modern Dance School), institutions supported by the Egyptian
Ministry of Culture. Both companies were established and run by Walid
Aouni (from 1992 to 2011), who resigned as director after the minister of
culture, Farouk Hosni, was removed and support dimmed for those propped
up by the regime. Aouini’s position was taken over by Karima Mansour, an
independent Egyptian artist, who trained and performed abroad for many
years before returning home. The promise that these changes held for a free
and invigorated Caironese contemporary dance scene was short lived. With
the numerous shifts in political leadership and instability within an already
fractured society, dance appears to have been relegated to the periphery of
people’s thoughts. In addition, conflict between the independent dance prac-
titioners who had taken over various facets of the contemporary dance scene
resulted in stagnation after initial change. At the same time, the comings
and goings of conservative political factions has meant that attitudes toward
dance have frequently changed. During the post-Mubarak months, people’s
attitudes seemed to be relatively open. As the Muslim Brotherhood and then
the Sisi government took over leadership, attitudes became more closed.
While external censorship and self-censorship appear to be more relaxed
than under the Mubarak regime, both continue to permeate dance practices
in Egypt.
It is hoped that the three dancers’ experiences documented in this chap-
ter will offer further contextualization for the realities of artists’ lives under
autocratic regimes and show how civil revolutions make an impact on dancers
and their dance practices. During and after the uprisings in Cairo, dance was
occurring in diverse locations, sometimes in improvised site-specific dance
moments that took place in Tahrir Square during January and February
2011 (Dalia and Amie’s experiences, for example), sometimes in urban loca-
tions that had previously been void of predetermined public performance
(for example, Mounier’s performance of Small Story). Politics, power, and
performance appear to be interwoven in the three dancers’ experiences of
the uprisings, providing a snapshot of the cultural and political events that
were occurring. The events of the Arab Spring and the dancers’ responses to
and roles within these events reiterate the shift and broadening of the notion
of what “war” constitutes, emphasizing that identity construction, including
of ideological and national identities, can be explored through contempo-
rary dance practices in times of conflict (for example, Dalia’s performance
of Wesh w’Dahr).
The uprisings in Egypt are full of extremes and contradictions, with simul-
taneous emotions coexisting—â•‰elation and fear, defiance and uncertainty, free-
dom and restriction. Since the election of Abdel Fattah el-â•‰Sisi as president in
2014, numerous arrests and detentions by Sisi’s government have occurred as
a method to control individuals speaking out against governmental ideals. For
example, in late January 2015, as Egypt marked the fourth anniversary of its
2011 uprising, more than five hundred people were arrested for demonstrating
over a week-â•‰long period, and twenty people died in clashes during the same
week. While the Egyptian government claimed the majority of those in the
demonstrations were supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, liberal activ-
ists were also arrested or killed. The haunting images of activist Shaimaa al-â•‰
Sabbagh, shot dead during the protest and dying in the arms of her husband,
illustrate this.
The effects these significant events have had, and will continue to have, on
dance in Egypt and the wider region require considered and critical investiga-
tion within future scholarly research. This chapter only touches the surface of
dance and the uprisings in Egypt. The three dancers’ experiences offer a contri-
bution to the history of dance in Cairo and the intricate relationship dance can
have with politics, highlighting how dance has the potential to act as a politi-
cal utterance during contemporary revolutionary moments. Dancers’ physical
presence in protest and performance provide, in Susan Foster’s words, “evi-
dence of our belief in the possibility of instigating change” (Foster 2003, 412).
NOTES
1. It should be noted that some scholars and writers have described the term “Arab
Spring” as an Orientalist label that is semantically Western in construction
(Alhassen 2012; Khouri 2011; Rooksby 2011). Others have encouraged the term
“Arab Awakening” (Fisk 2012); however, there have also been substantial critiques
of this label (Alhassen 2012; Rooksby 2011). Therefore, due to these contentious
and ongoing debates, the use of the terms “Arab Spring” and “Arab Awakening”
in this chapter will be kept to a minimum.
2. “Day of rage” has become a leitmotif of Arab Spring activities across the region.
3. Dabkeh is a folk dance “made up of intricate steps and stomps” (Rowe 2011,
364) performed by both men and women that is popular in areas such as Palestine,
Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, northern Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. The dance is
often performed at weddings and celebrations; however, it is also performed in
theatrical or contemporary modes.
4. The Egyptian Modern Dance Theater Company, Cairo Opera Ballet, the Egyptian
Folkloric Dance Company, Higher Institute of Ballet, and Cairo Contemporary
Dance Centre are state-â•‰funded institutions engaged in the teaching and perfor-
mance of ballet, folkloric, and contemporary dance. Independent folkloric dance
companies such as the Reda Company of Egypt are well supported, in part due
to their long histories and the “preservation” of nationalistic ideals. It can be

observed that in many locations of the southern Mediterranean region where
large, often state-â•‰funded, folkloric dance companies exist, there is very rarely an
equivalent company (in size and popularity) for the performance and production
of contemporary dance.
5. The Cairo Opera Ballet’s repertoire includes classical ballets such as Swan Lake,
Giselle, and Don Quixote and modern ballets such as Bolero, Zorba, and The Rite
of Spring.
6. Dance festivals in Cairo include the Experimental Theater Festival, Contemporary
Dance Night: 2 B Continued, Force Majeure at the Townhouse Gallery, and
TransDance 2012.
7. There were only about six Egyptians in the company of fifty dancers. The rest
came from other North African countries such as Tunisia and Morocco, as well
as Russia, Ukraine, Japan, and China.
8. Al-â•‰Musannafat is the department for censorship and supervision of theaters,
films, music, and dance affiliated with the Egyptian Ministry of Culture.
9. The Constitutional Declaration issued following the January 25, 2011, revolution
states in Article 13 that censorship should not be applied to media or the arts.
However, as is the case with several constitutional articles, the censorship article
once again sets an exception to the rule that overrides everything that precedes it,
allowing authorities to intervene (enforcing censorship) in the case of emergency
law, wars, and exceptional circumstances.
10. Amn el Dawla is the Egyptian State Security Investigations Service (SSI).
11. Similar ideas of self-â•‰censorship and the influence it has on creative work have
been expressed by other Egyptian artists such Mohammed Fouad, Mohammed
Shafiq, and Adham Hafez, and is also portrayed in Amal Ramsis’s 2011 documen-
tary, Forbidden.
12. Wesh w’Dahr translates into English as “back to front.” It was presented when
Mohammed Morsi, whose party is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, was
in power.
13. The festival has since run annually, and is now in its fourth year.
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Figures 11.1a–g Peacekeeper’s Entertainment, Art and Cultural Exchange by Mare Bulc
and Emil Hrvatin (Janez Janša).
11
War and P.E.A.C.E.
M A A I K E BL EEK ER A N D JA N EZ JA NŠA
After all that has been said, I want to ask the following questions: Do
forces in peacekeeping operations really need and want the national type of
entertainment they are currently offered? Do they benefit from unchallenging
entertainment? Is it not time that Blue Helmets had entertainment which
is just as global and multicultural as the peace forces themselves? Is it not
time for art to step into military entertainment? Can contemporary art
approach peacekeepers? Can it have a positive relationship or at least set up
a dialogue? And vice versa: is the military establishment really distrustful
of contemporary art and artists? Can the contemporary military and
contemporary art share (at least part of) the future?
—â•‰M are Bulc
With these questions, Mare Bulc ends his text “Who is Going to Entertain
the Blue Helmets?” (Bulc 2005, 20–â•‰39), in which he reports on research into
army entertainment and in particular into entertainment organized by the
military system itself—â•‰
sometimes in collaboration with other organiza-
tions—â•‰and financed from the military budgets of respective countries. Bulc’s
research was published in a small, blue, passport-â•‰like booklet titled We Are
All Marlene Dietrich FOR: Performance for Peacekeeping Soldiers; Handbook,
which accompanied the dance performance with the same title created by Erna
Ómarsdóttir and Emil Hrvatin (now Janez Janša), and produced by Maska
232 M aaike B leeker and J anez J an š a
(Ljubljana) and the Iceland Dance Company (Reykjavik) in 2005. In addition

to Bulc’s text, this booklet contains “Ten Rules—Code of Personal Conduct for
Blue Helmets,” a list of ten important differences between peacekeepers and
warfighters; a list of successful and less successful peacekeeping missions (“The
Ups and Downs of Peacekeeping”); and two more essays. Together this mate-
rial gives an impression of the research that inspired the dance performance
We Are All Marlene Dietrich FOR: Performance for Peacekeeping Soldiers and
a second, related project titled Peacekeeper’s Entertainment, Art and Cultural
Exchange by Janša) and Bulc (Figures 11.1a–g). This second project consisted
of a call for projects that was sent out internationally and a presentation at
a major army fair. P.E.A.C.E, so the description in the call states, aimed to
“provide high quality, high impact, live, free entertainment and special events
for the peacekeeping forces stationed in troubled areas around the world with
a priority in remote and isolated locations and contingency operations.” The
call invited artists to propose works intended to lift the spirits and morale of
peacekeeping troops and help them to maintain their readiness and effective-
ness while serving in defense of dignity, multiculturalism, and humanity.
We Are All Marlene Dietrich FOR: Performance for Peacekeeping Soldiers and
P.E.A.C.E. are two rare examples of works of art that deal with the role of the
peacekeeping soldier. They are complex in that they are simultaneously highly
satirical and deadly serious. This ambiguity is part of how these works work by
means of proposals that are outrageous yet also direct extrapolations of accepted
cultural perceptions, ideologies, and very concrete phenomena. The dance per-
formance We Are All Marlene Dietrich FOR is the result of a creative exploration
of the outcomes of the research into army entertainment and peacekeeping sol-
diers. A recurring motif in the show is boredom and the soldier as an image of
excitement. Another is John Lennon’s Imagine, sung onstage in a way that trans-
forms the song’s optimism about the possibility of a world in which all people are
living in peace into the specter of a world where nothing ever happens.
The performance begins with a story about American soldiers based in
Iceland at the end of the 1940s. They brought nylon stockings, chocolate, chew-
ing gum, and excitement for the young women to an island where otherwise
not much happened. One of these women followed her soldier back to America,
and they had a daughter named Cynthia Wood, who much later would play the
role of Bunny in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in the famous scene
in which young women are flown into an American army base in Vietnam to
entertain a crowd of soldiers. During the shooting Cynthia met Bruno, who
was playing an American soldier, and the story repeated itself. Cynthia and
Bruno fell in love and they had a baby. Or did that happen because it was warm
in the Philippines where the film was being shot, or because they were wearing
hardly any clothes and they were bored from having to wait time and again? In
any case, their daughter, Vala, was born and tonight Vala will perform for us.
War and P.E.A.C.E. 233
Figure 11.2 We Are All Marlene Dietrich FOR by Erna Ómarsdóttir and Janez
Janša (Maska, Ljubljana and Iceland Dance Company, Reykjavik, 2005). Photo by
Marcandrea.
Vala loves soldiers, and we, the audience, are asked to address her as if we are
the soldiers in Apocalypse Now, cheering and shouting at the women onstage,
and if we like her enough, we can meet her after the show (figure 11.2). It is an
uncomfortable experience.
What follows is a show that mixes radical performance art and contempo-
rary dance with the strategies and aesthetics of vulgar entertainment. Vala
loves soldiers, she tells us, but she does not approve of violence. She wants to
perform for soldiers of peace, for peacekeeping soldiers whose aim is to serve
and protect. She wants to support their mission. Her performance is, as the title
announces, “for peacekeeping soldiers.” What she has to offer is some action,
with her alone or with two or three others, half an hour, an hour, with pearls,
toys, live music; everything can be arranged, and everything has its price. Vala
loves soldiers and she knows what they want. Excitement. And it seems that
she wants that too. The show is a confusing mixture of energetic dance scenes
with vulgar gestures and movements and canonical tropes from performance
art like playing with raw meat, nudity, vomiting, hysterical screaming, and
bodies being covered in filth and hurting themselves (figure 11.3). All of this
Figure 11.3 We Are All Marlene Dietrich FOR by Erna Ómarsdóttir and Janez
Janša (Maska, Ljubljana and Iceland Dance Company, Reykjavik, 2005). Photo by
Yaniv Cohen.
is explicitly directed to the audience. They are doing it for us. The performers
put us in the position of the soldiers to be entertained, but what they offer us
fails to do so (which is obviously intentional), and their attempts become more
and more desperate. The singing of Lennon’s Imagine becomes more and more
desperate too. Near the end the music begins to sound like a punk song, while
the singer asks, “Can you, can you imagine a world with no more fun? You
think that I am a dreamer but I am not the only one. Just imagine no more Bob
Marley, no more John Lennon, no more Kurt Cobain. Can you, can you imag-
ine no more movies, no more modern dance, no more contemporary dance?
Just imagine.”
The performance confronts us with an unresolved tension between ideas
and ideals (soldiers of peace, a world that is one) and desires and longings (for
action, excitement, extremes), and how this tension manifests itself in the role
of the peace keeping soldier. The performance also raises the question of what
contemporary dance has to do with army entertainment. Why are we, the
audience of contemporary dance, watching a show intended for peacekeeping
soldiers? Why would one want to create a contemporary dance performance
for peacekeeping soldiers? This brings us back to the questions posed by Bulc,
quoted at the beginning of this chapter.
Bulc refers to the research of Eva Johansson (The UNknown Soldier, 2001),
who observes that, as a result of the nature of their mission, peacekeeping
soldiers are exposed to a very different kind of stress than their warfighting
colleagues:
The stress the peacekeeping units are exposed to—contrary to what one
might expect—does not originate from difficult fighting with hostile local
soldiers, but from—to put it simply—the lack of this activity. A peacekeeper
is constantly exposed to stress arising from lack of action, from idleness,
boredom, etc. … It needs to be acknowledged that peacekeepers often find
themselves in battle-stress situations, where their lives are endangered; the
problem is that they are much better prepared for this kind of situation.
Preparing for a peacekeeping mission involves mainly military prepara-
tions. This is one of the reasons soldiers find it less difficult to overcome
stressful situations in the battlefield. … They come least prepared for the
hours when they have to fight by way of diplomatic talks instead of arms.
It goes the same for both working and free hours, which, as already men-
tioned, interlock. It is in these situations that the so-called “peacekeepers’
stress syndrome” … appears. Its main characteristic is the fear of losing
control and unleashing aggression against fellow soldiers, or the use of
force in the field in a situation that could be solved peacefully with the help
of diplomatic skills. (Bulc 2005, 33)
Acknowledging this situation, Bulc poses the question of whether peacekeep-

ing forces actually benefit from unchallenging entertainment. Could art, and in
particular experimental dance and performance, perhaps provide the challenge
that is lacking in action? Following the line of his ironic argument, we might
wonder, could the contemporary experimental dancer, performer, or maker
perhaps provide a more useful role model than the war soldier? For, as Linda
Polman observes in her contribution to the handbook, “UN soldiers look like
soldiers, but they act like parking guards because that is the job we give them.
It is the job UN member states give them. … Much of the job of peacekeep-
ers anywhere in the world comes down to making the locals happy and divert-
ing people’s attention from resuming their fighting. This is why blue helmets
in many places reveal themselves as hosts and entertainers, too” (Bulc 2005, 9).
Hosts and entertainers, though, that need to be capable of functioning in com-
plex intercultural situations in which they cannot simply fall back on shared rep-
ertoire and shared values. Johansson similarly observes that, on the one hand,
peacekeepers should be fully prepared for (and trained for) combat while, on the
other hand, they must also master civilian skills and knowledge like negotiating
and diplomatic skills, sensitivity to cultural differences, and the capacity to work
and socialize in complex intercultural situations. Do forces in peacekeeping

operations really need and want the conventional type of entertainment they
are currently offered, that is usually rather “national-colored” (Bulc 2005, 37)
or even nationalistic and intentionally so. Bulc observes that celebrities do USO
tours gratis because, it is said “their only wish (…) is to bring the soldiers abroad
‘a small piece of America’ ” (Bulc 2005, 24). Does the new type of soldier that the
UN peacekeepers are, and the specificities of their practice, not require a differ-
ent approach to military entertainment as well. Or, as Bulc puts it:
“Do forces in peacekeeping operations really need and want the national
type of entertainment they are currently offered? Is it not time that Blue
Helmets had entertainment that is just as global and multicultural as the
peace forces, themselves? Is it not time for art to step into military entertain-
ment?” (Bulc 2005, 37-8).We Are All Marlene Dietrich FOR: Performance for
Peacekeeping Soldiers and P.E.A.C.E take as their starting point the very real
difficulties experienced by UN soldiers on peacekeeping missions. The aim
of these works is not to ridicule peacekeeping soldiers and the complexities
they encounter but rather to take these complexities as a starting point for
works that explore the rules of the game that is our reality. We Are All Marlene
Dietrich FOR: Performance for Peacekeeping Soldier does this in a dance perfor-
mance that creatively explores some of these complexities onstage. P.E.A.C.E.,
on the other hand, may be considered an example of what Nato Thompson
and Gregory Sholette (2004) have termed interventionist art. Among their
examples of such art are the Surveillance Camera Players’ performance of Ubu
Roi and other plays in front of surveillance cameras, or the Reverend Billy, the
alter ego of performance artist Bill Talen, and his Church of Stop Shopping,
preaching at Starbucks and the Disney Store and performing rites like “credit
card exorcism,” or the Yes Men’s interventions in meetings of (among others)
the World Trade Organization. The impact of interventions like these is not
to be found in a message (re)presented by them but rather in what they bring
about: how they trigger responses and destabilize the self-evidence of the rules
of the game that is our reality.
The P.E.A.C.E project directly engages with the rules of the game and plays
along with them, in this case the rules of the Armed Forces Entertainment
(AFE) operating under the aegis of the US Department of Defense. The AFE
engages relatively unknown entertainers—actors, cheerleaders, comedians—
who propose themselves and receive minimal fees. The idea is that a recom-
mendation from the AFE will help advance the performers’ careers. With
regard to their proposals, the AFE sets clear guidelines:
Each performer should register an act, performance, or concert which

will—as the AFE puts it—bring “a small piece of America” to the troops far
away from home. They also demand of the performers that they “avoid any
controversial subject” and that all performances should be “in good taste.”
In reality this means (and it is stated in written form) that the repertoire of
a band applying for a tour needs to include at least 75% of well-known and
popular American songs. (Bulc 2005, 22–23)
A second organization involved in army entertainment is the United Service

Organizations, founded by six nongovernmental organizations in 1941. Their
goal as they describe it on their website is to offer military officials moral and
recreational services. They actively recruit popular personalities from music,
film, and television such as Brad Pitt, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robin Williams,
Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, and many, many more. In Canada, the Canadian
Forces Personnel Support Agency (CFPSA) functions in a way similar to the
AFE. Here, too, performers have to send in an application, yet, unlike the AFE,
the CFPSA does not distinguish between celebrities and noncelebrities. The
United Kingdom also has a long tradition of army entertainment, which now-
adays is organized by the Combined Services Entertainment (CSE). Like the
CFPSA the CSE does not distinguish between celebrities and noncelebrities,
and the shows organized by them are similar to those organized by their US
and Canadian counterparts (Bulc 2005, 20–26).
The P.E.A.C.E. call for proposals mimics that of the AFE, setting similar
guidelines and offering similar conditions, with the difference, however, that
P.E.A.C.E. is looking for international experimental dance, performance, and
art to boost the morale of the troops (instead of nationalistic mainstream
entertainment). The aim of P.E.A.C.E is not merely to satirize AFE but to
draw attention to the same complexities in the role and identity of the peace-
keeping soldiers that were also the subject of We Are All Marlene Dietrich
FOR: Performance for Peacekeeping Soldiers. P.E.A.C.E. does so by means of
what seems an unlikely proposal. However, upon closer inspection it appears
to be drawn from the observations of Polman, Johansson, and others about
the role of the peacekeeping soldier. P.E.A.C.E. draws attention to structural
similarities between the practice and the demands placed on UN peacekeeping
soldiers and those placed on contemporary internationally operating dancers
and performers; from there the piece proposes what seems to be an unlikely
alliance.
The handbook outlines ten important differences between peacekeepers
and warfighters. For example, warfighters engage in large-scale combat opera-
tions, whereas a peacekeeper is a soldier/diplomat on a noncombat mission.
Warfighters are always in conflict with enemies, whereas for peacekeepers
the conflict itself—not the warring parties—is the enemy. And warfighters
cannot step outside of their individual cultures and value systems, whereas
peacekeepers reject ethnocentrism and respect the cultures and value systems
of host country (Bulc 2005, 42–43).
These differences put UN peacekeeping soldiers in situations similar to
those experienced by many contemporary artists working in the visual arts,
dance, and performance. UN peace soldiers are operating internationally and
interculturally. Their practice requires them to be able to adapt to different
styles and modes of performing instead of falling back on a seemingly self-
evident shared repertoire. This requires flexibility, adaptation to various cir-
cumstances and modes of working, and a sensitivity to differences in cultures
and practices. This is not unlike the situation many contemporary performers
find themselves in. Like UN peacekeepers, they are hired bodies, not only in
the literal sense that they are paid to put their bodies on the line but also in
ways similar to how Susan Foster (1997) describes a particular type of dancing
body that has emerged since the 1960s. Foster observes how a new cadre of
dance makers called “independent choreographers” require dancers who are
competent in many styles. She also observes the connection between the emer-
gence of these hired bodies and new modes of producing dance, modes of pro-
ducing in which dancers are no longer part of one company for an extended
period of time but have to adapt their ways of moving to what is required in
each new situation. Often, these dancers operate globally rather than nation-
ally, traveling to where the action is, collaborating in constellations that last
only for the duration of one assignment and without any further relationship
to the context in which this assignment takes place. Once the job is done, they
move on to other assignments in other places and with other people.
It is not the intention of We Are All Marlene Dietrich FOR: Performance for
Peacekeeping Soldiers or P.E.A.C.E to suggest that being a peacekeeping soldier
is like being a contemporary dancer or performer. Rather, the project takes the
similarities as a starting point for an intervention that triggered responses of
surprise and disbelief as well as resistance, both on the side of the military and
on the side of contemporary artists. The project self-consciously incurred such
resistances. Its aim was to trigger responses that expose tensions in how the
role and identity of UN peacekeepers are staged and perceived. If the UN sol-
dier is a soldier of peace who accomplishes his or her goal by means of civilian
skills like negotiating, diplomacy, and sensitivity to cultural differences, why
then is it so hard to imagine that the UN peacekeeper might share ambitions
and ideals with experimental art—and vice versa? If UN missions are so differ-
ent from fighting missions and demand a different kind of soldier, would this
not therefore demand a reconsideration of the kind of entertainment required
to suit the tastes of these new soldier-diplomats?
How unlikely this proposal seemed became clear when We Are All
Marlene Dietrich FOR: Performance for Peacekeeping Soldiers was actually
proposed to a UN military base as entertainment for their soldiers, and when

P.E.A.C.E was presented at an international army fair. On the part of the
military, the projects were met with surprise, and perhaps understandably
so. Surprise was apparent on the part of the artists as well. Experimental art-
ists and performers usually show little interest in the army and its projects,
except as a subject of criticism. From their side and that of those sharing their
perspective, it seems the proposed alliance disrupts a (self)understanding of
flexibility and creativity as automatically and self-evidently being critical and
autonomous. The projects thus seem to touch upon a complexity also high-
lighted by Jon McKenzie in his Perform or Else (2001), in which he points
to uncanny parallels between the demands being placed on various kinds
of cultural performance and post-Fordist modes of thinking—demanding
that workers be creative, inventive, and flexible. Foster, too, gestures in this
direction when she points to the connection between the emergence of the
hired body and new modes of production in which flexibility, adaptation to
various circumstances and modes of working, and a sensitivity to difference
in cultures and practices are not only means to creative and critical ends
but also strategies of survival in challenging circumstances. She is critical
of and concerned about instrumentalizing the dancing body and how this
may result in homogenization of different styles and vocabularies behind a
sleek impenetrable surface. Discouraging dancers from deep commitment to
a particular style or vocabulary, she fears, stands in the way of developing
excellence in specificity. Here, it seems, the P.E.A.C.E. project touches a sore
spot. Although the hired body as a strategy of survival may present a use-
ful model for the UN soldier-diplomat and a means to achieve what is the
core of their mission, in the arts it is not. The hired body is not a strategy
to reach artistic goals but a pragmatic approach to surviving economically
challenging situations. Instrumentalizing this strategy for the common good
(which is what a UN peace mission is supposed to aim at, after all), causes
a short circuit between what McKenzie describes as efficacy as a challenge
for those who create cultural performances and efficiency as the challenge
faced by organizational management. Dance and performance makers, too,
have to be efficient when it comes to the cost of living. Efficiency, however,
is not an artistic goal. By suggesting contemporary art as a means to relieve
peacekeeper’s stress syndrome and contemporary artists as role models for
the UN soldier/diplomat, the P.E.A.C.E. call for proposals invites artists to
make the increased efficiency of the UN peacekeeping army the goal of their
critical artistic practice, and thus puts them in a position where the distinc-
tion between efficiency and efficacy blurs.
Whereas on the side of artists and those sharing their perspective, the call for
performances was met with suspicion for how it invited an instrumentalization
of their practice (even though artists may have shared the aims and ideas
behind peacekeeping missions), on the side of the military the problem was
one of identification with the role of UN soldier/â•‰diplomat. In order to rec-
ognize what contemporary art and artists may have to offer to UN soldier/â•‰
diplomats, the characteristics of this role have to be acknowledged and accepted
in the first place. However, notwithstanding the widespread recognition of the
importance of UN peacekeeping missions, the role of the UN soldier, and in
particular those aspects of her/â•‰his role for which contemporary art and the
contemporary artist could be meaningful, appears to be difficult to identify
with. In his contribution to the handbook, “Blue Virtual Helmets,” Jure Novak
points to the remarkable absence of UN peacekeepers from computer games.
Soldiers are very popular as characters in games. So why not UN peacekeep-
ers? “They seem to be well equipped for hero work: they have the means (weap-
ons and training), a clear and structured goal, a ‘special situation’ in which to
work, and good on their side” (Bulc 2005, 52–â•‰53). However, a UN peacekeeper
as hero and a UN mission as subject for a game also appear to have serious
disadvantages, for “such a game would be inherently opposed to one of the key
elements of gaming—â•‰conflict. Not being able to act except in self-â•‰defense is
a very hard concept to translate in the challenge/â•‰conflict structure of games”
(Bulc 2005, 54). This difficulty in identifying with the role of peacekeeper and
the lack of challenge/â•‰conflict as the grounding principle of a mission seems to
be a problem not only for those who might aspire to design a game about UN
peacekeepers but also for the UN soldiers themselves. Among the many teams
playing the game Special Ops online, one finds the BlueHlmt team, compris-
ing ex-â•‰and active UN forces personnel relaxing by putting themselves into a
combat situation where they can actually do something. (Bulc 2005, 55). What
contemporary dance could do for them remains to be seen.
WORKS CITED
Bulc, Mare, ed. 2005. We Are All Marlene Dietrich FOR: Performance for Peacekeeping
Soldiers; Handbook. Ljubljana, Slovenia: Maska.
Foster, Susan Leigh. 1997. “Dancing Bodies.” In Meaning in Motion. New Cultural
Studies of Dance, edited by Jane C. Desmond, 235–â•‰ 257, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
McKenzie, Jon. 2001. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London:
Routledge.
Thompson, Nato, and Gregory Sholette, eds. 2004. The Interventionist User’s Manual
for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life. North Adams, MA: Mass MoCA
Publications.
12
The Body Is the Frontline
ROS I E K AY A N D DE E R E Y NOL DS
INTRODUCTION (ROSIE K AY AND DEE REYNOLDS)

5 SOLDIERS: The Body Is the Frontline, a dance theater work with five dancers,
four male and one female, was choreographed by Rosie Kay and premiered
in Birmingham, England, in 2010. It has since been toured throughout the
United Kingdom and also in Germany and Spain.1 The piece was made fol-
lowing a period of field research in November 2008 when Rosie Kay joined a
British Army infantry battalion, the 4th Battalion The Rifles (4 RIFLES) and
was allowed to participate in full battle exercises on Dartmoor and Salisbury
Plain. She then visited the military rehabilitation center, Headley Court, to see
the effects of conflict and training on the soldiers’ bodies.
By focusing on the embodied experience of the soldier rather than the moral
values of war, and by engaging the visceral experience of the audience through
the performance, 5 SOLDIERS reframes war inside the context of the soldiers’
body. The enactment of the soldiers’ training, the psychological consequences
of that training, and the impact of injury invite the audience to identify with
and thus respond to the issue of what soldiers are trained and asked to do in
the name of civilian elected governments. Although not overtly political, the
work invites audiences to see war through the soldier’s body, thereby influenc-
ing their perceptions of war. We argue that, especially in an era of great disil-
lusionment with the political establishment, choreography has a significant
242 R osie K ay and D ee R eynolds
Figure 12.1 The final scene of 5 Soldiers. From left: Tomasz Moskal, Tilly Webber, and
Chris Linda. Photo by Brian Slater. Courtesy of Rosie Kay Dance Company.
potential to affect audiences through embodied empathic engagement in ways

that cannot be produced by verbal means.
Major changes in the post–Cold War era have frequently made armed conflict
a much more disparate, diffuse, and asymmetrical business than more conven-
tional confrontations between nation-states. However, this dance work positions
the body—the body that is trained to injure, and that is also itself injured—at the
center of the theater of war. As Elaine Scarry has argued, the main purpose of
war continues to be inflicting injury and pain (Scarry 1985). The piece therefore
invites awareness of physicality at many different levels, both through the sub-
ject matter and the strength of energy conveyed by the dancers. This ranges from
the intense rigors and exhaustion of training, to sexual aggression and tensions,
to the literal breaking of the body and pain of injury in a shocking final scene.
Here, rather than disowning injury and its effects, the audience is subjected to
witnessing the prolonged pain of one of the liveliest members of the battalion/
troupe. Both in the military and choreographic contexts, graphically depicting
injury is a controversial move, since the emphasis in the military is on reha-
bilitation and positive attitudes, while in contemporary dance the trend is to
emphasize how disabled bodies are able to move, rather than on debilitating
effects of pain and trauma. The work raises issues of sacrifice—a notion perhaps
The Body Is the Frontline 243
out of sync with the general public but clearly articulated in military-religious
contexts, with death being seen as the “ultimate sacrifice” of war.2
In a political climate, albeit a democratic one, where the population feels dis-
enfranchised and powerless to change their government’s foreign policy, and
where war is increasingly disconnected from reality through what James Der
Derian has called the “military-industrial-entertainment network” (2009), the
viewing public can become indifferent to the seemingly inevitable and media-
tized horrors of war. However, we argue that dance performance offers the
opportunity for a challenging and thought provoking encounter with war,
through embodied, kinesthetic responses.
In this chapter, we analyze how the body is the “frontline” by describing expe-
riences of training with the army and how those experiences shaped the making
of the piece (Kay), by discussing the qualitative audience research process and
issues arising from it (Reynolds), and by looking at key moments in the work
itself and audiences’ responses (Kay and Reynolds). We will be focusing on live
performance, particularly two performances at venues in the United Kingdom.
First, however, we feel that it is important to position the work in the political
context of the United Kingdom.
At the time that the first performances of 5 SOLDIERS took place in the
United Kingdom (April–June 2010), Afghanistan was prominent in the news.
Also, debate was intensifying on whether it was time for Britain to reduce its
commitment to the war effort on financial grounds. Interestingly, audiences of
5 SOLDIERS did not refer to any such reports or political discussions in their
responses (interviews and focus group). This would support the argument that
the public felt disenfranchised and disengaged from political discourse.
Contrasting with the enshrinement of the army in the symbolic conscious-
ness of the British nation, there has been remarkably little public support for
the roles that the army has been asked to play in recent years. In 2003, opposi-
tion to the Iraq War fuelled the largest demonstration ever seen in the United
Kingdom, with the organizers claiming that approximately two million people
took part. The fact that the opponents of the war were powerless to prevent its
outbreak resulted in a strong sense of disenfranchisement, creating a “pained
distance” between the public and the political class, which has had a lasting
effect (Harris 2008). In the case of the war in Afghanistan, there has been a
glaring contrast between mass opposition to engagement in the conflict and
the platforms of the major UK political parties, all of which have argued that
the presence of British troops in Afghanistan was vital for reasons of national
security and humanitarian engagement. Those opposed to the war therefore
did not find their views represented by mainstream politicians, and, especially
since the failure of the anti-Iraq war demonstrations, public opposition to war
appears to be deprived of a political voice.
The recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have seen rapid advancements
in personal protective equipment and in the medical management of severe
trauma. These gains have meant that increasing numbers of soldiers are sur-
viving injuries that previously would have been fatal.3 At the time of Kay’s ini-
tial investigation, the Ministry of Defense (MOD) was releasing fatality figures
when they occurred. Hidden from public view, however, were the injury rates
incurred and the corresponding severity of the injuries. The MOD began mak-
ing amputation statistics available in February 2011, after previously resisting
calls for them to be released along with published injury statistics, possibly for
fear of further reducing public support for military action.4
Through investigating this area, Kay had stumbled upon a key aspect of
the wars, and also a defining bridge between the work of the dancer and the
soldier. Both risk bodily injury and face the experience of recovering from
profound, life-â•‰changing injuries as part of their jobs. Kay managed to secure
access to facilities that have since been off-â•‰limits to most researchers and the
press, perhaps because the role of artist seemed less of a threat. However, Kay
sensed that the military felt overwhelmed by the high rate of profound injury,
particularly incurred in Afghanistan during Operation Herrick between 2008
and 2010.
Investigating the injury and rehabilitation of the soldiers became a focus
throughout the research and creation of 5 SOLDIERS. Having worked in dance
and disability in the United Kingdom for many years,5 Kay was struck by the
marked changes in attitudes to disability within the military as it struggled
to deal with both a high rate of amputees and new regulations regarding the
armed forces and disability equality laws.6
At about the same time, in 2007, a former UK Army officer set up a charity,
Help for Heroes, with widespread media attention and a focus on highlighting
the injury and disability of soldiers. The charity has been highly successful
in raising funds to support the rehabilitation of soldiers and in drawing pub-
lic attention to these issues. However, the term “hero” could be seen as prob-
lematic to a liberal, disengaged civilian population, who saw nothing heroic
in the invasions. Kay also encountered responses from injured soldiers, who
did not see themselves as heroes but as young men with uncertain futures.
The complexity of their new identity, along with changing public perceptions,
led some soldiers to refuse to be interviewed or involved in publicity for the
project. Consequently, while public awareness of the injury rate increased and
was made more visible in the media, many soldiers were privately unhappy
about the way in which their injured bodies were being portrayed at a time of
fighting for employment rights and compensation. The public might see their
injuries as the “cost of war” or their “sacrifice,” but many soldiers had joined
the army for very different reasons; looking for stable employment, training,
education and a sense of strong identity. The possibility of injury was what
one amputee soldier described as “something that was just never going to hap-
pen to me.”7 But the only signs of war the public may have encountered were
through representations of the injured soldier promoted in charity appeals, X
Factor single hits, and sponsored hikes.8 With a public highly detached from
any sense of physical warfare, the injured body was the only visible sign of the
impact of war, mediated by the title of “hero.”
In contrast to this representation, the injury in 5 SOLDIERS is starker, more
brutal, shown without the aura of heroism. The decision to focus on the injury
of a soldier at the end of the dance piece in a shocking manner that highlights
a loss of that individual’s physicality was crucial. It influenced both how the
work was framed and its surrounding debate, as well as what was not included.
For example, there is no enemy in the work. That choice was made after dis-
cussions about the tactics used by insurgents in Afghanistan and the high
incident rate of improvised explosive device (IED) attacks, with the human
enemy seldom encountered by infantry patrols. The use of weapons was also
excluded, despite soldiers’ assertions that their weapons became “part of their
body.” It was felt that “toy-â•‰like” replicas, cumbersome and expensive, would
give the work an ‘action man’-â•‰like visual effect, which would deflect the focus
from the soldiers’ bodies and movement.
Because of its detailed reenactment of specific military details, 5 SOLDIERS
is deceptively realistic to a military audience. However, the work is set in an
imagined, claustrophobic compound (an aircraft hangar, a base drill hall, an
anteroom), the kind of place where soldiers in reality are grouped and told to
wait, their boredom and lack of control a real aspect of the soldier’s life, but
dramaturgically providing a space where anything can happen. It is both a real
and a fantasy space, where the soldiers’ fears or their memories are replayed or
imagined. Despite the impossibility of staging a realistic portrayal of war, what
is going on in the soldiers’ bodies and in their heads can be portrayed through
the mix of identifiable signifiers of military action, and through the beauty and
freedom of the dancing self, allowing an ambiguity of place and meaning to
be given over to the audience to interpret. While the story of soldiers is often
a male story, a very deliberate choice of one female upsets the balance of male
identity narrative and allows for a scope of tension and drama, as well as a
realistic reflection of women now on the frontline.
GENESIS AND MAK ING OF THE PIECE (ROSIE K AY)

After a severe knee injury in early 2007 and the resulting surgery, I had a
vision-â•‰like dream of lying in a desert war zone and realizing that my left leg
had been blown off—â•‰I could see my leg far away to my right, a large lump of
bone and flesh, dislocated from my body, but still “my” body. My first reac-
tion was shock; my second was surprise: I discovered (in my dream state) that
I could lose my limbs, but that I did not lose my soul. While my body was my
(dancer’s) identity, by losing parts of it I did not lose myself. Switching on the
TV the following morning, I was confronted yet again with images of more
soldiers killed in Iraq. I stopped and looked at them, the dreamed memory of
the battlefield still within me, and I saw and felt the connection between the
dancer’s body and the soldier’s body. I wondered how a soldier could risk not
just injury and the potential loss of limbs but even his life for a job. Do the
role of soldier and the physical act of soldiering mean that the soldier is will-
ing to take those risks? Is there perhaps even a thrill, an enjoyment, a love of
soldiering? There have been war artists, war photographers, war poets, but the
medium of soldiers’ profession is their body—perhaps a war choreographer
could get under the skin of a soldier and portray how it actually feels to be a
soldier.
In her work The Body in Pain (1985), Elaine Scarry points out that although
injury is an inevitable by-product of war, it continues to be disingenuously
described as “accidental” or “unwanted” (73). She argues that civilians and
politicians discuss war in a way that is remote from its real purpose, its true
nature, and talks of how, by contrast with this language, a real wound can
“stupefy us into silence or shame us with the shame of our powerlessness to
approach the opened human body and make it not opened as before” (72).
Theodore Nadelson, in Trained to Kill (2005), talks of the sexual arousal of
mortal risk, the unbearable building up of tension being released by contact,
and the strong thrill of shared conflict with comrades. I wanted to discover if
there was a link between aggression and repressed sexual feeling—is killing
itself sexualized? US Marines use the term “eye fucking” to describe setting
their sights on a (human) target (Nadelson 2005). and Glen Gray talks of the
lustful eye of conflict in The Warriors (1959). War is all about force and domi-
nation, the dominator and the dominated. Women are now embedded in the
UK military, but have an ambivalent role. They are not part of the infantry and
are not able to fight on the frontline; however, women are very much on the
frontline, particularly in their role as medics. Also, although women cannot
have “close combat roles,” they are in very dangerous situations, carry weap-
ons, and are often under fire.9 Indeed, following an announcement by the UK
defense secretary in May 2014 that he was ordering a review of women’s roles,
it now looks very likely that women will soon be eligible to serve in combat
roles in the British Army for the first time.
It took me nearly two years to secure and begin my attachment to the 4th
Battalion the Rifles (4 RIFLES). I was finally able to join them for a two-week
period of training exercises on Dartmoor, at barracks in Bulford, and on exer-
cises on Salisbury Plain. Following this attachment I also secured a week’s
temporary assignment, or secondment, at the Defense Medical Rehabilitation
Centre Headley Court, and visited the Royal Centre for Defense Medicine
then at Selly Oak Hospital, Birmingham.10 The two-week experience with 4
RIFLES was highly demanding and full of incredibly strong and powerful
experiences and emotions for me. It began with a four-day, four-night exercise
on Dartmoor, where I struggled with a seventy-pound rucksack (known in the
military as a Berghan), helmet, and body armor over a continuous march, with
battle exercises taking place throughout each day and in early dawn attacks.
The following account is from my diary written during the secondment:
As dawn came eyes play tricks on you. Every bush looks like a soldier. Very
eerie, silent, serious. Pain begins and sweating like a pig—so many layers
[of clothes]. Found the troops sitting along a bank—almost invisible in the
darkness. Quite bizarre—with their packs and helmets, it looked like sol-
diers from the Somme.
My role within the battalion subtly changed as the two weeks progressed;
at each stage I was being tested, assessed, and encouraged. This participatory
approach afforded some great benefits—after shared sleep deprivation with a
group of soldiers, their guards would be lowered, and the men stopped pre-
senting macho defensive postures and opened up about their lives and expe-
riences, both in battle and on return to the United Kingdom. In fact, after
the initial hostility, there was a general openness to questioning and quite a
sociable atmosphere.
It is worth stating that at times I felt my dance training was extremely useful
during this learning phase. The military is a world of unspoken rules, regula-
tions, instructions, and highly subtle and complex power hierarchies. With
a dancer’s instinct to watch carefully and unobtrusively, I was able to follow
the rules, fit in, and do the right thing without being spotted as out of place.
Despite this, I had quite a constant fear of “getting it wrong,” as the following
diary extract reveals:
I fear being late more than being wrong. It’s like everything starts to become
a moral issue—being unfit is a moral issue, being in the wrong uniform is
a moral issue, being late is probably a cardinal sin. Why does everything
seem to be a moral issue, and why do you want to be good? Is that how the
training works? You always want to be a good girl, a good boy, so you obey
instructions until you just do as you are told because it means that you are
“good” even if what you are doing is not good, not good at all.
I suggest that this attitude corresponds with a dancer’s training. Good

behavior, good physical ability is praised; one wishes to avoid mistakes, avoid
looking weak or stupid, and so both dance and the military encourage an
atmosphere of doing what you are told.
I became absorbed in the new language of the military world and used it
to understand how personnel coordinate and analyze troop and battle move-
ments. As a choreographer, some of the battle maneuvers were quick to read
(the notion of no movement without fire really struck me). Soldiers work in
pairs or in two-part groups, with Soldier 1 firing at the enemy to give cover
to Soldier 2, who advances while the enemies’ heads are down. Once Soldier
2 reaches a forward position, the soldiers swap roles, a sequence called fire
maneuver. While the movement sequence was easy to do in theory, in practice
it was difficult to execute on tricky terrain, even in only simulated exercises.
The eye becomes all-important, a bush on a hill becoming a crouching soldier
to the tired eye, an unaware enemy spied through the sights of a rifle a cause of
pleasure as you seek your target.
I felt generally tolerated even if not accepted by most of the soldiers, rarely
encountering overt sexism or any kind of bullying. But my diary extracts reveal
a sense of general intimidation at times (It’s Ok, I tell myself. You are bound
to feel a bit lost. You are in the bloody army—the real army. It IS intimidating!
Don’t make an idiot of yourself. Hold your dignity and pride). And I also sensed
a contradiction between how the soldiers talked of their mothers, wives, and
girlfriends and how women were discussed in general, with references to pros-
titutes, strippers, and slags. Women were judged openly on their appearance
alone, and yet I was treated with a rather old-fashioned gentlemanly charm
at times. I did feel that it would be hard for most of these men to take orders
from a female officer. I also sensed a lot of positioning around me among the
men as they judged one another. The men analyzed each other’s strengths,
weaknesses, and leadership capabilities constantly. At times their tone of con-
versation, particularly during meals, could be adversarial, and I made a deci-
sion to always answer back. This seemed to be effective and produce a certain
grudging respect.
After my secondment with 4 RIFLES, I then spent time at Headley Court
and Selly Oak Hospital. At Headley Court I shadowed the rehabilitation
instructors, a physiotherapist, and a clinical physician. I was allowed access
to the patients and was able to talk to them about their injuries and their
experiences of both war and now life after an injury. After these experiences
I took quite a long time to deal with the challenging intensity and depth of
the subject matter, and then started to process what could be made out of it
to create a work of dance theater.11 I began to form my creative team, and
was delighted to meet with the visual artist David Cotterrell, who had vis-
ited Afghanistan with Joint Medical Forces and spent time at Headley Court
and Selly Oak. Being able to share our thoughts was incredibly helpful as
we found parallels across both our individual experiences. Together we had

a small window of insight into the world of the soldier in training, the sol-
dier on deployment, and the injured soldier in hospital and in rehabilitation.
With these experiences still vivid in our minds, we agreed to work together
to represent the soldiers’ physical experience onstage in 5 SOLDIERS. I was
joined by dramaturg Petra Tauscher, composer Annie Mahtani, and theater
collaborator Walter Meierjohann.
The structure of the creative period was designed to give the five dancers
as full an understanding of the soldiers’ experience as possible. The dancers
were put through a two-part audition process, the criteria being that they had
to be physically robust and convincing as soldiers. One dancer, in fact, had
experience in the Polish Army, and another had been a cadet. The training was
designed to be physical, emotional, and psychological, with support from the
University of Wolverhampton Dance Science Department and psychological
support from the University of Birmingham Dance Psychology Department.
The first two weeks of the research period were spent as a residency at
Warwick Arts Centre on the University of Warwick campus. A program
of battle exercises on campus, predawn starts, weapon handling, and drill
training had been arranged with visiting military experts training the
dancers. As choreographer, I too joined in the exercises, and we discussed
in detail the dancers’ experiences, my own experiences, and those of the
military experts. Alongside this physical training, we worked closely with
David Cotterrell, who gave us a special photo lecture on his experiences
in Afghanistan and at Headley Court and Selly Oak. Many of his images
were graphic and gave the dancers a strong impression of the realities of
war conflict. We also worked closely with the dramaturg, Petra Tauscher,
who observed the dancers as we trained, drawing out their specific character
traits and starting to build a small squad of soldiers with different profiles.
We worked closely with an injured soldier seconded from 26 Engineers, who
joined us as a consultant throughout the creative studio process. Three danc-
ers went on a Territorial Army12 weekend training course, and the dancer
who plays the injured soldier and I joined the Joint Defense Disabled Ski
Team for a day of skiing using special equipment, talking and having dinner
with the injured soldiers.13
Once we were in the studio, we began to work more on concepts, first find-
ing strong physical languages before embarking on the full work’s structure.
Sections were improvised for a period of time, with increasingly defined roles
coming out of this process. I decided on the structure of the piece and then
wrote it as a film script, with timing, movement, action, music, and film pro-
jection all running at their own timelines. The work was then carefully con-
structed bit by bit.
5 SOLDIERS: The Body Is The Frontline premiered at the International Dance

Festival Birmingham on April 23, 2010, and toured the United Kingdom and
internationally in spring 2010 and Spring 2011.
The work has a three-â•‰part structure, with the soldiers confined in a pen-â•‰
like set between periods of action. The waiting structure allows the boredom
and tension to build, each scene being an imagined evocation of a true-â•‰to-â•‰life
Figure 12.2â•‡ The fight sequence from 5 Soldiers. From left: Tilly Webber, Chris Linda,
Michael Spenceley, and Chris Vann. Photo by Brian Slater. Courtesy of Rosie Kay
Dance Company.
scenario. The first part builds on ideas of training and drill, with the soldiers
forming a machine-â•‰like identity through long, complex drill maneuvers and
double-â•‰time marches. They aim an aggressive, honed attention at the audi-
ence. This training section is intended to dehumanize the participants, but
also to allow the audience to become lulled by the almost meditative quality
of the repetition and rhythm. The second part lets the audience see the sol-
diers as humans, attacking each other playfully, dancing and fighting together
in a nightclub, and preying on women, as well as the intense stress of long
waits and close friendships and hatreds (Figure 12.2). The audience is shown
relationships developing, tensions building, bonds forming. Part 3 is in effect
“on the ground” and starts with a helicopter scene, which develops into a sky-â•‰
diving dance. We build the long wait for an attack or explosion with a section
called “Patrol,” the rising tension evident on the faces of the soldiers as they
carefully tread on unsafe ground. When the explosion comes, the moment is
stretched out, the youngest soldier spinning and spinning before hitting the
ground, injured. The final part is an intense solo, the dancer’s legs strapped so
that he appears to be a double amputee. His colleagues sit along the side, wait-
ing again, as he fights to find his new identity.
QUALITATIVE AUDIENCE RESEARCH: PROCESS

AND ISSUES (DEE REYNOLDS)
I became involved in researching audience responses to 5 SOLDIERS after
Kay’s collaboration with a project I was directing on dance audiences, from
2008 to 2011.14 In some ways, the new research was a natural continuation
of this collaboration. Through audience research on Kay’s choreography, we
had explored the effects on spectators of their awareness of the physical pres-
ence of the performer and particularly effort, breathing, and the impact of
sounds produced by the dancers’ bodies. The body was at the center of Kay’s
new work, and I was intrigued to see how this would play out in the context of
a military theme.
I attended the premiere at the International Dance Festival in Birmingham
in April 2010, and then attended a performance on May 20, 2010, at the Rifles
Club Drill Hall in Mayfair, London. After that performance I interviewed by
telephone audience members who were either members or former members of
the armed forces (four, all men) or current or former dancers (four, two women
and two men). Subsequently, I attended a performance at the Lakeside Arts
Centre at Nottingham University on June 1, 2010; there I conducted a focus
group involving ten audience members (nine women and one man).
The reason for including military personnel and dancers in the research was
that I was interested in ascertaining what effect the particular professional
backgrounds and training of these groups would have on their experience of

the performance. Individual interviews were chosen in order to explore the
responses in some depth. Also, this was a more practical option than attempt-
ing to gather respondents together in a single place, since they did not all
attend the performance on the same night. The Nottingham performance, on
the other hand, offered an opportunity to interact with a more general view-
ing public.
The focus group format is particularly suited to wide-ranging discussion,
and it also encourages audience members to bounce ideas off each other,
which can then develop more independently of the researcher. Accordingly,
the questions asked in the focus group were more general, centering on par-
ticipants’ responses to the piece as a whole. Drawing on methodology used in
the Watching Dance project,15 at one point I also asked participants to note
down examples of something they had seen or heard, something that gave
them pleasure, that moved them, or that they disliked, which they were then
invited to discuss in the group. With the individual interviewees, I first asked
each of them about their experience of the army and of dance. As with the
focus group, I asked them to describe something they remembered from the
piece and something they liked. In some cases I also asked more specifically
about particular parts of the piece, such as the marching sequence, the female
solo, and the final injury scene. The transcripts record the words spoken ver-
batim, but some hesitations and repetitions have been edited here for ease of
reading.16
The viewing contexts of the performances were very different, which was
bound to make an impact on reception. The performance at the Rifles Club
marked the launch of the Care for Casualties appeal by the Rifles Regimental
Association, and all proceeds from ticket sales went to the new charity. The
evening was introduced by Frank Gardner, chief security correspondent for
the BBC, who is partially paralyzed owing to an injury sustained while report-
ing from a war zone. One of the interviewees, a dancer, expressed her response
to this beginning of the show:17
Dawn : He came up and gave a chat about the charity and about the men he’d
seen fighting, and risking their bodies. That really framed everything for
me, put it in a very specific place. … He spoke very passionately and really
communicated how these soldiers abroad are putting themselves on the
line, the sub-title [of the work], the body is the front line, and it just really
brought the seriousness of it to me.
The Rifles Club building is in the heart of London and very atmospheric;
the performance there was attended by many members of the military and
their families. “Looking around at the audience when I was there, there were
quite a lot of the old regimental badge and tie brigade to support the regiment”
(Johannes). The space was adapted for the event, and dancers and audience
were in very close proximity. The Lakeside Arts Centre, by contrast, is a pub-
lic venue, a bright modern building in an open, leafy setting by a lake on the
University of Nottingham campus. At the same time, it is quite an intimate
space, with a flat stage and tiered seating with capacity for around two hun-
dred spectators. (One member of the focus group said: “I had the amazing
feeling of closeness, and it is a fantastic stage because it’s not a stage. I like the
setting of this house.”) The performance attracted a general public, and the
piece was not introduced or framed in any special way.
In addition to the wider context of political disengagement discussed ear-
lier in the chapter, contemporary audiences are habituated to technologically
mediated experiences of war that can lead to a confusion of reality and vir-
tuality in what Der Derian calls “drama without tragedy”: “As the confusion
of the one for the other [the reality and virtuality of war] grows, we face the
dangers of a new kind of trauma without sight, drama without tragedy, where
television wars and video war games blur together” (Der Derian 2009, 10). By
contrast, in 5 SOLDIERS, the spotlight on the body indicated by the subtitle,
“The Body Is the Frontline,” resulted for many audience members in a visceral
confrontation with embodied aspects of war and life at the front. Could both
political indifference and the blurring of boundaries between war as a real
occurrence and a technologically mediated construction as occurs in gaming
(and in glamorized reporting) be challenged by modes of performance that
provoke painful awareness of the lived body as the target of war? Could the
lived, empathic experiences of spectators and the memories they triggered,
military or civilian, engender critical reflection on the theater of war?
As described above, the qualitative audience research processes were as
open as possible in order to allow participants to choose their own points for
expression and discussion, rather than proposing any interpretive viewpoint
or inviting engagement with any argument. Also in this spirit of openness it is
important to pay close attention to what people say, how they articulate what
is important to them, and to take the cue from this rather than merely slotting
selected quotes into a pre-prepared argument.
Responses to physicality emerged as a key theme right across the discus-
sions (interviews and focus group), albeit with different emphases. Frequently
it was the audiences’ embodied, visceral responses that led them to reflect on
the wider implications of what they were watching. Their comments focused
both on the general physicality of the dancers’ performance and on certain key
moments that were picked out for attention across the cohort. These included
a pseudo-rape scene in the “nightclub,” the helicopter scene, and the final
injury scene.
Interestingly, given Kay’s wish to explore links between the embodied expe-
rience of dancers and the military, both officers and dancers (who saw the
performance at the Rifles Club) responded very strongly to the athleticism and
expenditure of energy, which they related to in terms of their personal expe-
rience. Each group was surprised at the other’s physicality. James, an officer,
commented:
Although this was a dance show, actually there were so many parts of it
that were hugely physical, and they kept up that stamina and endurance
for a long period—â•‰it was very impressive and had you not known they were
just dancers, if you’d photographed them, not dancing, in a different …
with their look and dripping with sweat, you’d think that was a squaddie
off training or having just been running around in Afghanistan in forty
degrees of heat.
Johannes, an officer, was surprised by the energy: “I was absolutely fasci-

nated how no one ever stopped in the whole one hour, and the energy.” For his
part, Jon, a dancer, was surprised by the physicality of the soldiers’ experience:
The parallel that I see is amazing. [ … ] I didn’t quite realize how physical
it was, I mean, I understand soldiers would have to be very strong and very
well trained, and all of these things, but I didn’t quite think it would be so
hard and so regimental and so athletic and physical.
Martin, an officer, said that he was “amazed at the physical sort of levels that
they had.” He felt that this went beyond acting: “It was very tough and it wasn’t
acted physically, it was very physical.” As well as the degree of effort put in by
the dancers and their high level of fitness, the effect of the dancers’ physical
presence broke through visual distance by impacting on other senses:
Effectively if you were near enough you would have been able to smell them,
they were sweating, Jesus, they were sweating and you could definitely tell
that, you could tell when people were having a break effectively just because
they needed to, and you could hear the sound of people hitting the ground
as well, which was also pretty brutal.
For the officers, the experience of watching the piece evoked memories of
combat and preparation for combat as experienced in the body.
Tim: Then going actually out on an operation, of being dropped by helicopter
and getting ready and so on, you could feel the tension and that was really
communicated, and there is a lot of tension because you don’t quite know
what’s going to happen and your body is getting prepared and the adren-
alin is starting, that brought back memories.
For Tim and other officers, the tension is connected with embodied memo-
ries triggered by the performance, whereas for the dancers it is more about an
embodied experience of war as provoked by the performance itself and felt in
the moment of watching. This sometimes had a discomfiting effect that itself
triggered reflection on the war situation:
Jon: There’s no pretense, you know, just it’s hard, if not harder. So you have
absolutely no … it’s all there, you can see exactly how hard they work, how
much they sweat, and it’s kind of frightening to see that. And sometimes it
makes you feel uncomfortable because out there, it’s not sort of an illusion,
it’s not a piece that she dreamed out of nowhere; that’s what’s happening.
K EY MOMENTS IN THE WORK AND AUDIENCE RESPONSES

(ROSIE K AY AND DEE REYNOLDS)
One key part of the work is the “nightclub” scene, which was inspired by con-
versations with soldiers about how they let off steam when they returned from
Iraq or Afghanistan and how they preferred going out with their soldier mates,
because only they understood what they had been through. The dramaturgy
of the work means that where the soldiers are is never exactly specified—â•‰in a
way they are trapped forever in an aircraft hangar, and the things that happen
are at once imaginings, memories and fears. The nightclub scene is an evoca-
tion of many experiences described to Kay. Often because the men are used
to being in all-â•‰male environments, they do prefer to “let off steam” together
and behave badly. It’s a nonspecific outpouring of male aggression and ten-
sion, including sexual tension. Choreographed to the pop hit “I Gotta Feeling”
by the Black Eyed Peas, the nightclub scene starts with a floor bum dance by
the male dancers, but gets progressively wilder: pogoing jumping turns into
pushing, which quickly turns into violence. The physical needs of the men are
strong; they need to touch one another, even if that touch is violent at first. The
violence breaks through their skins until they can legitimately hug and hold
each other—â•‰underneath they are scared young men. The dance develops until
they are almost brainless with the visible physical effects of drink—â•‰and then
they see a female.
During all this, the female soldier has retired from the men and seems to
be in her own space, perhaps her own room, at the front corner of the stage.
Slowly she removes her clothes, neatly folds them, and takes down her hair
from its tight bun. Female soldiers talked of letting go of their soldier mask,
Figure 12.3 The nightclub scene from 5 Soldiers. From left: Tomasz Moskal, Chris
Vann, Tilly Webber, Chris Linda, and Michael Spenceley. Photo by Brian Slater.
Courtesy of Rosie Kay Dance Company.
but only in the privacy of their rooms, and needing time to be alone, to feel
like a woman and to do “girly things” such as hair and body care. The woman
starts to powder herself with talc (this scene is based on a true account of a
woman soldier in Afghanistan who talked about how vital her talc was to her
in preventing sweat rashes and making her feel better in a combat zone). In the
work we use it as a theatrical device, the men becoming aware of the scent and
aura of a woman near them. In interviews with soldiers at 4 RIFLES, I asked
a soldier what he missed most while away on tour, and he cited the scent of
women’s perfume. The dancers, too, remarked on how when they smelled the
talc; it brought them out of their masculine world of fighting and brawling
onstage.
When the men finally “see” the female soldier, the setting is deliberately
ambiguous. Is she a dancer in the club? A stripper or a prostitute? Or is she the
same soldier alone in her room, stretching, dancing alone? Or does she exist
only in the men’s imagination? Is she trying to seduce the men, or is she a fan-
tasy in their heads? The stage allows for this ambiguity to enchance the magi-
cal and disturbing quality of the scene.
The female soldier has all the power in the room for a second—she has the
power of sexuality; the men seem almost to fear her. But their looking turns
to lust, and then to stalking; they look like a pack of hungry wolves homing in
on their prey (Figure 12.3). There is a threat of rape, and they each grab a male
partner and pretend to fuck each other—eyes locked on the woman, playing a
game, intimidating her with their sexual dominance and aggression. The ten-
sion builds and the men chase her, until she turns and stops them with a dig-
nified and strong stare—the stare of their mothers, their wives, their sisters.
The power shifts, and the female soldier goes through a transformation as the
men prostrate themselves at her feet, literally worshipping her. She is queen,
country—a ll womankind, all motherhood to them, the sacred goddess. The
moment ends, and the infatuated sergeant tries to win her over, making her
laugh, to take away the memory of the attack.
The tension of this scene, with the female soldier’s very feminine solo, her
male colleagues’ aggressive pursuit of her, and the threat of imminent sexual
assault, was commented on by many of the nonmilitary spectators, while also
striking a chord with the officers interviewed.
James: It was a very, very good portrayal of the sort of sexual issue that arises
on a six-month [tour] away from your wife and girlfriends.
The unleashing of a sexual charge is quite sudden and unexpected, as the
female soldier without her fatigues reveals a new feminine identity, which her
colleagues have difficulty dealing with and which triggers aggressive rivalry
between them.
Martin: There is also the thing of a whole lot of guys and one girl and the
jealousy between them … and when you’re on tour every woman looks
amazing—this is the sort of very realistic thing that people have to deal
with—at one point this girl, often a very slight, pretty girl is a mate, then
she has a bit of a romantic interest, the next thing, she is just a sort of a
colleague.
This account bears out the complexity and the confused feelings that can
arise in the soldier’s situation, feelings that other spectators could also relate
to. One of the dancers interviewed said that her husband was in the parachute
regiment of the Territorial Army for two years, which she felt helped her to
connect with the emotions of the piece. So on one level she was thinking of
how male soldiers experience the presence of women:
Laura: From my experience of knowing soldiers and hearing about them, it’s
very true to probably what happens 99 percent of the time that they are
having to kind of hold back as well and there’ll be moments when they are
just … it’s just another mate and another moment when they suddenly look
at each other and think, gosh, they’re really stunning or, you know, there is
a sense of attraction.
On another level Laura was evaluating the choreographic decisions through
which complex feelings and impulses were expressed:
And that extraordinary phrase that went around the stage with her doing
these high leg extensions and turns and I thought, … coming from chore-
ography, it was very sensitively done because the sense of strong attraction
between them all, particularly, I think I sensed the men being very attracted
to her, or one or two of them particularly, yet there was this … from a cho-
reographic point of view, the sense of respect there as well. While one or
two were very attracted to her, other male soldiers pulled them back and
just, in a way, helped them to remember the context they were in as soldiers.
[ … ] So I thought it was artistically beautifully done, in terms of lighting,
the characterization, the choreography.
Both of the female dancers interviewed were particularly affected by the

scene with the female soldier, which was the first example they cited when
I asked them to describe a moment or moments that they remembered. For
Dawn this was a situation she could relate to as a woman:
Dawn: It made me think about the tension if a woman is over with a bunch of
men fighting, you know, sexual tension for that long being away from loved
ones. I guess I was kind of concerned for that woman.
Peter, a dancer, also chose this section as one that he particularly liked. In
the focus group, there was quite an extensive discussion about this scene and
the way that it expressed conflict between the men’s frustrated sexual desire
for the woman on the one hand and respect for her on the other (a Madonna-
whore complex). People liked this ambiguity and the contrast between “ani-
malistic” group behavior and the emotional needs underneath, which made
the men “gentle” and “respectful” (Caroline). Several people expressed their
agreement with Maria when she described her interpretation of the female
dancer’s behavior as facing up bravely to the soldiers’ aggressive sexual atten-
tions. “She walks toward them, as if she were saying: ‘Remember, I am one of
you. … We are all the same here, so don’t come with that.’ She walks straight
up to the men, looking into their faces, and each of them turns his head
away—apparently shamed by their behavior. I thought that was so powerful.”
“Amazing,” “powerful,” and “wonderful” were adjectives used by other women
in the group when discussing this section.
Figure 12.4 The helicopter scene from 5 Soldiers. Photo by Brian Slater. Courtesy of
Rosie Kay Dance Company.
Another scene, which takes place in a helicopter, utilizes David Cotterrell’s

original footage from helicopter journeys with the army in Helmand Province.
Here, the use of sound as well as visual projections intensified the audiences’
empathic engagement through direct impact on their bodies (Figure 12.4). The
soldiers and the audience go from the claustrophobia of sitting in a helicopter,
destination unknown, to experiencing the excitement of flying over the land.
The view from the back end of a Chinook helicopter appears, with projection
of footage of flying over Afghanistan. This use of technology in the theater
transports the audience and the soldiers into a view of Afghanistan that opens
up from below as they parachute out and fly over the whole of the imagined
country, dancing a tightly choreographed work of spinning and falling. This
scene corresponds to soldiers’ comments in conversation with Kay about
the excitement and beauty of the views in Afghanistan. Theodore Nadelson
discusses how soldiers speak of the wonder of war and the amazing sense of
freedom as fear of death is abolished (Nadelson 2005, 112–113). This sequence
turns into a “danced” segment, which highlights the contradiction of sol-
diers feeling beauty in a horrific setting. Many soldiers spoke in interviews of
the beauty and sublime excitement of going to war, and how that is not often
shown onstage: “War presents unequivocal certainty about the intersection of
life and death. Life embraces death in war, death sustains and nurtures life in
a contradictory coupling that gives both new and clearer meaning” (Nadelson
2005, 113).
The sensation of being inside a helicopter and looking down at the land-
scape is powerfully enhanced by a very evocative soundscape, to the extent
that many audience members felt themselves forcefully projected inside the
event through their embodied experience of this scene. Maria, for example,
said: “The imagery in my head, because of the noise and because of that little
projection there, brought me to different places, I was in there.”
Several focus group participants selected this scene as one that affected
them strongly, particularly because of the sound. Maria was not alone in
experiencing a convergence of the sensory environment of the actual theater
and the “theater” of war. Belinda thought that the loud whistling sound of
the helicopter was an ambient sound in the auditorium rather than part of
the performance. “And as you mentioned about the whistling noise, I thought
I was hearing that, I didn’t realize it was there [onstage].” Karen said that the
physical effect of the sound made her feel that she was “inside” the perfor-
mance space. “I really liked that throbbing [helicopter] because of the noise,
sometimes it actually throbs through your body, and even though it was really
uncomfortable, it was really powerful as well, because you felt that you were
actually in it.”
As well as drawing people in through sensations, the multisensory scenog-
raphy aroused embodied emotions. “I liked when it had sound as well, because
I think that stirs up emotions” (Ilke). “You almost felt what they were feeling,
or what they would feel. … Yeah, it made me very tense at times” (Belinda).
Maria: All the sounds and the lights and these tunes and everything. I felt
really like it was more than just dance. The performance, the faces, every-
thing, I’m just, actually, speechless. Coming from a family of military peo-
ple, I am just so moved by everything. I couldn’t believe it would work, but
it works, for me at least. Very emotional, very touching.
The sound had a strong effect on spectators, which led them to feel, in their
bodies, that they were present in the war scenario. Even though they had no
direct experience of war, they were filled with nervous anticipation of what
was coming next.
Oliver: I thought the score was very, very good. It was very powerful … you
know, the crickets and the cicadas and so on. And at times, just the omi-
nous drone of engines. It was very, very powerful, worked very well for me.
Mel: I mean I felt it [the helicopter sound] took me away, I felt that even
though it was painful … like my heart was beating; I was thinking, What’s
happening next? Because it was so loud, you think something was going
to crash, and you’re waiting for it, and you don’t know when it’s going to
happen.
The final section of the work, where one of the soldiers is seriously injured,
takes the audience and the performers through a long build-up of tension,
intensity, and meaning. This scene shifts from choreographed movement
Figure 12.5 Chris Linda in the injury scene from 5 Soldiers. Photo by Brian Slater.
Courtesy of Rosie Kay Dance Company.
that is recognizable as military into a world where dance is allowed a freer

rein and movement becomes a symbolic place of multiple meanings and
readings. The framing of this section is deliberately confusing at some
points—as if the soldiers start to have a war among themselves and the
roles of attacker, predator, victim, and executioner are blurred and muddled
(Figure 12.1). With the reduction of war on which to base human conflict,
the soldiers turn on each other, and the work is no longer a portrayal of
military action but a study of survival, fear, need, and aggression. Elements
of cannibalism, tribalism, and primitivism are introduced, with a deliber-
ate reference to The Rite of Spring, with the young male body as the sacrifice
of war, which brings the work into the realm of the metaphysical. In addi-
tion to evoking specific military conflicts, it also evokes a human quest for
meaning and redemption.
The dancers begin to chase one another, ganging up on the weakest, until
one soldier is chosen. He is lifted in a crucifixion pose and placed in the cen-
ter of the stage. The dancers spin, then fall around him, leaving him alone,
spinning in the center. Amid a building cacophony of sound, the lights dim
until the soldier is lit by a single spot. There is a flash and an explosion, and he
drops to his knees. Accompanied only by a high pitched ringing, he dances a
solo, falling back, struggling, dragging his lower body until he lies at the edge
of the light, shaking and convulsing in a replication of the shock resulting
from blood loss.
This scene, in which one of the soldiers loses his legs in a blast, was taken
from a description by a soldier who survived an IED blast that cost him his
leg. He was thrown upward, seeing light, then mud, then sky, then mud again
as he went head over heels four times. Then all he heard was a screeching in
his ears—totally deafening. He wanted to scream and fight and run, but it
took him a while to realize that he did not have his legs, and then he started
shaking—soldiers can lose all their blood in minutes if their arteries are not
tied with a tourniquet. He also described how time seemed to stop and every-
thing was distorted. We took that literally and distorted all the moments so
that the quick things happened slowly, ever so slowly, as the soldier struggles
and fights, until he collapses.
The other four soldiers jump up, and instead of running to him (as one
might expect) they have to very carefully feel and pick their way across the
stage to him, their fingertips representing the thin metal sticks used to check
for IED’s. This is based on real-life bomb training Kay received in Dartmoor.18
The youngest soldier is then stripped and changed into a T-shirt, and his legs
are bound. He is lifted, cradled, held, then placed down onto the stage (Figure
12.5). We called this scene “rehabilitation center”; it is based on soldiers’ expe-
riences of “stubbies,” the first short prostheses that are given to patients who
are re-learning to walk following the loss of limbs.
Two soldiers hold the young man’s arms on either side, while another walks
in front to help if he falls. He takes a few, painful steps forward. He falters,
falls, and is helped back up, until he finally shakes off his helpers, wanting to
go it alone. Then he begins a danced solo of the moves from earlier in the work,
but now on his knees—he tries to dance, but the anger, pain, and frustration
are obvious. The four others watch him, then step aside, returning to their
places, waiting for what they might be ordered to do next.
In this final scene it was decided that the injured soldier’s ankles would be
tied to his thighs using military straps that look a little like tourniquets. This
means that when he is on his knees, he looks as if he has lost his lower legs. As
the scene changes, he is shown in rehab at Headley Court. For Kay this is the
key scene of the work, controversial with civilian and military audiences alike.
Both injured soldiers and rehabilitation staff talked of how realistic the scene
was to them, describing it as hard but truthful. Kay wanted the audience to feel
the literal breaking of the body and the pain of injury. Nonmilitary audiences
and participants often felt the scene was too long, although one focus group
member said she thought it conveyed the reality of the experience more effec-
tively. One of the officers interviewed, who had first-hand experience of this
sort of event, expressed (with some difficulty in finding the right words) his
appreciation that it was presented in an unemotive way.
Martin: We had IED strikes when we were in Afghanistan this last time and
it was, you know, as a battalion we lost … of stats we lost the same number
of guys … and injured as well. Where I thought it was very good was in
portraying it without making it very emotive, so I mean one of the things
[ … ] was almost the frantic … tragicness of it all and … trying to sort
everything out and all that kind of thing.19
Dee asked Dawn, a dancer who had no military connections or experience,
to describe how this scene made her feel. She responded with reference to spe-
cific muscles and expressed how the emotion and subsequent reflection were
rooted in physical response:
Really tragic I think. I got quite emotional; I am now, as well. I didn’t expect
that. I think it went back to the man who did the introduction in the begin-
ning, but […] it was funny because they pulled his legs back into the strap,
the dancer’s legs, and so his quads were really tightly [bound], and then he is
standing on his knees and I kept thinking that must hurt for the dancer and
he is putting himself out there as well, but I mean, thinking of the broader
context, I just, I think she [Kay] did a good job of visualizing the severity
of people going out there and dancing because it’s bodies and not words,
you know. […] I’ve seen that before and I have thought about it before, but
it made me think about it in a different way because I saw the guy, I saw a
body minus the legs, and his struggle with just trying to deal with that in
the last couple of minutes of the piece.
Another dancer, who had to give up his career after sustaining a leg injury,
described the ending to the piece as “terrifying.” It evoked his own experience,
as well as heightening his identification with the soldier:
Jon: And they have to deal with that. So I think it’s … in my own experience as
a dancer, it was almost like someone chopped off my legs because I couldn’t
do, you know, what I was trained to do, and that was what I did from the
age of nine. So that had a registered personal moment for me, but also a
realization that the people, the soldiers out there, that they have bodies, and
bodies get injured, and they get messed up, and it’s a very physical, athletic
thing that they go through.
CONCLUSION (ROSIE K AY AND DEE REYNOLDS)

It was important to Kay that the piece end on a negative and angry note of
a broken body that can, in Scarry’s words, “shame us with the shame of our
powerlessness to approach the opened human body and make it not opened
as before” (1985, 72). Despite all the rhetoric of politics, technologies, and ene-
mies, it is the individual body that bears the brunt of all wars; in Kay’s words,
“I did not want an empathic end, an end in which this tragedy makes us cry,
but an ending that makes you face your own repugnance; I wanted to express
the physical frustration of the young soldier and the waste of war on the body
itself.”
As noted above, spectators at these performances did not engage in political
discourse when responding to the work, and we have discussed how this reflects
the British public’s disengagement from the politics of the war. However, it
is clear from spectators’ responses that through the work they experienced
embodied effects that led them to reflect on the issues. This included regret-
ting the loss of life of young soldiers and questioning the necessity of war in
general. Karen (focus group) remarked of the soldier who was injured:
I thought there was something terribly young about him. I don’t know
whether that’s what drew me in, it was … he was the sort of face you see
when, when every week somebody is, an announcement about some young
man who’s been killed, some lad, I think it just, tonight it was a twenty-â•‰year-â•‰
old. And you see impossibly young faces and you think about all the things
they won’t do, and his face just … and it just reminded me of that, really.
I was drawn to his face and I followed him, and somehow I thought, please
don’t let it be him, please don’t let it be him.
Later, Maria took up this train of thought:
It’s exactly what K. W. was saying about the newspapers, reading the news-
papers and seeing the young faces.â•›… I was thinking exactly the same: don’t
kill the young one, don’t kill the young one. Why do they have to go to war?
Why? Why?
The work repeatedly brings audiences closer to the embodied experience

of war and makes them feel uncomfortable. This effect is particularly intense
in certain scenes (the nightclub “rape,” helicopter, and injury episodes), but
it also occurs generally through the use of strong physicality, and of sound
and projection. The work tries to take an audience into an experience rarely
felt by those outside the military. For its military and dance audiences, the
work evokes lived, felt, in-â•‰the-â•‰body experiences that can open up memories of
warfare and complex senses of identity following injury (in battle or onstage).
The lived, empathic experiences of spectators provoked painful awareness of
the lived body as the target of war and opened up a space for critical reflec-
tion. Given the political context outlined at the beginning of this paper, we
would suggest that a direct, embodied approach to performance that brings
spectators to reflect on the body as frontline via an empathetic and sensory
experience of dance is a powerful means by which to open up, in a creative and
affective manner, the shameful wound of war.20
NOTES
1. The film version (http://â•‰w ww.5soldiers.co.uk) was launched online in March 2011
and is available in different formats, including a director’s cut and tracking shots
from headcams worn by each of the five dancers. For discussion of the film ver-
sion see Reynolds 2013.
2. The term was used in church services Rosie Kay attended with soldiers while
embedded with 4 RIFLES during Remembrance Week, November 2008.
3. “Medical advances saw 38 troops live through ‘un-â•‰survivable’ injuries in Iraq and
Afghanistan,” The Telegraph, August 21, 2015, http://â•‰w ww.telegraph.co.uk/â•‰news/â•‰
uknews/â•‰defence/â•‰11646952/â•‰Medical-â•‰advances-â•‰saw-â•‰38-â•‰t roops-â•‰l ive-â•‰t hrough-â•‰u n-â•‰
survivable-â•‰injuries-â•‰in-â•‰Iraq-â•‰and-â•‰Afghanistan.html.
4. See Richard Pendlebury, “I Need a Helicopter … I Think I’ve Lost My Leg: The
Soaring Number of Soldiers Maimed in Afghanistan,” Daily Mail, July 25, 2009,
explaining the “hidden wounded:” http://â•‰w ww.dailymail.co.uk/â•‰debate/â•‰a rticle-â•‰
1202047/â•‰I-â•‰n eed-â•‰h elicopter-â•‰-â•‰ I-â•‰t hink-â•‰Ive-â•‰l ost-â•‰l eg-â•‰T he-â•‰s ecret-â•‰s oaring.html.
For Operation Herrick casualty and fatality figures to January 31, 2013, see “Op
Herrick Casualty and Fatality Tables: 2014,” https://â•‰w ww.gov.uk/â•‰government/â•‰
publications/op-â•‰herrick-â•‰casualty-â•‰and-â•‰fatality-â•‰tables-â•‰released-â•‰in-â•‰2014.
5. Rosie Kay was a member of the touring company Green Candle (2000–â•‰2001),
working with young people with disabilities (http://â•‰w ww.greencandledance.
com/â•‰about/â•‰). She was dance artist in residence (DAiR) at DanceXchange (2003–â•‰
2004), and resident at the integrated school Fox Hollies in Birmingham (http://â•‰
www.foxhollies.bham.sch.uk/â•‰overview.html). In addition, she created Ballet on
the Buses (2007) in collaboration with the Birmingham Royal Ballet and Fierce!
Festival designed specifically for children with disabilities. Kay also created an
In2dance commission, Supernova (2008), with a group of young people from the
Young, Gifted and Talented program in collaboration with DanceXchange.
6. In 2000, the chief of the defence staff, Sir Charles Guthrie, stated that inclu-
sion of disabled people would be “detrimental” to the armed forces; see Mark
Oliver, “Disabled People in the Armed Forces,” Guardian, December 20, 2000,
http://â•‰w ww.theguardian.com/â•‰society/â•‰2000/â•‰dec/â•‰20/â•‰d isability.voluntarysector2.
For calls for the disabled to be allowed to join the armed forces, see Sean Rayment,
“Disabled Should Be Able Join Armed Forces,” Telegraph, January 17, 2009,
http://â•‰w ww.telegraph.co.uk/â•‰news/â•‰u knews/â•‰defence/â•‰4 277226/â•‰Disabled-â•‰should-â•‰

be-â•‰able-â•‰join-â•‰armed-â•‰forces.html. For exception to the 2010 Equality Act, see
Equality Act 2010, Schedule 9, http://â•‰w ww.legislation.gov.uk/â•‰u kpga/â•‰2010/â•‰15/â•‰
schedule/â•‰9.
7. As described to Rosie Kay while she was on secondment at the Defence Medical
Rehabilitation Unit, Headley Court, by an injured soldier.
8. Help for Heroes (H4H) is a UK charity that was set up to respond to the high rate
of injured soldiers and to raise funds for their rehabilitation support (http://â•‰w ww.
helpforheroes.org.uk/â•‰). X Factor is a TV talent contest that released a record with
the proceeds going to H4H, which raised public awareness of the charity (https://â•‰
www.youtube.com/â•‰watch?v=dHsCGoZst-â•‰w). Other charities were also set up,
including Walking with the Wounded (http://â•‰walkingwiththewounded.org.uk/),
whose patron is Prince Harry, which sponsored hikes.
9. Ministry of Defence Review of Women in Close Combat Situations, see https://â•‰
www.gov.uk/â•‰government/â•‰uploads/â•‰system/â•‰uploads/â•‰attachment_â•‰data/â•‰fi le/â•‰27406/â•‰
women_â•‰combat_â•‰experiences_â•‰literature.pdf.
10. These periods of military attachment and secondments to the hospital settings
were supported by Rosie Kay’s position as a Rayne Foundation fellow.
11. While some of Kay’s works have a more pure dance approach (Double Points:
K [2008] and Supernova [2008]), 5 Soldiers was a work with a narrative structure,
some characterization, and a strong dramaturgical approach, thus making it very
much a piece of “dance theater.”
12. Now The Army Reserves.
13. For information on the Joint Defense Disabled Ski Team, see http://â•‰w ww.
teamarmy.org/â•‰news/â•‰combined-â•‰services-â•‰disabled-â•‰ski-â•‰team/â•‰.
14. See the website, Watching Dance: Kinesthetic Empathy, http://â•‰w ww.watching
dance.org.
15. See Reason and Reynolds 2010.
16. These are indicated by square brackets.
17. In the interests of anonymity, the names attributed to interviewees and focus
group participants are not their real names.
18. Soldiers running to aid an injured colleague had also been seriously injured
and killed in a “daisy chain” of linked IED’s, resulting in multiple injuries and
death on a single site. Following that, despite the need to apply a tourniquet to a
wound quickly, soldiers had to protect themselves first before aiding an injured
colleague.
19. In some quotes, hesitations have been removed to facilitate reading, but here
I have left them in as they indicate the difficulty of discussing a painful topic.
20. Rosie Kay Dance Company staged 5 SOLDIERS in spring 2015, premiering at
Birmingham Repertory Theatre, before touring UK theaters, a military base,
an army reservist center, an officers’ club, and an Oxford college. The work will
tour internationally in 2015–â•‰2016. The tour includes widespread outreach, aim-
ing to work with over ten thousand participants across the United Kingdom
and delivering workshops in military bases with support from Army Welfare
Services. This new 5 SOLDIERS 2015 tour draws on research Kay has conducted
with a visit to the United States in January 2014. A new white paper on the arts,
health and the military in the United States draws attention to the role the arts
can play in opening a military-â•‰civilian dialogue, and Kay’s company is at the
forefront of this kind of research in the United Kingdom, working with York
St John University in conducting a full evaluation of the new touring model.
See National Initiative for Arts and Health in the Military, “Arts, Health and
Well-â•‰Being across the Military Continuum.” http://â•‰w ww.americansforthearts.
org/â•‰sites/â•‰default/â•‰fi les/â•‰pdf/â•‰2013/â•‰by_â•‰program/â•‰legislation_â•‰a nd_â•‰policy/â•‰a rt_â•‰a nd_â•‰
military/â•‰ArtsHealthwellbeingWhitePaper.pdf.
WORKS CITED
Der Derian, James. 2009. Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-â•‰Industrial-â•‰Media-â•‰
Entertainment Network. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
Gray, Glen. 1959. The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
Harris, John. 2008. “The Day Politics Stopped Working.” Guardian, February 15,
http://â•‰w ww.guardian.co.uk/â•‰politics/â•‰2008/â•‰feb/â•‰15/â•‰iraq.
Nadelson Theodore. 2005. Trained to Kill: Soldiers at War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Reason, Matthew, and Dee Reynolds. 2010. “Kinesthesia, Empathy and Related
Pleasures: An Inquiry into Audience Experiences of Watching Dance.” Dance
Research Journal 42(2): 49–â•‰75.
Reynolds, Dee. 2013. “Empathy, Contagion and Affect: The Role of Kinesthesia in
Watching Dance.” In Touching and Being Touched: Kinesthesia and Empathy in
Dance and Movement, edited by Gabriele Brandstetter, Gerko Egert, and Sabine
Zubarik, 211–â•‰231. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.
13
Geo-â•‰Choreography and Necropolitics

Faustin Linyekula’s Studios Kabako, Democratic Republic of
Congo
A R I EL OST ERW EIS
This chapter revisits an article written in 2010 during a moment when

Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula was embarking on the develop-
ment of Studios Kabako in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).1 Now,
five years later, much of Studios Kabako has materialized as a viable arts
network. Yet this project is driven by much more than materiality and prod-
uct: just as Studios Kabako was spawned by an ambitious vision amidst the
aftermath of war, it perseveres today due to Linyekula’s unflinching belief in
the potential contained in the realm of the imaginary. Linyekula stages what
I call “geo-â•‰choreography.” What is choreography if not an embodied practice
that demands a continual reordering of space? Geo-â•‰choreography reorders the
urban landscape choreographically without colonizing it. Instead, it estab-
lishes a network of architectural sites within that landscape whose effect I shall
endeavor to describe in this essay. In 1993 Linyekula went into exile for eight
years, during which time he attended university in Kenya and studied theater
in London, only to be pressured by the British government to return to Kenya,
where he was introduced to dance theater.2 In 2001 Linyekula returned to the
DRC, where he founded his contemporary dance company, also called Studios
Kabako, in Kinshasa, the country’s capital. Working out of both Kinshasa and
Paris, Linyekula established an international career as an experimental dance
270 A riel O sterweis
maker. After five years (in 2006) he transferred his company from Kinshasa
to his hometown, Kisangani. Located in the northeastern DRC, this haunted
urban terrain has been devastated by political violence, including that of the
Second Congo War (1998–â•‰2003) and its aftermath.3 In trying to rediscover a
sense of belonging for himself and others, Linyekula has established a net-
work of studios for emerging artists throughout Kisangani. Linyekula’s dance
company and network of studios, taken together and housed under the same
name of Studios Kabako, encourage a fluid movement between the social and
the artistic.4
Working in and across the urban landscape, Linyekula’s geo-â•‰choreography
recontextualizes multiple spaces and forms of cultural production. For exam-
ple, he places popular performance forms in theaters that normally pres-
ent contemporary dance, and he brings contemporary dance into parts of
Kisangani steeped in popular culture. One repeated component of Linyekula’s
spatial recontextualizations is ndombolo, a popular form of Congolese music
as well as the popular dance form it has inspired. Postcolonial theorist Achille
Mbembe and anthropologist Filip De Boeck have interpreted these forms as
part of a culture of death. They attribute its force and popularity to the false
promise of hope offered by its driving sounds and material ostentatiousness.
Ndombolo is the sonic and corporeal practice that best exemplifies the DRC
as a necropolitical state. Furthermore, both commentators see it as a musi-
cal culture that mimics the contentious nature of war through competitive
“battles.” Linyekula’s work for both his company and his studio workshops
consciously engages with ndombolo in an attempt to reconfigure its bellicose
associations.
CHOREOGR APHY, NDOMBOLO, AND THE CULTURE

OF DEATH
In cities such as Kinshasa, generational order has been disrupted by mass
killings. Society is increasingly shaped by a youth culture defined by—â•‰and
continuously reappropriating—â•‰horror. Living with death characterizes a soci-
ety subsumed by what Mbembe calls “necropolitics,” or “the power of death.”
“Necropolitics and necropower,” Mbembe explains, “account for the various
ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the inter-
est of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-â•‰worlds, new
and unique forms of social existence in which cast populations are subjected to
conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (2003, 39–40).
For Mbembe, ndombolo and the dancing it engenders is born of necropoliti-
cal social conditions. In the DRC, the aftermath of contemporary warfare has
engendered an unspeakable amount of bodily violence—â•‰not simply death but
Geo-Choreography and Necropolitics 271
the display of civilian and rebel corpses, famine, and rampant rape. Amidst
this landscape, ndombolo’s corporeal effects are of particular importance.
In his essay “Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of
Sounds” (Mbembe 2007), Mbembe theorizes the aesthetic of violence that
informs ndombolo: “[Congolese] music ‘breaks bones’ … and ‘hurls bod-
ies’ … causing women and men to ‘behave like snakes.’ … The body is not so
much ‘harmed’ as it becomes a site of transgression, the locus of a blurring—
between the transcendental and the empirical, the material and the psychic”
(2007). In works for the stage created in and around 2009, Linyekula drew
from the energy of ndombolo music in order to explore the carnal possibili-
ties central to ndombolo’s power and popularity. “For several years, ndom-
bolo, Congolese pop music, has been haunting my pieces,” Linyekula says.
“Bastard [daughter] of rumba, traditional rhythms, church fanfares and Sex
Machine funk, pimped by local brewers, ndombolo delivers loads of energy”
(Linyekula, 2011). According to Linyekula’s description of a typical ndombolo
event in Kinshasa or Kisangani,
Concerts invite you at 9pm. Don’t come before midnight but be prepared to
stay until dawn. … Listen to … songs you know by heart … drink, … eat
brochettes, dance and flirt. Musicians … singing their own praises, power,
beautiful women and expensive stuff, designer cloth and luxury cars … as if
everything were granted in a country where everything is to be built again
each morning. (Linyekula, 2011)
In Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City (2004), Filip De Boeck traces the
musical form and its surrounding culture back to the popular music star
Papa Wemba in the 1980s. “This movement,” writes De Boeck, “escalated
into real fashion contests and potlatches in which youngsters would display
their European fashion designer clothes, in an attempt to outdo each other”
(De Boeck and Plissart 2004, 54). The materialism associated with ndom-
bolo’s musical culture has, for De Boeck, recently taken on new and more
threatening forms:
Not only do the music and its accompanying dance styles reflect, and reflect
upon, the violence that pervades the city and Congolese society at large, but
the frequent clashes between avid followers of rival bands have themselves
become increasingly responsible for the mounting insecurity in Kinshasa’s
public spaces. (De Boeck and Plissart 2004, 55)
Congolese music and the dances it inspires nonetheless provide rare

and vital outlets for artistic expression. But, as Linyekula’s own experience
demonstrates, the decision to participate in almost any form of public art or

performance in the DRC carries with it the potential for personal harm. In her
field notes from a recent visit to Kisangani, arts presenter Cathy Zimmerman
writes:
Faustin [Linyekula] … worries about artistic freedom, as freedom of expres-

sion in general is very much in danger these days under Kabila [president
of the DRC]; and there have been times when Faustin was told he was in
danger. This is due mainly because Faustin and Studios Kabako are gain-
ing in reputation and influence. … Two weeks ago, a journalist friend of
Faustin was suspected of inciting against the government and the govern-
ment confiscated his notes, cell phone, and computer. Since the journalist
was in contact with Faustin, it was feared that Faustin and his family might
be in danger and the journalist told Faustin that he should leave the country
for a while. The journalist was later cleared and Faustin stayed put. Still, I
cannot imagine working as an artist under such conditions and Faustin, at
times, finds it difficult to continue.5
Despite these risks, Linyekula has continued to produce works for local
as well as international consumption. In his willingness to explore the pos-
sibilities of ndombolo in his choreography, Linyekula risks entering an arena
that Mbembe characterizes as a crucial aspect of Congolese culture, a zone of
participation and productivity that appears to offer the incredible potential
for liberation from war but that simultaneously risks re-enacting cycles of
violence.
“Congolese music carries with it illusion, sycophancy, lies, deception,
and ostentatiousness,” remarks Mbembe, “making the dancing subject into
someone who is putting on an act for himself and others alike” (2007). In
the works staged by his dance company, Linyekula intervenes amidst the
conflicting features of ndombolo and popular Congolese culture—between
its illusory, sycophantic tendencies and its experimental, exploratory thirst
for new forms of collective experience. “Shaped and sculpted by sound,”
Mbembe describes, “the [dancing] subject relinquishes himself, erases
from her face the expression of destitution” (2007).6 Popular social danc-
ing to ndombolo thus eclipses for a brief moment the pain of poverty and
war but only and specifically because of its most depraved and despicable
aspects. The “ostentatiousness” to which Mbembe refers is similarly noted
by De Boeck: “In spite of, or maybe precisely because of its extreme poverty,
Kinshasa’s aesthetic regime of the body has turned it into a veritable cult
of elegance, culminating in the movement of the Sape, an acronym for the
Society of Fun Lovers and Elegant Persons” (De Boeck and Plissart 2004, 54).
Central to Linyekula’s intervention is a critique of Sape. By embracing Sape,

young urban Congolese entrenched in the culture of ndombolo mimic com-
mercial hip-hop’s idea of bling. Bling—t he ostentatious display of material-
ity (shiny jewelry, cars, and even women) is already a mimicry of wealth.
Mbembe refers to ndombolo dance’s culture of Sape or bling as “counterfeit-
ing” (2007). Driven by the performance of wealth, competitive ndombolo
music and dance “battles” can escalate such that their violence mimics war.
Despite the fact that the DRC is perhaps the richest country in the world in
terms of natural resources, warfare has prevented its population from access-
ing resources or their potential profits. What is performed in dance and
music battles preoccupied with the culture of Sape and bling is an attempt
to grasp the DRC’s inaccessible wealth. Ultimately, Mbembe suggests, the
culture of counterfeiting and mimicry stages a mimicry of death itself, thus
helping to reproduce the necropolitical sociocultural climate of violence and
retribution from which it would seem to offer an escape.
Bling and Sape are critiqued in Linyekula’s projects. He eliminates the fetish
objects associated with popular music’s consumerist cults. The few material
objects that figure in his work almost always appear as if salvaged from obliv-
ion. Indeed, his is a scavenger’s practice:
[I am] trying to show a body that refuses to die. Scavenging through the
ruins of what I thought was a house in search of clues: a poem by Rimbaud,
Banyua rituals my grand-mother took me through, Ndombolo dance
steps from a music video by Papa Wemba, Latin classes with Father Pierre
Lommel … Aesthetics of survival … Bundling together whatever comes
my way to build a temporary shelter. (2005)
In more more more … future (2009), Linyekula self-consciously stages a

scene of popular dance’s counterfeiting habit: he and a fellow member of his
all-male ensemble react to the ndombolo-punk sounds of an onstage band by
dancing together in a knowing lilt—step touch, step touch. Yet their imperfect
unison reveals a counterfeiting, an imitative mirroring that does not amount
to precise simultaneity. The men’s costumes consist of bulbous layers of col-
orful reflective material (think Michelin Man meets crinkly detritus turned
hip-hop sheen amidst grotesque, botanical blooms). These costumes—bizarre
caricatures that mimic the ostentatious clothing fads periodically envelop-
ing pop culture—seem designed to underscore and, simultaneously, render
absurd the impulse toward movement that arises “spontaneously” through the
music of the band with which they share the stage.
Beneath the mockery of ostentatiousness exhibited by the costumes in more
more more … future, Linyekula and his dancers draw upon the productive
energies Mbembe identifies as ndombolo’s precarious potential. Mbembe

locates a distinct beauty in the dance that accompanies popular musical forms
such as ndombolo:
Congolese dance is a carnal endeavor. Against … ideologies that would cast

the body as a prison for the soul, dancing here is a celebration of the flesh.
The body is in absolute flux and music is invested with the power to enter it,
penetrating it to the core. Music produces psychic, somatic and emotional
effects on the organs and limbs, subjecting them to the rule of waste. …
In addition to existing as flux, the body is also a force-field of contrasts.
Music engages in a struggle with these forces. Never simply movement of
the human form, Congolese dance embodies something that resembles a
search for original life, for perpetual genesis, and, through this, for an idea
of happiness and serenity.” (Mbembe 2007)
Linyekula mobilizes ndombolo’s generative impulse in order to raise ques-

tions about the future of the DRC.
In more more more … future, Linyekula and several contemporary dance–
trained performers collaborate with the renowned ndombolo guitar soloist
Flamme Kapaya and the Congolese hip-hop dancer Dinozord. In preparing
Figure 13.1 Papy Ebonati, Dinozord, and Faustin Linyekula in more more more …
future. Photo by Agathe Poupeney.
the piece, Linyekula looked to the past in an attempt to “imagine more future,”
for the present does not offer much more than a continuation of wartime:
The energy of 70s and 80s punk movement in Europe and America comes
to my mind … how young people took music to destroy everything around,
in a self-claimed no-future society. If it’s impossible for us to send to hell a
future that we never had, if it’s difficult to go on ruining our pile of ruins,
let’s try to dream … feet firmly … on the ground, just to imagine more
future. (Linyekula, 2011)
As Linyekula sees it, one way to allow a space for “more future” is to untan-
gle ndombolo from its agnostic tendencies, replacing prestige-driven battles
with unconventional collaborations. He asks, “Why not [use] the fantastic
energy of guitars and voices, not to sustain dreams as thin as the cheap paper
handkerchiefs sold in the streets of Kinshasa, but on the contrary, to [speak]
difficulties, dead ends, mistakes and the poor legacy of our fathers[?]‌” (2011)
His personal style of contemporary dance blends the bodily articulation of a
dancer trained in Western as well as African techniques with the experimen-
tal impulse found in the somatic theater of Kenyan director-choreographer
Opiyo Okach.7 Linyekula’s first professional performances developed under
Okach’s tutelage. Okach’s contemporary choreography, inclusive of nondance
techniques such as mime and physical theater and informed by research into
ritual ceremonies, constitutes one of Linyekula’s primary influences.
In Linyekula’s works for the stage, ndombolo musicians, contemporary
dancers, and hip-hop dancers imagine relationships and forms of experi-
ence, performance, or expressions that are freed from the empty, consumer-
obsessed fantasies commonly found in Congolese popular culture. He
appropriates ndombolo and uses it to a different end. As a part of that cul-
ture, the music itself demands that space be given over to improvisation.
By inserting ndombolo music into a concert dance setting, Linyekula and
his company make the social element of their art explicit, relinquishing the
comfort and control of memorized movements in favor of the music-driven,
corporeal risks that ndombolo demands of its most ardent enthusiasts. As a
popular form, ndombolo dance is entirely improvised. In his choreography,
Linyekula cultivates a tension between spontaneous invention and prescribed
phrases. He places special significance upon his sense of improvisation as a
survival tactic and a means of self-preservation rather than an expression of
artistic taste: “Improvisation here is not an aesthetic luxury, but a state of liv-
ing, surviving: in such a hostile context, where one never really knows what
tomorrow will be made of (another war? An [epidemic]?), one needs to know
how to improvise to remain alive” (Linyekula 2005). Like Mbembe, Linyekula
conceives of improvisation—even in vernacular contexts—as an elaboration of

the “search for original life.” This search may be desperate, frenzied, or clumsy,
but its principle drive is survival, not “aesthetic luxury.”
Linyekula’s staged improvisations and modifications of popular music thus
serve as dynamic counterweights to what Mbembe refers to as the “aesthet-
ics of vulgarity.” Mbembe employs this terms to characterize government-
sponsored performance spectacles in various postcolonial nations, programs
that pander obsequiously to the commandement, or corrupt postcolonial
leadership (Mbembe 2001, 111).8 In reflecting on popular dances inspired by
ndombolo music, De Boeck observes that the dancing body consumes and
recasts the corrupt power of the commandement: “In and through dance,
the juvenile body thus appears as a subversive site, as a corporeal locus which
reflects, and reflects upon, the violence generated by official cultural and polit-
ical grammars that have been characterized by some as necropolitical, as the
work of death” (De Boeck 2005, 16). Dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild
finds that Linyekula attempts to “work with choreographic movement, energy,
rhythm, the body and its physical presence,” answering “the challenge to
remain standing, vertical, in spite of a crushing environment” (Gottschild
2007). “I am showing the individual,” he says, “in a context where there is
no space for individuals. … I speak in my own name, not in the name of ‘all
Congolese’ or (worse) ‘all Africans’ ” (quoted in Singer 2005). The continual
threat of invasion, a threat that has shaped the Second Congo War, is such that
one’s individual stance could lead to either misrecognition or murder.
Earlier performances such as Spectacularly Empty II (2003) display simi-
lar fusions of improvisatory movement and absurd, improvised, or seem-
ingly scavenged costuming: elaborately detailed ensembles are replaced with
destructible pelvic wraps made of propaganda-filled newspapers. Linyekula
has been known to forgo subtle performance lighting, choosing instead “arti-
ficial light: lamps, lanterns, and strings of light bulbs” (Gottschild 2007).
Refusing the feigned elegance others might associate with Sape— not to
mention much dance and theater staged on Western proscenia—Linyekula
constructs an imaginative terrain of broken goods and material fragments,
a playground of “urban detritus” (Gottschild 2007). In his assembly of such
remnants, Linyekula’s inﬂuences range from ephemera, poetry, and video
dancing to somatic theater, improvisation, and live vocalizations distorted
electronically by a DJ.
Festival of Lies (2007) includes standard performance-length productions in
theater settings as well as temporally unbounded pre-and postperformance
festival-like gatherings that stage informal encounters through a variety of
channels. In one iteration of Festival of Lies, African musicians play as the
audience enters the space of the theater, a hybrid environment evoking at once
a black box theater, jazz lounge, potluck feast, and ndombolo concert, attempt-
ing to restage elements of collective experience found in urban Congolese
culture. Festival of Lies complicates practices of cultural importation; at each
tour stop (in cities such as San Francisco, New York, and Avignon, France),
Linyekula employs African musicians and chefs who are living as immigrants
in that locale. If Western audiences attend these events expecting to sample
African culture through Linyekula himself, they discover that Linyekula
has instead assembled locally residing sub-Saharan African artists and chefs
whose presence, if previously unrecognized, now becomes visible.
Linyekula’s personal role in these pieces is unclear; he observes the space as
he performs inside it, exposing the audience to what appears to be a prepara-
tory process as he arranges fluorescent light bulbs and cords across the floor.
The soundtrack for his movement is similarly hybrid. The live music gives a
sense of a concert happening in the present, but it is interspersed with a seem-
ingly detached or displaced urban soundtrack that conjures the hustle and
bustle of a city street. Other audio elements include fragments of speeches by
the DRC’s various postcolonial leaders, with projected translations in English.
Male bodies on the floor shift back and forth not to the live music but to the
soundtrack. The bricolage materiality of Linyekula’s scenic and sonic elements
is matched by the hybridity of his movement. The shifting bodies give way to
Figure 13.2 Faustin Linyekula and Marie-Louise Bibish Mumbu in Festival of Lies.

Photo by Agathe Poupeney.
a solo by Linyekula that highlights his personal style: fragmented, in that his

limbs seem to break and come together, yet always connected by a liquid flu-
idity, demonstrating surrender amidst control. At the conclusion of the solo,
the rest of the performers join Linyekula, hovering over and falling onto the
fluorescent bulbs. “Thank you all for being here,” Linyekula says in his address
to the audience. Festival of Lies thus restages the DRC’s troubled urban spaces
abroad, in an international context, as sources for and of cultural production,
refiguring a history and identity that thus far has had trouble imagining itself
beyond ruins. Linyekula’s commitment to encounter depends on such forms
of spatial recontextualization, creating the familiar out of the unfamiliar, and
the unfamiliar out of the familiar. Such exercises in alienation and recogni-
tion become productive templates for imagining social cohesion on a scale
larger than the stage. Ultimately, in these events, Linyekula is a scavenger of
time, tracing errant bits that history would rather forget, offering fragile re-â•‰
collections of images, objects, dance, and sound through strategic, imagina-
tive productions that exceed the boundaries of the proscenium, relocating
contemporary Congolese war and its afterimages in the West.
STUDIOS K ABAKO, R AW EARTH ARCHITECTURE,

AND K ISANGANI REIMAGINED
The Studios Kabako network in Kisangani has been designed to initiate a pro-
cess of healing. This process began with a series of questions that demand a
reimagining of the city itself: “How do we live here? … How do [we] continue
to work here? … How do we create spaces where people can think it’s possible
to imagine things for the arts? … How do we continue to imagine a future for
us here, from the arts to the city life at large?” (Linyekula, in telephone inter-
view with the author, June 1, 2008). As Mbembe has noted, “Belgian colonial
rule was to a large extent an endeavor aimed at restructuring local time and
space” (2007). Linyekula’s dispersal of creative spaces across the city employs
choreography’s project of spatiotemporal restructuring as a model to confront
the spatiotemporal damage inflicted over the course of the country’s colo-
nized past. His efforts thus attempt to transpose what Mbembe refers to as the
“repressed topographies of cruelty” into productive spaces of experimentation
in which artistic practice can inform larger social bodies: geo-â•‰choreography
(2003, 40).9 Although Linyekula seeks transformation from within, relying
on the local to effect change, he has also been aided by the prestigious Prince
Claus award and the Curry Stone Design Prize (2014), as well as various French
funding sources.10 His commitment to the local is reflected not only in the self-â•‰
conscious insertion of his arts centers into specific areas and neighborhoods of
the city but also in the raw earth architectural techniques used to construct the
studios themselves. These techniques favor mud and clay over steel and glass,
producing vivid reminders of the ground underfoot. The point is not to erase
evidence of European involvement in the Congo—a French architecture school
has advised local workers in the construction process—but to demonstrate that
lasting, valuable products can be manufactured from resources so common-
place and familiar as to be neglected. The external support Linyekula receives
is used to guide local artists and builders to be more self-sustaining. “We use
the most available material at home, gesturing to the rest of the community
that raw earth is not a material that we should despise; it’s material from which
you can do sustainable things,” Linyekula explains (interview with the author).
Studios Kabako’s multiple spaces are designed to act upon the city “like acu-
puncture.” The sequential “puncturing” of the earth initiated by the construc-
tion of Studios Kabako parallels the philosophy of healing that is practiced
in acupuncture. “When you connect the dots,” Linyekula says, “you begin
healing or appeasing the body” (interview with the author). In the context of
Kisangani, such healing practices force the individual to grapple with a place
that has betrayed him, ejected him, and confronted him with loss. Linyekula is
known for stating, “My body is my only country” (Van Reybrouk, n.d.).
Figure 13.3 Land acquired for a Studios Kabako residency site in Kisangani, DRC.
Photo by Cathy Zimmerman.
The spiritual component of both acupuncture and Linyekula’s work is such

that the body is called upon as a kinesthetic vessel of memory. Medical anthro-
pologist Linda L. Barnes explores the nuanced meanings that “healing” car-
ries within the practice of acupuncture. According to anthropologist James
Waldram, whom she quotes, “Healing … can occur while disease remains; heal-
ing can … even prepare for death” (Barnes 2005, 254). Acknowledging the pos-
sibility of healing while disease remains provides artists working in traumatized
environments such as the DRC with a template for working in a space of death.
It also liberates Linyekula’s project from Western market-driven paradigms that
prefer binaries such as success or failure, healthy or sick. Waldram’s suggestion
that acupuncture can “even prepare for death” departs from much of Western
medicine’s emphasis on the avoidance of death, either through its repression
or through the prolongation of life. Linyekula’s practice is one of acceptance
of death rather than denial. Studios Kabako not only reimagines the culture of
death; it is founded upon its very existence: “Kabako, the one after whom the
dance company was named, died … [of] bubonic plague … in a small village
without cemetery. … Kabako was buried under a coffee tree. The body, even the
corpse, is a locus of pity and oblivion” (Linyekula, quoted in Van Reybrouk,
n.d.). Nonetheless, Linyekula believes in the collective political strength of the
“people who are willing to beat a personal path in this environment” (Ruigrok
2007). Such a collective is founded upon a sense of shared loss: “Today what I see
is that my real heritage is a pile of ruins,” observes Linyekula in the war-torn
DRC, “but when I was growing up I was told I had a stable home. This is some-
thing I share with my peers” (interview with the author).
The portion of Studios Kabako dedicated to providing workshops in
Kisangani has been deliberate and incremental in its expansion and diverse
in its offerings. Studios Kabako currently consists of four sites, with a fifth on
the way: in addition to their office in downtown Kisangani, studios have been
built in the city’s communes Kabondo, Mangobo, and Tshopo, and a water
treatment center that doubles as a cultural center is under construction in
Lubunga on the south bank of the Congo River. Finally, a large site in the town
of Simisimi will eventually house a cultural laboratory and residential center
(http://w ww.kabako.org). In Kisangani creative urgency overrides the need for
architectural completion. Linyekula initiated Studios Kabako activities before
the studios were actually built: “We cannot wait until we have the buildings
to start something,” Linyekula said in 2008. “The space can begin to exist first
as a mental space before materializing as a physical space” (interview with the
author). The activities sanctioned by the individual centers vary. One center
is a stage, a performance space dedicated to presenting pieces by workshop
participants; another is a studio that provides arts residencies, encouraging
communication with the outer world; a third space is a “bubble-like” space
for rehearsal, recording, and editing, in which individual artists are free to
experiment without distraction (interview with the author). Studios Kabako
focuses its attention on young adults, “people in their twenties who have made
a commitment to becoming professional artists” (interview with the author).
Too often, artists train only in their chosen discipline, without developing
the tools to support their practice. Linyekula hopes that by engaging in a net-
work of spaces dedicated to a full range of arts practices, young artists can
begin to document their work and place it in conversation with the work of
others. Other events engage much larger constituencies:
In October [2009], Studios Kabako produced a day-long music event featur-

ing local hip hop artists in which 4000 people attended. The day was totally
peaceful and created a hunger in the community for more. … The featured
group, Pasnas, led by a singer named Bastion, is a hip hop music group,
which is now touring in Africa, under the auspices of Studios Kabako. …
At their temporary offices in Kisangani, they have set up a sound produc-
tion studio where they are cultivating other music and sound production
artists. … At their temporary offices in Kisangani, they have set up a sound
production studio where they are cultivating other music and sound pro-
duction artists. … All this is part of Faustin and Virginie’s vision to create
an arts community in Kisangani and to provide ways for artists to make a
living through their art.11
The production of such events exemplifies Linyekula’s belief that the arts
can allow for the social construction of an additional, physically manifested
dimension of the imaginary. Through this process, Linyekula suggests, “You
can use the arts as a starting point to talk to the city on a larger scale” (inter-
view with the author). Studios Kabako thus attempts to reconcile such “imagi-
nary cities” with present-day Kisangani. The coalescence of death, Christian
fundamentalism, and popular performance’s mimicry of war has upset the
balance between the public and private, the sacred and the profane. In a cul-
ture where spectacle abounds in unexpected locations, the experimental artist
must struggle to identify her own stage and be careful not to undermine the
value of popular entertainment in the process. It is not unusual in the urban
DRC to find rap or ndombolo performances at churches and religious rheto-
ric in bars. De Boeck cites an increased theatricalization of urban Congolese
public spaces, specifically Kinshasa’s bars and churches: “The religious trans-
formation which Congolese society is currently undergoing has contributed to
a reconfiguration, if not an obliteration, of the dividing lines between public
and private space, as well as an increasing theatricalization of the city. … The
space of the church has become the city’s main stage” (De Boeck 2005, 56).
Though not adverse to spirituality, Studios Kabako offers a secular stage sepa-
rate from the contested battleground of church spaces. In their mimicry of
war and gangster rap’s antagonism on the church’s stage, Congolese ndombolo
and hip-â•‰hop “battles” intensify the imaginary-â•‰as-â•‰death. Recently, Linyekula
curated a performance in Kisangani on behalf of Studios Kabako in which
three local MCs who usually battle one another came together on the same
stage to share their talents. Such gestures refigure De Boeck’s dystopian vision
of Congolese popular culture. They reconceptualize an otherwise violent, the-
atrical public space into a collaborative arena for collective experience through
individual expression.
In acupuncture, healing is defined as “any change that allows you to say
that something important has happened here” (Barnes 2005, 253). By per-
forming a kind of architectural acupuncture on Kisangani’s urban land-
scape, Linyekula advocates efforts to effect change in one’s immediate
surroundings, even when this locus is removed from more recognizable
places of social or political power. Barnes suggests that “given the local-â•‰
global interface, each … locale where acupuncture is practiced creates its
own particularized version of local knowledge” (2005, 241). To extend the
acupunctural metaphor to Studios Kabako is to envision ways in which
locally produced knowledge can provide alternatives to official varieties of
signification or state-â•‰authorized forms of discourse. “Local knowledge” also
conjures Clifford Geertz’s anthropological term, identifying crucial forms of
meaning making in local contexts that “preserve the individuality of things
and enfold them in larger worlds of sense at the same time” (Geertz 1983,
xi). To explore a site where “something important has happened” is not to
cure or to make sense of horror but to allow for the possibility to heal, even
if difficulties remain.
Art making is a durational practice, one that can forego resolution in order
to question or identify; it might also simply leave an imprint, serving as a
means with which a place might be marked as the site of an event. “Everyone
has a right to culture,” Linyekula says. By bringing his body—â•‰his “home”—â•‰to
the geographic locale from which he has at times felt most alienated, Linyekula
forces himself to grapple with the DRC’s own complicated identity crises:
My dance will be an attempt to remember my name.â•›… Zaire was but a

lie invented by Mobutu, a dead exiled land. Perhaps my name is Kabila;
perhaps I’m a bastard son of King Leopold II.â•›… A kid soldier scavenging
through a heap of lies, raped virgins and cholera. Democratic Republic of
Congo was my real name.â•›… My portion of Africa doesn’t care about me.
Years of war, raped women, epidemics, millions killed.â•›… At best I’m left
with some energy to survive on my heap of ruins. (Gottschild 2007)
For Linyekula to state that “dance will be an attempt to remember [his]

name” is to point to dance’s potential to kinetically assemble multiple tempo-
ralities at once—â•‰of history, of memory, and of the present. Laboring toward
an imagined identity, the dancing body provides a spatiotemporal demon-
stration that the “imagination is primarily … interaction between the past,
the present and the projection of a future” (De Boeck 2005, 157). Linyekula
chooses to linger in—â•‰and to transform—â•‰the imaginative space that threat-
ens to reify death’s specters. For De Boeck, imagination is both a theoretical
concept that—â•‰like choreography—â•‰bridges multiple temporalities and mul-
tiple social players and that which defines the haunting nature of death in
the Congo.
The imagination is … also interaction between social actors, or between

societies, the relations of which are selectively shaped by their respective
“imagining consciousness.” … The imaginary, as an alternative field site,
therefore presents novel opportunities for more detailed analytic scrutiny
of the multiple transformations that African society is currently undergo-
ing. (De Boeck 2005, 156–â•‰157)
By conceiving of the imaginary as an “alternative field site,” De Boeck

emphasizes social potentials and possibilities that may only exist in the
minds of the individuals living in a given town, city, or country. Such a
method of “fieldwork” can trace dreams, fears, regrets, and failures, not
to mention those goals that do not reach completion due to circumstances
of power, corruption, or time. What began as an imagining of a possibility
has grown into physical studios and collaborative art making. The art mak-
ing at Studios Kabako promises to generate further imaginings on the part
of numerous participants. One can already say “Something has happened
here.” The urban has become the spatial terrain upon which the imagina-
tion labors: “There are cities and cities,” Linyekula says. “There are cities
which you kill in silence, cities that you love and cities that you give birth to
every day. There is the city which you carry within, there is the city that you
dream of, there are imaginary cities that clash in the imaginary world” (Van
Reybrouk, n.d.).
NOTES
1. A previous version of this chapter appeared as an article in Dance Research
Journal (Osterweis Scott 2010). I would like to thank the following people for
their support of this project: Faustin Linyekula, Virginie Dupray, Mark Franko,
Stefania Pandolfo, Cathy Zimmerman, Emily Harney, and Susan Leigh Foster.
2. In a 2005 interview, Linyekula explained the conditions of his exile:

In 1991, I wanted to attend college, but the universities were considered dangerous,
threatening places by the regime and were shut down. So, in 1993, I went to Kenya
in order to attend University there, and I remained there for three years, until 1996.
From Kenya, I went to London, where I became involved in theater, but England
began to view me with suspicion because of having lived in two countries on the
African continent, and I was forced to return to Kenya. It was there that I began to
dance at a dance theater workshop taught by Alphonse Pierou, a dancer from the
Ivory Coast. Three years later I began to choreograph. I began in 1997 with a collabo-
ration with Opiyo Okach. It was for nine artists. We took the piece to festivals around
the country.” (Singer 2005)
3. Kisangani and its surroundings are known for rich natural resources, includ-
ing diamonds. Much political conflict—â•‰colonial and “postcolonial”—â•‰is linked
directly and indirectly to mineral wealth.
4. Virginie Dupray is the managing director of Studios Kabako.
5. Cathy Zimmerman, field notes, October 2009 (permission for use granted to the
author in November 2009).
6. By “Congolese dance,” Mbembe refers to popular social dancing associated with
contemporary musical forms such as ndombolo.
7. Opiyo Okach is a renowned Kenyan choreographer who works in Kenya and
France and founded Kenya’s first contemporary dance company. He “trained at
the Desmond Jones School of Mime and Physical Theatre in London,” and his
work incorporates “research on traditional [Kenyan] ritual and performance”
(see the biography of Okach at the GaaraProjects website, http://â•‰gaaraprojects.
com/â•‰opiyookache.htm).
8. The commandement’s “agents [include] the party, policemen, soldiers, adminis-
trators and officials, middlemen, and dealers,” and “aesthetics of vulgarity” refers
to the hyperbolic spectacle surrounding events such as welcoming a president back
to his country as he drives into the capital from the airport (Mbembe 2001, 111).
Mbembe writes, “The commandement defines itself as a … fetish” (2001, 111).
9. By “repressed topographies of cruelty,” Mbembe refers to, among other things,
land on which the cruelties of slavery were enacted. This phrase can also be used
to describe colonial and postcolonial topographies of Congolese history and con-
temporary warfare.
10. “Currently about one third of Studios Kabako’s revenue is earned through tour-
ing and the rest is raised through French government support, significant com-
missions from European presenters, and other funding sources including the
Prince Claus Fund” (Zimmerman field notes).
11. Zimmerman field notes.
WORKS CITED
Barnes, Linda L. 2005. “American Acupuncture and Efficacy: Meanings and Their
Points of Insertion.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 19(3): 239–â•‰266.
De Boeck, Filip. 2005. “The Apocalyptic Interlude: Revealing Death in Kinshasa.”

African Studies Review 28(2): 11–31.
De Boeck, Filip, and Marie-François Plissart. 2004. Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible
City. Antwerp: Ludion.
Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Knowledge.
New York: Basic Books.
Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. 2007. “My Africa Is Always in the Becoming: Outside the
Box with Faustin Linyekula.” Walker Art Center Website, http://performingarts.
walkerart.org/detail.wac?id=4062&title=Articles.
Linyekula, Faustin. 2005. “Corks and Memories.” Studios Kabako Website, http://
www.kabako.org/t xt-entretiens/Corks.html.
———. 2011. Program for performances of more more more … future at Roy and Edna
Disney/CalArts Theater, October 5–8. Available online at http://w ww.redcat.org/
sites/redcat.org/fi les/event/linked-fi les/2012-07/10.05.11_Linyekula_0.pdf.
Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Translated Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15(1): 11–40.
——— . 2007. “Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds.”
Documenta Magazine, June 1; revised August 2, 2007. Available online at http://
www.documenta.de/magazine.html?&L=1?.
Osterweis Scott, Ariel. 2010. “Performing Acupuncture on a Necropolitical Body:
Choreographer Faustin Linyekula’s Studios Kabako in Kisangani, Democratic
Republic of Congo.” Dance Research Journal 42(2): 12–27.
Ruigrok, Inge. 2007. “Faustin Linyekula and the Esthetics of Survival.” Power of
Culture, November, http://www.powerofculture.nl/en/current/2007/november/faustin.
Singer, Toba. 2005. “An Interview with Studio Kabako’s Faustin Linyekula.” Ballet-
Dance Magazine, October, http://w ww.ballet-dance.com/200510/articles/Linyekula
20050900.html.
Van Reybrouk, David. n.d. “My Only True Country Is My Body.” Studios Kabako
Website, http://w ww.kabako.org/t xt-entretiens/mybody.html.
14
Re: Moving Bodies in the USA/â•‰Mexico

Drug/â•‰Border/â•‰Terror/â•‰Cold Wars1
R U T H H E L L I E R -â•‰T I N O C O
1.â•‡ ANONYMITY, COMPLICITY, DUPLICITY

A theater space. High panels form tall, seemingly solid walls on all sides.
Spectators face the action.
An entangled and chaotic metal mass towers upward in one half of
the space.
A tilted TV dangles prominently and precariously in the center,
suspended from one corner by cables, and connected somewhere way up
out of sight. It flickers with iridescent light.
High up in the shadows a small opening appears in the otherwise
ostensibly impenetrable wall.
A simple, narrow, wooden ladder connects the space up above with the
ground down below, creating a route between the two places.
The head of a large, fluffy white polar bear appears in the opening up
above. He peers through, looks around, cautiously climbs over the ridge,
crosses the threshold, and makes a descent down the long ladder, placing
a paw carefully on each rung. When he reaches the ground below, he looks
around, then tentatively takes a few steps.
Above, in the open entryway, another much smaller polar bear appears
out of the darkness. The little bear moves to the top of the ladder, hikes one
288 R uth H ellier -T inoco
Figure 14.1 Anonymity, complicity, duplicity. As the space slowly shifts into darkness,
two actors, disguised as polar bears, continue their dance. There is no easy reading—no
easy interpretation. Nothing is obvious. Timboctou, 2012. Photo by Steven A. Gunther.
Courtesy of CalArts Center for New Performance.
leg over the top, and begins to climb down slowly, eventually reaching the
ground down below.
The large polar bear walks slowly through the space, crossing behind the
dangling TV screen, eventually moving to a dark corner where a young
man crouches on one knee. The man holds a posture of readiness to fight,
with fists raised, yet he is motionless, seemingly frozen with fear. The polar
bear stands over the young man yet acts as though he does not see him.
The polar bear and the young man do not interact. The bear turns and
wanders back to the heart of the space.
When he is back in the center, the bear takes up a position facing
the side of the TV, then grabs hold of it and steps backward across the
space—raising the TV high into the air. Abruptly he lets go of the TV
and quickly runs behind it. The TV swings pendulously across the space,
set in motion by the bear’s releasing action—right side—left side—right
Re: Moving Bodies in the USA/Mexico Drug/Border/Terror/Cold Wars 289
side—left side—right side—left side … Standing behind, the bear follows

the movement with his head—this way and that—this way and that—this
way and that—with mesmerizing predictability. As the TV continues its
ceaseless motion, the large polar bear turns his back and strolls over to the
small polar bear, who rolls on the ground.
The two polar bears stand, one in front of the other, facing forward,
motionless, as a man stands up on the top of the jumbled, metal network.
He holds a small plant in his right hand, which he shakes vigorously. With
difficulty he clambers down from the mound, walks across the space to the
ladder, sets the plant down, and begins to ascend the narrow route to the
open threshold.
The TV continues swinging across the space with predictable certainty—
right side—left side—right side—left side—right side—left side …
The second man, now with fists relaxed, walks gingerly over to the
ladder, passes the plant up to the first man, and ascends behind him. All
the while the two polar bears stand inactive, with their backs to the ladder,
yet within a few feet of the men who are treading the pathway up to the
space above. As the second man crosses the border at the top of the ladder,
he glances back at the bears. They do not turn to look.
Once the men have disappeared out of sight the two polar bears move:
they commence a coordinated dance sequence, incorporating rhythmic
disco moves, with turning, gliding, floating, and shimmying.
As the space slowly shifts into darkness, the polar bears continue
their dance.
The bodies, choreographies, and movement sequences in the scenario described

above seem absurd, illogical, baffling, and incongruous. Who are the polar
bears? How are they connected to the two men? What is the plant that is carried
over the border? What are the bears concealing? Why did the bear act as though
he didn’t see the man with raised fists? Why did the bears descend the ladder?
Why are they dancing with such predictability? Where are the men going? What
is across the threshold?
The bears are masked, disguised, and anonymous. Spectators do not know
who is underneath the masking—they do not know the “real” identity of these
bodies that tread carefully and enact movement routines familiar to many
through dissemination via popular transnational media outlets. The polar
bears offer interpretations of duplicity and doubleness—a doubleness that is
easy to disremember, for, despite the presence inside the framing of a theater,
these bodies at times seem like real polar bears. Their movements are con-
vincing and believable, even as they are absurd and illogical. A dancing polar
bear? Yet there is always another body present, even as the other body is cov-
ered up, requiring a shift to believe—â•‰sliding between knowing and believing.
As these bodies stand side by side, as they shimmy and move through well-â•‰
known and well-â•‰rehearsed social movement routines, we know that they are
not polar bears, but humans assuming a concealed identity. As the bear pulls
and releases the TV, we see him influencing the media, and then observing the
inevitable and certain consequences of the maneuver and his actions.
The bears coexist in the same space as two men, yet the bears do not see the
men, or rather their movements seem to indicate that they do not see them.
They appear not to see, yet obviously they know. There is an overt sense of col-
lusion, of an agreement not to admit to seeing. As the man descends the metal
mass, then ascends the ladder and disappears across border, the bears appear
not to see, yet it is obvious to all observing that they are all in this together. As
the man holds up his fists in a classic battle stance, he appears to be ready to
fight, yet the gesture of battle seems feeble and ineffective. As the bear looks
straight at him, the man stands motionless. The bear turns to look the other
way, moving silently, with padded feet.
These choreographies, corporeal gestures, spatial alignments, and
embodiments are fragments of the theater piece Timboctou.2 They offer con-
nections to diverse attributes and characteristics of the multiple wars being
played out between and within the USA and Mexico, with connections to
much wider global spheres of influence. The opening performative vignette
provides correlations to a few elements of these multiple wars: a core of
duplicity, anonymity, and collusion; of working undercover and of work-
ing together; of international diplomacy and of transnational intervention;
of never really knowing who is working for who; of double standards and
hypocrisy; of media involvement and manipulation; of territory, border
issues, migration, legality, and legitimacy; of unseen transactions and of
turning a blind eye; of flows back and forth across boundaries; of milita-
ristic gesturing; of following known routes; and of control and power, fear
and containment.
There are, of course, many interpretations of the same sequence of move-
ments, the same choreographies, the same embodiments, and the same spatial
alignments. Nothing is obvious. Perhaps the bears and the men are CIA agents
and high level government officials in Mexico and the USA, or traffickers of
“illegal” drugs and guns, or migrants crossing a boundary that shifted just
one hundred and fifty years ago, or lawmakers and politicians embroiled in
policing notions of morality and ethics, or CEOs of USA drug companies aim-
ing to create monopolies, or bankers aiding money laundering through off-
shore accounts who send money via many routes, or military and paramilitary
agents, or border patrol officers, or underpaid police officers in Mexico who
look the other way, or autocratic judges who lack transparency, or presidents
who seek re-â•‰election.
The Nature of the Whole: Multiple Bodies, Multiple Wars

In recent years, and particularly since 2000, numerous graphic media reports
of multiple violent killings inside Mexico’s borders specifically linked to the
recently labeled “Mexican drug war” have been disseminated around the globe.
The violence done to multiple bodies excites sensationalist audiences hungry
for stark stories and images, generating large financial profits for transnational
media conglomerates and providing evidence for politicians and lawmakers in
the USA who are endeavoring to secure and militarize the USA/â•‰Mexico bor-
der and enact control within and against Mexico. A myopic view of the violent
drug-trafficking organizations (VDTOs) (see Paul, Schaefer, and Clarke 2001)
emphasizes the extremes of ferocity and the harm done to bodies, focusing
on killings, shootings, kidnappings, and dismemberment. What is not always
so obvious is that this one group of activities—â•‰classified as “war” as recently
as 2006 by then-â•‰president Felipe Calderón—â•‰is connected to other activities
categorized as “war,” all of which have a longer history than the Mexican drug
war, namely:
1. the USA war on and in Mexico (and more broadly Latin American
countries), ongoing since the formation of the United States of
America;
2. the USA/â•‰Mexico border war, ongoing since 1846 when the USA
invaded Mexico, gaining half of Mexico’s territory;
3. the USA war on drugs, ongoing since 1914, when the Harrison
Narcotic Act came into force, and reinforced in the 1970s and 1980s
by Presidents Nixon and Reagan;3
4. the USA war on communism, fought as the Cold War offensive in
Latin America from 1947 onward; 4 and
5. the USA war on terror, declared as such in 2001 by President George
W. Bush, downgraded by President Barack Obama to the Overseas
Contingency Operation, yet still encompassing heightened border
security and militarization, with overt connections to racialized
rhetoric concerning fear and “difference.”
In the early 1800s, the renowned Prussian military theorist and practitio-
ner Carl von Clausewitz—â•‰whose tome On War is still widely studied—â•‰posed
the question “What is war?” He responded: “In war more than in any other
subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more
than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together”
(Clausewitz 1976, 75). For complex political and social reasons the activities
categorized as “the Mexican drug war” are often thought of as “the whole”—â•‰as
something terrible that is happening south of the border, from a USA position.
Yet the activities inside Mexican national borders connected with drug traf-
ficking and control of territory are part of a much larger network of wars—â•‰the
nature of the whole concerns multiple wars involving Mexico and the USA,
situated within global contexts. All coexist and are interrelated.
Theater of Wars: The Violent Art of Defeating One’s Enemies

In addition to On War, Clausewitz wrote an essay entitled “Art and Theory
of Art,” in which he illustrated his use of aesthetics to explore “the violent
art of defeating one’s enemies.”5 “â•›‘Art,’ he wrote, ‘is a developed capacity. If
it is to express itself it must have a purpose, like every application of exist-
ing forces, and to approach this purpose it is necessary to have means.â•›…
To combine purpose and means is to create. Art is the capacity to create’â•›”
(Paret 1976, 14). In 2012, a joint force of artists from Mexico and the United
States combined purpose and means to create a provocative and profound
theater piece entitled Timboctou, specifically focused on exploring aspects of
the recent network of activities in Mexico related to drug trafficking, drug
use, and the involvement and complicity of US and Mexican governmental
agencies. Timboctou articulates—â•‰in body, voice, space, and time—â•‰anxieties
and issues concerning wars that are playing out in and between Mexico and
the United States, within global and transnational frameworks of power, high
finance, and politics. Significantly, this bilingual, binational work was per-
formed by the same ensemble on both sides on the Mexico/â•‰US border.6 As
Mexican director Martín Acosta noted: “I believe in the collaboration of art-
ists because one day, they are the ones who will save the world. If there is
anything left to save” (2012). He referred to the artistic project as “a dialogue
of gazes between artists from Mexico and the USA … a collaboration that
would allow for a complex and rich framework: the only way of tearing down
walls and crossing rivers and tunnels without visas, with the powerful flight
of imagination” (2012).
With a script written by the young Mexican playwright Alejandro Ricaño,
the narrative, set inside Mexico’s borders, overtly encompasses pairs and indi-
viduals connected through financial, political, and personal transactions,
concerning drug users, drug traffickers, intelligence agents and politicians,
migrants, and media agents. With a plot in which the storyline is tempo-
rally jumbled, a few fragments are offered up.7 As the piece unfolds, con-
nections between the fragments are revealed, along with the horror of those
connections, incongruities, and absurdities. Throughout the piece, as the

characters speak of disfigured bodies, love and loss, drugs and beer, killing
and dying, and the endangerment of polar bears, their bodies are engaged
in complex sequences of movement, created by Mexican choreographer Ichi
Balmori acting on guiding provocations by artistic director Acosta. The intri-
cate choreographies create juxtapositions, subtexts, and absurdities: spoken
words tell one story, and bodies articulate another, as corporeal forms, embod-
ied postures, and multifaceted movement vocabularies offer insights into rela-
tionships and connections, power relations and attitudes. Ever present is a
sense of duality, multiplicity, and dichotomy; of contradiction and duplicity; of
notions of things overt/hidden and of truth/lies. That the sequences of move-
ments, choreographies, corporealities, and spatial elements can be read and
interpreted independently of the spoken text in Timboctou is, I suggest, a fun-
damental meta-trait concerning a basic and central element of these multiple
wars.8 Actions should be separated from rhetoric. There is no easy reading—no
easy interpretation. Nothing is obvious.
At the opening of this chapter I engaged impressionist descriptions of the
final choreographies of Timboctou, and combined these with brief remarks
as a way of reflecting on a few tiny facets of the multiple wars. Through this
combination of performative vignettes and comments, my aim in this chap-
ter is to enable consideration of a few elements of the multiple wars. My
intention is to offer short provocations, rather than explanations or answers.
As a structuring element I draw on the concept that “fragments are the foun-
dation of our montage reality,” as noted by artistic director Travis Preston in
his introductory comments to Timboctou (2012),9 and as wholly applicable
to conceiving of the multiple wars, in which a reality can only ever be com-
prised of fragments. Reflecting this reality, my chapter therefore includes a
few fragments, offered as vignettes. Given that a vignette is a “brief evoc-
ative description” and “a small illustration that fades into its background
without a definite border,” (OED) this form allows me to place unframed
moments into a linear format, specifically connecting with perceptions of
the multiple wars.
My selection of fragments from Timboctou is based on some possibilities
that they offer for studying elements of the multiple wars. It is important to
recognize that I have disconnected the scenarios from the script, and from the
narrative and characters. I am “simply” invoking these scenarios and describ-
ing them for their movements, choreographies, spatial elements, patterns, and
corporeal relationships. What remains are moving bodies in space, discon-
nected from spoken text, not related to the identity of the character in the
theater piece, and not related to intentions of the creators and performers.10
My choice of vignettes, my impressionist descriptions, and my interpretations
are subjective, and deliberately so. As should be clear from the opening sec-
tion, I am suggesting that there are numerous interpretations of the same
action. Nothing is obvious. As a scholar and practitioner of dance, theater, and
performance, I am interested in planes, spatial and proxemic relationships,
movement vocabulary, and corporeal identities as frameworks of analysis. As
a scholar of the Americas (particularly North America, encompassing Mexico
and the USA) my knowledge and understanding of the multiple wars is drawn
from many sources. The sheer volume of material offers myriad perspectives
and commentaries, and so my approach for this chapter has been to synthesize
elements of Timboctou with my understandings of the wars. I have organized
these elements into eleven vignettes that structurally engage the multitude of
wars with choreographic choices.
Where Do I Stand?
As I undertake this task, I am cautious. I take seriously the words of Charles
Bowden in his poetic and provocative account Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and
the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields:
We will not allow anyone with answers to be present. Explanations will be

killed on sight. Theories strangled by my own hands.â•›… Academic com-
mentators must show video of themselves at the killings or having beers
with the killers before they will be allowed to say a single word. (2010, 209)
I question my own position, my stance, and my attitude. I have not been

present at a killing in Juárez nor had beer with a killer. Yet, as I sit with
erect spine on my Wave Stool, moving my fingers on my laptop keyboard
in (Alta) California, my body resonates with moments that connect me
with these wars: a few months ago, as the bright afternoon sunshine slowly
faded into darkness, I spent six hours sitting uncomfortably in my almost
stationary car, in a long line of vehicles waiting to cross the border from
Mexico to the United States; on September 16, 2008, I heard of the grenade
attack the previous night on the celebrating crowd in the plaza in Morelia,
Michoacán, Mexico, during the Independence Day celebration, where I had
celebrated so many times, wondering if any family and friends had been
killed;11 yesterday, in Santa Barbara, my home now, I heard a derogatory
comment about a local Mexican man; on July 7, 2005, I spent the day inside
a college building in Russell Square, central London, as sirens wailed and
helicopters hovered overhead, hearing the unfolding news of bomb attacks
on the Underground;12 recently, a friend bought drugs classified as illegal;
on my flight last year to South Carolina I paid a ten-â•‰dollar “September 11th
security fee” and spent an hour shuffling in a snaking line of slowly moving
bodies before having to remove clothes and unpack luggage for a uniformed
security officer …
It is important to recognize my own positionality and politics. I have spe-
cifically chosen to frame this chapter through the notion of a network of
wars, rather than focusing on “the Mexican drug war.” Most media report-
ing on the drug war is graphic and obvious, presenting drug lords killing
civilians and each other, and referring to the brutality of these actions, and
to vast sums of money, control of territory, and more recently, to self-â•‰defense
forces. Transnational and global causes are rarely part of such reporting.
Responding to my own anxieties, I take my cue from Timboctou director
Acosta, who commented: “I believe it’s a question of binational responsibil-
ity” (quoted in Johnson 2012). These wars and the performance of Timboctou
seem to necessitate the question: “What does it take to be human in such
an age as this?” (Malpede 2000, 123), requiring viewers to take a respon-
sible and ethical witnessing stance (Hellier-â•‰Tinoco 2010, 24; 2011). Our lives
are enmeshed in these wars: from the micro to the macro, from individual
relationships to global organizations and networks, each choice has a con-
sequence. These are changing wars, impacting billions in the United States,
Mexico, and globally.13
2.â•‡E NTANGLEMENTS, NETWORKS, AND

INTERCONNECTIONS: MULTIPLE WARS
Two men march into the space together, side by side.
Two men shuffle through a doorway, one behind the other.
Two men crouch, one behind the other, as the one behind straightens the
necktie of the one in front.
At any one moment bodies are present in twos or threes. Even though
they are intimately connected within the frame of this theater of wars, they
do not share the space together at any one moment.
As one scenario merges into the next, which merges into the next, there
are no clear-â•‰cut boundaries between the spaces occupied by the bodies in
motion. Bodies move in and out of the space, with no fixed points to mark
recognizable entrances and exits; suddenly an entryway appears and then
closes.
The space is devoid of easy-â•‰to-â•‰read and easy-â•‰to-â•‰interpret objects. One
half is filled with a large form that, at first glance, appears as a single mass,
rising mountain-â•‰like to a peak from a wide base. Closer inspection reveals
an entanglement of chairs, all identical, which could only be separated
with great difficulty.
Figure 14.2â•‡ Shifting borders—â•‰the USA/â•‰Mexico border war. As the man remains

atop the mound, almost imperceptibly the mass in its entirety begins to move across
the space, reconfiguring the borders. Timboctou, 2012. Photo by Steven A. Gunther.
Courtesy of CalArts Center for New Performance.
To simplify and essentialize, wars often involve two sides, two opposing forces
in relationship. Although the idea of asymmetry in war has been proffered as a
useful notion for analyzing wars in the 21st century (see Münkler 2005), even
this idea encompasses a notion of sides in opposition. Yet in the multiple wars
under consideration in this chapter, the pairs of bodies are often side by side, not
in opposition, but together. The pairs of bodies seem to be disconnected, each
undertaking their own choreographies, their own sequences of movements. Yet
each is interconnected with other side-â•‰by-â•‰side sets of bodies in some way, reflect-
ing the nature of complex networks of relationships. It is easy to overlook that
they are all part of the same network. Even though they do not share the same
space at the same time as a presence visible to the onlookers, they are all con-
nected by the overriding framework. It is not necessarily obvious how they all
connect, but they do: each has a relationship to another. Though these multiple
wars are not often considered as a whole, they are all interconnected, impossible
to separate, and must be viewed within the same framework. As Münkler has
noted: “In the new wars their course is determined by the dispersion, not the
concentration, of forces in space and time, for there is no time or place when all
the threads converge and a decisive result is sought” (2005, 12).
3.â•‡ SHIFTING BORDERS: US/â•‰MEXICO BORDER WAR

One half of the space is dominated by a mound-â•‰like mass of old, entangled
chairs. A man stands atop the mound. Two men stand facing the mass,
with fists raised and legs apart, one in front of the other, knees flexed,
shifting from foot to foot, in a gesture of battle-â•‰readiness.
Almost imperceptibly, as the man remains atop the mound, the
mass in its entirety begins to move across the space. Despite the fighting
gesture, the two battle-â•‰ready men are forced backward across the space
by the encroaching mass, until their backs are against the wall. Within
a few moments the mound has relocated. The sense of space has been
reconfigured.
Classic frameworks of war tend to involve battles over territory and borders.
These multiple wars are no exception, with control of territory forming an
integral element. The most obvious is the shift of the national border between
Mexico and the United States that took place not so long ago: “One should not
forget that the United States invaded Mexico in 1846 and conquered half of its
national territory. Mexicans do not forget this; many in the United States never
learn it” (Gibler 2011, 42). After the Mexican-â•‰American war of 1846–â•‰1848 the
United States continued to occupy and settle what is now the US Southwest.
Issues of racial, ethnic, and linguistic prejudice; of migration control; and of the
presence of people inside US territory who lived on previously Mexican territory
all continue to form elements of the border wars. Older and newer territorial
struggles are also inherent in these multiple wars, from the European penetra-
tion into the Americas from the end of 1400s onward to drug cartels fighting
turf wars for control of territory within Mexico’s borders.
4.â•‡ COVERT ANONYMITY: THE US WAR IN MEXICO

Two human bodies, disguised as polar bears, descend a ladder that connects
a recently revealed portal high up in the back wall with the ground down
below. One bear walks around the space; the other rolls on the ground.
Two men coexist in the same space as the “polar bears,” yet the bears do
not acknowledge them, appearing not to notice them, even though their
presence is undeniable. One “bear” sets a TV screen in motion, pulling
it back and letting it take its predictable course according to the laws of
physics.
Since the formation of the United States of America, the government has
attempted to extend territorial reach, embarking on long-â•‰term strategies to gain
power and primacy over the Western Hemisphere, enacting a form of impe-
rialism, and generating spheres of interest. Since the US-â•‰Mexico border revi-
sion in 1846 the US government has attempted multiple times to intervene
in Mexican (and more widely Latin American) politics—â•‰sometimes overtly,
sometimes covertly—â•‰and there have been many interpositions by agents of the
United States inside Mexican territory.14 From the mid-â•‰1940s onward the US
government, at the very highest level, participated in covert operations inside
national territories of many Latin American countries. As Robert Skidmore
and colleagues note: “The Cold War altered the conduct of inter-â•‰American rela-
tions, elevating ‘national security’ to the top of the USA foreign policy agenda
and turning Latin America into a battleground” (Skidmore, Smith, and Green
2014, 445). Stephen G. Rabe states that “Only a small number of U.S. citizens
are aware of the dimensions of the Cold War that the United States waged in
Latin America” (2012: 194). With secrecy and duplicity, the United States has
waged war on socialists and communists, secretly training and arming agents in
Central America, South America, and Mexico, even as media outlets have been
manipulated and massaged.
In recent years questions continue to be posed concerning the presence,
role, and influence of multiple US agents (manned and unmanned) inside
Mexican territory, connecting to issues of binational-â•‰and counterintelligence
and control, not least the July 2013 killing of CIA agents near Mexico City, the
use of unarmed drones, and the recent allegations and revelations concerning
the role of the CIA in the murder of a DEA agent in Mexico in 1985 (see Rosen
2011; Thompson and Mazzetti 2011; Diego Quesada 2013; Lee 2014).
5.â•‡S ECURE BORDERS AND NEBULOUS FEAR: THE US WARS

ON DRUGS, MEXICO, AND TERROR
The high walls seem impenetrable, impassable. An inverted man’s head
appears on the dangling TV screen.
A door opens in the back wall. Almost imperceptibly, the body of a
man materializes out of the murkiness—â•‰he is half in and half out of the
doorway and has his back to the spectators. He turns around—â•‰this is the
man on the TV screen.
He shifts again and then disappears through the open doorway into
darkness.
Ongoing issues of “sides” and “an enemy” are played out in relations between the
United States and Mexico, with escalated “homeland security” activities ranging
from militarized border patrol and literal wall-â•‰building to the display of indi-
vidual prejudices and discriminations. In 2012, the director of the US National
Drug Control Strategy, R. Gil Kerlikowske declared ,“We will continue to coun-
ter drug production and trafficking within the United States and will implement
new strategies to secure our borders against illicit drug flows.â•›… USA Borders
Must Be Secured.â•›…The Administration has deployed unprecedented technol-
ogy, personnel, and resources along the Southwest border” (Kerlikowske 2012,
v and 26).
On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush engaged the phrase
“war on terror” following the attacks that took place on September 11 in the
United States. This term is not used officially by President Obama, who uses
the phrase Overseas Contingency Operation, and who stated in his January
20, 2009, Inaugural Address, “Our nation is at war against a far-â•‰reaching
network of violence and hatred” (Obama 2009). In a speech on May 23,
2013, President Obama announced an unofficial end to the war on terror
(Obama 2013). With no identifiable enemy (other than “terror”), the basic
objective has been to defend US citizens and residents through structures
of Homeland Security, comprising strategies of covert and overt policing of
borders, media manipulation, and the targeting of perceived threats to the
United States.
6.â•‡L ONG-â•‰STANDING AND PREDICTABLE: THE US WAR

ON DRUGS
Two men stand in an almost empty space. One pushes his arm forward,
clenches his fingers, as if grasping something, then pulls his arm backward.
He looks at an (unseen and imagined) awfulness, signaled by an
exaggerated expression of horror on his face. Quickly he pushes his arm
forward again.
He repeats his movements, pushing his arm forward, clenching his
fingers, pulling his arm backward, and looking at the (imagined) horror.
He turns to the other man.
Together they commence a long sequence of choreography incorporating
elements of a classic double act, with many movements reminiscent of
Laurel and Hardy. With overstated actions they push each other; they run
in place; one falls into the arms of the other; and they stand face to face as
one spins the other around 360 degrees before returning to the face-â•‰to-â•‰face
configuration.
Again and again they turn to face the (imaginary) horror, before
resuming their frenetic movements, falling, turning, pushing, and catching.
One kicks the back of the legs of the other; they hold each other’s faces;
one pinches the shirt shoulders of the other—â•‰all the time facing different
directions, running this way and that, with great busyness.
One man crouches on the ground, holding his head in his hands,
running his fingers through this hair, looking at the ground, and rocking
to and fro.
With overplayed and comedic gestures, one man enters the space
struggling with a real object, an apparently heavy suitcase. His muscles
are tense; he grimaces as the weight of the suitcase slowly but inevitably
pulls him down to the ground until he is doing the splits. The other man
ascends a ladder that connects a portal in the space above to the ground
below. The first man struggles to move the suitcase, eventually lifting it
up and passing to the man up the ladder, who passes it through the open
portal in the high back wall to an unseen receiver.
Moments later the man at the top of the ladder grasps hold of a brown
box from within the portal, which he drops into the waiting arms of the
man below.
Figure 14.3 Long-standing and predictable—t he USA war on drugs. A long sequence

of choreography incorporates elements of a classic double act, with repeated, formulaic,
and highly recognizable movements and actions. Timboctou, 2012. Photo by Steven
A. Gunther. Courtesy of CalArts Center for New Performance.
After descending the ladder, in unison the two men take ten paces
forward, then stand together, one holding out the brown box with extended
arms. The other turns his head on one side, making overplayed facial
expressions by contorting his jaw, lips, and eyes. He returns to face the
front, giving the impression of two people, yet with the same body.
Together the two men step backward along the same path toward the
ladder. One man ascends and passes the brown box through the open
portal. Moments later, the box re-emerges covered with brightly colored
gift wrap.
The US war on drugs is a long-standing war, founded on duplicity and an institu-

tional hypocrisy that prohibits some drugs and allows others. The double act and
movement sequences referencing the long-standing choreographed routines of
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (classic 1930s and 1940s icons of US film industry)
offer embodied insights into facets of this war, through fragments of repeated,
formulaic, and highly recognizable movements and actions. Each knows what
the other will do and how the other will react with a degree of predictability.
They catch and fall; they tread over the same old ground again and again; they
effectively return to the same place, going nowhere, despite all the movement.
They move backward and forward, on a persistent plane of front to back, back
to front, toward and away from the viewers. Their bodies undertake a multi-
plicity of ineffectual actions, as they shift through different vocabularies, trying
one strategy after another, yet neither makes any progress. According to Anila
Churi, “Narcotics prohibition has been a failure from the start. The violence and
bloodshed are a predictable consequence of the black market created by mak-
ing drugs illegal, a lesson that should have been learned from alcohol prohibi-
tion, the so-called noble experiment that so clearly failed. It appears nothing was
learned. After 75 years, the effectiveness of drug prohibition has been proved by
neither scientific evidence nor historical experience” (2012).
Although there are displays of strength, they seem ineffectual, with pos-
turing and exaggerated gestures of exasperation that are all for show. There
is duplicity and blatant two-facedness in their spectacle. The institutional
hypocrisy and double-standards of regarding drugs as a “problem” and com-
mitting to a “drug-free world” (Kamminga 2010, vii) are all the more duplici-
tous given the vast sums spent by pharmaceutical companies on advertising
and selling. In 2012 President Obama stated: “Our Nation still faces serious
drug-related challenges. … Our commitment to work with partner nations
must remain steadfast to reduce drug production, trafficking, and related
transnational threats” (Obama 2012, iii). Even as there is a stated commit-
ment to work with partner nations to reduce drug production, more “legal”
drugs are being produced, often at extortionate prices, through monopolies of
the large transnational drug companies. Notions of legality are central. Laws
change. As a suitcase is exchanged for a brown box, and then returned cov-
ered in gift-â•‰wrap, who effected the transformation? What is the reality? What
is the truth of the matter? Even as the government pronounces certain sub-
stances “illegal,” there is a collusion between the pharmaceutical industry and
politicians, as one protects the interests of the other, deregulating consumer
protections and defunding agencies tasked with investigation of business and
industry fraud and anticompetitive behaviors. Many sources note that the
ultimate cause of drug trafficking is the strength of consumer demand, espe-
cially in the United States, which follows the law of supply and demand, with
profits mostly staying in the hands of the distributors and the middlemen,
rather than the producers. As Robert Skidmore and colleagues have noted,
“The largest share of profits accrued not in Latin America but at the retail end
of the market, suggesting that a great deal of drug money stayed in the United
States. For this reason, money laundering eventually became a central issue”
(Skidmore, Smith, and Green, 2014, 480). The United States is the world’s larg-
est consumer economy, and where drugs are concerned—â•‰drugs classified as
legal and illegal—â•‰the ever-â•‰increasing demand, the ever-â•‰increasing marketing,
and the ever-â•‰increasing divide over morality and ethics indicate that these
wars will continue, providing vast financial wealth to those enmeshed in drug
businesses, legal and illegal (see Mallea 2014; Paley 2014).
7.â•‡R ACE, INCARCER ATION, CRIMINALITY: THE US WAR

ON DRUGS
A door opens in the back wall. A man stands in the entranceway. With
trepidation he takes a step forward, and the door closes behind him.
A camera on a tripod stands nearby. The man seems cautious. He
takes another step with difficulty. He wears large, yellow, oversized shoes,
which inhibit his ease of movement. He also wears puffy red shorts with
huge buttons, black leggings, and a black shirt—â•‰creating a resemblance
to Mickey Mouse. On his head is a baseball cap. Covering the man’s own
hands are large, puffy, white four-â•‰fingered hands.
The man picks up an upturned chair, places it in front of the camera,
and sits, staring at the camera lens.
His body appears awkward.
He slowly stands to turn on the camera. The white four-â•‰fingered hand
makes it impossible to operate the tiny button, so he removes one white
hand, presses the button with an uncovered finger, then replaces the
white hand.
As he stares at the camera lens, his own upside-down face appears on

the TV screen dangling in the space.
The man stands and takes a few steps away from the camera, and as he
does so his virtual face remains unchanged on the TV screen.
He looks toward the dangling TV screen, and, with shimmying jazz
hands and scissor steps, he dances toward his own inverted head on the
screen.
Grasping the TV screen clumsily with his four- fingered, oversized
hands, he crouches, looking at his own disconnected self on the screen.
Releasing the TV, he walks over to the sidewall and leans against it.
He moves back to the TV and begins a long sequence of tai chi moves,
gracefully shifting his weight through constantly flowing gestures, with
perfect coordination.
He breaks from the tai chi and lies on the ground, underneath the
TV screen, placing his head next to his inverted self-face, looking up at
himself.
Suddenly he pushes his virtual head upward—and changes the channel.
Figure 14.4 Race, incarceration, criminality—t he USA war on drugs: The othered

body seems to be in a state of entrapment, forcefully detained, as a consequence of
forces of “law” and history. Timboctou, 2012. Photo by Steven A. Gunther. Courtesy of
CalArts Center for New Performance.
Integrally embedded in the US war on drugs are issues of legality, moral-

ity, race, and ethnicity. A 2012 White House report noted the racialized
aspect: “[M]â•„embers of minority groups are more likely to be incarcerated for
drug offenses and punished with longer sentences than their white counter-
parts. State prison data show that African American and Hispanic-â•‰American
individuals who commit drug offenses are consistently incarcerated at higher
proportions than white drug offenders–â•‰in 2009 alone, there were nearly 66 per-
cent more African Americans in state prison for drug offenses than Caucasians”
(Kerlikowske 2012, 20). This recognition is coupled with the insistence by some
US politicians on an ideological commitment to prohibition that seeks to veil
prohibition’s use for social control (Gibler 2011, 43). Although Mickey Mouse
has a long-â•‰standing and iconic profile, specifically constructed and constituted
within a US cultural-â•‰historical context, his body is othered, it is not real, and it
is “less than” human. The body seems to be in a state of entrapment, forcefully
detained, as a consequence of forces of “law” and history. The Mickey Mouse–â•‰
like body on the stage inside this theater of wars is trapped inside the frame, in
a solitary relationship with his own disconnected self, moving through many
embodied vocabularies, one after the other, as he tries to connect with his own
inverted, virtual head.
In the war on drugs the purported enemy is “drugs,” and specifically “nar-
cotics.” In medical usage, a narcotic is a drug that relieves pain and induces
drowsiness, stupor, or insensibility. In USA usage (from 1894), a narcotic is
a drug or other substance affecting mood or behavior which is sold for non-
medical purposes, especially one whose use is prohibited or under strict legal
control (OED). The term narcotic is derived from Old French, Medieval Latin
and Greek terms with meanings related to numbness and the deprivation of
the power of sensation. It is surely no coincidence, then, that within state pris-
ons, those individuals who have committed drug offenses are deprived of nor-
mal powers of sensation as they shift into a context that affects their mood and
behavior, often inducing numbness, just as the Mickey Mouse–â•‰like body shifts
and drifts within the incarcerated frame, attempting to connect with its forced
disconnected self.
8.â•‡F LOWING BACK WARD AND FORWARD: DRUG RUNNING

AND GUN RUNNING
Two men march into the space side by side and take up a position in the
spatial mid-â•‰point, both facing forward.
Without turning, one man runs energetically backward, while
maintaining a forward gaze. The other man runs energetically forward.
When they have reached the extent of the possibilities that the space
allows, they stop, each balancing for a moment on one leg, with the other
leg cocked and raised behind, before reversing their routes and retracing
their steps, again without turning round.
They meet at the same midpoint, standing side by side.
They repeat their movement sequence: again one runs backward and
one forward, covering a great deal of ground in a short time.
As they run, one man suddenly extends his arm sideways in front of the
other man’s body, effectively stopping him from progressing, then almost
as suddenly releases his arm, allowing him to continue running forward.
For many decades guns and drugs have been moved across the US/Mexico bor-
der—guns going south, drugs going north, using the same route, backward and
forward. “The Brookings Institution estimates that on average two thousand
guns—ranging from cop-killer pistols to AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles—are
legally purchased in the United States and then smuggled across the border into
Mexico every day” (Gibler 2011, 38). What constitutes legal trade in firearms
varies widely, depending on state and national laws. During the Cold War the
Figure 14.5 Flowing backward and forward—drug running and gun running: One

man suddenly extends his arm sideways in front of the other man’s body, effectively
stopping him from progressing, then almost as suddenly releases his arm, allowing him
to continue running forward. Timboctou, 2012. Photo by Steven A. Gunther. Courtesy
of CalArts Center for New Performance.
US government had known involvement with gunrunning in support of activi-

ties for war on communism. In more recent decades, arms trading, (legal and
illegal) has operated as a lucrative cross-â•‰border business, in which brief moments
of immobility and protection, enacted by makers, sellers, and buyers, enables
business to flow without hindrance.
9.â•‡VIOLENT DRUG-â•‰T R AFFICK ING ORGANIZATIONS: THE

MEXICAN DRUG WAR
Two men dance side by side, with perfect coordination, undertaking an
elaborate and complex choreography. With a persistent and regular four-â•‰
four rhythm the men step in unison, with a bouncy, jaunty feel: right
forward, left on spot, right back, left on spot, right forward, left on spot,
right back, left on spot. The form (quebradita—â•‰a little break) draws on
prior movement patterns from polka, country and western, merengue,
and norteña. Within the simple basic arrangements the men incorporate
turns, spins, kicks, and partner holds. Each knows the moves.
Drug cartels and trafficking have been in existence and operating “success-
fully” in Mexico for decades, with crime groups prospering even as the national
government of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ultimately called the
shots. Under this Pax Mafiosa the drug cartels, in collusion with governmental
officials and police, maintained stability. The arrangements were highly orga-
nized and coordinated, with known patterns and movements. “Before 2000,
under the PRI, there were well-â•‰understood lines that the cartels could not cross”
(Finnegan 2012, 45). In 2000 this stability changed as Vicente Fox came to the
presidential office, effectively creating a power vacuum for the cartels as the
colluding organizational networks fell apart. When President Felipe Calderón
took office in December 2006 he declared war (his metaphor) on the country’s
drug traffickers, hence the notion that this was “Calderón’s drug war” (Conn
2011). In December 2012 Enrique Peña Nieto assumed the presidency and
introduced a major policy change that shifted the rhetoric away from an obses-
sion with security. In 2011 an official report was published in the United States
classifying the key players in Mexico as violent drug-â•‰trafficking organizations,
stating, “Because we want to be as accurate as possible and provide a useful
framework for the discussion of the problem without presupposing the answer,
our preferred term … is violent drug-â•‰trafficking organizations (VDTOs). This
label recognizes that the primary … undertaking of these organizations is drug
trafficking, that they are organized, and that a significant and salient part of
the problems they cause is a direct result of the violence they perpetrate” (Paul,
Schaefer, and Clarke 2011, 13).15
10.â•‡MILITARIZATION
A small mob of individuals shuffles nervously into the space and pauses,
before shuffling to the center. Abruptly they stand to attention in a tight
configuration. With heads held high, torsos erect, and sober faces they
march forward in unison, with taut military steps, slapping feet onto the
ground with discipline and precision.
They break from the marching formation into a display of lunges,
creating geometric patterns—â•‰ to the sides, front, back and on the
diagonals—â•‰each time returning to the center.
They stand to attention and shuffle back into a tight structure, as a door
opens in the back wall. With rapid, backward marching movements they
pass through the open exit and disappear into the darkness beyond. The
door closes.
In the multiple wars, elements of classic official military and paramilitary

involvement are ever-â•‰present. In Mexico there has been an increasing mili-
tary role in local security efforts, with the deployment of tens of thousands of
military personnel: “Through bi-â•‰lateral cooperation with the United States, the
military under Calderón killed or captured twenty-â•‰five of the top thirty-â•‰seven
most-â•‰wanted drug kingpins in Mexico” (Lee 2014). The US military is impart-
ing military expertise in Mexico (and other Latin American countries), with the
irony that one of the most high-â•‰profile VDTOs, the Zetas, were trained by US
Special Forces commandos before they formed their own organization. In rural
areas in Mexico, despite their ostensible function in fighting VDTOs, the mili-
tary also plays a role in controlling indigenous campaigns for land and rights.
The US military presence on the US/â•‰Mexico border has been increased, with a
standing army of gunmen, and the US military continues to enact displays of
militarization as part of the war on terror. Military interventions encompass
both conventional fighting techniques and displays exhibiting ability rather
than battle strategies.
11.â•‡MEDIA WARS
A man sits with his back against the wall, desperately and repeatedly
struggling to stand up, but sliding back down again with each attempt. He
clutches at his throat, his face contorting in agony.
A panel opens in the wall close to the floundering man, and another
man slithers in. He supports a large camera on his shoulder, with a long
cable trailing behind him that leads out of the portal and away into an
unseen space. The cameraman lunges and crouches on one knee beside the
writhing man, leaning forward and thrusting the lens of the camera close
to the man’s face. As the man twists his face, the cameraman raises and
lowers the camera to follow the unbearable movements.
Deftly, the cameraman stands up with his back against the wall, legs
slightly apart, as he heaves the camera across his body, the lens facing the
ground and his right hand supporting the upper part of the heavy object,
as if holding a machine gun.
He glances right and left, then slides into the shadows and out through
the back door, closing it behind him.
In his book The New Wars Herfried Münkler notes: “The use of images of war as
a method of war—â•‰the transformation of war reporting into a reporting war—â•‰
represents a huge step in the asymmetrization of war” (2005, 28). Countering
notions of asymmetrization in relation to the multiple wars under consideration
in this chapter, I have described how pairs of bodies are not in opposition but
work together, entangled in a complex network of relations.
Yet the overt asymmetry of the cameraman, wielding his heavy technologi-
cal equipment in the capture of an unarmed man, shooting close-â•‰up images
of the writhing, slumped, and dying body, knowing that his shots will be dis-
persed around the world, indicates that in the media wars, the violence, death,
and mutilated bodies within Mexican territory win out every time.
Figure 14.6â•‡ Media wars. The cameraman wields his heavy object in the capture of an
unarmed man, shooting close-â•‰up images of the writhing, slumped, and dying body,
knowing that his shots will be dispersed around the world. Timboctou, 2012. Photo by
Steven A. Gunther. Courtesy of CalArts Center for New Performance.
CONCLUSION? CESSATION? PERPETUATION? WHERE DO

YOU STAND?
As the space slowly shifts into dimness, the polar bears continue their dance.
For a war to end there must be a good reason. The main players will not cease
their actions if they “derive more disadvantages than advantages from a last-
ing renunciation of violence” (Münkler 2005). In the presence of such immense
multiplicity, complexity, and collusions I offer no conclusions and no finality
concerning these multiple wars, except to say that they are not happening “else-
where” but are all-â•‰encompassing. They are global in reach, even as many media
outlets focus their gaze inside Mexico’s borders, placing mutilated bodies inside
the frame. Where and how do you position yourself in relation to these wars?
Where do you stand? William Reno writes:
Terms such as “crime” are usually defined in ways that reflect the position of
the state, and now also the norms associated with global society and inter-
national law. But where the position of the state is called into question and
where international actors behave tactically or strategically in contradiction
to norms or international law, the definition of “crime” undergoes constant
revision. This blurring of boundaries between public and private behavior
complicates efforts to define stable concepts of deviant or normal behavior. By
this metric, defining “war” also depends upon the position of the observer.â•›…
Like “crime,” “war” depends on where one stands. (Reno 2011, 221)
Inside the theater of wars the viewers and witnesses face the sequences of
movements, the complex choreographies, the bodies moving forward and
backward and up and down. Each individual has an ever-â•‰changing and dif-
ferent view—â•‰a portal is visible to some, but obscured for others—â•‰obscured by
another body, by an interlocked metal mass, by a TV screen, or by a camera-
man and his equipment; a body is visible to some, but obscured for others.
No body is far away as events unfold—â•‰every body is close to the wars. Yet
nothing is obvious.16
NOTES
1. My chapter originally had another title, which was changed for consistency with
the book as a whole. The original title was: “The … U. S. A./â•‰Mexican (drug /â•‰
border) /â•‰ War /â•‰ON /â•‰IN /â•‰Drugs/â•‰Mexico /â•‰Communism/â•‰Terror * *delete as
appropriate.” Spatially, this was formatted on nine lines down the page vertically
to generate a visual choreography of words offering multiple readings, connec-
tions, and interpretations.
2. It is important to stress that the interpretations I draw from Timboctou, expressed

in this chapter, are entirely my own, and are not the intentions or interpretations
of any individual involved with the production of Timboctou.
I would like express my huge gratitude to the many extraordinary people
who conceived of, created, produced, and performed the brilliant and provoca-
tive piece of new binational, bilingual, interdisciplinary performance work that
is Timboctou; and to those who assisted in providing me with materials for this
chapter. Sincere thanks to Travis Preston, dean of the School of Theater and artis-
tic director of the CalArts Center for New Performance (CNP); Marissa Chibas,
founder and director of Duende CalArts; Carol Bixler, former producing direc-
tor, CalArts CNP; and Paul Turbiak and Miranda Wright of CalArts. The artistic
and pedagogical vision of CalArts CNP is of vital importance in generating a
context in which exciting and provocative scenic art work is valued and in which
binational and bilingual artistic creative processes are given a crucial place in
facilitating shared knowledge and understanding. I would also like to thank the
marvelous Mexican choreographer Ichi Balmori for talking with me about her
processes of training and working with the performers. ¡Mil gracias!
I also thank Jens Richard Giersdorf, faculty and graduate students at the
University of California Riverside for their feedback following my presentation in
the Colloquium in Current Topics in Dance Research, February 12, 2014; and my
friend Marianne Sharp for bringing the production of Timboctou to my attention.
3. The Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914 was the first instance of the United States
enacting a ban on the domestic distribution of drugs, dealing specifically with
opium and coca leaves (Benavie 2009, ix). President Richard Nixon declared war
on drugs in 1971, followed by President Ronald Regan, who “declared his War
on Drugs in February 1982, a time when drug use in the United States was in
decline” (Gibler 2011, 43).
4. Although the Cold War ostensibly came to an end in the 1980s, US interventions
in political theaters of Latin American countries has continued.
5. I engage the term “theater of war” in three overlapping and interconnected
senses: in the classic military sense of an area where an armed conflict takes
place; to indicate a broad performance studies analytical framework of viewing
all actions relating to all permutations of the multiple wars as performance; and
to indicate the specificity of Timboctou as a piece of theater dealing with notions
of war, inside a conventional, black-box studio theater space.
6. Timboctou, written by Mexican playwright Alejandro Ricaño, directed by
Martín Acosta, with choreography by Ichi Balmori, was produced by CalArts
CNP in association with Duende CalArts and the University of Guadalajara
Foundation. The overarching vision and organization was provided by Marissa
Chibas, founder and director of Duende CalArts, and Travis Preston, dean of
the School of Theater and artistic director, CNP. Cast and creative team: Michael
Aurelio, Gabriel Álvarez García, Gabriela Escatel, Axel García, Jeremy Kinser,
Mario Montaño Mora, Sofía Olmos Vázquez, Juan Parada, Manuel Parra García,
Kyle Stockburger, and Eric Booker (the “camera man”); Martín Acosta: director;
Ichi Balmori: choreographer; Angel Herrera: scenic design; Mario Marín del Río:
costume design; Ellie Rabinowitz: lighting design; Jackson Campbell and Jenn
Peterson: sound design; Omar V. Delgado and Keith Skretch: video design; Tania
Salas Platt: scenic art; and Carol Bixler: producing director. Timboctou was per-
formed at the Redcat Theater in Los Angeles, March 3–11, 2012, and the Teatro
Experimental de Jalisco in Guadalajara, Mexico, July 6–15, 2012, and was funded
in part by the University of Guadalajara Foundation USA; Cultura, la Universidad
de Guadalajara; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles; and the
California Community Foundation.
As Travis Preston noted:
This co-production between the CalArts Center for New Performance and the
University of Guadalajara is the culmination of a long and satisfying process of
development. Timboctou emerged from a true co-operation between artists, manag-
ers, and technicians from both Mexico and the United States—balanced in creativ-
ity, dedication, and, not insignificantly, language and cultural landscape. Created in
both countries through multiple workshops, our collective commitment to equality
of process has brought unforeseen riches to our work. … At CalArts Center for New
Performance we search for a producing strategy that allows for expressive possibili-
ties that could not otherwise exist. The process of Timboctou has richly responded to
this search. I am infinitely grateful to our collaborators from Mexico for the imagina-
tion and warmth they have so generously brought to our community. (Preston 2012)
7. The title Timboctou is, in itself, enigmatic, and I present a fragment of the script
to provide a brief explanation (my translation):
Chucho: We’re not in Timboctou. We’re in Tijuana. … I can’t get rid of the image
of my dad, Dany, talking about Timboctou before he died. He always spoke
about Timboctou as the furthest place on earth. … I’m sure that no one knows
where Timboctou is. … It’s absurd to think of the furthest place on earth
when the earth is round. … Perhaps that’s why the earth is round, Dany—so
that no one has to live at the end of the world. … Before I die I have to go to
Timboctou. No one should die without knowing Timboctou, Dany. After all,
it’s the end of the world.
8. For new theories on multiple wars see, for example, Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri (2005), who refer to a notion of a perpetual state of war or wars (multiple)
as a means to maintain the capitalist world order and social hierarchy, and where
war is the “primary organizing principle of society, and politics merely one of
its means or guises” (2005, 12). Hardt and Negri also refer to the “war on drugs”
and “the twenty-first century war on terrorism,” noting that “these discourses
of war serve to mobilize all social forces and suspend or limit normal political
exchange. … In these wars there is increasingly little difference between outside
and inside, between foreign conflicts and homeland security” (14).
9. “Timboctou exuberantly embraces the contradictory determinants of contempo-
rary life—that many languages constitute our daily experience; that the ‘conti-
nuity’ of life is collaged from a multiplicity of disparate cultures, sources, and
socio-political landscapes; and, that fragments are the foundation of our montage
reality” (Preston 2012).
10. I have conducted an interview with choreographer Ichi Balmori. However, my

objective in this chapter is not to draw on the choreographer’s intentions but
to utilize the choreographies and spatialities as impressionistic embodiments.
Likewise, I have chosen not to include or refer to lines written by playwright
Alejandro Ricaño.
11. Eight people were killed, and more than one hundred injured.
12. The July 7, 2005 bombings were a series of coordinated suicide attacks in London.
Fifty-â•‰two civilians and the four bombers were killed in the attacks, and over
seven hundred more were injured.
13. By the time this is in print, these wars could have changed dramatically in any
number of ways. However, it is unlikely that processes of decriminalization
of “narcotic” drugs throughout the entire United States will have taken place.
Criminalization is acknowledged by many experts as one of the main driving
forces in these wars. However, as of April 2015, twenty-â•‰three states have legalized
marijuana for medical purposes, and four have legalized recreational marijuana.
14. In addition to the normal usage, meaning interference, the term interposition
has a specific usage in the United States concerning an asserted right to oppose
federal government actions deemed unconstitutional by a state.
15. This report, entitled The Challenges of Violent Drug-â•‰Trafficking Organizations,
was prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense by the National Defense
Research Institute, and sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Navy, the Marine
Corps, the Defense agencies, and the defense Intelligence Community (the upper
case here is taken from the original).
16. For performance, dance, and theater studies discussions relating to drug traf-
ficking in Mexico see, for example: e-â•‰misférica 8.2 #narcomachine, Winter 2011;
Christina Baker. 2014. “Staging Narcocorridos: Las Reinas Chulas’ Dissident
Audio-â•‰Visual Performance.” Latin American Theatre Review 48.1, 93–â•‰113; Jaime
Chabaud. 2015. “Un país en llamas y luto.” Paso de Gato 60, 2–â•‰3. For a perfor-
mance studies analysis of what Jorge Dubatti has called the “shocking theatrical-
ity of the war of the drug-â•‰traffickers” (Dubatti. 2014. “El teatro frente a la barbarie
del mundo.” Escenarios: Revista de Cultura) see Ileana Diéguez. 2009. Cuerpos
exPuestos: Prácticas de duelo. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Columbia.
WORKS CITED
Acosta, Martín. 2012. Timboctou Program. CalArts and University of Guadalajara,
Mexico.
Benavie, Arthur. 2009. Drugs: America’s Holy War. New York: Routledge
Bowden, Charles. 2010. Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New
Killing Fields. New York: Nation.
Churi, Anila. 2012. “Resisting the Silence: Voices of Survival in Mexico.” NACLA
Report on the Americas, Summer, 79–â•‰81.
Clausewitz, Carl von. 1976. On War. Edited and Translated by Michael Howard and
Peter Paret. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Conn, Clayton. 2011. “Cherán: Community Self Defense in Mexico’s Drug War.” North
American Congress on Latin America. July 3, https://nacla.org/news/cher%C3%A1n-
community-self-defense-mexico%E2%80%99s-drug-war-photo-essay.
Diego Quesada, Juan. 2013. “Camarena fue asesinado por la CIA”/“ ‘The CIA helped
kill DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena,’ Say Witnesses.” El País /El País in
English, October 15.
Finnegan, William. 2012. “The Kingpins: The Fight for Guadalajara.” New Yorker,
July 2.
Gibler, John. 2011. To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War. San
Francisco: City Lights.
Hellier-
Tinoco, Ruth. 2010. “Corpo- Reality, Voyeurs and the Responsibility of
Seeing: Night of the Dead on the Island of Janitzio, Mexico.” Performance Research
15(1): 23–31.
———. 2011. Embodying Mexico: Tourism, Nationalism, and Performance. New York:
Johnson, Reed. 2012. “Narco-Themed Works Explore Toll of Drug Use in the US on
Mexico.” Los Angeles Times, March 9.
Kamminga, Jorrit. 2010. “Forward.” In The Politics of Cocaine: How USA Foreign Policy
Has Created a Thriving Drug Industry in Central and South America, by William
L. Marcy, v–v ii. Chicago: Lawrence Hill.
Kerlikowske, R. Gil. 2012. National Drug Control Strategy 2012. Washington,
DC: Executive Office of the President of the United States, Office of National Drug
Control Policy.
Lee, Brianna. 2014. “Mexico’s Drug War.” Council of Foreign Relations. CFR
Backgrounders, http://w ww.cfr.org/mexico/mexico-drug-war/p13689.
Mallea, Paula. 2014. The War on Drugs: A Failed Experiment. Toronto: Dundurn.
Malpede, Karen. 2000. “Theater of Witness: Passage into a New Millennium.” In
Performing Processes: Creating Live Performance, edited by Roberta Mock. 122–138.
Bristol, UK: Intellect.
Münkler, Herfried. 2005. The New Wars. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Cambridge,
UK and Malden, USA: Polity.
Obama, Barack. 2009. First Inaugural Address, January 20. Available online at https://
www.whitehouse.gov/blog/inaugural-address.
———. 2012. “Introduction.” In Kerlikowske 2012, i–iii.
———. 2013. Remarks by the President at the National Defense University, May 23,
2013. Available online at https://w ww.whitehouse.gov/t he-press-office/2013/05/23/
remarks-president-national-defense-university.
Paley, Dawn. 2014. Drug War Capitalism. Oakland, CA: AK.
Paret, Peter. 1976. “The Genesis of On War.” In Clausewitz 1976, 3–26.
Paul, Christopher, Agnes Gereben Schaefer, and Colin P. Clarke. 2011. The Challenges
of Violent Drug-Trafficking Organizations. Santa Monica, CA: RAND.
Preston, Travis. 2012. Note in Acosta 2012.
Rabe, Stephen G. 2012. The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin
America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reno, William. 2011. “Crime versus War.” In The Changing Character of War, edited
by Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers, 220–â•‰240. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rosen, Fred. 2011. “The U.S. War in Mexico.” Mexico, Bewildered and Contested (blog),
November 7, https://â•‰nacla.org/â•‰blog/â•‰2011/â•‰11/â•‰8/â•‰us-â•‰war-â•‰mexico.
Skidmore, Thomas E., Peter H. Smith, and James N. Green. 2014. Modern Latin
America. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Thompson, Ginger, and Mark Mazzetti. 2011. “U.S. Drones Fight Mexican Drug
Trade.” New York Times, March 15.
15
After Cranach
War, Representation, and the Body in William Forsythe’s Three
Atmospheric Studies
GER ALD SIEGMUND
1.â•‡ FR AMING BODY, WORD, AND IMAGE

William Forsythe’s evening-â•‰length piece Three Atmospheric Studies begins
with a woman in a pink dress entering the proscenium. “This is Composition
One, in which my son was arrested” (Forsythe 2006), she says pointing to the
dancer Ander Zabala in a red shirt who is held by other dancers and hence,
we assume from the woman’s utterance, arrested (Figure 15.1). The woman,
dancer Jone San Martin, exits and will not return until the second part of
the piece. Mediating between the audience and the action (of which she is
and yet is not part), San Martin introduces the events onstage as an image
behind her she is pointing at, inviting us to listen and look at the scene like
a picture. At the same time, her pointing gesture creates a distance between
her and what she is referring to. The short appearance opens up a third space,
which is neither stage nor auditorium but rather, as I will argue, the site of
language and speech. This third space created at the proscenium between
the pit and the stage is only a virtual one, but, once established, it is always
there. Like a membrane or lens, it filters our perception of the events before
us, where during the next twenty minutes not another word is spoken and
a pure dance performance unfolds. On an empty stage, the dancers of the
Forsythe Company combine and reshift into varying figurations, time and
316 G erald S iegmund
Figure 15.1 A son being arrested: Ander Zabala, Sang Jijia, and Ioannis Montafounis
in the first act of Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies. Photo by Dominik Mentzos.
again abruptly stopping in mid-movement, holding poses before the over-

all picture shifts again, dissolves, and transforms into the next figuration.
Often the dancers look upward with bodies bent backward, protectively held
or caught by other dancers as if they were in danger. Yet there is no more
explanation; any motivation for their movements is missing in the sequence
of live images created by the occasional standstill, suspending the agile and
supple twists and turns of the dancing bodies rotating around varying joints
of the body and points in space that serve as axes for their movements. Always
on the edge of destabilization, their bodies find strength in the flow patterns
they create. Is there imminent danger lurking? Where is the source of the
threat that seems to control their movements? What are they backing away
from; why must they support one another? Going back to the beginning of
the piece, we might ask: Why was the son arrested? In the emptiness of the
stage we do not find any answer. Since the dancer Jone San Martin has left,
what makes itself clearly felt is the glaring absence of the the spoken word.
Language is not part of the picture(s), although it enshrouds and frames the
dancing because the initial speech act has generated our perception of the
scene as one of seizure or arrest. At the same time, this speech act has also
inscribed the expectation of language into the image. Ever since the female
After Cranach 317
dancer has left the stage, the image has been awaiting its expression, explica-
tion, and explanation in language.
Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies, which I set out to examine in this
paper, poses the question of violence and war in contemporary societies.
In composition and content, as I will show, the piece refers to a painting by
Lucas Cranach the Elder called The Lamentation beneath the Cross from 1503.
Hence, the question of violence is, I suggest, addressed through and literally
inscribed into the Christian tradition and iconography that the piece makes
explicit use of. Three Atmospheric Studies premiered on April 21, 2005, at the
company’s Frankfurt venue, Bockenheimer Depot. Contrary to what the title
suggests, at the first performances the piece consisted of only two parts. The
current and final version was not developed until February 2006.1 For this ver-
sion, Forsythe omitted the first part altogether and renamed the second part
Study III. Studies I and II were replaced by a revised version of the two-act
piece Clouds after Cranach I and II from November 2005. Thus, Clouds after
Cranach was entirely integrated into Three Atmospheric Studies, although it is
still shown as an independent production.2
This compositional method is typical of Forsythe, who, during his forty-
year career, has always had the habit of merging and recontextualizing one-
act pieces into evening-length ballets.3 Atmo, as the piece has become known
informally, is also another example of Forsythe’s method of superimposing
and layering strands of meaning, various media, and visual components to
create an impressive web of interferences, contexts, cross-references, and con-
notations. In Three Atmospheric Studies, the basic material to start this pro-
cess of shifting and translating forms and content consists of, first, Cranach’s
painting impregnating the stage events with a religious foundation in the
literal sense and, second, an anonymous press photo of an explosion in the
Middle East with a man being dragged away by soldiers or police officers. With
both images displaying dark clouds in the upper right hand corner, Forsythe
draws a parallel between the painting and the press photo, thus creating a field
of interference between them. This intermediate space the piece produces as it
unfolds is the space for negotiating war, violence, their medial representations,
meanings and affective potential, and our emotional and intellectual reactions
toward them.
In the wake of the events of September 11, 2001, and the invasion of Iraq in
2003 by the United States and its allies, the piece questions our relationship to
war in light of the flood of war images and twenty-four-hour media coverage.
The piece is structured by a double deprivation, adding a traumatic dimen-
sion to the proceedings onstage. At the level of “story/histoire,” that is, that
which is represented, Forsythe introduces characters who have no access to
the development and truth of events they are involved in. At the level of “plot/
discours,” or manner of presentation, the audience is deprived of a stable point

of view on the war-â•‰related events the three Studies unfold in front of our eyes
and ears. This is achieved by the various materializations the story undergoes,
which is the story of the son being arrested in some undefined war-â•‰related
activity. Framed by language, Study I draws exclusively on dancing and thus
physical action. By contrast, Study II can be seen as a theater piece with the
characters talking and trying to reconstruct the events leading up to the son’s
arrest. Study III, finally, makes use of both dancing and talking while add-
ing sculptural elements and expanding on the dimension of sound. In this
complex process of medial transformation and displacement any kind of truth
value the photo may have had as a document evaporates. In the subsequent
section I will analyze how these transformations into dance and movement,
language and theater, and thus into different modes of listening and seeing are
accomplished. Proceeding on the assumption that in the piece verbal, visual,
and bodily representations of an act of violence (the truth of which remains
inaccessible) are played off against each other, I argue that the viewers must
take an active stance in defining their relationship toward war and its medial
representations that replace the experience of war in our consciousness. Rather
than simply representing events of war, Forsythe stages a “war” between vari-
ous materializations that ultimately the spectator cannot synthesize. “War,”
here, becomes also a metaphor for a consciousness decomposing. In a further
step, taking my cue from Cranach’s painting, with reference to the image the-
ory of Marie-â•‰José Mondzain, I shall refer to the religious implications of the
concept of the theatrical image.
As I have pointed out at the beginning, the stage images the piece pro-
duces are framed by language, thus changing the very nature of the image
as a self-â•‰evident piece of visual information. This re-â•‰mediatization prevents
the engulfing presence of the image appealing to the viewer or spectator to
forge his or her own access to the image’s content and emotional qualities. It is
this idea that is central to Mondzain’s argument, which also grounds the fol-
lowing reflections. With Mondzain, it is thus possible to bring the theatrical
image closer to what she calls, in reference to the Christian tradition, images
of “incarnation,” rather than images of “incorporation.” Images of the latter
type, so I will argue, are closer to the media images of today.
2.â•‡ THE ABSENT BODY

“This is Composition One, in which my son was arrested” (Forsythe 2006).
After San Martin’s voice has died away, the first part of Three Atmospheric
Studies, as noted above, unfolds like an abstract dance work: self-â•‰conscious
and seemingly without language, the dancers concentrate on their movements,
After Cranach 319
playing tricks on gravity in the company’s distinctive dynamic style of con-

tinually changing directions and shifting orientation. However, what seems
to produce abstract dance in its purest form is assigned a very specific mean-
ing retroactively in Study II. After an interval there are now only three danc-
ers onstage the woman in the pink dress (Jone San Martin), a translator
(Amancio Gonzalez), and a third figure (David Kern). Jone San Martin sits
down on a chair stage right, shuffling her papers while trying to spell out the
text. At stage left Amancio Gonzalez sits behind a fragile desk, a clothes rack
full of costumes behind his back, trying to help the woman understand the
story by translating it into Arabic. Between them, David Kern hovers in the
background making gestures and mumbling words that only once in a while
become audible, thus interfering in the dialogue of the others. In front of him,
a number of papers and images lie on a desk. Every once in a while he picks up
one of them, reading and translating it into movement. Thus all three contrib-
ute in different ways to the reconstruction of the events surrounding the son’s
arrest. Kern consults the images, which he too calls “compositions,” while San
Martin tries to make sense of the story by reading it out loud slowly. However,
the actual event remains unclear and is literally lost in Gonzalez’s translation.
As Study II unfolds, it slowly dawns on us that the seemingly abstract group
configurations and solos of the first part were actually representing concrete
occurrences related to the story that we only learn about in Study II. If it was
the absence of language appealing to our understanding of the images seen in
Study I, then, inversely, it is the absence of the image of the son being arrested,
which in Study II is sought to be captured by language. Although absent in
words, it is a narrative that structures the dancers’ movements as Study I’s
choreography.
As the cast list shows, all the dancers have clearly defined parts in Study I,
embodying figures in the story such as My Son, My Sister, The Big Man, The
Cousin, The Niece, The Man I Do Not Know, The Solider or The Shop Keeper.4
However, in personal communication the company’s dramaturg, Freya Vass-
Rhee, explained that the roles migrate between the dancers, thereby causing
shifts in identities, which render it impossible to reliably link one physical body
to one particular role. In other words, although Three Atmospheric Studies
follows a dramaturgical outline that includes various dramatis personae,
Forsythe obliterates all traces of them. Developing coherent figures is therefore
impossible for dancers and spectators alike. In a similar vein, it is a hopeless
venture for the viewer to try to recapitulate from memory the dancing in Study
I in order to retroactively map it exactly onto the story. The creation of uncer-
tainties and gaps in an understanding of the events onstage and references to
a threatening loss of sense are the piece’s major artistic strategies. Seeing and
hearing, we are able to perceive the scenic actions, never knowing what they
really mean, or what we actually see if what we see will only be defined in ret-
rospect. Through continually shifting perspectives, the events appear in vary-
ing material forms (verbal, visual, bodily) precisely to prevent their becoming
manifest and materialized in one single form. What is prevented, therefore,
is the production of one single valid and solid representation of war events
claiming to capture and display the truth of the events. Representation loses
its grounding in events to be represented. Its reference gets lost and is replaced
by a self-â•‰referentiality of symbolic or iconic signifiers shifting and gliding until
all pretense to a reality that we may know has evaporated. Although empa-
thy with the mother and her loss is not impossible, the constant shifting of
points of view primarily draws the audience’s attention to the construction of
the truth, which appears to be endlessly malleable depending on personal or
political interests. War here also becomes a metaphor for the destruction of
all certainties. Thus, what the audience experiences is not the representation
of the brutality of war but the brutality of a world decomposing. The artis-
tic device of inconsistent perspectives and materializations actively engages
the spectator in this loss and prevents the illusion of a closed and meaningful
world from forming.
Away from the stage and along the walls of the theater a series of images is
posted. They are, as we gather, photocopies of the images, or “compositions,”
the dancers deal with onstage. Here, the audience may detect an image of the
Cranach painting that gave Study I and Study II their names. Here, too, the
press photo that served as the basis for the story of the son’s arrest is exhib-
ited. Nothing, however, draws our attention to these photos. Members of the
audience may take notice of them when they enter the auditorium, during
the intermission, or after the performance. Some, however, do not discover
them at all. Even if you have seen them, it is entirely up to you to make con-
nections to the events onstage. The press photo shows four policemen drag-
ging a man away from an explosion, presumably somewhere in the Middle
East. Forsythe translated this photo into a story that, in turn, served as the
basis for yet another translation into the movement sequences that make
up Study I. He created a chronological sequence of events. In using a differ-
ent medium, namely, symbolic language, he extracted a “before” and “after”
out of the iconic sign, reading the image and thereby opening it up to what
is obviously absent in the picture itself—â•‰a possible answer to the question
“What has happened?” Similar to the dancing in Study I, the press photo
in the piece appeals to language, because language and what it stands for—â•‰
sense, logos, communication—â•‰constitutes the absent center of the other two
medialities.
The son was arrested as he was trying to help his sister and her two friends,
who had been playing outside when a missile hit a house in the vicinity. This is
After Cranach 321
the mother’s story, which in various ways is marked as an unreliable account of

what might have really happened: the text reveals itself to be a pieced-â•‰together
version based on accounts by other eyewitnesses, some of whom even the
mother regards as unreliable. She claims to have seen the son being beaten by
a soldier during the rescue, yet in the crucial moment her eyes were watering
because of smoke from the explosion. “This I saw,” she says. “I saw him three
feet from the soldier, or police or something, whatever he was. There was so
much smoke I couldn’t see much before that. My eyes were watering; I wiped
them just as the cloud of smoke passed” (Forsythe 2006, Study II). The event
of the arrest is thus veiled in a dual sense. On the one hand, the extent of the
catastrophe is obscured by a cloud of smoke, which, as an index sign, merely
refers to the explosion—â•‰it is not the representation of the explosion proper.
On the other hand, the mother’s tears triggered by the smoke and her subse-
quent wiping and thereby closing of her eyes cloak the traumatic experience
of her son’s arrest, which she cannot see for herself or know the reason for.
The mother’s trauma, from which the story unfolds, is embedded in a major
trauma caused by the explosion, which, in its suddenness, literally rips apart
people’s everyday life.5
3.â•‡ THE BODY OF CHRIST

If the press photo serves as the basis for the verbal and physical materializa-
tions that make up the piece, the painting Lamentation under the Cross by
Lucas Cranach the Elder especially inscribes itself into Study II. The artistic
confrontation with the issues of pain, grief, loss, and unattainable meaning
thus takes place against a religious background. The painting’s title refers
to a state of grief, and the most obvious link between the press photo and
Cranach’s painting is dark clouds in the upper right of both pictures (smoke
in the case of the photo). During the preparations, as a close look at the com-
pany’s documents reveals, Forsythe identified possible structural analogies
between various visual elements, which were then drawn as lines on a repro-
duction of Cranach’s crucifixion scene. The draft also shows vertical and hor-
izontal lines framing pictures within the picture to establish proportions and
relations between visual elements. The compositional analysis of Cranach’s
painting brings to light numerous framings, extrapolated to and documented
on a second drawing. A third drawing, finally, captures the abstract web of
all the frames and lines extracted from the painting. Analyzing the result,
Forsythe was obviously focused on the visual axis connecting the gazes of
Jesus, Mary, and John, Jesus’s favorite disciple, mourning at the feet of the
Cross. Yet another line can be singled out, linking various body parts of the
figures: the thief’s nipple relates to Jesus’s navel, Jesus’s feet to John’s knee,
and the knee to the feet of the thief. This abstract grid of lines, then, serves as
the basis for Study II’s stage design: by means of white elastic ropes stretching
across the stage, the abstract compositional analysis of the pictorial space is
mapped onto the theatrical space, linking gazes to body parts under the eyes
of the invisible, unrepresentable God whose place in the painting is indicated
by the cloud. At the front of the stage, John’s knee is the focal point at the
“joint” where two ropes intersect. Looking closer at Cranach’s painting, the
knee seems to virtually stick out of the painting, pointing toward the viewers
to draw them deeper into the picture. In yet another translation process the
body, and more specifically the Christian body, gets transferred to the theat-
rical space as a skeletal abstraction. This body does not merely consist of the
body of Christ Crucified, but rather includes the whole scene as the story of
Christ suffering for mankind that, in the belief in resurrection and redemp-
tion, later merged into the corpus mysticum of the church. Jesus at the Cross
is already beyond earthly existence and beyond Mary and John’s reach. Jesus’s
head touching the dark cloud signifies the closeness between God the Father
and God the Son.
Hence, the compositional essence of Cranach’s painting is projected onto
the three-dimensional theatrical space in a transfer of abstract lines distilled
from the two-dimensional surface of the painting. In this transfer, the gazes
and arrangements of bodies are given spatial expression. Through extensions
and anamorphotic distortions of the elastic ropes, the translation process
opens up intermediate spaces onstage, generating new spaces for other bod-
ies to move in. In Study II it is mainly the dancer David Kern who moves
between the ropes and speaks literally from within the gap that separates the
visible construction of the stage from the invisible ultimate truth of God. The
crucifixion scene is absent onstage. It is not depicted, nor does it materialize
onstage. Yet, in the form of elastic ropes, it serves as the hollowed and hallowed
space in which all actions take place. Apart from simply being a visual device
to structure the space, the space demarcated by the ropes in Study II may be
read symbolically as the absent body of Christ and the corpus mysticum of
the church. Unfolding the lines of the gazes and the overall composition of
the painting thus generates spatial movement on the absent-present structure
of and within the space of the crucifixion scene and the figures involved. Put
another way, the body of Christ, along with the promise of resurrection and
forgiveness of sins, represents the symbolic matrix—a literal grid—for the
stage action.
At the juncture of the absent painting invoked by the elastic ropes and the
actual scene onstage, further translations and rewritings in the most literal
sense take place. At the bottom of Cranach’s painting—here at the front of the
stage—the story of the son’s arrest is literally narrated into the structure of the
After Cranach 323
image. Already here, the intermedial texture of the performance establishes

intertextual relationships between Jesus and the son as well as between Mary
and the mother. Against the backdrop of violence described above, the scene
onstage can thus be understood as a questioning of the painting’s symbolic
message of redemption in much the same way in which Jesus questions the
Father in his hour of death according to the Gospel of Matthew 27:46 and
Mark 15:34: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
However, the story in Study II is not told in a linear way either, any more
than it was coherently “danced” in Study I. In the translation process into what
sounds like Arabic, numerous corrections and changes are made, as the word
order changes or wordings are adjusted. But why does the woman, who has
introduced herself as the mother, want the story translated in the first place?
Will she seek justice before an Arabic-language court? Does she want to com-
prehend what happened—a likely interpretation given the meticulous verbal
attempts to get the wording right in her reconstruction of the story? There is,
however, no clear explanation; the piece keeps everything in suspense. Behind
Amancio Gonzalez’s table there is a clothes rack with heaps of colorful cos-
tumes, disclosing the scene as a theater or dress rehearsal, once again bracket-
ing the referential meaning of the events. Jone San Martin apparently is also a
dancer learning her lines.
Meanwhile the dancer David Kern has been moving around in the middle
space of Cranach’s crucifixion scene, circling a table center stage, alternating
between English and Arabic, between the fictional scene of the translation and
the imaginary space of the story yet to be translated. The documents, sketches,
and photos, which also served as the basis for my analysis, are spread out on
the table. In this scene it serves as material from which the dancer generates
gestures, dancing movements, and speech, as he moves between the com-
positional lines of the painting marked by the ropes in the spaces they have
opened. At first it seems as if he is set on merely miming the story of the arrest.
Yet as the performance progresses he more and more frequently interferes ver-
bally until suddenly the presumed relation between words and gestures (owing
to their overlapping) becomes doubtful. Picking up pictures from the table—
“compositions,” as he calls them—the dancer looks at them, then takes a few
steps back from the table and starts to describe them from memory. He tells
of soldiers with shields, helmets, and spears, and remembers rearing horses
and other things that are related neither to the story nor to Cranach’s paint-
ing. “Do you have ‘horse’?” “Do you have ‘spear’?” (Forsythe 2006, Part 2), he
asks the translator, as if he should translate David Kern’s story instead of the
woman claiming to be the mother of the arrested man. Not only do the trans-
lations clash in the process, but the spaces of the dancer’s performance seem
to be mutually incompatible and impenetrable, as if they belonged to different
fictional orders. They converge, however, the moment David Kern describes
the explosion of a house: “Turned over car, white, yellow, orange, dark grey,
medium grey, billowing, expanding, drifting,” he describes the colors of the
explosion and its movement, painting an imaginary cloud in the picture space
(Forsythe 2006, Part 2). The press photo shows four policemen dragging a male
body away from a demolished house toward the observer. It corresponds with
the narration of a missile attack on some house in the neighborhood where the
son was arrested. “Are these clouds?” the mother asks David Kern. “No, this
is smoke,” he replies (Forsythe 2006, Part 2). In the conversation, or rather the
question-â•‰and-â•‰answer session, compositional spaces constantly shift so that the
mother in the end loses her mental grounding.
Three Atmospheric Studies projects fictional spaces in language based on
images that are in turn inscribed in Cranach’s crucifixion scene and the absent
body of Christ used in an abstract form for the stage design. These separate
spaces are connected through structural homologies: the dark cloud in the
sky above Jesus and the cloud of the explosion, Mary and the mother, Jesus
and the son. These elements combine into chains linking different spheres of
perception and imagination without, however, equating them. As the visible
and the imaginary space cannot be fully synthesized, they never merge but
instead open up intermediate spaces for questioning. As a consequence, and
without necessarily being aware of it, the figures onstage simultaneously act
in different imaginary spaces, thereby unraveling the space-â•‰time continuum.
The resulting placelessness of the characters, who begin to lose control of
the situation, adds to the pulverization of all certitudes. “I am the mother in
Composition One,” Jone San Martin tries to define her position in the second
picture of Study II. “No, I don’t think so,” Amancio Gonzalez replies (Forsythe
2006, Part 2). This and similar utterances immediately cast doubts on possible
continuities between I and II tentatively reconstructed by the spectators. The
figure who in Study I claimed to be the mother of the arrested son is obviously
not the same women who wants her story to be translated in Study II. Entering
a different constellation of visual spaces distorts and sets adrift her identity
and the story in the other context (Figure 15.2).
Hence, a translation has taken place between Study I and Study II as well. If
Study I was based on translating a press photo into a narrative, which onstage
was translated into an abstract or narrative piece of dance, depending on the
spectator’s knowledge, then Study II retranslates dance into language, which
is in turn inscribed in the pictorial space of the crucifixion. The shifts and dis-
placements occur between the translations of the story and the descriptions of
the images. The gap between Studies I and II, the split and discontinuities that
separate them, are multiplied, repeated, and reproduced in the heterogeneous
spaces clashing within the compositions themselves.
After Cranach 325
Figure 15.2â•‡ A woman losing her bearings: Jone San Martin and David Kern in the
second act of Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies. Photo by Dominik Mentzos.
4.â•‡ THE TIME AFTER

After scrutinizing the work’s medial transformations of space, I now turn
to the aspect of time already implied in the piece’s parallel production titled
Clouds after Cranach. The preposition “after” suggests a temporal succes-
sion, which is why the cloud of smoke from the press photo not only parallels
Cranach’s painting but also transposes the cloud into a time after the end of
all religious certainties, when the Christian and Islamic faiths—â•‰both used for
political ends—â•‰irreconcilably confront each other. Another resonance, here,
is the art-â•‰historical sense of ”after.” Thus the press photograph is a contempo-
rary work in the manner of Cranach. Inasmuch as we all live in a time “after”
Cranach, the structural equivalence of the clouds also marks what is lacking
in the theater space—the body of Christ and its resurrection. Hence, the third
part of Three Atmospheric Studies is about the absence of salvation unmis-
takably alluding to the Iraq War under George W. Bush’s government in the
aftermath of the events on September 11, 2001.
In the last part, Study III, the elastic ropes have disappeared. The theater
space is cleared of any reminder of Christian iconography and corporeal-
ity. A plywood wall placed at an obtuse angle dominates the right part of
the stage. Through an open door at its front we perceive a picture of clouds
obstructing the upper half of the passage. In the structural chain of shifts,
these clouds are reminders of the veiled presence of God framing Christ’s
death on the Cross—at least prospectively—as salvation. Salvation always
also means salvation in meaning, of being part of a logos that is meaning-
ful. In the press photo, however, the clouds are an index sign of death and
destruction, which has no transcendental, meaningful dimension. In the
third part, their symbolic meaning has shrunk once again to merely rep-
resenting a banal meteorological phenomenon: gesticulating, David Kern
walks up and down in front of the door, like the announcer of a weather
forecast describing the cloud formation in the picture. Then he turns to dis-
cussing the impact of weather conditions on the military forces, talking of
field operations and allies exposed to adverse weather conditions. No doubt,
David Kern is giving us an account of a war scenario susceptible to atmo-
spheric disturbances.
At the rear-facing side of the wall through another door other dancers come
onstage successively, performing small solos that are time and again inter-
rupted by a force that seems to be only visible or palpable to the dancers them-
selves, and which they frantically dodge in an evasive maneuver. Ducking away
and twisting, they try to avoid body contact. At the edge of this wall the woman
in the pink dress sits apathetically on a chair. After approximately six minutes,
the stage lights dim as if dark clouds have pushed in front of the sun to obscure
the scene of violence. When the stage is relit a minute later, another woman,
Dana Caspersen, has moved next to her, addressing her directly: “Well ma’am,
look at that. This is magnificent!” Jone San Martin remains impassive on her
chair, staring into the void (Forsythe 2006, Part 3). Soon she falls off. Cramped
and inert like a statue, she remains lying on the floor until Amancio Gonzalez,
the translator from Study II, provides treatment and mechanically moves her
limbs like a puppet’s. During the whole act, Dana Caspersen’s voice is played
back through an electronic filter making it sound like a male voice. Until the
end she keeps claiming to be in possession of the truth and urges everyone to
stick to the story she soothingly sums up thus: “Our department has recently
conducted three atmospheric studies, Ma’am, and our experts have concluded
After Cranach 327
there is no cause for alarm.” Despite a “general state of emergency” there is no

reason for concern (Forsythe 2006, Part 3).
In the Gospel of Saint Luke 23:44–46, we are told that just before Jesus’s
death on the Cross, “there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth
hour. And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the
midst.” The clouds are the corollary of Jesus’s death on the Cross, and yet
simultaneously they announce the salvation of mankind through the sacrifice.
They are inseparable from the cruelest act of violence that, via the resurrec-
tion of Christ, transforms into salvation and forgiveness. It is the production’s
ironic twist that after the darkness in Study III neither redemption nor the
resurrection of Christ and the Saints, who descended upon the Holy City, will
take place. Instead, a swaggering, bragging politician whom one might easily
identify as George W. Bush enters the stage. The voice of God is thus replaced
by the ineffective language of politics identified as false and dishonest speech
through the sound manipulations described above.
If the production’s strategies aim at creating a sense of “placelessness”
regarding the spectator’s point of view, then the different materializations of
the narrative—the varying medial “embodiments” of the story—refer to the
absence of the body of Christ and the impossibility of signifying pain and suf-
fering, no matter the type of medial representation, rewriting and translation.
What the mother was supposed to look at becomes evident when David
Kern, ceasing to be a weather announcer, suddenly moves about the stage as
a kind of travel guide. Leaving the logic of time and space behind, he is—
from a future perspective, when all the battles will have been fought—guiding
an invisible group of tourists over the battlefield, recounting past events and
pointing out detritus like human fingers and arms on the ground.
Study II already hints at the fact that resurrection and salvation will not
be forthcoming in Three Atmospheric Studies. After a series of unsuccessful
attempts to translate the story, the woman in the pink dress becomes angry
and starts shouting. Cornered by the translator, she is being pressured to jus-
tify her son’s conduct, but is unable to provide a definitive interpretation of his
behavior. Around the black hole of events—a hole that because of its traumatic
nature cannot be filled by an appropriate signifier that could set off the chain
of signification to make sense out of the events—multiple stories accumulate
as rewritings of images translated into narrations transformed into dance and
movement. In this schizophrenic situation with varying truths split off from
each other, the mother’s voice suddenly breaks off (Forsythe 2006, Part 2).
Her face and body grotesquely distorted, she screams and shrieks as if pos-
sessed by some invisible force. Her metallic voice is detached from the body
floating freely and placelessly in space. This expanding voice seems to come
from elsewhere, destroying the very space where explanations, meaning, and
signification could take place. A heterogeneous force alien to communicative

language is breaking through her voice, taking the body away. This deeply
disturbing sonic quality further intensifies in Study III. A microphone is now
passed around, which records the sound of the movements and the noises and
voices of the dancers. Electronically edited and supplemented by extra audio
tracks played in reverse, a cacophony of distorted sounds unfolds—â•‰a hor-
ror scenario of unidentifiable noises and, sounds that no human body could
accommodate: shrill and jarred, they corrode any possible context of meaning
and understanding. The imaginary effort to close the real wound by means
of images (“Look at that, Ma’am”) or language (“Stick to the story”) and inte-
grate it into the realm of the symbolic fails before the very eyes and ears of the
spectators.
5.â•‡ THE THEATRICAL IMAGE AS INCARNATION

Three Atmospheric Studies, as I have argued, simultaneously reflects the condi-
tions of mediation and medialization in representations of war. Deeply unset-
tling, it destabilizes any fixed point of view, thereby preventing the creation
of a closed fictional world that would represent war or its “truth.” The piece
does not represent the brutality of war; it stages “war” in our consciousness
by withdrawing any kind of certainty or stability in regard to the events seen
and heard. In doing so, the piece inevitably draws attention to the means and
potentials inherent in theater. Jone San Martin, after all, is only a dancer who
learns her lines. Through a self-â•‰reflexive process, the theatrical performance
plays off image and the description of images (ekphrasis), body and move-
ment, story and characters against each other. One result of this process is
the mise-â•‰en-â•‰abyme of frames that frame other frames, preventing any closure
of meaning. Another result is the substitution of the signs’ referent in a sup-
posed reality by a referent within the piece itself. As image includes language
includes movement, each one becomes the referent for the other. Since their
specific materialities never fully coincide, language, image, and body cannot,
however, refer to each other without loss. This is why the image must appeal
to both language and the physical body—â•‰to both things that it is fundamen-
tally and materially lacking. In doing so, it breaks open its closed frame. The
self-â•‰referentiality of the piece thus does not propagate an attitude of art for
art’s sake—â•‰quite the contrary. In a paradoxical twist, the crossing of story and
discourse where the one finds its referent in the other opens up the piece to
discursive reflection and intersubjective negotiation. This crossing implies a
change of structural levels figured in the performance as an interplay of image
and language, the interaction of which triggers possibilities of meaning. Three
Atmospheric Studies simultaneously tells a story while at the time displaying
After Cranach 329
how the story might be constructed differently. The “how” changes the “what,”
and the “what changes the “how.” It is at the interstice of these different levels
that the spectator with his or her cultural knowledge, experience, and emo-
tions literally comes into the picture. The opening up of different levels toward
each other produces a zone of indeterminacy, playing with both the spectators’
perceptions and reflective capabilities. Only then does the image cease to rep-
resent a supposedly given reality to enable multiple accesses to its status and
content instead. Against this backdrop, in the last section of my essay I would
like to conclude with a brief reflection on the nature of the theatrical image.
In the spirit of the religious setting and implications of the piece, I draw on
Marie-José Mondzain’s distinction between two types of images, which she
sees as deeply rooted in the Christian tradition.
According to Mondzain, the way contemporary Western societies generally
deal with and conceptualize (media) images goes back to the foundations of
Christian culture. Here, she distinguishes between two models for the image,
namely, the concepts of incorporation and incarnation (Mondzain 2010).
Each type also designates a specific perspective and position for the specta-
tor in relation to the image. Incorporation is modeled on the Last Supper as a
celebration of affiliation, where participants literally incorporate the body of
Christ in the form of wine and consecrated hosts. Thus, incorporation largely
relies on the presence of the divine. Images structured according to this model
therefore aim at “engulfing” the observer, as Mondzain puts it (2010, 39), in a
gesture of agreement and consent. By contrast, the model of incarnation aims
at establishing a connection between the visible and the invisible via the gaze:
To incarnate is not to imitate, nor is it to reproduce or to simulate. The

Christian Messiah is not God’s clone. Nor does the Messiah offer a new
reality to the eyes of the idolatrous. The image is fundamentally unreal; its
forces reside in its rebellion against becoming substance with its content.
To incarnate is to give flesh and not to give body. It is to act in the absence
of things. The image gives flesh, that is, carnal visibility to an absence in the
irreducible distance from its model. To give body, in contrast, is to incor-
porate; it is to propose a substance of something real and true to the guests
who fuse and disappear in the body with which they identify. (Mondzain
2010, 29)
The original image is the incarnation of God in the body of Christ—the Word
turned flesh. The body of Christ as the image of God, as visible body-image,
thus always contains the invisible: God who is not representable and has
even forbidden men to make an image of him. This dimension of the invis-
ible remains forever inscribed in the incarnated image. Hence, such an image
always includes more than just its visible elements. It becomes image only by
unclosing and betraying its immanence through the voice and the word. “The
visible is inhabited by the invisible; it is thus not a matter of seeing through
the eyes but one of seeing through hearing the word, which alters perception”
(Mondzain 2010, 42). An image based on the model of incarnation also implies
a different position for the observer-â•‰spectator. “In this case, the visible puts
the spectator in a place where the image is yet to be constructed. The visible is
shared only in terms of an image educated by the voice” (Mondzain 2010, 42).
Both components—â•‰voice as the bearer of language and the screen or body as
the bearer of the image—â•‰are in no way self-â•‰contained, independent vehicles of
meaning. On the contrary, they always fill the void within the other medium,
thus referring to the absence of the real body of Christ, without being able to
close the gap. Mondzain compares the model of incarnation to the Passion of
Christ. “Christ’s Passion, that is, the Passion of the image, occurs in the image
of the Passion” (Mondzain 2010, 23). Since Christ’s body is the incarnation of
God’s word, his Passion is always also the passion of the image in which the
Passion takes place. Thus, this type of image implies the corporeal as well as
the linguistic. It establishes a site for speaking and moving rather than engulf-
ing the observer with the force of its presence.
The way in which Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies implicates body,
word, and image parallels Mondzain’s analysis of the incarnation model of
the image. Forsythe’s media use does not reinforce the presence of what is,
in a phenomenological sense, visibly given and fully present onstage. On the
contrary, when we are made to see and hear the absences between the vari-
ous materializations of the story, we are given the freedom to construct an
image that is never given onstage by relating what we see to the conflicting
realities of what we know and hear. We thus actively achieve the construction
of the world depicted onstage. We are not engulfed in the charged presence of
the performance, but are asked to fill the gaps between the medial representa-
tions. While doing so, the absences refer us back to our own understanding
and judgment of media images representing war activities. The uncertainty of
what to think or believe, which is at the same time our freedom to engage with
the performance, requires that “the spectators are responsible for their own
access to the invisible in the visible” (Mondzain 2010, 29).
Theater always includes the potential to confront and open up visual mate-
rial with words, movements, and bodies, thereby altering our modes of percep-
tion and understanding. With the help of our gaze and our sense of hearing,
Forsythe’s medial transformations establish a connection between the visible
and the invisible, canceling out the self-â•‰evident nature of the scenic action. As
such, his work may stand as a model for what the theatrical image as incarna-
tion is and what it may achieve. It is a multilayered, multisensorial compound,
After Cranach 331
or composition, that actively engages the spectators’ faculties. The medial

transformations in Three Atmospheric Studies never aim at overwhelming
the spectator through emphasizing and re-â•‰presenting the presence. By insist-
ing on the radical absence of truth, Forsythe’s live images and scenes, from
which the divine has withdrawn long ago, instead “assume an incarnation”
(Mondzain 2010, 46). It cannot be stressed often enough that the production’s
auditory dimension is extremely important, the soundtrack of which artic-
ulates the voice of the image as the disembodied, despairingly frantic voice
devoid of the body of Christ. Three Atmospheric Studies shows that our world
is plastered with images that show nothing but the visible. These merely “vis-
ible” images claim to hold the truth and prevent us from developing our own
access to reality, which can only be facilitated by the voice and the word.6 At
the same time, however, the performance seeks to open rifts in our perception,
generating gaps between image, body, text, and space, which, due to trans-
lation processes and varying materializations, never fully coincide or corre-
spond to produce an absolute embodiment or incorporation of the truth of
the image/â•‰story. Invoking absence, the production thus appeals to our capac-
ity to speak (about it) to make the voice of the image—â•‰its passio—â•‰speak in a
different language from that of the politician caricatured in the piece. Mark
Franko in his contribution to this volume describes this active and nonra-
tional engagement with the politics of war as the politicality of civil society
under threat in “new forms” of war. Hence the focus on an engulfing atmo-
sphere in the piece that speaks yet does not speak any truth. Forsythe’s dealing
with war brings representations of war and therefore their understanding to
an end by setting various representations off against each other. He replaces
control over his material with the creation of an intermediate space in which
our understanding and judgment of the events as members of the audience are
constantly challenged and brought to the brink of collapse. “War,” therefore,
also becomes a metaphor for our states of mind while watching the piece.
NOTES
1. I attended both the Frankfurt premiere of the first version and Clouds after
Cranach as well as the performance of the final version on November 6, 2006, at
the Schiffbau in Zurich, Switzerland.
2. The piece Clouds after Cranach I and II premiered as a separate production on
November 26, 2005, in Frankfurt am Main.
3. Enemy in the Figure from 1989, for instance, was to become the middle part of
Limbs Theorem in 1990.
4. The cast list identifies fourteen different roles including absurd ones such as the
Bonsai, reflecting an ironic attitude toward the material. I am indebted to Freya
Vass-â•‰Rhee and the Forsythe Company, who made available the text material and
the drawings used in the performance. My analysis draws on this source material
and a conversation with Freya Vass-â•‰Rhee.
5. In his essay on Three Atmospheric Studies in this volume, Mark Franko sees the
woman’s actions as attempts to deal with the traumatic nature of her war experi-
ence. The concept of trauma that grounds Franko’s essay is responsible for recon-
figuring historical truth and awareness that Forsythe here engages with.
6. According to Peter Michalzik, the “loss of the concrete war” in mass media images
is the central topic of the piece. The discrepancy between knowing that a war is tak-
ing place and its denial due to its representations together with the corresponding
loss of experience lead to “the real event making itself felt again.” (Michalzik 2006).
WORKS CITED
Forsythe, William 2006. Three Atmospheric Studies, DVD recording of the per-
formance on 14 May 2006 at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Berlin, Germany,
archive copy.
Michalzik, Peter. 2006. “Desastres de la Guerra: Wie aus Tanz in William Forsythes
Three Atmospheric Studies politisches Tanztheater wird.” In Three Atmospheric
Studies/â•‰Heterotopia. Program booklet edited by Schauspielhaus Zurich.
Mondzain, Marie-â•‰José. 2010. “Can Images Kill?” Critical Inquiry 36 (1): 20–â•‰51.
16
The Role of Choreography in Civil Society

under Siege
William Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies
M A R K F R A N KO
This essay is about William Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies, a ballet

addressing the Iraq War prosecuted by the United States in the aftermath
of 9/â•‰11.1 But it is also more broadly about the role of choreography in civil
society—â•‰or society tout court—â•‰under siege.2 Society itself has become the tar-
get of warfare—â•‰called, for convenience sake, the collateral damage of “new
war,” or asymmetrical warfare3—â•‰and consequently the very possibility and
function of civil society faces an existential threat. The classical notion of the
citizen as enjoying human rights that include freedom of speech and assembly
as well as the ability to deliberate in the public sphere over matters of power
while maintaining a crucial distance from the offices of power itself has been
thrown open to question. If the classical theory of civil society understood the
latter as a potential counterweight to the power of the state, the asymmetry
in question in “new war” doubly weakens the influence and viability of civil
society: it relinquishes its power of discourse, since civil society is under these
circumstances no longer properly located outside the political sphere—â•‰that is,
the sphere where direct and crushing force may be exerted—â•‰and, by the same
token, the powers of the state itself are being challenged through violent con-
frontation perpetrated against its citizens by nonstate entities and reciprocal
334 M ark F ranko
attacks by state entities against civilian populations in what can be classified

as permanent war.4
Civil society only exists in a structural relationship to the state and state
power. If the state is the product of absolutism, then it is no accident that chore-
ography has historically played the role of social organizer, a point made by the
editors in the introduction to this volume. But it should also be noted that cho-
reography has played the role of resistance to absolute power, even under abso-
lutism.5 And it has done so not through rational-â•‰critical debate but through
ironic “burlesque” performance. Thus, we could say that not only is chore-
ography a cultural institution of civil society, but civil society is not merely a
rational entity but also a theatrical one. Of course, this presupposes that we are
reimagining civil society in its relation to theater and performance. My point
here is not to determine whether choreography fulfilled a critical function typi-
cal of civil society in the prebourgeois era—â•‰I assume this to be the case—â•‰but to
underline the ontological politicality of choreography, a point also stressed by
the editors.6 To understand this politicality we must recur to corporeal expres-
sion as a mode of civil society with critical (hence political) force.
A NEW FACE OF CITIZENSHIP

William Forsythe, a choreographer based for some time in Germany, is
American, and while his opposition to the Iraq War may be seen through a
European lens (the Iraq War was highly unpopular in Europe), it is indubitably
a work in which the choreographer assumes his identity as an American citi-
zen.7 In fact, Forsythe has gone so far as to call Three Atmospheric Studies “an
act of citizenship.”8 To me this means that he sees this ballet as a way of exercis-
ing his civil rights as a citizen of the United States to initiate a public discourse
on the war. More precisely, he is using choreography as such to enter into a
discourse upon war, and hence this chapter will deal in part with the ability
of choreography to “respond.”9 To claim one’s identity as a citizen means to
assert one’s role in a deliberative and, by extension, democratically oriented
process—â•‰by definition outside a war zone—â•‰and to be receptive to response. In
other terms, it is to engage in a discourse and assume one’s identity as one able
and entitled to speak and/â•‰or to choreograph and dance. Citizenship implies
the existence of sovereign individuals with a “voice,” that is also to say, with
the possibility of corporeal expression. There are different theories providing
a framework for how those individual sovereign voices become heard: public
sphere, civil society, radical democracy, and, more recently, the counterpub-
lic.10 I am suggesting they get “read” through the use of bodies in a theatrical-â•‰
poetic-â•‰theoretical assemblage we can call choreography (although Forsythe
introduces many new twists into the means at the disposal of choreography).
The Role of Choreography in Civil Society under Siege 335
Since at least the theorization of the enlightenment public sphere by Jürgen

Habermas as an open space of visibility and rational-critical discourse, civil
society has been considered an essential if jeopardized resource against the
abuse of state power, and hence to be distinguished from both the political
sphere and the private sphere.11 As Michael Hardt has written: “Civil society
is proposed as the essential feature of any democracy: the institutional infra-
structure for political mediation and public exchange” (Hardt 1995, 27).12 Civil
society is an infrastructure within which the public sphere might operate as a
particular form of social exchange with political ramifications. The domain of
sociality denoted by the public sphere, inasmuch as it exists informally between
private individuals and among aggregates of individuals, can be pursued in
civil society as much through writing as through speech or performance, and
has, since Habermas, given rise to debates about who counts as a citizen, and
what groups constitute the public sphere in an adequate theory of democracy
(Warner 2005). Yet in America’s relationship to the world the question of who
has a voice in the international community is also debated alongside the per-
ception that civil society is withering through its contamination by the state
itself. Jean-François Lyotard discussed the undermining of the possibility of
communication in rational terms as early as 1983 in positing the notion of the
differend, thereby stressing the importance of the issue of translation (Lyotard
1988). As we shall see, Forsythe also privileges this issue in the particular aes-
thetic construction of his work as it is focused on a scene of translation: transla-
tion between media and the dramatic scene of the translation of a letter.
This being said, one should add that the spread of war to civilian populations
and the withdrawal of the state from the defense of the citizenry have dam-
aged the balance between state and civil society, and could be seen as a large-
scale consequence of what Lyotard prefigured. It would seem that Atmospheric
Studies seeks to analyze this imbalance and, in this way, to address, if not
redress, it. That choreography is able to perform this operation is part of the
burden of this chapter to demonstrate. The type of reasoning needed to dem-
onstrate it points to the existence of what I have called elsewhere the choreo-
graphic public sphere even in a situation in which the very existence of the
public sphere is placed in doubt.13 When choreography affects thought and
circulates within discourse by providing new options for conceiving of and
dealing with a situation, when it attains to a certain public currency such that
it engenders a drive to discuss it—where its interpretation becomes at some
level a social phenomenon—then a choreographic sphere has come into exis-
tence. The choreographic public sphere exists, in other terms, on the ruins of
civil society, formerly considered a site of rational-critical debate. The destruc-
tion of the relationship between state and civil society of course renders civil
society vulnerable, but it also liberates civil society from society as “a basis
336 M ark F ranko
of normative principles and political action” (Cohen and Arato 1992, 127).
Along with such normative principles goes rational-critical debate as such.
This points to the reformulation of civil society as, in the terms of Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri, the multitude, “a new subjective configuration of
labor” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 395). The multitude, such as it is theorized by
Hardt and Negri, draws upon the importance of immaterial labor. Dance is
such a labor. Given that civil society itself is a concept grown since Hegel from
a conception of labor, there can be no doubt that this reconception of labor
afforded by the potential collapse of civil society is a phenomenon opening
an avenue for choreography and the choreographic as public discourse. The
choreographic is in many instances indistinguishable from the theatrical, yet
it also brings to bear a set of actions able to “occupy” public space—the space
of openness presupposed by the public sphere—and to place embodied sub-
jects there in lieu of disembodied voices.14 The model for the open visibility of
public space in Habermas (Öffentlichkeit: openess) has been replaced by that
of crowding—in short, occupation. Voices and writing have been replaced by
bodies.
Forsythe’s decision to identify Three Atmospheric Studies as an act of citi-
zenship has a biographical component shared by many Americans: it indicates
his intimate awareness of the sorts of politico-social irregularities that enabled
George W. Bush to actually become president of the United States, despite lin-
gering doubts as to the legitimacy of his first electoral win, which was bestowed
upon him by the Supreme Court in the absence of a majority of the popular
vote. In the third act of Three Atmospheric Studies, a part of the act Forsythe
calls Study III, dancer Dana Caspersen makes a lamentable effort to console
a bereaved Iraqi mother for the death of her son. Through electronic voice
distortion, Caspersen delivers a cloyingly drawling Texas accent. As Rachel
Howard remarked of this scene: “Caspersen’s authority figure captures the
essence of President Bush without lapsing into imitation.”15 “What we give you
is what you need, and what you need is what we give you,” Caspersen intones to
the prone and traumatized woman, recalling Charles Erwin Wilson’s famous
dictum as secretary of defense under Eisenhower: “What is good for General
Motors is good for the country and what is good for the country is good for
General Motors.” This personification of the United States military in Iraq,
made all the more cutting by familiarity with the rhetoric of collateral damage,
merited a visit from the FBI during a subsequent visit of Forsythe to the United
States.16 This act of intimidation effectively breached the separation of state and
civil society. When understood in the context of the distinction between state
and civil society, Forsythe’s evocation of citizenship thus provides us with one
context in which to interpret the ballet’s three disparate scenes. While the per-
formance is concerned with human suffering and trauma, the question of an
adequate response to suffering and trauma is part of what we should consider

as the illocutionary force of the ballet. This question is presented, as we shall
see, in terms of the issue of translation and translatability.
With dance, we may find ourselves, as Michael Warner points out, in a
situation where corporeal expressivity displaces rational-critical discourse.
However, corporeal expressivity and its theatrical setups also obey the man-
dates of public circulation. Where might such a dialogue between citizens in
response to the provocation of this dance take place—in reviews of the dance?
Jennifer Dunning in the New York Times wrote: “ ‘Studies’ has much to say in
a time when much needs to be said, in exactly this way.”17 But Dunning ends
there, leaving what it says, and what needs to be said, unsaid. Rational-critical
discourse—I borrow this phrase from Habermas’s theorization of the public
sphere—seemed impossible for this dance review to carry off. I am counter-
posing in this essay the idea that dance can explore trauma,18 but that in so
doing it can also generate a discourse as the choreographic public sphere. This
piece of writing and the responses it may elicit is a part of that sphere, and
indicative of its existence. That the review, which is also part of that sphere,
insists on nonverbalization of the discourse is itself a symptom of the muz-
zling of civil society. The allusiveness of this language is a sign of the suppres-
sion of an oppositional view toward the Iraq War and the damage this war
inflicted on the American public sphere. Thus, rather than argue the possibil-
ity of rational-critical discourse, I am arguing the possibility of choreographic
discourse as a public sphere activity. Such a discourse of and about movement
functions on the borders of rational constructs, and is more adequate than
rational argument to the absorption and contemplation of borderline situa-
tions and pathological abreactions.
The fact that Forsythe has called Three Atmospheric Studies “an act of citizen-
ship” raises the question of civil society, human rights, and direct democratic
participation. These terms are usually discussed in the context of a critique of
the state, of what is now called a poststatist politics, or of nongovernmental
activism.19 Moreover, any civil society activity in the wake of such catastrophes
must inevitably address the impact of trauma and the way in which trauma
can reconfigure what we usually think of as historical awareness. “For history
to be a history of trauma,” writes Cathy Caruth, “means that it is referential
to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs” (Caruth 1996, 12). The
question that ensues is: what happens when rational-critical discourse must
take place under the auspices of social and personal trauma in which experi-
ence as such cannot be fully assimilated? The differend at the core of conflict is
itself the trauma of the public sphere, effectively displacing its role and func-
tion in civil society (Lyotard 1988). This is a situation that is potentially shat-
tering for the rational and critical faculties themselves.
338 M ark F ranko
STRUCTURAL HYBRIDITY
Three Atmospheric Studies sets forth this foreboding sensation in its very
structure rather than in its acts; that is, Three Atmospheric Studies is itself
constitutive of an atmosphere. While human suffering is front and center,
the question of how we respond to suffering (and injustice) is an important
structural component of the work.20 The analysis that follows is structural, and
I see this as called for by the hybrid elements of Three Atmospheric Studies—â•‰it
contains and transmutes among them modalities that are by turns choreo-
graphic, pictorial, operatic, theatrical, and discursive—â•‰and the way these can
be understood to foster but also inhibit discourse. An atmosphere, through
its all-â•‰pervasive nature, is an environment encompassing at once the politi-
cal, the civil, and/â•‰or the private. The structural hybridity of the work mirrors
the pervasive qualities of atmosphere as a subject, theme, or mood of Three
Atmospheric Studies, and a structural analysis should begin with an analysis
of this hybridity.
The first hybrid component I wish to discuss is the painting, and by exten-
sion the image, or composition in both a visual sense and conceptual sense.
Images, whether offered to our imagination through words or presented to
us visually, are the pivot points between text and movement. There is con-
stantly an effort to describe the visual images in both verbal and movement
terms. Two images stand at the origin of the work: a press photo of a disaster
in which several men carry a body from a burning building and the cruci-
fixion of Christ in Lucas Cranach the Elder’s 1503 painting The Lamentation
Beneath the Cross. The press photo is a pretext for the first section of the ballet
in which the dancers cope with an explosion in figurative terms. The subtitle of
the ballet’s first two acts—â•‰Clouds after Cranach I and II—â•‰references the upper
right-â•‰hand corner of the Cranach painting, which is filled with clouds, as more
pertinent to the ballet than the august actors of the passion itself. Clouds and
smoke, disaster and martyrdom, such links between the two series can be
made, which alert us to the role of images in the iconography of art history
as well as in contemporary visual culture. The Studies—â•‰three modules, also
called parts—â•‰are themselves likened to sketches or visual “compositions” (the
term is used repeatedly in the ballet) that take atmosphere as their climactic
focus. Since composition (istoria) in quattrocento art theory refers to both the
visual and dramatic aspects of a painting, the thematic focus on atmosphere
continuously draws our attention to the invisible. If suffering is the subject, it is
clearly not representational or mimetic in any conventional sense. As Hubert
Damisch noted in his study of Correggio: “On a conceptual level, a ‘cloud’ is an
unstable formation with no definite outline or color and yet that possesses the
powers of a material in which any kind of figure may appear and then vanish”
(Damisch 2002, 31). In the history of painting, as Damisch also points out, the
cloud is often used for scenes in which the transcendental makes an appear-
ance, but at the technical level clouds also are antimimetic or purely pictorial
in that they stress the prominence of paint per se over figurative representation
and/â•‰or the painted sign (2002, 27). Clouds transgress the rules of perspective
in painting in place since the quattrocento, and are, strictly speaking, unde-
pictable in perspectival terms.
ATMOSPHERE: CLOUDS VERSUS LINES
The term composition, which is evoked so repeatedly as to virtually constitute
a leitmotif, seems to partner cloud as a floating signifier in the work, and, like
cloud, composition exists in a sort of metalanguage of one performer whose
relation to the action is unclear—â•‰David Kern. In the second part, Kern makes
repeated reference to compositions, even numbering them and describing them
in words, as a form of surrealistic evidence. More precisely, however, cloud and
composition are actually antonyms in that clouds belie the notion of composi-
tion, which is usually understood to signify the outline, linear-â•‰perspective, fig-
ural representation and the possibility of diagrammatic analysis as opposed to
texture, color, emphasis on materials, and constantly metamorphosing shape.
The notion of composition, indeed, implies a frame, and the question of what a
composition—â•‰understood here (since a composition can be a various elements
arranged according to certain rules) as an interpretation or representation
of an event—â•‰entails, and what frames it, is uppermost throughout the piece.
I note this binary opposition here between two “terms” that are not actually
visible in the ballet but that are offered up as verbal clues—â•‰in the subtitles or
in the spoken word—â•‰similar to the clues the choreographer gave to the press
when he called the work an act of citizenship. Three Atmospheric Studies, in
other terms, must be interpreted not only according to its internal logic but
also following a set of clues that fall outside the frame while being contained
within it.
These structural indications are compounded by generic ones. As already
mentioned, Three Atmospheric Studies is a hybrid work combining elements
of dance, theater, and performance installation.21 In its abrupt shifts between
movement and the spoken word, theatrical dramatization and the verbal
description of visual compositions, Three Atmospheric Studies presents us
with a conundrum: in what medium might we anticipate the rational-â•‰critical
discourse of civil society to emerge or be put into perspective, as it were? The
visual, the verbal, and the choreographic seem to merge and to contradict one
another, to compete for precedence, and to offer no aesthetically satisfying fit
from a conventional standpoint.22
340 M ark F ranko
It is for this reason that I think we are justified in naming translation as one
of Forsythe’s major concerns, and also to pinpoint the ethical ramifications of
translation: Why is it necessary, how does it really enable communication at an
international level, and what is the purpose of translation in the artistic con-
text of intermediality? If the power of public response to atrocity is muted and/
or inchoate, this is in part because the audience is being required to do the dif-
ficult work of translation, and the difficulties involved here point to the pres-
ence of a third important theme after citizenship and hybridity: trauma.23 That
is, from the perspective of public sphere theory as rational-critical exchange,
the sphere itself has become a site of social trauma understood as one in which
it has become impossible to process experience logically and rationally. This
difficulty is iterated in the difficulty of “studying” the atmosphere as a way to
graph it. The disturbance of composition by clouds is indicative of the loss of
the ability to exercise the public sphere in the name of civil society.
Three Atmospheric Studies is a formally traumatized work in the sense
that the transcendental disturbs the order of figural reality as trauma. In this
respect, Three Atmospheric Studies steps decidedly outside the religious con-
text, a point made abundantly clear by Gerald Siegmund in his analysis of the
work. The differend, which is causative of conflict—a blackout on the possi-
bility of rational verbal exchange—causes us to fall back on war as an action
of redress, and choreography as an action of accounting and recounting.
However, in this situation we do not travel between language and language,
but between language and movement. The question is how we separate move-
ment from violence or understand movement as a spectacle whose contempla-
tion leads to the resolution of violence.
I think this is made particularly clear in the second and third acts of Three
Atmospheric Studies, which concern the linguistic and rhetorical rather than
the kinesthetic climates surrounding war. In the second act, Jone San Martin
attempts to analyze the fog of war in Part 1 by trying to recount the situation
to an official, played by Amancio Gonzalez. He, in turn, translates her state-
ments in defense of her son who has been arrested into Arabic. The translator is
obviously a hostile witness, and the tendency of his translation will be toward
dehumanizing it. She grows increasingly frustrated at the translator’s bureau-
cratic obtuseness. This much of the act follows the logic of a theater scene.
Alongside Forsythe’s statement about citizenship are visual statements about
composition: the references to Lucas Cranach’s The Lamentation Beneath the
Cross, and the question of the lines that can be drawn in the visual analysis
of the painting in a classic art history mode of aesthetic examination. These
statements, like that on citizenship, are outside the work: communicated
through the press or in production materials shared with scholars. As Gerald
Siegmund explains, part of the process of creation was to use the lines derived
from the visual analysis of the painting as a grid for the stage action. He also
points out that in this section of the work elastic cords were suspended across
the stage to simulate the presence of the absent body of Christ. But, despite this
visual subtext of lines that impose the structure of the analytic gaze as a skel-
etal grid upon the painterly composition, Clouds after Cranach I, testimony,
and the acts of translation and transcription upon which it is dependent are
fraught with uncertainty. Clouds become the “atmospherics”: signs of events
that resist through their sudden violence any form of retrospective mimesis. In
this sense, they are the polar opposite of analytic lines. This structural antin-
omy is symptomatic of what I see as operating throughout Three Atmospheric
Studies as the “structural” principle of trauma that both enables and forecloses
civil society. Civil society itself has become traumatized.
Yet there is always an element in the work that resists this state of affairs.
A third unidentified character played by David Kern presents pieces of evi-
dence and fragments of analysis to the audience, repeatedly using the term
“composition.” During the conversation between the mother and the official
Kern hovers around a box on a table center stage and also sets up the elastic
wires that simulate the analysis of the Cranach composition. He intercedes
suddenly in the dialogue underway on stage: “Unidentified figure in com-
position four.” From here, there is a counterpoint between the testimony
and translation and Kern, who consults images on the table, describes in
great detail elements of compositions we do not see, appears to substitute
other images for the one the mother is attempting to draw for the translator,
describes the actions of the first act at such a level of detail that they remain
persistently out of focus. In this way, Forsythe brings the idea of translation
into connection not only with the linguistic but with the visual. At moments,
Kern manages to intercede surrealistically in the dialogue between the
mother and the official, but neither acknowledge the strangeness of his pres-
ence or attempt to account for it.
The unexpected tour de force of this act emerges in the psychotic episode
of the mother, a solo for Jone San Martin in which she begins to space out her
language with gesture and establish a halting rhythmicity to her speech that
becomes at the same time a new study in movement. Further, her voice becomes
amplified and distorted against the background rumbling of the score, such
that San Martin takes leave of the scene as it had existed until this moment and
presents us with a suffering that is compounded of gesture, voice, words, move-
ment, rhythm, sound, and electronic distortion, which itself becomes a visual
and choreographic document. This solo highlights, for me, that everything
that remains intentionally unclear in Three Atmospheric Studies is an effect of
trauma as an extension of the experience of the mother. It is here that dance
rejoins speech and the visual to create a new counterpoint that is profoundly
342 M ark F ranko
disturbing, and that can be likened to Cranach’s clouds rather than to the art
historical analysis of the visual representation of the crucifixion or the admin-
istrative transcription or translation of events, let alone their memory. It is
significant that during this solo the mother disrupts the lines of the analysis of
the Christ composition. This is an occasion to reflect on Forsythe’s movement
style developed in the wake of his deconstructions of classical ballet and docu-
mented to some degree in his CD-â•‰ROM Improvisation Technologies because it
bears on the structural distinction between cloud and composition as well as
on the mother’s solo. Forsythe’s deconstruction of the classical body is also a
deconstruction of its capacity to delineate form as geometric shape.24 In the
decentering of this body, about which much has been written, we find an anal-
ogy with the import of clouds for the history of painting.
Taken together, the first two acts—â•‰Clouds after Cranach I and II—â•‰operate
as an ekphrasis,25 in other terms, as the attempt to describe a painting in
dance—â•‰Cranach’s crucifixion—â•‰but also as the attempt to put violence into
language, movement, and voice: to bear testimony to the scene in which the
son is arrested, to plead for his release for the ostensible purpose of placing
the collateral damage of the bombing in a police report, or procès-â•‰verbal.26 The
violence exists in the transition from the chaotic scene of the bomb exploding
to the deposition of testimony, in which transition one notes that the witness-
ing of the event cannot attain an adequate level of testimony and representa-
tion in the political sphere. As Cathy Caruth explains of trauma:
[Trauma] is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us
in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise avail-
able. This truth, in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot
be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our
very actions and our language. (Caruth 1996, 4)
At the same time, the attempt to describe the experience in words can be
considered a phenomenon of reenactment in the psychological context of rep-
etition compulsion proper to traumatic experience. I am suggesting here that
all forms of intermediality in this piece be accounted for as ekphrasis, and
that the problematic of translation for Forsythe here reaches the dimensions
of trauma. Michel Feher notes that “the political purpose of citing specific
intolerable experiences caused by a mode of government … is to question the
social norm that enables governing bodies to call upon unimpeachable prin-
ciples in order to justify objectionable policies” (Feher 2007, 17). The verbal
response of the Voice of the Military (Caspersen) in the third part of the work
is the annihilating response of the political sphere to the mother, in which
policy principles are themselves crucified.
FIGURES OF TR ANSLATION: EK PHR ASIS

The hybridity of Three Atmospheric Studies extends to genre. The work starts
as a ballet but then continues on as a theater piece that ends up looking like
a performance installation. The second and third acts (called parts) of Three
Atmospheric Studies are more static and conventionally dramatic than the
first, and rely to a greater extent on use of the spoken word in dramatic situa-
tions. What I wish to argue here, however, is that this generic hybridity is quite
intentional; what Gerald Siegmund calls the transpositions between media
can be considered a symptom of trauma transferred to the work’s structural
principle. Although thematically the concern is with the twisting of language,
as many critics have noted, the more disturbing twist is to the principle of dis-
course itself in whatever medium we consider. Without the acknowledgement
of the role of trauma in the composition of Three Atmospheric Studies, it is
subject to misunderstanding, as happened with some reviewers in the United
States who, although sympathetic to the work’s politics, found it aesthetically
unfocused.27
Three Atmospheric Studies was nevertheless made for the stage. Forsythe’s
performance installations usually take place in sites that are not theaters, and
in which the audience is invited to circulate freely with the option of becom-
ing participants rather than simply observers under controlled circumstances.
The spectator of the ballet is transformed into a visitor to a performance
installation, a visitor invited to engage with a certain number of objects or
tasks—â•‰through which the audience is induced to meditate on the connec-
tions suggested between an image, an action, and a broader theme or question.
More than most ballets, performance installations bring into play movement,
mediatized image, and text.28 The theme itself is frequently set forth through
text, but its meaning is engaged through a relation to the body. In Human
Writes, for instance, the text is the Declaration of Human Rights, fragments
of which the dancers attempt to write under physical duress. Despite the fact
that the audience of Three Atmospheric Studies cannot participate in this
way—â•‰they remain in their theater seats throughout—â•‰the visual and textual
clues they are given, and the sort of thinking they are asked to do, resemble
the performance installation. This hybridity is, I want to argue, a clue to how
Forsythe repositions the audience with respect to passivity. It is thus at this
juncture that the framework of civil society joins up with the structural issues
of hybridity. It is from this dual perspective that Three Atmospheric Studies is
an act of citizenship: for example, an action on behalf of the citizenry evoking
not a belonging to the state, nor national identity per se, but membership in a
different body outside the state apparatus. Civil society is concerned with how
individuals operate outside of the allegiances and operations of the state. And,
344 M ark F ranko
similarly, choreography operates outside any symbolic practice of social order

or organization.
Three Atmospheric Studies starts, with Clouds after Cranach I, like a ballet
in the theater before a seated audience. Jone San Martin walks toward the
audience and says, “This is Composition One, in which my son was arrested.”
She points to another dancer, Ander Zabala, who holds a defensive position
with his arms above his head. We are later given the context: a bomb has
exploded in a public place. Alongside the visual document of Cranach the
Elder is the press photo of several men running from an explosion carry-
ing a body with them. Ten other dancers stand at the back of the stage; their
attitude is straightforward and businesslike (it feels at first almost more like
a rehearsal than a performance). The twelve dancers engage in a silent group
improvisation in which freeze frames indicate snapshots of violence through
the evocation of wartime journalistic photography. One characteristic of this
sort of imagery is that its narrative can rarely be reconstructed. As such, it
participates in the structure of trauma as unassimilated experience. This
powerful opening is nonetheless a choreographic scene: it suggests mayhem,
but at the technical level of the improvisation particular to Forsythe’s ensem-
ble it also demonstrates the potential for exemplary cooperation among the
dancers; it suggests a borderline between civil chaos and civil society. Even
as this segment depicts the intrusion of war into the civilian population of
Iraq, it also hints at the mobilization of civil society implicit in any common
response to this aggression. In it, we see what the potentiality of what Feher
has called in his discussion of the contemporary manifestations of civil soci-
ety “the political movements of the governed” (Feher 2007, 13). It is both a
compelling rendering of chaos in a war-torn scene and, from a technical per-
spective, a danced model for civil society. It is the eerie stillness held between
the disparate and fragmented interactions of the twelve dancers that most
effectively suggest violence, which is contained more in the abrupt pauses—
frequently related to pain—t han in the movement itself, which never reaches
for an expressionist dimension. Violence, on the other hand, also emerges
from the impossibility of resolving the simultaneous movement of all twelve
dancers into one coherent composition. Yet one is mesmerized by the chang-
ing configurations of the mass in which a face, a gesture, a posture—a ll con-
noting fear and violence—are pinpointed by the moments of suspension of
the action. Gerald Siegmund has stressed the visual aspect of this part of the
work, referring to it as a picture. This section is doubtless a choreographic
tour de force, which has been called Forsythe’s Guernica, although, for me,
it is more like Goya’s Horrors of War in a nonmimetic, postmodern dimen-
sion. But what serves to underscore its heightened pictoriality is precisely
our inability to discern within its constant metamorphoses a fixed shape or
meaning. In this sense, Clouds after Cranach I aligns itself with the cloud
phenomenon itself. To cite Damisch: “Cloud, in the ever changing variety of
its forms, may be considered the basis, if not the model, of all metamorpho-
ses” (Damisch 2002, 23).
If generic hybridity aspires to stage dialogue in the midst of a ballet, the
question of ekphrasis (from painting to dance) and of translation (from
English to Arabic) gives hybridity a structural content within each section of
the piece. The work’s generic hybridity might itself be a device related to the
question of a response. But the content of these three scenes also exceeds ratio-
nality or the clear possibility of reflective thought; Three Atmospheric Studies
theorizes its own hybridity by revealing the apparently impossible boundary
between experience, testimony, and representation. If, as Caruth claims, “for
history to be a history of trauma means that it is referential to the extent that
it is not fully perceived as it occurs,” then Three Atmospheric Studies, whose
interpretive challenges bespeak the erasure of the referential, imposes inter-
pretive challenges on its audience designed to enlist their advocacy. So, if
Three Atmospheric Studies navigates between the conventional assumption of
the spectator’s passivity and the intent to engage the spectator’s advocacy, this
can only occur through the imbalance between bodies, memory, and histori-
cal reference. This is, in other terms, the trope of civilians in contemporary
warfare.
It is for this reason that I think the structural contradiction between
lines and clouds is pertinent to our understanding of this work. First of all,
lines imply flatness, whereas clouds imply volume. Forsythe is also elabo-
rating a structural reflection on the relation of writing to language, body,
and image whose civil society impulse, in the case of Three Atmospheric
Studies, is communicated to the audience as a demand to unravel hybrid-
ity through the fog of war.29 Yet what the work actually does is to frustrate
any such attempt to “make sense” of this choreography. Its function, in
fact, is to be untranslatable and point thus at the crisis in rational-critical
discourse and possibly a radical rethinking of civil society. In this sense,
Three Atmospheric Studies is an exploration of communication as transla-
tion, but one in which the target language and the idiom of translation are
in an undecidable relationship. The political “statement” comes in the final
scene, but the first two scenes are those setting forth the blockages to trans-
lation, which are equally blockages to thought, memory, public sphere, and
rational-critical discourse. This amounts to the incommensurability of the
social and the political.
Now that this relationship has been sundered, we are left with the mayhem
of suffering bodies, but also with the hope choreography holds out of dealing
directly with the mayhem and “structuring” it such that its aporias can be
346 M ark F ranko
refelt and reflected upon. This would be the choreographic public sphere in
action, which is in actuality post-â•‰civil society even though, paradoxically, it is
on view in a theater.
NOTES
1. The Forsythe Company premiered Three Atmospheric Studies in Berlin in 2005. It
was performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in New York in March
2007. Although I was not able to attend that performance, I viewed the videotape.
I wish to thank BAM for giving me access to it.
2. I am thinking here of the classic distinction between society and the state that
motivates in one form or another all concepts of civil society, its possibility, and
its effectiveness as a counterpoint to politics properly speaking.
3. Herfried Münkler (2003) identifies three major features for wars of the 21st cen-
tury: demilitarization, privatization/â•‰commercialization, and asymmetry. By
demilitarization, he means that wars are fought only partially by soldiers and are
no longer aimed predominately at military targets. Civilian targets now replace
military ones much more frequently than in traditional state warfare.
4. See Roal et al. (2005).
5. See Franko (1993/â•‰2015).
6. Given its assumed distance from politics, dance might be presumed to be the
quintessential civil society pursuit, but given its presumed distance from rational-â•‰
critical discourse, it might also be presumed to be precritical. That neither of these
is the case is beyond the scope of this chapter to demonstrate. See my “Dance and
Articulation” in The Handbook of Dance and Politics (Franko, forthcoming).
7. For more on Forsythe’s relationship with his homeland, see Franko (2011b). At
the time of this writing, Forsythe has left Germany for the United States, and will
also serve as associate choreographer at the Paris Opera.
8. “I’m a citizen,” says Forsythe. “And I have the opportunity to speak in public and
many people don’t. Dance happens to be the medium I have access to. I feel obli-
gated on some level to use it to make a comment” (O’Mahoney 2006). The idea of
the artist as citizen was reiterated at the New York premiere in 2007: “To those
who question whether dance and politics make good partners, the ever provoca-
tive Mr. Forsythe is ready with a question of his own: ‘Since when aren’t artists
citizens?’â•›” (Solway 2007).
9. For another attempt to deal with the theme of choreography and response, see
Franko 2004.
10. The important notion of the counterpublic is developed by Michael Warner
(2005): “Counterpublics are spaces of circulation in which it is hoped that the
poesis of scene making will be transformative, not replicative merely” (2005, 122).
For an interesting reflection on radical democracy and its neglect of class and
power, see Barbara Epstein (1996).
11. “The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private
people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated
from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate
over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly
relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor” (Habermas 1994, 27).
12. In his 1995 article, Michael Hardt links the provenance of the concept of civil
society in Hegel to labor: “In political philosophy, civil society is fundamentally
linked to the modern notion of labor” (1995, 27).
13. See Franko (2009), 27–40.
14. For more historical background on the relation of dance to immaterial labor, see
Franko (2003).
15. Howard (2007).
16. Forsythe reported this at a preperformance discussion at the Brooklyn Academy
of Music (March 2, 2007).
17. Jennifer Dunning, “Deconstructing the Costs, and Emotions, of Warfare,”
New York Times, March 2, 2007.
18. See the essay by Alessandra Nicifero in this volume.
19. See Cohen and Arato (2007) and Feher (2007).
20. For an impeccable analysis of the piece itself, see the chapter by Gerald Siegmund
in this volume.
21. On Forsythe’s installation work, see Sabine Huschka (2010, 61– 72). Gerald
Siegmund speaks of a space opened up by speech at the start of the work.
22. For more on this, see the article by Gerald Siegmund in this volume.
23. Damish recognizes “the opposition between the ‘linear’ and the ‘pictorial,’ ” rela-
tive to a painting by Zurbaran, as “more than solely stylistic”: “It sets two sty-
listic configurations that seem to be contradictory within a single field, which,
however, at the same time reveals that both belong to a more general structure
with regard to which the opposition itself becomes significant” (2002, 144). I am
arguing here that the opposition between the linear and the pictorial in Three
Atmospheric Studies points to a semiosis of trauma.
24. Of course, it does so through the very techniques that enabled the appearance
of classicism as an art of the body, but this would be precisely what makes it a
deconstruction, which always leaves intact that which it seeks to unravel.
25. By ekphrasis I mean the description of a work of art by means of another medium.
26. Although Siegmund is dubious about the reasons for this interview, I feel it is
clear that the mother seeks redress in this scene. It is her ability to do so as she
deals with traumatic experience that is foregrounded by the end, and is continued
into the third scene in which she remains mute when faced with Bush.
27. Susan Reiter called it “a deeply personal, unsettling (and not always ideally
focused) work.” Danceviewtimes, March 12, 2007, http://archives.danceview-
times.com/2007/Winter/10/forsythebam.html.
28. There are of course exceptions in Forsythe’s oeuvre to this neat demarcation,
most notably Kammer/Kammer, which, although performed on a stage, engages
with all three modalities proper to the performance installation. In evoking a
distinction between ballet and performance installation I do not mean to estab-
lish an ontological critique of either. I find the thesis of the nondifferentiation of
these forms from the point of view of a philosophical aesthetics to be probative.
See Rebentisch (2012).
29. For more on this line of interpretation of Forsythe’s work, see Franko (2010, 2011a).
348 M ark F ranko
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CONTRIBUTORS
Harmony Bench is assistant professor of history and theory in the Department

of Dance at The Ohio State University. Her writing can be found in Dance
Research Journal, the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital
Media, Participations, and the International Journal of Screendance, for which
she currently serves as coeditor. In addition to publishing essays on net.art,
viral videos, flash mobs, mobile media, dance on television, and dance video
games, she is working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled Dance as
Common: Movement as Belonging in Digital Cultures.
Maaike Bleeker is professor and chair of theatre studies at Utrecht University
(the Netherlands). Since 1991, she has also worked as a dramaturge for various
theater directors, choreographers, and visual artists. She has published exten-
sively on theater, dance, and visual arts and edited several books and journals,
including Anatomy Live: Performance and the Operating Theatre (2008). Her
book Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking was published in 2008 by
Palgrave. She was an artist in residence at the Amsterdam School for the Arts
(2006–â•‰2007). Since May 2011, she has been president of Performance Studies
International.
Derek A. Burrill is an associate professor in the Department of Media and
Cultural Studies at UC Riverside. He is the author of two books, Die Tryin’:
Videogames, Masculinity, Culture (2008) and The Other Guy: Media Masculinity
within the Margins (2014). His essays have appeared in Modern Drama, Text
Technology, Social Semiotics, and Television and New Media. He sits on the edi-
torial boards of Games and Culture and Journal of Games and Virtual Worlds.
Sarah Davies Cordova is professor of French and Francophone literatures
and cultures at the University of Wisconsin–â•‰Milwaukee. Her current research
examines literature and dance performance in relationship to their intersection
with memory and the histories of forced migrations, dictatorships, genocide,
352 Contributors
and conflict. Her interdisciplinary work focuses on social and theatrical

dance representations in 19th-century France and in Francophone colonial
and postcolonial works of the Antilles and Africa. Her publications include
Paris Dances: Textual Choreographies in the Nineteenth- Century French
Novel, re-editions of little known Balzacian early works concerning Haiti
and Africans in France and Hippolyte Carnot’s 1824 translation of Gunima,
and articles on Antillean and West African women’s literature and 19th-and
21st-century women dancers. From 2005 to 2008 she directed Marquette
University’s Service Learning Program in Cape Town, and she is affiliated
with the University of Johannesburg as Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty
of Humanities.
Mark Franko is Linda H. Carnell professor of dance and coordinator of
graduate studies in the Dance Department of the Boyer College of Music
and Dance, Temple University (Philadelphia). He received his PhD from
Columbia University in French and romance philology and was a profes-
sional dancer before becoming a scholar. He has published six books: Martha
Graham in Love and War: The Life in the Work; Excursion for Miracles: Paul
Sanasardo, Donya Feuer, and Studio for Dance; The Work of Dance: Labor,
Movement, and Identity in the 1930s; Dancing Modernism/ Performing
Politics; Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body; and The Dancing
Body in Renaissance Choreography. He is the editor of two anthologies:
Ritual and Event: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and, with Annette Richards,
Acting on the Past: Historical Performance across the Disciplines. Franko also
edits Dance Research Journal and is founding editor of the Oxford Studies
in Dance Theory book series. He is the recipient of the 2011 Outstanding
Scholarly Research in Dance Award of the Congress in Research in Dance.
A revised edition of his Dance as Text has been issued by Oxford University
Press.
Jens Richard Giersdorf is professor of dance at Marymount Manhattan
College. Giersdorf earned a Magister in theater, dance, and music theatre
theory from the University of Leipzig and received his PhD in dance history
and theory from the University of California, Riverside. He has taught at the
University of Surrey and at the University of California, Riverside. His research
focuses on choreographies of nationhood and locality in a global context as
well as epistemological investigations in dance studies. He has published in a
number of peer-reviewed journals including Dance Research Journal, Theatre
Journal, GLQ, Forum Modernes Theater, and Maska. His work has been trans-
lated and anthologized in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Italy, Serbia, and
Germany. His monograph The Body of the People (University of Wisconsin
Press) is the first study on dance in East Germany, and the German transla-
tion, Volkseigene Körper, was published by Transcript Verlag in 2014. In his
Contributors 353
professional affiliations, Giersdorf is a member of the editorial boards of the

Society of Dance History Scholars and Dancer Research Journal.
Ruth Hellier-Tinoco is a scholar, creative artist, and professor at the University
of California, Santa Barbara, where her interdisciplinary research, practice,
and teaching are focused on experimental performance making, the politics
and poetics of 20th-and 21st-century performance (theater, dance, music) of
Mexico in national and transnational contexts, and community arts and social
justice. Her publications include Embodying Mexico: Tourism, Nationalism,
and Performance (Oxford University Press, 2011), Women Singers in Global
Contexts: Music, Biography, Identity (University of Illinois Press, 2013), and
Theater of Time, Memory, and History in Mexico (Intellect, forthcoming),
focusing on La Máquina de Teatro of Mexico City. She serves on the board
of directors for the Congress on Research in Dance and is editor of the bina-
tional, bilingual journal Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos and co-chair of
Arts and Cultures Working Group of the UC-Mexico Initiative.
Janez Janša (formerly known as Emil Hrvatin) is an author, director, and per-
former of interdisciplinary performances. He studied sociology and theater
directing at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and performance theory at
the University of Antwerp. He has created many performances and installa-
tions in Slovenia and abroad. He has published widely on contemporary theater
and art, including a book on Flemish artist and theater maker Jan Fabre. Since
1999 he has been the director of Maska, a nonprofit organization involved in
publishing, production, and education, based in Ljubljana.
Neelima Jeychandran is a Mellon visiting assistant professor in the “Reimagining
Indian Ocean Worlds” research initiative at University of California, Davis.
She was also a junior research fellow at the Humanities Institute of New York
University, Abu Dhabi. A scholar of visual cultures and performances of South
Asia and West Africa, she also studies the role of museums as “contact zones.”
She has worked as an independent curator on several ethnographic and con-
temporary art exhibitions in India. She was awarded a PhD in culture and
performance from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2014.
Bill T. Jones is artistic director/co-founder/choreographer of the Bill T. Jones/
Arnie Zane Dance Company and artistic director of New York Live Arts. He
is the recipient of the 2013 National Medal of Arts, the 2010 Kennedy Center
Honors, two Tony Awards for Best Choreography (for FELA! and for Spring
Awakening), the 2005 Wexner Prize, the 2003 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize,
the 1994 MacArthur “Genius” Award, and the French government’s Officier
de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, among other awards. In 2000, the Dance
Heritage Coalition named Jones an Irreplaceable Dance Treasure. Jones
choreographed and performed worldwide with his late partner, Arnie Zane,
354 Contributors
before forming the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in 1982. He is the
founding artistic director of New York Live Arts, an organization that strives
to create a robust framework in support of the nation’s dance and movement-
based artists.
Rosie Kay trained at London Contemporary Dance School and formed
Rosie Kay Dance Company in 2004. Kay has created award-winning works
that include Sluts of Possession (2013), in collaboration with the Pitt Rivers
Museum; There Is Hope (2012), exploring religion, 5 SOLDIERS—The Body Is
The Frontline (2010–2015), which is touring in the United Kingdom and inter-
nationally; and Double Points: K (2008), in collaboration with Emio Greco|PC.
Site-specific works include Haining Dreaming (2013); The Great Train Dance
(2011), on the Severn Valley Railway; and Ballet on the Buses (2007). Kay
creates installation and dance films: 5 SOLDIERS—The Film was exhibited
at the Herbert Gallery, Coventry, and the Stadtmuseum Dresden, and is in
the film collection of la Médiathèque du Centre National de la Danse, Paris.
Feature Film credits include choreographer for Sunshine on Leith (2013). Kay
was the first Leverhulme Artist in Residence to the School of Anthropology
and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, 2013–2014, and is currently
research associate, with the first paper published in medical humanities. Kay
is associate artist of danceXchange, Birmingham.
Rose Martin holds a PhD from the University of Auckland, New Zealand,
where she is now a lecturer in dance studies. Her research interests are dance
pedagogy, dance in postcolonial contexts, dance and politics, and cross-
cultural dance education. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Dance
Education, Research in Dance Education, and Qualitative Inquiry. Martin
is the author of Women, Dance and Revolution (forthcoming) and, with
Nicholas Rowe and Ralph Buck, Talking Dance: Contemporary Histories from
the Southern Mediterranean (2013). She trained at the New Zealand School
of Dance and is a former dancer with the Royal New Zealand Ballet. She has
taught dance at the Cairo Modern Dance Company; Higher Institute of Dance,
Syria; El-Funoun Palestinian Dance Troupe; Jordanian National Dance Center;
and Lebanese American University. She has lectured at Utrecht University,
Lebanese American University, University of the Arts Helsinki, Town House
Gallery Cairo, World Dance Alliance Global Summits, and Society of Dance
History Scholars Conferences.
Gay Morris is a New York–based dance and art critic whose work has appeared
in numerous publications, including Dance Research, Dance Research Journal,
ARTnews, Modernist Cultures, and Body and Society. She is a frequent con-
tributor to Art in America and Dance View. She is the author of A Game for
Contributors 355
Dancers: Performing Modernism in the Postwar Years, 1945–1960 (Wesleyan

University Press, 2006), which won the De La Torre Bueno Award for out-
standing contribution to dance literature. In addition, she is the editor of a
collection, Moving Words, Rewriting Dance (Routledge, 1996). Morris is a
member of the International Art Critics Association, serves on the editorial
board of Congress on Research in Dance (CORD), and is the reviews editor
for Dance Research Journal. She holds a PhD in sociology from Goldsmiths
College, University of London.
Alessandra Nicifero is a dance writer and translator based in New York. Her
articles have appeared in Hystrio and Danza&Danza. Her book, Bill T. Jones,
was published by L’Epos in 2010, and her translation of Selected Poems by Elio
Pecora was published by Gradiva in 2014. She serves on the editorial board of
Dance Research Journal.
Janet O’Shea is author of At Home in the World: Bharata Natyam on the
Global Stage, coeditor of the Routledge Dance Studies Reader (2nd ed.), and
a member of the editorial review board for the online Routledge Encyclopedia
of Modernism. She recently received a UCLA transdisciplinary seed grant to
study the cognitive benefits of hard-style martial arts training. Her essays have
been published in three languages and six countries. In addition to academic
writing, she has published general nonfiction and short fiction. Recipient of
the Association for Asian Studies First Book Award and the Society of Dance
History Scholars Selma Jeanne Cohen Award, she is professor of world arts
and cultures/dance at UCLA.
Ariel Osterweis, a visiting assistant professor in the Dance Department at
Skidmore College, was an assistant professor of dance at Wayne State University.
She earned her PhD in performance studies at UC Berkeley and BA in anthro-
pology at Columbia University. She is at work on her first book, on Desmond
Richardson and the politics of race, gender, and virtuosity in contemporary
dance. Osterweis also researches sub-Saharan African dance and the disavowal
of virtuosity in mixed-race, feminist, and trans performance art. Her articles
have appeared in Dance Research Journal, Women and Performance, e-misférica,
Theatre Survey, TDR/The Drama Review, The Oxford Handbook of Dance, Popular
Screen, and more. Osterweis danced with Complexions Contemporary Ballet,
Mia Michaels RAW, and Heidi Latsky Dance, choreographs, and is dramaturg
for choreographer John Jasperse and performance artist Narcissister. She is on
the board of directors of the Society of Dance History Scholars and Dance/NYC.
Dee Reynolds is professor of French at the University of Manchester. She is the
author of Rhythmic Subjects: Uses of Energy in the Dances of Mary Wigman,
Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham (Dance Books, 2007) and Symbolist
356 Contributors
Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art: Sites of Imaginary Space (Cambridge

University Press, 1995). She also coedited, with Penny Florence, Feminist
Methodologies: Multi-Media (Manchester University Press, 1995) and, with
Matthew Reason, Kinesthesia, Empathy and Related Pleasures: An Inquiry into
Audience Experiences of Watching Dance (Intellect, 2010). In addition, she has
edited several special issues of journals, including a Dance Research Electronic
issue on dance and neuroscience (2012). Her work has appeared in numer-
ous edited collections and journals, including Body and Society; Body, Space
and Technology Journal; Dance Research; and Dance Research Journal. From
2008 to 2011 she directed the research project Watching Dance: Kinesthetic
Empathy (http://w ww.watchingdance.org), funded by the Arts and Humanities
Research Council, and she is director of a three-year international network
funded by the Leverhulme Trust, Evaluating Methods of Aesthetic Enquiry
across Disciplines, 2015–2018.
Nicholas Rowe graduated from the Australian Ballet School and worked with
the Finnish National Ballet, Australian Ballet, Sydney Dance Company, Royal
New Zealand Ballet, Nomad Dance Theatre, and Modern Dance Turkey. From
2000 to 2008, Nicholas lived in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, work-
ing with local dance groups and directing dance education projects in refugee
camps. His books include Art, During Siege (2004), Raising Dust: A Cultural
History of Dance in Palestine (2010), Moving Oceans: Celebrating Dance in the
South Pacific (2013), Talking Dance: Contemporary Histories from the Southern
Mediterranean (2014), and Talking Dance: Contemporary Histories from the
South China Sea (2015). His films include The Secret World (2009). Nicholas
holds a PhD in dance studies from the University of Kent at Canterbury and is
currently an associate professor in dance studies at the University of Auckland.
Yehuda Sharim is a postdoctoral fellow in Jewish studies at Rice University.
He holds a PhD in culture and performance from the UCLA Department of
World Arts and Cultures. He also received a BA in English literature from
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an MA in performance from Goldsmiths
College—University of London, and an MA in performance studies from
New York University. His upcoming book, tentatively titled The Struggle for
Sephardic-Mizrahi Autonomy: Racial Identities in Palestine, 1918–1948, is con-
cerned with interdisciplinary approaches to the question of race in Mandate
Palestine. His research chronicles the creation of a Sephardic- Mizrahi—
literally, “Oriental”—Jewish identity, uncovering how cultural and racial fac-
tors contributed to the production of this identity, particularly in regard to
struggles over citizenship and racial belonging.
Contributors 357
Gerald Siegmund is professor for applied theater studies at the Justus-Liebig

University in Giessen, Germany. He studied theater, English and French lit-
erature at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, from which he also received
his PhD with a thesis on theater as memory. Between 2005 and 2008 he was
professor for contemporary theatre at the University of Berne, Switzerland.
Gerald Siegmund is author of numerous articles on contemporary dance and
theater performance, as well as editor of the book William Forsythe: Denken
in Bewegung, published in 2004 by Henschel Verlag, Berlin. His most recent
monograph, Abwesenheit: Eine performative Ästhetik des Tanzes, was pub-
lished in 2006. It includes in-depth studies of the work of Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le
Roy, Meg Stuart, and William Forsythe. In 2013, he published Dance, Politics,
and Co-Immunity together with Stefan Hölscher. Gerald Siegmund currently
is president of the Gesellschaft für Theaterwissenschaft (German Association
of Theater Studies).
INDEX
Abu Hijleh, Lana, 30 games studies and, 68–71

Access Denied (Ramallah Dance Theater) tie-ins of, 73–77
description of, 35–40, 36, 38–39 videogame at, 63–64, 71–73, 77, 79
genesis and making of, 25–26, 28–35 Amie (dance practictioner), 209–12
performance and impact of, 40–41 Amisi, Baruti, 106n12
Acosta, Martín, 292, 295, 310n6. See also Anastasopoulos, Julia, 91
Timboctou (Ricaño) Ancient Greece, 5
Act of Valor (film), 65 Anderson, Benedict, 130n14
acupuncture, 279–280, 282 Angola, 87–88
Adkins, Brett, 108n27 antiapartheid, 53
aesthetics of vulgarity, 276 Aouni, Walid, 217
affective temporalities apartheid and antiapartheid, 6, 85–86
dance videogames and, 160–61, Arab Spring (2010–2011), 207–9, 211–12,
168–177, 172, 175 214, 217–18
definition and use of term, 157–161 Armed Forces Entertainment (AFE),
So You Think You Can Dance and, 159, 236–37
160–68, 165, 176–77 army entertainment, 231–240. See
Affleck, Ben, 237 also We Are All Marlene Dietrich
Afghanistan, 243–44 FOR: Performance for Peacekeeping
Afkar Media (Syrian publishing company), Soldiers (Ómarsdóttir and Janša)
77–78 Army Experience Center, 74–75
Agamben, Giorgio, 10, 51, 58 “Art and Theory of Art” (Clausewitz), 292
Ahmed, Ishtiaq, 183 asymmetrical warfare
Algeria, 207 characteristics of, 2–5, 296
Alleg, Henri, 45–46 choreography and, 1–2
Allon, Yigal, 136 civil society and, 333–34
Amelan, Dora, 206 Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking
American Idol (television show), 161 and, 91
American Psychological Association 5 SOLDIERS: The Body Is the Frontline
(APA), 59–60n8 and, 242
America’s Army (website) impact of, 185
as component of state and military in Palestine, 33
policy, 63–68, 75, 78–80 refugees and, 89–90
360 Index
Atta, Mohamad, 29 Bobbitt, Philip, 3

El-Attar, Ahmed, 215 Border Security Force (BSF, India). See
audience. See qualitative audience research lowering of flags ceremonies (India-
Awadallah, Ruba, 32, 36 Pakistan border)
borders. See lowering of flags ceremonies
Badwan, Raed, 31, 38 (India-Pakistan border)
Bains, Anurita, 107n17 Boss, Stephen (tWitch), 163
Baker, Noora, 31 Bouazizi, Mohamed, 207
Ballard, Richard, 106n12 Bourdieu, Pierre, 89, 141
ballet, 9, 208–10. See also Three Bowden, Charles, 294
Atmospheric Studies (Forsythe) Braidotti, Rosi, 46–47
Balmori, Ichi, 310n6, 312n10 Bryant, Brandon, 164
Band of Brothers (television show), 65 Buddhism, 119, 120
Banes, Sally, 6 Buffard, Alain, 48
Barahi, G., 141 Bulc, Mare, 231–32, 234–38
Barak, Ehud, 147 Burden, Chris, 6
Barghouti, Omar, 29–30 Burstyn, Varda, 191
Bar-Khama, Amos, 140–41 Burundi, 87–88
Barnes, Linda L., 280 Bush, George W.
Battlefield 3 (videogame), 80n2 legitimacy of, 336
Bausch, Pina, 91 war on terror and, 158, 204, 291, 299,
beating-retreat ceremony, 191. See also 326–28
lowering of flags ceremonies (India- Butler, Judith, 54–55
Pakistan border)
Bejart, Maurice, 210 Cage, John, 205–6
Bengal, 183–84 Cairo Contemporary Dance Center
Benjamin, Walter, 80 (formerly Cairo Modern Dance
Benveniste, Émile, 105–6n10 School), 217, 218n4
Bergmann, Martin, 53 Cairo Opera Ballet Company, 208–9, 210,
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 218n4
55–56 Cairo Opera House, 212–13
Bhagavad Gita, 196 Calderón, Felipe, 291, 306
bharata natyam (dance) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4
examples of, 111–14 (videogame), 69, 75
functions of, 114–18, 122, 126–28 Canadian Forces Personnel Support
history of, 122–24 Agency (CFPSA), 237
Tamil identity and, 119, 120, 123–24 Carlson, Carolyn, 107n18
Al-Bijawi (Sareyyet Ramallah Group), Carnatic music, 119
26–27, 28 Caruth, Cathy, 337, 342, 345
biopolitics, 4 Caspersen, Dana, 326–27, 336
biopower, 4 censorship
Black Eyed Peas, 255 in Egypt, 208, 210–11, 213–14, 215, 217
Black Narcissus, 211 in Palestine, 25, 27
Blind Date (Jones), 203–6 See also self-censorship
bling, 273 Centre National de la Danse (Angers), 48
Boal, Augusto, 91 checkpoints, 33, 34
Index 361
Cheney, Dick, 204 Damisch, Hubert, 338–39, 345

chhau, 191 Dance Central (videogame), 159, 160–61,
Chibas, Marissa, 310n6 168–69, 172–77, 175
choreography Dance Dance Revolution (videogame),
asymmetrical warfare and, 1–2 81n4, 159, 160–61, 168–173, 172,
evolution of, 8–10 174–76
identity and, 192–93 dance studies, 7, 68–69
politics and, 9–12 dance training, 169–171, 173,
war and, 5–8 246–49
Church of Stop Shopping, 236 dance videogames, 81n4, 159, 160–61,
Churi, Anila, 301 168–177, 172
citizenship, 334–37, 339, 343–44 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research
civil society, 333–37, 343–44 Projects Agency), 65
Clacherty, Glynis, 91 Dayan, Moshe, 136
The Clash of Cultures in Israel (Shumsky), De Boeck, Filip, 270–72, 276, 281, 283
139 De Mel, Neloufer, 129–130n12
Clausewitz, Carl von, 3, 11, 127, 291–92 de Peuter, Grieg, 75
Clouds after Cranach I and II (Forsythe), Deeley, Cat, 164, 166–67
317, 325–26 Defense Advanced Research Projects
Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, Agency (DARPA), 65
59–60n8 degenerate wars, 1–2. See also
Coffey, Ted, 206 asymmetrical warfare
Cohen, Robyn, 106n16 Deleuze, Gilles, 46, 159
Coker, Christopher, 5 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC),
Cold War, 291–92, 298, 305–6 87–88, 270–73. See also Linyekula,
Combined Services Entertainment (CSE), 237 Faustin; ndombolo (Congolese
commandement, 276 music)
community Der Derian, James, 71, 243, 253
dance competitions and, 163 Derrida, Jacques, 55, 89
LTTE and, 124–25 detention, 33, 34
memories and, 46–47 Dharmapala, Anagarika, 119
Shalit affair and, 149 Diary: How to Improve the World (You
sumud and, 30–31 Will Only Make Matters Worse)
voice and, 56–57 (Cage), 205–6
Connell, R. W., 81n12 differend, 340
Contour, Catherine, 48 Dinozord, 274
Cotterrell, David, 248–49, 259 disability, 244
Cranach, Lucas, the Elder, 317, 320–23, Dolar, Mladen, 56
325–26, 338–39, 341–42, 345 Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival
Crazy Body Group, 211 (D-Caf), 215
curfews, 33, 34 Duboc, Odile, 48
Dumisa, Thabisa, 105n8
dabkeh (rural folkdance), 27, 208 D’umo, Napoleon and Tabitha, 163
Dada, 6 Dunning, Jennifer, 337
Dalia (dance practictioner), 209–10, Dupray, Virginie, 284n4
212–15 Dyer-Witheford, Nick, 75
362 Index
École du Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, 91 structure of, 250–51, 250

Egypt Fleishman, Mark, 86, 91, 92, 103
Arab Spring uprisings in, 207–9, 211–12, folkdance, 27
214, 217–18 Forbidden (documentary), 219n11
dance and politics in, 208–18 Forsythe, William, 334. See also
Egyptian Folkloric Dance Company, Three Atmospheric Studies
218n4 (Forsythe)
Egyptian Modern Dance Theater “Fort-Da” game, 55–56
Company, 212–13, 217, 218n4 Foster, Susan Leigh
Einstein, Albert, 46 on body in public protest, 212, 218
Eisenhower, Dwight, 204 on empathy and kinesthesia, 70
electronic dance music (EDM), 169, 170 on hired body, 162, 238
Ellayan, Khaled, 29 on identity, 134
embodiment, 8, 68–70, 79, 172 on narrative, 192–93
The Emigrants (Sebald), 206 Fouad, Mohammed, 219n11
empathy, 70, 147, 162 Foucault, Michel, 4, 7–8, 11, 159
Eritrea, 87–88 fourth generation wars, 1–2. See also
Esposito, Roberto, 4–5, 46 asymmetrical warfare
Ethiopia, 87–88 Franko, Mark, 8, 331, 332n5
Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking Freeman, Elizabeth, 158, 176
(Magnet Theatre) Freire, Paulo, 107n20
choreographic structure of, 102–3 French Revolution, 5–6
description of, 92–101, 94–96, 99 Freud, Sigmund, 55–56
genesis and making of, 90–92 El-Funoun Popular Dance Troupe, 26–27,
representation of refugees in, 86–87, 28, 29–30, 40
90–92, 103–4 Futurism, 6
shoes in, 101–2, 101
Gallimore, Béatrice Rangira, 108n26
Far… (Ouramdane), 49–50 Galloway, Daniel, 91
Farber, Viola, 48 Galvanek, Paxton, 81n9
Feher, Michel, 342 games studies, 68–71
Festival of Lies (Linyekula), 276–78, 277 Gandhi, Indira, 121
Feuillet, Raoul Auger, 8 Ganguly, Sumit, 184
first-person shooters (FPSs), 64–66, Gardner, Frank, 252
68–69. See also America’s Army Geertz, Clifford, 282
(website) Generation Kill (television show), 65
5 SOLDIERS: The Body Is the Frontline geo-choreography, 269–270
(Rosie Kay Dance Company) Gibler, John, 297, 305
body and injury in, 241–46, 242, globalization, 3
260–63, 261 Gonzalez, Amancio, 319, 323–24, 340
genesis and making of, 245–250 Gottschild, Brenda Dixon, 276
key moments and audience responses Gray, Glen, 246
in, 255–263, 256, 259, 261 Gross, David, 159
political context of, 243–44 Grusin, Richard, 159–160, 164, 168–69,
qualitative audience research and, 171, 177
251–55, 257–58, 260, 262–65 Guthrie, Charles, 265n6
Index 363
Habermas, Jürgen, 335, 336, 337 “I Gotta Feeling” (song), 255

Hafez, Adham, 219n11 Iceland Dance Company (Reykjavik).
Haganah, 136–37 See We Are All Marlene Dietrich
Haifa, Beirut wa Baed (El-Funoun Popular FOR: Performance for Peacekeeping
Dance Troupe), 26–27, 28 Soldiers (Ómarsdóttir and Janša)
Hajjar, Lisa, 59n3 “Imagine” (song), 232, 234
Hamas, 25 Immunitas (Esposito), 46
Hanna, Judith Lynne, 214 imperialism and empire, 4
haptic theory, 70 Improvisation Technologies (Forsythe),
Hardt, Michael, 2, 4, 311n8, 335–36 342
Hardy, Oliver, 301 India
Harmonix, 172. See also Dance Central Mumbai terrorist attacks and, 185, 196
(videogame) Pakistan and, 183–85
Harrison Narcotic Act (1914), 291 Sri Lanka and, 120–22
Hawayat, 27 See also lowering of flags ceremonies
Hayner, Priscilla B., 53 (India-Pakistan border)
Help for Heroes (charity), 244 Indian Councils Act (1909), 183
Hemalatha, Miranda, 114 informal wars, 1–2. See also asymmetrical
Hezbollah, 77 warfare
Hicks, Janine, 88, 105n8 injuries, 241–46, 242, 260–63, 261
Higher Institute of Ballet (Egypt), interventionist art, 236
218n4 Iqbal, Muhammad, 183
Hinduism, 119, 120, 122, 183–84 Iran, 211
hip-hop, 48, 273–75, 282 Iraq War, 243–44, 326–28
Hob (Sareyyet Ramallah Group), 27 Islam and Muslims, 118, 325–26. See also
Hölscher, Stefan, 8 September 11 terrorist attacks
Homefront (videogame), 65, 69, 75 (2001)
Hong Kong, 194–95 Israel
Hoskins, Andrew, 157, 167, 168–69, expansion of military codes to society
170 in, 134, 143–44
Hosni, Farouk, 217 Shalit affair and, 133–34, 144–150
hostipitality, 88–90, 103–4 The Israeli Fitness Strategy (Bar-Khama
Howard, Rachel, 336 and Shoenfeld), 140–41
Hrvatin, Emil (now Janez Janša). See
We Are All Marlene Dietrich Jackson, Shannon, 10, 11
FOR: Performance for Jamat-ul-Ahrar, 189
Peacekeeping Soldiers (Ómarsdóttir James, Etta, 205
and Janša) Jammu and Kashmir, 184
Huntemann, Nina B., 70–71 Jandullan, 189
The Hurt Locker (film), 78 Janša, Janez (born Emil Hrvatin).
Hussainiwala (border outpost). See See We Are All Marlene Dietrich
lowering of flags ceremonies FOR: Performance for Peacekeeping
(India-Pakistan border) Soldiers (Ómarsdóttir and Janša)
Hussein, Saddam, 4, 158, 204 Jarvis, Lee, 177–78n3
Huynh, Emmanuelle, 48 Jbaineh (Sareyyet Ramallah Group), 26–27
hypermasculinity, 191–92 jiao rites (Hong Kong), 194–95
364 Index
Jijia, Sang, 316 Linyekula, Faustin

Johansson, Eva, 235–36 geo-choreography and, 269–270
Jones, Bill T., 203–6 healing and, 278–283, 279
ndombolo and, 270, 271–78, 274, 282
Kahn, David, 144 Lippe, Rudolf zur, 8
kalaripayattu, 191 Lopez, Jennifer, 237
Kaldor, Mary, 3–4, 130n16 lowering of flags ceremonies (India-
Kammer/Kammer (Forsythe), Pakistan border)
347n28 description of, 185–190
Kandyan dance, 120, 124 functions of, 181–83, 192–94
Kapaya, Flamme, 274 history of, 186, 191
Kargil War (1999), 184–85 hypermasculinity in, 191–92
Kashmir, 183–85 photographs of, 182, 187–88, 190,
Kasmiya, Radwan, 77–78 192–93, 195, 198
kathakali, 191 as theater of peace, war, and memory, 194–99
Katz, Jack, 50–51 low-intensity wars, 1–2. See also
Kay, Rosie, see 5 SOLDIERS: The Body asymmetrical warfare
Is the Frontline (Rosie Kay Dance LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam),
Company), 241 111–12, 112, 115–17, 116, 121, 123, 124–28
Kerlikowske, R. Gil, 298–99 luminous data, 50–51
Kern, David, 319, 323–24, 325, 326–27, Lyotard, Jean-François, 335
339, 341 Lythgoe, Nigel, 178n5
Kgomongoe, Jessie, 107n17
Khaseb, Yaser, 211 Macaulay, Alastair, 60n10
Kinect, 172 Magnet Theatre, 86. See also Every Year,
kinesthesia, 70 Every Day, I Am Walking (Magnet
Klein, Naomi, 117 Theatre)
kongonya dance, 6, 11 Mahtani, Annie, 249
krav maga, 144 Mallot, Edward, 197
Krueger, Anton, 92 Mamnou al-Oubour. See Access Denied
(Ramallah Dance Theater)
bin Laden, Osama, 158 Manzi, Yvonne, 195
Laermans, Rudi, 104n2 Maran, Rita, 59n1
The Lamentation beneath the Cross Marj Ibn ‘Amer (El-Funoun Popular
(Cranach the Elder), 317, 320–23, Dance Troupe), 26–27
325–26, 338–39, 341–42, 345 martial arts, 191
Laqueur, Walter, 3 Martin, Randy, 159, 212
Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), 185, 198 masculinity, 65, 74, 133–143, 191–92
Laurel, Stan, 301 Maska (Ljubljana). See We Are All Marlene
Lecoq, Jacques, 107n19 Dietrich FOR: Performance for
Lennon, John, 232, 234 Peacekeeping Soldiers (Ómarsdóttir
Lepecki, André, 10, 58–59 and Janša)
Leskov, Chaim, 136 Mason, Jeannine, 164
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), massively multiplayer online games
111–12, 112, 115–17, 116, 121, 123, (MMOGs), 64–66, 68–71. See also
124–28 America’s Army (website)
Index 365
Mbembe, Achille, 87–88, 270–71, 272–74, Mubarak, Hosni, 207–8, 210, 211, 213–14,
275–76, 278 216–17
McKenzie, Jon, 239 Mugabe, Robert, 6, 11
media Mumbai terrorist attacks (2008), 185, 196
Shalit affair and, 133–34, 143–150 Münkler, Herfried
in Timboctou, 307–8, 308 on “new” wars, 3–4, 296, 308, 309, 346n3
war and, 5 on “old” war, 124, 130n16
See also affective temporalities Murder City (Bowden), 294
Meidan, David, 147, 150 Murphy, Mary, 164
Meierjohann, Walter, 249 Murphy, Richard, 194
Menon, Jisha, 194 Muslim Brotherhood, 208, 217, 218
Metcalf, Thomas, 183 Muslims, 183–84
Mexican drug war Muyanga, Neo, 86–87, 88, 92
researchers’ positionality and, 294–95
Timboctou (Ricaño) and, 290–92, Nørgård, Rikke Toft, 69–70
298–306, 300, 303, 305 Nadelson, Theodore, 246, 259
as “war,” 291–92 Nasser, Lana, 210–11
Michalzik, Peter, 332n6 nationalism
Mickey Mouse, 302, 304 bharata natyam and, 117–18
militainment, 64–66 in Israel, 134–35, 143–44
military training lowering of flags ceremonies and, 183,
dance and, 5–6, 8 194–97
dance training and, 246–49 trauma and, 53
in 5 SOLDIERS, 241–43, 251–52 war videogames and, 71–73, 80
masculinity and, 133–143 Navalar, Arumuga, 119, 122
war videogames and, 64, 71–72, 79 Nazi Germany, 6
Milius, John, 65 Ndende people, 5
MIME-NET (military-industrial-media ndombolo (Congolese music), 270, 271–78,
entertainment network”), 71 274, 282
Mish’al (El-Funoun Popular Dance necropolitics, 88–90, 103–4, 270–73
Troupe), 26–27 necropower, 87–88, 270–71
Mizrahi Black Panthers, 140 Negash, Girma, 211
MMOGs (massively multiplayer online Negri, Antonio, 2, 4, 311n8, 336
games), 64–66, 68–71. See also Nelson, Jeremy, 48
America’s Army (website) Netanyahu, Benjamin, 147–48
Mondzain, Marie-José, 318, 329–330 “new war.” See asymmetrical warfare
Montafounis, Ioannis, 316 The New Wars (Münkler), 308
more more more … future (Linyekula), New York Review of Books (magazine),
273–76, 274 204–5
Morley-Minto Reforms (1909), 183 The New York Times (newspaper), 337
Morsi, Muhammed, 208 Nikolais, Alwin, 48
Mounier (dance practictioner), 209–10, Nioche, Julie, 48
215–16 Nixon, Richard, 291
Mousa, Hamzeh, 32 Nora, Pierre, 197
Moussaoui, Rana, 208 Nordau, Max, 138–39
Mozambique, 87–88 Novak, Jure, 240
366 Index
Obama, Barack, 205, 291, 299, 301 police

Occupy Movement, 149–150 Arab Spring uprisings and, 207–8, 216
Okach, Opiyo, 275 censorship and, 213
Ómarsdóttir, Erna. See We Are All Marlene politics and, 6, 11
Dietrich FOR: Performance for in South Africa, 85–86, 90
Peacekeeping Soldiers (Ómarsdóttir Tamil people and, 119–120, 121
and Janša) in Three Atmospheric Studies, 320–21,
On War (Clausewitz), 291–92 324
Onuf, Nicholas, 54 politics, 6, 9–12. See also biopolitics;
Oppliger, Patrice, 191 necropolitics
Ordinary Witnesses (Ouramdane) Pollock, Della, 107–8n26
description of, 55–59 Polman, Linda, 235
genesis and making of, 49–55 postmodern wars, 1–2. See also
photographs of, 47, 52, 58 asymmetrical warfare
use of interviews in, 46–47 Prabhakaran, Velupillai, 117, 129n4
Ouramdane, Rachid, 47–50. See also premediation, 159–160, 163–64, 168–69,
Ordinary Witnesses (Ouramdane) 171
Overseas Contingency Operation, 177n2, Preston, Travis, 293, 310–11n6, 311n9
291, 299 privatized wars, 1–2, 3–4. See also
asymmetrical warfare
Pacht, Nurit, 204 Proust, Marcel, 203–4, 205
Pakistan, 183–85. See also lowering of flags Punjab, 183–84
ceremonies (India-Pakistan border) Pyramide—El Nour (Bejart), 210
Pakistan Rangers (PR). See lowering of pyrrhike, 5
flags ceremonies (India-Pakistan
border) el-Qaddafi, Muammar, 4
Palestine, 26–30. See also Access Denied Qatamish, Khaled, 30
(Ramallah Dance Theater) qualitative audience research, 251–55,
Palestine International Festival (1999), 27 257–58, 260, 262–65
Papa Wemba, 271 La Question (Alleg), 45–46
Paxton, Steve, 6
Peacekeeper’s Entertainment, Art and Rabe, Stephen G., 298
Cultural Exchange (P.E.A.C.E) (Janša Rafeedie, Maysoun, 31, 36, 38
and Bulc), 223–29, 232, 236, 237–240 Rainer, Yvonne, 6
peacekeeping soldiers, 231–240. See Ramallah Dance Theater, 27, 30–31. See
also We Are All Marlene Dietrich also Access Denied (Ramallah Dance
FOR: Performance for Peacekeeping Theater)
Soldiers (Ómarsdóttir and Janša) Ramallah International Festival for
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire), 107n20 Contemporary Dance, 40
Peña Nieto, Enrique, 306 Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 197
People’s Republic of Bangladesh, 184 Ramsis, Amal, 219n11
Perform or Else (McKenzie), 239 Rancière, Jacques, 10, 11
Pfaffenberger, Bryan, 122–23 Ravindran, Krishanti, 122
photography, 54–55 Ravnitzky, Yehoshua, 135
Pillai, Thamotheran, 129n11 Reagan, Ronald, 291
Pitt, Brad, 237 Real Heroes program, 73–74
Index 367
reality shows, 161. See also So You Think Sebald, W. G., 206
You Can Dance (television show) Second Congo War (1998– 2003), 270
recruitment games, 77–79. See also Second Intifada, 25–26. See also Access
America’s Army (website) Denied (Ramallah Dance Theater)
Reda Company of Egypt, 218–19n4 “Security” (song), 205
Reed, Susan, 120, 124, 129n7 Selaiha, Nehad, 213–14
refugees, 85–91, 103–4. See also Every self-censorship, 208, 213, 217
Year, Every Day, I Am Walking September 11 terrorist attacks (2001), 2–3,
(Magnet Theatre) 158, 159–160, 204
Reisner, Steven, 53 Shafiq, Mohammed, 219n11
Reiter, Susan, 347n27 Shalit, Gilad, 133–34, 144–150
Renaissance, 5–6, 8 Shawamreh, Maher, 31
Reno, William, 309 Al-Sheiq (Sareyyet Ramallah Group),
retreat ceremony. See lowering of flags 26–27
ceremonies (India-Pakistan border) Shinkman, Tammy, 152n18
Reznek, Jennie, 86, 91–101, 94–96, 99, 101, Shoenfeld, Yehuda, 140–41
103–4 Sholette, Gregory, 236
Ricaño, Alejandro, 292 Shoot (Burden), 6
RiffraffDC, 175–76, 175 Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence),
Rizzo, Christian, 48 142–43
Robbe, Hervé, 48 Shumsky, Abraham, 139
Roumain, Daniel Bernard, 204 Siegmund, Gerald, 8, 55–56, 340–41, 343
Rudakoff, Judith, 91 Sikhs, 183–84
Al-Rumi, Jihad, 30 Simonds, Anthony, 151n9
Rumsfeld, Donald, 204 Singh, Hari, 184
Rushdie, Salman, 119 Sinhalese people, 118–121, 123–24, 126,
Russell, Jane, 129n7 127–28
Rwanda, 87–88 el-Sisi, Abdel Fattah, 208, 217, 218
Sivanesan, Shantini, 127
al-Sabbagh, Shaimaa, 218 Skidmore, Robert, 298, 302
sacrifice, 242–43 Small Story (dance performance), 215–16
Said, Edward, 48 small wars, 1–2. See also asymmetrical
San Martin, Jone, 315–19, 323–24, 325, warfare
328, 340–42, 344 Smith, Rupert, 5
Sape, 273, 276 So You Think You Can Dance (television
Sareyyet Ramallah Group for Music and show), 159, 160–68, 165, 176–77
Dabkeh (now Sareyyet Ramallah Soldiers in Flesh and Spirit (Barahi), 141
Group for Music and Dance), 26–28, Somalia, 87–88
29, 40 Sontag, Susan, 54–55
Sarkozy, Nicolas, 148 South Africa, 85–91. See also Every Year,
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 45–46 Every Day, I Am Walking (Magnet
Satkunaratnam, Ahalya, 122, 129n5, Theatre)
130n19 Special Force (videogame), 77
Scarry, Elaine, 54, 242, 246, 264 Special Ops (videogame), 240
Schneider, Rebecca, 10 Spectacularly Empty II (Linyekula), 276
Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 237 sports, 48, 191
368 Index
Sri Lanka, 118–121. See also bharata photographs of, 316

natyam (dance); Tamil people structural hybridity of, 338–39, 343–45
Sri Lankan Civil War (1983–2009), 113–14 theatrical image as incarnation in,
Story/Time (Jones), 206 328–331
Strike Back (television show), 72 time in, 325–28
Stuart, Meg, 48 translation in, 323–24, 327–28, 335, 340,
Studios Kabako 342, 345
geo-choreography and, 269–270 Timboctou (Ricaño)
healing and, 278–283, 279 duplicity, anonymity, and collusion in,
ndombolo and, 270, 271–78, 274, 282 287–291, 288, 309
Suitcase Project, 91 media in, 307–8, 308
sumud (steadfast resistance), 26, 30, 41 militarization in, 307
Superstar (Ouramdane), 48–49 multiple wars in, 292–96, 296
Surveillance Camera Players, 236 US/Mexico border war in, 297–99
Swales, Sinque, 78 war on drugs in, 298–306, 300,
303, 305
Talen, Bill, 236 war on terror in, 298–99
Tambiah, Stanley, 120–21 Times of India (newspaper), 196
Tamil people torture, 45–46, 54–55. See also Ordinary
language, culture, and religion of, Witnesses (Ouramdane)
118–121 toyi-toyi war dance, 6
LTTE and, 111–12, 112, 115–17, 116, 121, training. See dance training; military
123, 124–28 training
See also bharata natyam (dance) translation, 323–24, 327–28, 335, 340,
Tanztheater Wuppertal, 91 342, 345
Tauscher, Petra, 249 trauma and trauma survivors, 53–54,
Tehrani, Atefeh, 211 340–44. See also Ordinary Witnesses
Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), 189 (Ouramdane)
Terror and Consent (Bobbitt), 3 Tunisia, 207
terrorism, 2–3, 46. See also September 11 tWitch (Stephen Boss), 163
terrorist attacks (2001)
Theater Arts against Political Violence, Ubu Roi (Surveillance Camera Players),
60n8 236
Theatre of the Oppressed, 91 Under Ash (videogame), 77–78
Thompson, Nato, 236 Under Siege (videogame), 77–78
Three Atmospheric Studies (Forsythe) United Nations, 184
absent body in, 318–321 United Nations High Commissioner for
as act of citizenship, 334–37, 339, Refugees, 87–88
343–44 United Service Organizations, 237
body of Christ in, 321–24, 329–330, 341 USA/Mexico border
clouds versus lines in, 339–342, 345–46 militarization in, 307
description of, 315–321, 316, 325 war on communism and, 291–92
Iraq War and, 326–27 war on drugs and, 290–92, 298–306,
The Lamentation beneath the Cross 300, 303, 305
(Cranach the Elder) and, 317, 320–23, war on Mexico and, 291–92, 297–99
325–26, 338–39, 341–42, 345 war on terror and, 291–92, 298–99
Index 369
Vasquez, John, 184 We Are All Marlene Dietrich

Vass-Rhee, Freya, 319 FOR: Performance for Peacekeeping
Versace, Gianni, 210 Soldiers (Ómarsdóttir and Janša),
videogames, 63–66, 68–71, 77–79, 240. See 231–240, 233–34
also America’s Army (website); dance Welvering, Diane, 107n17
videogames Wesh w’Dahr (dance performance), 214–15
Vilangukal Siadium Kalam (Tamil dance Westmoreland, Mark, 105–6n10
drama), 111–13 Wichterich, Ina, 91
violent drug trafficking organizations Williams, Robin, 237
(VDTOs), 291, 306. See also Mexican Wilson, Charles Erwin, 336
drug war Wingate, Orde Charles, 136–37
Virilio, Paul, 159 Wings (film), 81n6
Virtual Army Experience (VAE), 76–77 women
voice, 56 bharata natyam and, 117, 122–24, 128
in 5 SOLDIERS, 254–58, 256
Wadi Tofah (El-Funoun Popular Dance in Palestinian political and military
Troupe), 26–27 struggle, 33–34
Wagah (border outpost). See lowering of as refugees, 88
flags ceremonies (India-Pakistan roles in British Army of, 246
border) at Waggah lowering of flags ceremony,
Waldram, James, 280 187–88
Wall Street Journal (newspaper), 198 Wong, Alex, 163
war on communism, 291–92. See also Wong, Janet, 204
Cold War World of Warcraft (videogame), 69–70
war on drugs, 290–92, 298–306, 300, World Trade Organization (WTO), 236
303, 305 Wright, Tom, 198
war on terror
Bush and, 158, 204, 291, 299, 326–28 xenophobia, 88–90, 103–4
Timboctou (Ricaño) and, 291–92,
298–99 Yes Men, 236
See also affective temporalities Yisa, Faniswa, 91–101, 94–96, 99, 101,
war videogames, 64–66, 68–71, 77–79. See 103–4
also America’s Army (website) Yosef, Raz, 144
Wardynski, Casey, 75
Warner, Michael, 337, 346n10 Zabala, Ander, 315, 316, 344
Watching Dance project, 252 Zarrilli, Philip, 191
Watson, James L., 194–95 Zimbabwe, 87–88
Watters, Chris, 175 Zimmerman, Cathy, 272
Žižek, Slavoj, 67

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Choreographies of 21st Century Wars

Oxford Studies in Dance Theory

French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop

E dited by Gay Morris

Jens R ichard G iersdorf

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-â•‰in-â•‰Publication Data

11. War and P.E.A.C.E.â•‡ 223

many ways. What would choreographic evidence suggest about contemporary

GAY MOR R IS A N D J E NS R IC H A R D GI E R S DOR F

Islamic-​fundamentalist terrorism was sometimes transformed into a gen-

Münkler, like Kaldor, emphasizes the privatization of war, but he also

increasing attempts at immunization become threats to democracy. Political

and processions celebrating military victories were part of Renaissance and

videos in the Israeli-​occupied Palestinian Territories to demonstrate to audi-

choreographer manipulated into varied arrangements. With the development

and disappearance of dance and performance (Schechner 1985; Blau 1982;

society through aesthetics exclusively in terms of organizing principles.10 We

alternative communal entities. Recent revelations regarding the private secu-

art becomes political. We argue that choreography critiques present condi-

coherence and highlights the disorder so important for choreography’s engage-

If Tamils in the diaspora used bharata natyam as a propaganda device to

symbolic practice of social order or organization” can create citizens critically

Jackson, Naomi M. 2000. Converging Movements: Modern Dance and Jewish Culture

Access Denied and Sumud

THE SECOND INTIFADA

Addressing this salient juncture in Palestinian political history, Ramallah

CONTEMPOR ARY DANCE AND POLITICS

DANCE BRIDGES AND BARRIERS

Palestinian dance organizations to be willing to work with Israeli dance artists

who wanted to use it as a base camp. Khaled Qatamish, artistic director of

R AMALLAH DANCE THEATER

of Pisagot on a nearby hill (Rowe 2008b). As the premiere of Access Denied

generally addressed this tension by positioning women onstage as either

THE PERFOR MANCE

Figure 1.3â•‡ Access Denied, Ramallah Dance Theater.

status as a foreigner in the region, I am simultaneously declaring my distinc-

In this essay I intend to explore the use of questioning—â•‰literally the act

Like a choreography of flows or intensities that require adequate framing in

Specifically, in Ordinary Witnesses, using recognizable contemporary aes-

QUESTIONING THE TRUTH, OR IN SEARCH

the stories narrated at home.4 If initially he perceived those differences as con-

of the most famous classic and contemporary choreographies in the company’s

In two important articles Reisner has emphasized the need to distinguish

function of containing and structuring an image, provides a narrative. “If the

Figure 2.3â•‡ Mille Lundt in Ordinary Witnesses. Photo by Patrick Imbert.

for making a real understanding of torture possible by discovering a language

intelligence interrogations in places such as Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and

“There’s a Soldier in All of Us”

and so I do a quick sweep of my rear, noticing two glowing eyes peering

idealized portrait of war and violent conflict. Other contemporary examples

Army operates at the ideological level in an even more pernicious manner.

The subject’s elementary, founding, gesture is to subject itself—​voluntarily,

RULES AND REGULATIONS

treat “gaming as corporeally detached rather than corporeally engaged” (2011,

Contemporary videogames, particularly war-​themed games, offer a tactical

A particularly polyvalent example of this militainment, or what James Der

of the genre—â•‰the joystick cowboy in me sometimes desires to roam free and

figure I have in front of me as I write is of Sergeant Tommy Rieman of the

relief efforts,” and this overwhelmingly closed narrative operates as a kind of

Islamic-fundamentalist terrorism was sometimes transformed into a gen-

videos in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territories to demonstrate to audi-

The subject’s elementary, founding, gesture is to subject itself—voluntarily,

Contemporary videogames, particularly war-themed games, offer a tactical

———. 2010b. “Playing with Fear: Catharsis and Resistance in Military-Themed Video

French—(hospes—g uest-master) and (hostis—stranger and, by extension, later

identity. This racialization of language is actually a four-way conflation of reli-

were divided by first language. English-medium education, despite its colonial

spheres of Israeli society (Gor 2005; Kimmerling 2001; Sasson-Levy 2006;

Hispano-cultural communities, who retained the use of Judeo-Spanish and

As is typical of the rhythm-action genre, players are first bombarded with