Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion

Edited by Naomi Jackson and Toni Shapiro-Phim. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, December 2008. Paper: ISBN 978-0810861497, $65. 416 pages.

Review by Kirstin L. Ellsworth, California State University, Dominguez Hills

How do we incorporate dance into discussions of human rights in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? A significant part of the question that informs Jackson’s and Shapiro-Phim’s carefully edited collection is the extent to which the query has remained largely under-examined. Dance historians and critics have generated an extensive body of literature on the aesthetic and performative contexts of modern and contemporary dance. However, Jackson and Shapiro-Phim are the first to focus the investigation so cohesively on the political implications of movement. Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion investigates the role of dance as a medium for expressing human rights by way of a global perspective that incorporates voices, performances, and cultural contexts typically absent in western-dominated narratives. Jackson and Shapiro-Phim also extend the definition of dance beyond traditional classical or modernist criteria to include folk, therapeutic, and other forms. The result is a ground-breaking anthology that repositions understandings of the fundamental ways in which the dancer’s body serves a range of human rights agendas from the oppressive to the corporate-controlled, nationalist, and liberatory.

Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion is organized into four sections; contributors to each include dancers, choreographers, critics, historians, and human rights activists. Jackson’s and Shapiro’s decision to include academic essays alongside personal anecdotes allows for a richly textured and accessible collection. “Regulatory Moves” examines the use of mandatory state dance as a means for repressive socio-political control. Case studies range from analysis of Minzu Wudao anticommunist mass dance performances in Taiwan in the 1950s, to Joseph Mobutu’s brutally enforced Animation Politique dances in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in the 1970s. “Choreographing Human Rights” addresses the staging of performances such as Barro Rojo Arte Escénico’s El Camino that enact through dance the torture and abuses experienced in the history of El Salvador. Choreographer-dancers including Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, survivor of the Pol Pot Regime in Cambodia, illuminate the ways a single dance inscribes a tragic history while seeking to gain closure from the past. Authors in “Healing, Access, and the Experience of Youth” document the use of dance as therapy with children and young people who have witnessed violence in Haiti, Serbia, and the Sudan, or have experienced the power of dancing with physical disabilities. “Kinetic Transgressions” documents dance in social justice causes from Mall Dances in conjunction with the AIDS quilt to the cueca sola, a dance created by women under Pinochet’s dictatorship that transforms the national cueca dance into the “cueca of solitude.” In the cueca sola, still performed as a protest against social abuse of power today, a single woman from the Association of the Detained and Disappeared dances alone, emphasizing the absence of a husband, son, father, or other male taken during Pinochet’s regime.

Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion asks readers to re-evaluate the power of dance as a staged form of resistance. In the process, contributors also reveal in more subtle ways the complexity of defining human rights. If we accept Jackson’s and Shapiro-Phim’s premise that control of the body is at the basis of human rights, the role of dance in assessing the past and regulating the future is critical, thus making Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion of interest to an audience much broader than just those interested in the performing arts.