From Direct Action to Being There: The Ambiguous Politics of Community Dance and the Occupy Movement (A History of Resemblance)

This chapter re-orientates the politics of Community Dance in the UK through ‘a history of resemblance’ using Michel Foucault’s (1972) notion of the ‘episteme’. This alternative historiography creates relationships between Community Dance in the UK and the experimental choreographic approaches arising in the 1960s and 1970s and to political movements and imperatives; in particular suggesting synchronic connections between the physical tactics of the global Occupy movement and site-specific Community Dance. Rather than specific physical actions that constitute ‘dance’ or ‘direct action’, this chapter argues for occupation as a method for both practices, locating politics in an embodied ontology of being-with-others (Jean-Luc Nancy, 2000)