DANCE 280: Current Topics in Dance Research (Colloquium)
Current Topics in Dance Studies is an on-going lecture/demonstration series by established and emerging scholars, performance artists, and dancers on interdisciplinary approaches to dance and the body, invited by the Department of Dance to share their work with the larger academic community of UC Riverside.
Choreographies of War and Conflict
Jens Richard Giersdorf, coordinator
January 22 -- March 5, 2013
Tuesdays, 4:10--5:40 pm
Dance Studio Theatre, ATHD 102 (Athletics and Dance Building)
Free and open to the campus
Since the end of the Cold War, commentators increasingly agree that the world has moved away
from wars of the so-called “great powers” that dominated the 20th century, and toward what are
often termed “asymmetrical” wars. These wars tend to include civilian combatants as well as
trained soldiers and are represented by a variety of conflicts such as insurgencies, counter-
insurgencies, revolutions, rebel uprisings, and civil wars. From a viewpoint of corporeal agency,
this colloquium enters into the debates surrounding asymmetrical wars, by critiquing established
theories through an examination of the complex relationship between choreographed movement
and war. That choreography is central to war is demonstrated in practices ranging from soldiers’
training to the rituals of peace signings, from the carefully worked out trajectories of drones to the
players’ maneuvers in digital war games, from public demonstrations against the state to the
response of police and armies. Viewing war through choreography is also significant because it
shifts the focus of study away from the abstractions of military theory and policy to corporeal
agency on all sides of war, including the structure and performance of spectacles of war and
terror, the physical response—artistic and pedestrian—to war, and the support of or resistance to
particular conflicts.