For example, the legislation that set out to alter the socioeconomic imbalances faced by America's poor-known unofficially as a War on Poverty-under President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 evolved into later “wars” declared by successive governments with wide-ranging negative legacies. The shaping of race relations in general and mass incarceration in particular, as articulated below, links to concepts of necropolitics, biopower, and neoliberalism that emerge through interrogation of various “wars” and armed conflicts, which manifest social control in different ways.

are introduced to help situate the dance analyses.īiopolitics, Necropolitics, and Neoliberalism

Bodily constraint, control over life, and concepts of freedom that impact upon racial and economic politics in the U.S. The productions analyzed here are celebrated for their agency, as art, and as contributions to wider discourses around race, the criminal justice system, and equality. Conceptualization of a black habitus offers another analytical strategy, one that is juxtaposed to movement drawn from technical vocabularies ranging from hip-hop to ballet and contemporary dance.

Inspired by his own experiences as an African American man and John Singleton's 1991 film Boyz in the Hood, Abraham layers abstract dance phrases with stark motifs that evoke the veil of suspicion often faced by people of color. Overreading is utilized in my analysis of Kyle Abraham's dance theatre production of Pavement (2012), which reflects on the complexity of social relations in an inner-city neighborhood. Jones's productions that connect narrative and abstract components of his choreography to external realities. The third case study draws on Martin's concept of overreading developed in his analysis of Bill T. Choreographic power arises in part from a decentered social kinesthetic that is counterhegemonic in the way it transforms pedestrian movement. A social kinesthetic is identified in an analysis of a screendance by Amie Dowling and Austin Forbord, whose film Well Contested Sites (2013) responds to issues of mass incarceration that cross racial boundaries. The concept of mobilization is interrogated in Zaccho Dance Theatre's Dying While Black and Brown (2011), which explores attempts to create a sense of home while incarcerated on death row.

The first two case studies below apply Martin's work to projects emerging from participatory creative processes and have outreach imperatives, thus expanding the theoretical scope beyond its initial articulation. Footnote 1 Key concepts are applied below to innovative artistic responses to mass incarceration and the conditions that led to the Black Lives Matter protest movement that began in 2014 to raise awareness of police shootings of unarmed men of color, prompted by the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Martin's theories offer tools for analyzing the choreographic agency in works inspired by distinct sociopolitical conditions and unequal relations of power in society. In over three decades of research, Randy Martin has critiqued failures of capitalism and the Left's inability to correct social injustices, interrogating relationships between artistic and cultural expressions and the way they are situated within economic and political contexts.

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