Abstract
Morris and Griersdorf breathe new life into the allegorical theatre of war in this dark yet powerful interdisciplinary anthology that foregrounds situated and localized corpo-materialities of the body as an alternative site in which to apprehend the destabilizing effects of Empire, 1 the degradation of our social and cultural environment, as well as the decimation of human rights. By investigating how war and choreography are complementary ‘meaning making system(s)’ (p. 2) that share organizational logics premised upon ‘movement with inherent political potenti[al]’ (p. 6), the text pushes at disciplinary boundaries, making it of timely relevance to critical debates in political and creative geography while also sitting comfortably within a more established literature on dance, performativity, and embodiment. Through theoretically rich, yet practitioner-based contributions, we are also reminded of the ways in which disembodied academic narratives have themselves contributed to the production of a Manichean geopolitics.
Morris and Griersdorf’s central thesis, that an existential and ‘amorphous’ (p. 2) warfare has now been ‘extend[ed] over foreign territori[es]’ (p. 6) in the aftermath of 9/11, is elaborated through 16 loosely arranged thematic chapters from a geographically expansive, yet nevertheless eclectic bricolage of Global North and South locations. Moving fluidly between the artistic and the political, the authors are united in their mutual recognition that ‘the way bodies move . . . says a great deal about how we think about bodies in general’ (p. 65). Many of the essays point to the instability of Empire on multiple scales given that its military might is grounded in, but equally relies upon, corporeal and affective registers of the body instrument – highly attuned in its technical proficiency, as much as its vulnerability. Burrill’s study is most notable in making these claims. The ‘virtual enlistment’ (p. 65) and training of prospective soldiers through the power geometries of military gameplay are both a means and process through which combatants become accommodated to the warscape. By seeing and sensing war through the soldier’s body, gameplay elicits a kinesthetic empathy connecting civilians with military communities; a probing analysis which extends beyond the mere ‘antagonistic binary of normative versus resistive’ (p. 11) often found in studies on violence and social justice.
For other contributors, the question of how choreography might intervene performatively in affective spaces of the political is more pertinent: Hellier-Tinoco’s analysis of moving bodies in the US/Mexico borderlands shows how the ephemerality of performance art enables an articulation of the ‘absurd, illogical’ and even ‘incomprehensible’ (p. 289) conditions of war that opens somesthetic practices of military operations to critical interrogation and subversion. In Rowe and Davies-Cordova’s essays, Palestinian and South African dance theatre productions ‘Access Denied’ and ‘Every Year, Every Day I am Walking’, respectively, are used to depict the fast and slow choreographing of socio-spatial erasure inherent in the (neo)colonial project. By manipulating the theatre-space to reflect ‘asymmetries of power’ (p. 87), the authors bring the kinesthetic essence of these visceral, yet highly fragmented ‘collage[s] of moments under occupation’ (p. 27) into comparative relief with the architectural environments under study. The point which the authors make is both subtle and convincing: in a context where movement presents as an everyday ordeal and where life is rendered an ungrievable and de-corporealized grid on a map, cultural creation becomes a necessary survival mechanism, not only for enabling decimated sites to persist through bodily memory and cultural transmission, but also for enabling subjects to perform aspects of their own humanity.
Another contribution which chimes with a trajectory of research in cultural geography is Osterweis’s concept of a ‘geo-choreography’ which designates ‘the re-ordering of the [postcolonial] urban landscape choreographically without colonizing it’ (p. 269). In this seductive vision of counter-cartographic power, choreography emerges as an ‘event’ where kinesthesia and the landscape collide to not only curate and shape new space–times of the urban field but rather attend to violent traces and memories in the landscape to enable more ethically just and self-sustaining futures. If the anthology deserves any criticism however, it is in this continual slippage between choreography as metaphor and practice, such that the ‘more than representational’ cognitive processes integral to dance are, at times, regrettably lost.
Despite this, Morris and Griersdorf do justice in weaving a web of sensibility and intelligibility that privileges the constitution of a new transformative haptic and somatic geopolitics, one which, to follow Gregory 2 and others, may provide us with situated practices and affective experiences rather than tautological narratives to belie the violent shroud that cloths our contemporary geopolitical moment.