Overview

This text presents an inquiry into the relationship between dance, politics and cultural theory. It illustrates how the study and practice of dance can re-animate arrested prospects for progressive politics and social change. From experimental and concert dance to more popular expressions, the author engages a range of performances and demonstrates how a critical reflection on dance helps promote fluency in the language of mobilization that political theory alludes to yet rarely speaks. Looking at various areas of popular culture, Martin aims to reveal how the mastery of modern dance technique teaches an individual body to express cultural differences and display its intrinsic diversity, concluding with a reflection on the contribution dance studies can make to other fields within cultural studies and the social sciences.

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9780822322030

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Reviews

Critical Moves explores the relationship between dance and politics and exposes the limitations of modernist criticism currently prevalent in dance. Randy Martin considers a wide variety of dance but is less concerned with its diversity than with methods of analysis... His attempt to offer other disciplines a critical paradigm elaborated from dance is to be lauded ... --TLS, December 17, 1999

Critical Moves makes a crucial contribution to the emerging field of dance studies. Martin's ability to think politics through dance also suggests a challenging and enabling new critical framework for political theory. -Susan L. Foster , author of Choreography and Narrative: Ballet's Staging of Story and Desire Randy Martin has written a bold and interesting book, imaginative and deftly presented. Few political theorists understand dance and dancing as well as Martin does. -Jane Desmond, editor of Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance

Author Information

Randy Martin is Chair and Professor of Sociology in the Department of Social Science and Management at Pratt Institute. He is the author of Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self and Socialist Ensembles: Theater and State in Cuba and Nicaragua.

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