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This essay problematizes the term ‘decolonization’ as applied to university dance and performance curricula. It does so via Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s (2012) argument that colonization is rooted in a worldview that positions beings as exploitable things. Addressing efforts to foster diversity within studio training, choreography, and scholarship, the casualization of labor within university departments is also examined. The essay considers the structure of the university as both a colonial and corporate entity, signaling its relationship to the precarity of neoliberalism. The paper concludes by suggesting that arts and humanities scholarship and teaching create opportunities for alternate ways of living and interacting beyond neoliberal, neocolonial paradigms.

Decried as mere brutality on display and celebrated as viscerally real, combat sport has escaped nuanced reflection. Risk, Failure, Play addresses this gap, signaling the many ways in which competitive martial arts differentiate themselves from violence through risk-based play. Despite its association with frivolity and ease, play is not the opposite of danger, rigor, or failure. Indeed, Risk, Failure, Play demonstrates the ways in which physical recreation allows us to manage the complexities of our current social reality. This book suggests that play gives us the ability to manage difficult conditions with intelligence and that physical play, with its immediacy and its heightened risk, is particularly effective at accomplishing this task. Presented from the perspective of a dancer and writer, this book takes readers through considerations of the politics of everyday life exemplified in martial arts practices such as jeet kune do, Brazilian jiu jitsu, kickboxing, Filipino martial arts, and empowerment self-defense. Risk, Failure, Play intertwines personal experience with phenomenology, social psychology, dance studies, performance studies, and theories of play and competition in order to produce insights on pleasure, mastery, vulnerability, pain, agency, individual identity, and society. Ultimately, this book suggests that play allows us to rehearse other ways to live than the ones we see before us, challenging us to reimagine our social reality.

The stage lights come up gradually as a bharatanatyam dancer, costumed in a tailored silk sari and beautifully adorned in jewelry, walks out from backstage. In a manner neither formal nor completely relaxed, she walks downstage to a point beyond the normal performing space but still removed from the audience. She begins to explain the key features of this South Indian classical dance form. More specifically, she extracts, for decoding, the symbolic hand gestures known as mudras from bharatanatyam's semiotic lexicon. Standing in one place and without musical accompaniment, she performs mudras fluidly and gracefully. Meanwhile, she also translates into English the sahitya, or lyrics, of the song that the gestures will accompany. Demonstrating her skill in elegantly balancing the competing tasks of speaking and rendering gestural movement, she alerts the audience to the linguistic nature of the abhinaya, or dramatic dance. 1 At the end of the synopsis, the dancer retreats backstage. A musical interlude signals the beginning of the "actual" performance. The dancer reappears, walking crisply. When she launches into the performance of the piece, her gestures flow easily as in the explanation, but now she augments them with evocative facial expressions and a directed use of her gaze.Bharatanatyam, a highly technical, primarily solo South Indian classical dance form, consists of a repertoire and vocabulary that bifurcates into nritta, abstract rhythmic choreography, and nritya or abhinaya, dramatic dance. Its nonthematic sections consist of explosions of virtuoso footwork, performed with legs rotated outward into a bent-knee position that exemplifies the form's characteristically grounded use of weight. An erect torso floats gracefully above the dynamic feet. The abhinaya component, by contrast, organizes itself around lyrical, leisurely phrases of gestural movement traced by articulated fingers, hands, and arms. In these segments, the dancer walks in time to the music, her body position almost quotidian in comparison with the sharply delineated positions of the more staccato phrases.Preperformance explanations have characterized bharatanatyam performances over the course of the 20th century. In the mid-1920s, when brahman lawyer E.

The stage lights come up gradually as a bharatanatyam dancer, costumed in a tailored silk sari and beautifully adorned in jewelry, walks out from backstage. In a manner neither formal nor completely relaxed, she walks downstage to a point beyond the normal performing space but still removed from the audience. She begins to explain the key features of this South Indian classical dance form. More specifically, she extracts, for decoding, the symbolic hand gestures known as mudras from bharatanatyam's semiotic lexicon. Standing in one place and without musical accompaniment, she performs mudras fluidly and gracefully. Meanwhile, she also translates into English the sahitya, or lyrics, of the song that the gestures will accompany. Demonstrating her skill in elegantly balancing the competing tasks of speaking and rendering gestural movement, she alerts the audience to the linguistic nature of the abhinaya, or dramatic dance. 1At the end of the synopsis, the dancer retreats backstage. A musical interlude signals the beginning of the "actual" performance. The dancer reappears, walking crisply. When she launches into the performance of the piece, her gestures flow easily as in the explanation, but now she augments them with evocative facial expressions and a directed use of her gaze.Bharatanatyam, a highly technical, primarily solo South Indian classical dance form, consists of a repertoire and vocabulary that bifurcates into nritta, abstract rhythmic choreography, and nritya or abhinaya, dramatic dance. Its nonthematic sections consist of explosions of virtuoso footwork, performed with legs rotated outward into a bent-knee position that exemplifies the form's characteristically grounded use of weight. An erect torso floats gracefully above the dynamic feet. The abhinaya component, by contrast, organizes itself around lyrical, leisurely phrases of gestural movement traced by articulated fingers, hands, and arms. In these segments, the dancer walks in time to the music, her body position almost quotidian in comparison with the sharply delineated positions of the more staccato phrases.Preperformance explanations have characterized bharatanatyam performances over the course of the 20th century. In the mid-1920s, when brahman lawyer E.