The Activism of Dance Performance in Appalachia: Utilizing the Arts to Address Social and Environmental Crisis and Injustice in the Mountains

Abstract

For well over a century, the human and more-than-human of Central Appalachia have endured oppression and exploitation, primarily due to natural resource extraction. In spring 2008, the author led a dark touri to a mountaintop removal coalmining site in Southern West Virginia for colleagues, which included Dance Professor Deborah McLaughlin. As a result, the two collaborated on three evening-length dance/theater works highlighting social and environmental crises and injustices in the region. The performances incorporated contemporary dance, poetry, the spoken word, and the visual arts, as well as contemporary and traditional music. The first, Eating Appalachia: Selling Out to the Hungry Ghost, focused on mountaintop removal coalmining and its environmental and cultural destruction. With Sounds of Stories Dancing, the duo paid homage to millions of mountain residents forced to leave the region to find stable employment, despite longing to remain. In the final piece, The Shadow Waltz, they honored the lives of coalminers with black lung disease, as well as their families. This essay discusses the challenges of creating art that critiques socially constructed messages portrayed as given truths, as well as the educational and social successes of daring to dance truth to power.