Dance, the Everyday and Social Resistance

Dancers perform in the aisles of moving buses, pensioners execute mundane actions in everyday clothes. Contemporary choreography invokes the everyday in manifold forms: from untrained dancers, old-aged performers and pedestrian movements to the use of ordinary public spaces and commonplace objects. Yet scholarship almost entirely overlooks this phenomenon. What is the artistic and socio-political significance of dance referencing the everyday? This interdisciplinary project offers the first comprehensive account, analysing a range of 21st-century US and European choreographies (e.g. Ek, Platel, Hiesl) and their roots in 1960s American postmodern dance, to consider how the everyday aesthetic contributes to socially critical discourse.