What is the lesson politics can draw from dance? In the following I will not so much approach this question by focusing on dance as a genre of fine arts. Of course, as an art form, dance has always been articulated with politics: from the initial moments of ballet at the court of Louis XIV, where it was an intrinsic element of what Habermas called the representational public sphere of the court and a central element in constructing the grandiose public persona of the sovereign, via New York’s Workers’ Dance League with their intriguing slogan: Dance is a weapon in the revolutionary class struggle, to the innumerable dance events today driven by more or less radical political intentions. While it would be fascinating to present a political history of dance, this is not going to be my concern. For the start, I would like to approach the question from the opposite angle, from the perspective of politics and the role dance plays within political practices. In other words, this chapter will not be so much concerned with whatever is political in dance as a cultural or artistic genre, but with what might be dance-like in political acting. What happens, we will ask, when today’s sovereign, the people, start dancing publicly for reasons of protest? Only after this question has been clarified, I will return to two examples of “dancing politically” that originated from the art field – “East Side Story” by the Croatian artist Igor Grubic, and “How long is now?” by the Israeli performance collective Public Movement. 


The politics of frivolity


Let us take the following observation as a starting point: In the course of the last protest cycle, largely defined by the actions of the global justice movement and, more recently, the Occupy movement and other radical democratic movements, dancing has become an intrinsic and, indeed, ubiquitous part of protest. It is inseparable from the movement’s protest repertoire. Where protests occur, as a rule, there will be trucks with sound systems and a crowd of dancing people following them, there will be samba bands or drum bands such as Rhythms of Resistance, there will be radical cheerleaders of whatever gender exercising and waving their pompoms, perhaps there will be soldiers of the Insurgent Rebel Clown Army marching and pantomiming. In other words, there is all sorts of performative pomp and circumstances involved in today’s political protest. But hasn’t this always...