Kunstwerke jedoch haben ihre Größe einzig darin,
dass sie sprechen lassen, was die Ideologie verbirgt.1
Theodor W. Adorno

How are we to think about the relationship between dance and politics? Might it mean not only understanding dance politically, but also considering the politics of dance? The history and the discourse of dance is a history of the intricate negotiations between body, movement and politics: what André Lepecki calls the “choreo-political.”2 And the discourses and interpretations of Dance Studies reflect and address these questions with shifting degrees of emphasis. Yes, the political has for some time now been a search formula for an understanding of dance, and one that has managed to direct public attention to many of its different forms.

What can be said to be political is the relationship between aesthetics and power, the coincidence of political and aesthetic representation, for example in the dances at the court of Louis XIV – as Mark Franko’s reading of The King’s Two Bodies referring to Kantorowicz, has shown.3

Also political are the dances and movements portrayed by those choreographers whose pieces deal with questions of power, hierarchies, law and justice, inclusions and exclusions. A random sampling might include: Kurt Jooss’s The Green Table, Jean Weidt’s workers’ choirs, Valeska Gert’s socially critical dance sketches, Martha Graham’s American pieces,4 or the (early) Pina Bausch’s choreographies with their unsparing critical view of the social conventions and social roles of post-war Germany.

Finally the word political applies – quite openly and evidently – to those productions of a politically committed dance and performance scene, close to the Agitprop theatre, that uses movement choreo-politically in the sense of an emancipatory act – whether in the Europe of the 1968 student revolts;5 or – in another guise – in the context of the revolutionary new concepts of everyday body, everyday movement and everyday space as publicly performed by the members of the Judson Dance Theater: Democracy’s body6, as Sally Banes puts it.

Another – and terrible – chapter of the political is the history of all those dancers and choreographers who were persecuted, forced into internal emigration or driven into exile – the list is shockingly long. A historical investigation of the dancers persecuted and forced to emigrate in the Nazi period,7 or of the history of violence,...