What does it mean for dance to be political?

The handful of films curated under the thoughtful title “Your Space Is My Dancefloor” eschews a simple reading of the creators’ and curator’s intention that dance liberates and resists oppression, that life is better or more joyful when we dance. Instead, we see dance performing a deep critique, revealing stories of ostracization, vilification, intimate trauma, violence, exploitation and dispossession.

We are invited to contemplate the efficacy of dance as a means of demonstration and remedy in postcolonial, capitalistic and anti-woke environments. The true power in being political or asserting identity is not in “what is danced” or even in the pleasure that movement can bring, but it is in the action and function of dance to disclose, disrupt, make explicit and bring visibility where there was none; it dialectically exposes and enables debilitating traditions and behaviours.

We also see how dance, when it critiques itself, unmasks the ideology and ignorance deeply choreographed in the socio-cultural body. Each film permits the subject to gaze back at the viewer, petitioning us to acknowledge and do better.

«To fall into the hole of this city», or in between the couch cushions of the person ordering food, Leonardo Martinelli’s Fantasma Neon (2021) explores the indignity and exploitation of the delivery person in the gig economy, on the streets of Brazil. It is part musical, part mockumentary, a fictional tale based on the truth of too many lives. Small street dances punctuate details of material injustices faced by their labour precarity. Figures in fire-engine red pop and bend, constrained in their movements by a delivery box strapped to their backs forming a kyphotic hump. Gig-sapiens, a new kind of human, loiter in the streets, waiting on the whim of a customer to get them on their bikes. While the use of text enables our understanding, the movements of this hyper-stylised gig-sapien disclose a visceral dimension to their cumbersome and cruel “damnation”. «Not even neon makes them see us». A montage of faces appeal: we are humans, not machines.

Leonardo Martinelli | BRA 2021 | 20’
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The filmic apparatus helps to unmask the hidden ideologies in a given culture that dance distracts us from. Costuming and “customing” in Onyeka Igwe’s We Need New Names (2015) points to how dance has been traditionally used in Nigerian culture for mourning practices and community rituals (including exorcisms) to distract from grief, abuse and sexism. The “jog trot” of pall bearers in white suits reminds Igwe of “white supremacy”; I’m reminded of words by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, when the white man fixes the black man with his othering gaze and says «Look, A Negro!». Someone tells Igwe they like the way she moves and that she dances like her mother. She is confronted by the other confirming her blackness. Ethnographic footage is woven with a low-quality cam-recording of her grandmother’s funeral celebration of her 103 years of life. We see the shimmying bodies of two women in multi-coloured unitards performing with the band, their rapidly shaking lower halves attuned to the rhythm and beat of the music, hovered upon by Igwe – uncomfortably so. The movements are erotic to the Western eye and alarming at a funeral, but Igwe’s British upbringing allows her to look even deeper, past an appropriated ignorance to unearth aspects of Nigerian culture where custom masks the power of the patriarch in claiming women’s bodies.

Onyeka Igwe | UK 2015 | 13’
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Pidikwe, or “Rumble”, is a dance filmed on a stage with a front facing, fourth-wall performance. The camera does not move with the bodies to integrate us into the experience, but is a walled-off observer: objectifying the five figures on stage, isolating them, sometimes closing in on their faces. A swinging globe encircles each performer’s slow hand gestures, a rhythmic pendulum of darkness and light. The costume is ambiguous, carefully coutured. It is a meeting of 30s flapper wear, Weimar Cabaret and colourful traditional dress: feathers, beads, sequins, lace and satin.

Filmmaker Caroline Monnet is of Anishinaabe and French origin. The five dancers are First Nations, and the choreography reflects this amalgam. Limbs flick at awkward angles in a Charleston-come-Lindy Hop manner. Fast, repetitive footwork, dropping weight onto one leg then the other, whipping up energy, gives the impression of a traditional dance. Igwe suggests there is no difference between a Nigerian mourning ritual and ballet, but the form in Pidikwe is never clear, and this is where Monnet’s voice is best heard. She draws our attention to an acute tension between artificial and primal movements in a predictable occidental measure.

The movement is buoyed by the frantic development of sound from an ethereal, minimal scape to quickened beats and bird caws. The lighting completes the progression from moody chiaroscuro to rave-like propulsions. This delineation clashes, and there are images resonant of Loïe Fuller’s Serpentinentanz (1902) and Mary Wigman’s Hexentanz (1926) where modernity revolts against the classics. Pidikwe disrupts the insidious polarity embedded within our systems between the so-called cultured and savage by performing it.

Caroline Monnet | CAN 2025 | 10’
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Film has the ability to transport us to the site of the trouble. In the case of Maman danse (2024) we are physically and affectively placed in the scene of domicile crimes through lingering shots of poorly lit, dilapidated rooms that hold a history the memory cannot. We are moved in time, events revivified for healing effect between mother and daughter, filmmaker Mégane Brügger, both victims of domestic violence. Each authentic element of Brügger’s making brings us face to face with their brokenness and humiliation. “Happy Boots” line dancing as social practice becomes a litmus for the degree of trauma and eroded self-esteem that years of abuse can bring. The mother’s inability to share in this assembly of bodies, moving lightly in unison, cannot be overcome. It is a space brimming with shame. In this instance, social dance shrouds rather than alerts anyone to the realities of intimate partner violence and its effects. The final minutes of the film show mother and daughter prising boot scooting from the fixture of its social ontology – now alone, gliding comfortably together on an empty basketball court. It is a gentle, safe reconciliation that they can control and the start of a mending process. 

Mégane Brügger | CH 2024 | 23’
Interview with Mégane Brügger on FILMEXPLORER

“Your Space Is My Dancefloor” is a strong title. “Your” may be construed as the perpetrator, coloniser, corporation, regime and us as viewers; “my” is the victim, marginalised, fighter for rights and identity, the subject who dances. Their bodies are their dancefloor, sometimes bent and broken, but also powerful, creative and disruptive. While there were many interesting films selected this year, I could only write about these few artworks, which – while not all recent – point to a potent future for the curatorial practice of presenting dance both “on” and “in” film as meaningful critique.

Curation of the three dance programmes: Inken Blum, Laura Walde
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