Talk: Dancing Land, Dancing Power - Corpus Fest 2026
Company:
Arabella Stanger
How does dance take up space in the world? Why pay attention to the histories of the places where people gather to create and watch choreography? What happens when those places are contested?
Arabella Stanger’s talk begins with a simple premise: dancefloor histories matter. She explores the often ambivalent relationships between concert dance, land use, and histories of social struggle. Both celebrating and complicating dance’s promise to release bodies into space, Stanger shares research that approaches choreography as a process both embodied and geographic, unearthing the relationship between dance as an art form and territorial seizure, racialized displacement, and acts of social defiance. Suggesting that acts of hope might arrive through observing dance’s violent histories, she examines the power dynamics of dances embedded in their material contexts, from “democratic” ballets performed at Lincoln Center to the “utopian” experiments of Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain College, and even to this festival at EMPAC.
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