Violence, Performance, and Relationality

Abstract

This chapter analyses two experimental dance pieces from the mid-2000s that were made in response to situations involving violence. It argues that each in its own terms has drawn attention to the unequal ways in which violence and corporeal vulnerability are distributed globally. The Brazilian choreographer Lia Rodrigues made Incarnat in 2005 after relocating her company to studio space in Maré, a violent slum or favela in the middle of Rio de Janeiro. Close Ups was a site-specific performance installation from 2005 made by the Irish choreographer John Scott whose company at the time included untrained dancers who were refugees receiving treatment at Dublin’s Centre for Care for Survivors of Torture. Both pieces addressed the effects of the collapse of the comfortable distance between those living affluent, first world lives and those who, through poverty, disenfranchisement or abuse of human rights, live precarious, vulnerable ones. In doing so they troubled and disturbed normative ideas about dominant power relations that limit recognition of humanity to those who conform with ideologically constructed and legitimated identities.