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Description of  Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance: South-South Choreographies

This book argues that contemporary dance, imagined to have a global belonging, is vitiated by euro-white constructions of risk and currency that remain at its core. Differently, the book reimagines contemporary dance along a South-South axis, as a poly-centric, justice-oriented, aesthetic-temporal category, with intersectional understandings of difference as a central organizing principle. Placing alterity and heat, generated via multiple pathways, at its center, it foregrounds the work of South-South artists, who push against constructions of tradition and white-centered aesthetic imperatives, to reinvent their choreographic toolkit and respond to urgent questions of their times. In recasting the grounds for a different global stage, the argument widens its scope to indicate how dance-making both indexes current contextual inequities and broader relations of social, economic, political, and cultural power, and inaugurates future dimensions of justice.