| | Posted by Tony Schultz

This week Maia Jordaan, a choreographer and graduate student from South Africa, found our reading group and injected a healthy dose of enthusiasm, intellect, and curiosity into the conversation. Yet another amazing person I have met through the internet. She seemed to have found us through Swan Lake Samba Girl.

Thanks Tonya and greetings Maia!

Maia is studying in the department of Contemporary Performance at Rhodes University. Her master’s thesis uses elements of Lepecki’s theoretical framework to analyze contemporary South African dance. Read what she has to say. Her comment on the original reading group post is provides great ideas and resources. The SARMA database is a great online resource for dance studies and criticism. Since Exhausting Dance deals with so many ideas Lepecki has developed in other writings it can be helpful to read some of his related work on the SARMA database. Maia points us toward http://www.sarma.be/text.asp?id=869 called: “Undoing the fantasy of the (dancing) subject: ‘Still acts’ in Jérôme Bel’s The Last Performance” and encourages us to follow the links.

The difficulty, or best part (depending on how you look at it), is that grappling with this scholarship forces you to do research in all the related scholarship. So as we might get lost in following the links of a web page we can also get lost in Lepecki’s references and footnotes.

Luckily we have a smart team and collectively have the intellectual resources to tackle this project. I found another rabbit hole that some might find helpful. The reading list for Lepecki’s course on Movement Theory can be downloaded here. You many of these texts referenced throughout Exhausting Dance. I read Randy Martin’s Critical Moves and Mark Franko’s The Work of Dance in order to get a better handle on what Lepecki is communicating.

It will be exciting to carve out this conversation and we should feel lucky to have found our friend Maia. I would love if Maia could join The Winger and we could collaborate in framing this discourse.

So please Kristin, pretty please, can we keep her?

Maia suggested collecting online video links to works by the artists discussed in Exhausting Dance. This is a great idea and am looking forward to see what folks dig up.

Maia has also added a number of comments that relate to identifying some important questions and ideas. Lets add them to our laundry list of useful ideas.

1. dance=movement (John Martin)

2. modernity=movement (Sloterdijk)
kinetic excess of modern industrial capitalism
kinetic excess of modern political mobilization

3. dance=politics (Randy Martin)
dance is inherently political in its mobilization of bodies

4. the book title
what is ‘performance’?
what is ‘dance’?
how does the term ‘exhaustion’ play?
what is ‘the politics of movement’
how do all of these link?