Analysis

So what is this story about now?

Please email me directly to receive a copy of my notes regarding these questions. You will discover that dance, though often framed as ornamental and trivial, is a potent analytic through which to consider political events and through which to understand how ideology is embodied and enacted. After all, choreography, or the arrangement of bodies in space, is ontologically political.

high-tech authoritarianism?
understanding the category of Chinese dance?
choreography as an apparatus of the war on terror?
choreography as a solidification of national unity?
pedagogies of minority dance as political tools?
repressive state management of cultural activities?
Dance versus religion?
terror capitalism?

The short answer is: The dance symposium that I attended in Urumqi, Xinjiang in July of 2017 engages in all of the above questions. It speaks to historical developments of ethnic categorization; institutionalized Islamophobia; advanced methods of AI surveillance; cultural and political embodiment; techno-nationalism, and future economic development.

Choreography of Surveillance

Stop and Go

Props

Inspection

Monitoring the flow of movement

Host of social engagements in the Kazhak Village

engineering "social order"

Prescribed tourist ritual

Dance as an infrastructure tool for government progress

Teaching dance to hesitant regions:

This presentation discussed efforts to bring social Uyghur dances to rural regions in Xinjiang that were more religious than others. The teachers were met with extreme resistance from local Imams who thought dancing was heterdox. Eventually, the teachers were able to introduce some social dances to the villages. The CCP is actively introducing dance to rural villages because they see dance as a tool by which to combat religious extremism.

Developing Uyghur dance with everyone's support

This presentation provided a brief history of the development of Uyghur dance as a concert form since the establishment of the People's Republic of China.

Dancing within constraints not of one's own choosing

Dancing at the security gates

This is a visual metaphor for what I understood the everyday situation to be in Urumqi. Just outside this beautiful scene are metal detectors and security gates.

Thank you for reading