The Space of the Body from Classical to Contemporary Dance
A Matter of Coloniality
abstract
This essay aims to reveal the changes in the understanding of the space of the body in Western theatrical dance through decolonial lens. Arguing that the dancing body has fallen prey since the Renaissance to the rhetoric of modernity/coloniality, the following pages analyse the main stages from the establishment of the colonial body to recent decolonial experimentations showing how the myth of the efficient body-organism is gradually giving way to the chaos resulting from desire freed from colonial conditioning.
Keywords: Space • Coloniality • Organism • Dance • Cultural decolonialism • Modernity • Body