"Stanger’s Dancing on Violent Ground is an important new contribution to critical dance studies that shows how the utopian ideals of some of the most celebrated Euro-American theater dance works are not only imbricated with but also actively conceal structural conditions of racial violence, displacement, and inequity. Thinking with Indigenous critiques of settler colonialism and Black studies critiques of Western liberal notions of individualism and freedom, Stanger develops a politically incisive spatial analysis that demands that we reckon with the materialist histories that undergird seemingly liberatory choreographic ideas." —Anthea Kraut, author of Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance— -
“Incisive and original, Dancing on Violent Ground roots choreographic meaning in the politics of space. Considering questions of imperialism, racism, land seizure, dispossession, and labor, Stanger shows how a wide range of European and American concert dance idioms obscure the exploitative histories of the spaces—theatrical, urban, national, and geopolitical—in which they occur. Well-written, thoughtfully structured, and deftly argued, Dancing on Violent Ground offers an important contribution to dance studies and critical geography.” —Janet O'Shea, author of Risk, Failure, Play: What Dance Reveals about Martial Arts Training— -
“Stanger achieves a clear intervention in the field of dance studies by shifting her analytical attention toward the ways that bodies and institutions design and inhabit space. This approach interweaves the corporeal, architectural, political, and philosophical details of dance history through a materialist analysis that accounts for the people and communities displaced from their homes through physical and cultural acts of seizure . . . Methodologically, this analysis (like those that precede it) models what Stanger terms ‘critical negativity’—an ‘analytical attitude attuned not to how dance improves experiences of living but to how dance’s exuberant modeling of forms of life might provide cover for life-negating practices.’ Dancing on Violent Ground exemplifies the effectiveness of this scholarly orientation and draws attention to the need for similarly attuned inquiries. At the same time, Stanger’s writing demonstrates an abundant critical generosity—a deep and keen engagement with a wide range of carefully cited scholarship. In addition to the rigor of her research, it is the combination of these scholarly practices that makes Dancing on Violent Ground so compelling.” —Rebecca Chaleff, Dance Chronicle— -