Exhausting Dance, Performance and the Politics of Movement, by André Lepecki

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The translation of dance theorist André Lepecki’s exceptional book, even 20 years after its publication, is particularly important for the development of dance studies in Romania, a little-studied field that informs choreographers, dancers and performing arts researchers. The book offers a significant and radical revision of the way we think about dance, arguing for the need for a renewed engagement between dance studies and experimental artistic and philosophical practices.

In the book’s seven chapters, Lepecki develops his argument about the politics of the ontological connection between dance and movement by analyzing a series of performance works by choreographers and visual artists who transformed the contemporary dance scene in the early 1990s in Europe and the USA: Jérôme Bel (France), Juan Dominguez (Spain), Trisha Brown (USA), La Ribot (Spain), Xavier Le Roy (France-Germany), Vera Mantero (Portugal), Bruce Nauman (USA) and William Pope. L (USA). Through their dynamic and explicit dialogue with the performing arts, visual arts and critical theory over the last thirty years, this new generation of choreographers challenges our understanding of dance by depleting the concept of movement.

The publication is a project realized by the CNDB in partnership with TACT Publishing House, at the initiative of performing arts critic Cristina Modreanu, and represents the translation of a book that has influenced generations of choreographers and dancers.

“The seemingly simple yet philosophically charged question Professor André Lepecki answers is: what can a body do? Lepecki organizes his discourse around themes generally addressed by postcolonial and race studies, while also taking into account the contributions of feminist theories to performative studies. The present volume, finally translated here, places dance at the intersection of these studies capable of reconfiguring today’s identity dynamics. The connections made by the author are spectacular and require readers to have advanced knowledge of philosophy or, at the very least, the openness to relate dance to this field that gives it weight and amplifies its meanings.” (Cristina Modreanu)