Dance's Political Imaginaries

This chapter examines claims made by choreographers and scholars about a particular type of political value. In relation to ideas arising in philosophical aesthetics about the distinction between inherent and instrumental value, and different forms of cognitivist value, I examine how claims made through the textual framing of performance about dance’s ability to challenge neoliberal capitalism create a paradox in which dance’s non-instrumental character is instrumentalised as politically useful. In response to this paradox, I go on to suggest that claims about dance’s political nature function as a form of ‘myth’ which gives rise to an ‘imaginary’ in which dance can oppose the structural forces within which it is produced, shared and consumed.