go in and feel ‘well, I’m just one of the crowd’. It’s sad because you don’t
stand out and nobody knows you. You’re just – and this is why I need to
practice more and get absolutely back into it – part of the crowd. I’m not the
one. And I feel so sad about that. I was always the one who people would
look at and say ‘oh look, she’s the dancer over there. See her.’ And now, I
just go in and I’m a nobody.
(Pini 1996: 424 )The second example is concerned with the use of dance as a more general instru-
ment of change in identity. Such dance can be found in contemporary examples
such as the case of the numerous African-American dance groups which are
struggling to embody history and then provide ‘biomythographies’, tales that
elaborate visionary sagas of social and personal survival (Albright 199 7 ). It can
be found in the case of dance groups that have disabled members who have had
to make the journey from the classical notion of the body – and even more par-
ticularly, from classical priorities for dance – towards new syllabuses based on
weight and expressive force. For example, in one duet, two dancers are able to
gradually rewrite the physical expectations of the classical form, exploring, like
Contact Improvisation, ‘the kinesthetic sensations and physics of weight and
momentum, rather than the visual picture of bodily shape’ (Albright 199 7 : 86).
And it is found in a number of projects involving Community Dance, which
provide all kinds of ways of investing new forms of presence (Thomas 1998).
Nowadays, where dance is involved in general projects to change identity this will
often mean a connection to performance art, a motley collection of practices which
emerged in the 1960s from dada, experiment with projective verse, happenings
(Sandford 1995).
... Cage’s and Kaprows’ Zen-influenced theories of non judgement and
present-centredness, politicised art, feminists who insisted that the personal
and the political went hand in hand, and even street demonstrations. Thus:
performance has been a powerful catalyst in the history of twentieth century
art not only because it has subverted the formal conventions and rational
premises of modernist art but also because it has heightened our awareness
of the social role of art and, at times, has served as a vehicle for such change....
The term ‘performance art’ first appeared around 19 7 0 to describe the
empirical time-based and process-oriented work of conceptual ‘body’ and
feminist artists that was emerging at the time.... Over the past thirty-five
years many styles and modes of performance have evolved, from private,
introspective investigations to ordinary routines of everyday life, cathartic
rituals and trials of endurance, site-specific environmental transformations,
technically sophisticated multimedia productions, autobiographically based
cabaret-style performance, and large-scale, community-based projects
designed to serve as a source of social and political empowerment.
(Brentano 199 4 : 31–32)
Afterwords 143