Choreographing Dirt

Angenette Spalink is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Texas A&M University.

"In Choregraphing Dirt, Angenette Spalink excavates and activates our intimate and interwoven dance with the material stuff of the earth – call it dirt, soil, detritus, mud, peat, humus, ash – it is the delicate and constant dance partner of our intractably embodied lives. In light of current myriad crises, Choregraphing Dirt analyzes how performance – dance, theatre and cultural enactment – can trace the impacts of extraction and trade, reveal displacement and destruction of human and more-than-human lives, unearth and lay bare racist and genocidal histories long buried in soil, or celebrate deeply rooted cultural reciprocities with the land around us. Choreographing Dirt is a lucid and compelling analysis of the essential work of the performing arts in the era of climate change: to illuminate and complicate human kinship with the more-than-human world. Spalink has made an elegant and incisive contribution to the intersectional fields of ecodramaturgy, performance studies, dance studies and environmental humanities."Theresa J. May, author of Earth Matters on Stage: Ecology, Environment and American Theatre"Spalink does the urgent work of bringing ecocriticism to dance studies, taking seriously how dirt is choreographed on the stage, as well as how dirt in turn choreographs the movement of others in and across biological, geographical, and cultural spaces. Her analyses of theater and dance pieces in which dirt takes center stage model how the movements of dirt itself offer new insights to intractable ecological problems."Rosemary Candelario, University of Texas at Austin"By attending to the ways in which the 'choreography of matter matters,' Choreographing Dirt represents a welcome and much-needed expansion of ecocriticism and ecodramaturgy into the fields of movement and dance. Focusing on well-chosen case studies, Spalink’s analysis astutely reveals how performance can illuminate connections between the displacement of resources and environmental injustices."Dr. Wendy Arons, Professor of Drama and Director of the Center for the Arts in Society, Carnegie Mellon University

• List of figuresAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Biogeocultography1. Performative Taphonomy: Excavating and Exhuming the Past in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play2. Staging Extraction: Peat’s Vitality in Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring3. A Dirty Pas De Deux: Dirt, Skin, and “Trans-corporeality” in Eveoke Dance Theatre’s Las Mariposas4. Mycelium in Motion: Choreographing Care in Iván-Daniel Espinosa’s Messengers DivinosConclusion: Moving with the TroubleIndex