"Funny Moves explores the politics of dance humor in ten case studies found on stages, screens and streets of Latin America, the Caribbean, South Asia, Europe, and the United States. Moves found funny are the Other to dance because funniness emerges whenever bodies move otherwise and outside of discipline. Furthermore, the same skillfulness needed to make a dance "serious" can also make it seem funny to the "wrong" spectators. These essays examine who laughs at whose moves, and who doesn't, and they ponder the situated cultural politics of laughter. Funniness, whether gleeful, surprising, or odd, intentionally so or not, is shown to arise from social disruptions, which may be progressive or conservative, or both, and which are always contested"-- Provided by publisher.
Funny Moves: Dance Humor Politics explores the intersection of dance and humor and the political stakes that bodies incur when they dare to be both aestheticized and funny. The editors posit that funny moves are dance's Other--the missteps or oversteps that don't fit a particular dance form. Funniness in dance, whether gleeful, surprising, or odd, causes disruptions which may be progressive or conservative, inciting pleasures that counterbalance the artform's often serious codes.
Writing from Latin America, the Caribbean, South Asia, Europe, and the United States, the book's ten authors provide diverse observational techniques and creative vocabularies for finding, analyzing, and theorizing funny moves across dance forms, dance scenes, and dance screens. Some of the authors find hope in the laughter of their artist subjects and their audiences, and some linger in the ambiguity and confusion so created. Each essay takes on a single surprise factor or a choreographic comic rupture, relishing in the amassed effects or affects across an absurdist cinematic, staged, or quotidian sequence. What is "funny" in each case pops up as a wildcard that evokes recognizable shared experiences, sometimes pushing back against dominant or mainstream logic and its supremacist laughter.
Funny Moves explores the intersection of dance and humor and the political stakes of that intersection. Writing from Latin America, the Caribbean, South Asia, Europe, and the United States, ten authors discuss instances of dance humor from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Funny Moves articulates dance scholarship with theories of laughter, feminist theory, gender/sexuality studies, de/postcolonial studies, film studies, and critical race studies. Insisting that humor adds more than accessory or faulty moves to dance, it invites readers to consider funny moves as dance's Other--the exclusions that define dance and ensure that dance always skirts the ridiculous.
