Home Bodies
Submitted by: Charlotte Carbone
Submitted on: December 6 2023
Submitted for: Contemporary Research Methods
Submitted to: Amish Morrell
Introduction to HOME BODIES
From June to September 2023 I was an artist in residence with the Dance In Public Space Residency hosted by The Bentway and Toronto Dance Theatre. Through this residency I created HOME BODIES, an embodied research project that explores street dance through the lens of safety, accountability, and site responsiveness. Before I was a street dancer, I was a studio dancer with 10 years of ballet and 5 years of commercial choreography training. However, I was pushed out of classical institutes as they strive to “produce ideal bodies in line with dominant discourses by valuing certain bodies according to specific styles of dance”. My queer femme Asian body was not welcomed beyond corporate rhetoric. I found street dance as an alternative, but it was not a pendulum swing to dialectical solutions. Street dance also reproduces systems of inequity and cultures of violence in other ways. HOME BODIES is equity seeking work through community arts. Through iterative community research-creation that included cyphers, play-based exercises, and journaling I was able to challenge issues of equity and safety in street dance , HOME BODIES culminated in the public shareback Dance Like Everyone’s Watching which showcased the key provocations of an audience with closed eyes, partnered prop work, and an audience invitation to join us in dancing. This glimpse into our process demonstrated the importance of curating safer spaces for queer racialized dancers and sharing knowledge outside of colonial dance institutes.
The effects of intersectional identity politics within street dance
Marginalized communities are at the center of street dance. Street dance styles were born from the lived experiences of queer and racialized people because of their needs for expression, agency, community, and escapism. Central to HOME BODIES is their legacy as safer spaces for queer and racialized people. Through HOME BODIES, I question how these safer spaces have been maintained, evolved, or destroyed as street dance exists against the backdrop of modern identity politics. For example, the 1970s style of Punking was renamed and popularized in the 2000s as Waacking. Punking was pioneered by gay racialized men in gay clubs, however, Waacking today is dominated by non-Black cishet women through dance battles and formal classes. Is this change in practice and practitioners a way in which “waacking kinesthetics reorient bodies to bring a black queer consciousness into being” and therefore foster compassion and allyship? Or is this an example of appropriation and extraction of queer bodies and culture? With these types of discourses, I question how dancers make or take space since street dance’s expansion beyond its original identity-based communities. As I reflect on HOME BODIES, I am grounded by Indigenous scholar Eve Tuck who calls for desire-based over damage-centered research. Such as with krumping, a style created by Black men as an emotional outlet, “[krumping] and the body serve as sites for processing, absorbing, deflecting, and claiming urban space, not, reductively, resisting victimization to it”. Street dance is inseparable from the lived experiences and collective memory that lead to their creation. HOME BODIES is an attempt to bring fullness and complexity to these realities.
With HOME BODIES, I carefully considered who to include in the development process and shareback performance, and how I would check my positionality. As a queer femme thin-bodied Asian with a post-secondary education, I recognize the survivorship bias and confirmation bias I may hold and therefore must be accountable to. I thought of the selection process as not a box checking exercise to achieve “total” and “equal” representation of dance styles and identities, but rather an attempt to gather street dancers who are invested in their communities yet prepared to question them. It was also key to blur separation between my role as a participant, facilitator, and researcher in order to build rapport with peers instead of instill a hierarchy. Once all dancer selections were made, we learned weekly from each other through dance-based play. Learning through play was a central method in HOME BODIES because of its ability to break down barriers to understanding, connecting, and discussing the personal and the political. Building cross-community relationships through new dance styles, “estranges the practitioner's body from its habitual kinesthetics, bringing to consciousness how movement feels. Estrangement creates critical distance” and therefore complex relationships.
The gentrification and commodification of street dance
Street dance was created in the neighborhoods, clubs, and parties of poor racialized people in reaction to elitist spaces. Street dance fostered ways of moving, feeling, and speaking that were passed to the next generation through oral storytelling and candid photos/videos. Street dance maintains these practices of sharing and documentation, but it is complicated by the modern commodification and commercialization of street dance by bodies of greater societal power. For example, through HOME BODIES we were able to discuss the reality of street dance being sold as bite-size classes in expensive commercial dance studios by teachers who are not in the street dance community. Dance classes are perceived as meritocracies, however, financial accessibility and stability largely affect if a person can participate let alone consistently train in a dance style therefore privileging the upper-middle class. We also discussed how the idealized linear process of disciplined training, to intense competition, to dance mastery is an accepted mentality in street dance, but is contradictory to the original emotional and social purposes of street dance. This mentality dangerously internalizes the capitalist values of constant productivity, conflating ability and self worth, and competition over resources.
HOME BODIES questions how we can embody anti-capitalism in street dance yet survive the capitalist reality of making a living as dance professionals. I am grounded by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s words on Indigenous anti-capitalism, as “[her] Ancestors didn’t accumulate capital, they accumulated networks of meaningful, deep, fluid, intimate collective and individual relationships of trust.” HOME BODIES’ prioritization of safety and accountability is an attempt at rerouting street dance back to accessibility instead of profitability. Part of this prioritization included free drop-in dance sessions for “girls, gays, thems, femmes” that I called GET HOME SAFE. By opening up a dance space with priority to marginalized dancers, I dream of who is now able to come forward and sit in the power among peers.
Notes of gratitude
Thank you HOME BODIES research team.
Thank you GET HOME SAFE girls, gays, thems, and femmes.
Thank you T.O.Wh/acking.
Thank you Toronto Kiki Ballroom Alliance.
Thank you to my ancestors who are unknown in my history but deeply felt in my spirit.
Bibliography
Bragin, Naomi. “Techniques of Black Male Re/Dress: Corporeal Drag and Kinesthetic Politics in the Rebirth of Waacking/Punkin.” Women & Performance 24, no. 1 (2014): 61–78.
Rose, Victoria, Simon Barrick, and William Bridel. “‘Pretty Tough and Pretty Hard’: An Intersectional Analysis of Krump as Seen on So You Think You Can Dance.” Journal of dance education 21, no. 4 (2021): 236–246.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done : Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis, Minnesota ; University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Tuck, Eve. “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.” Harvard educational review 79, no. 3 (2009): 409–428.
