Choreographing the North

Book excerpt: Choreographing the North examines 11 contemporary dance pieces that perform northern culture, landscape, folklore, and ideas of "North." The choreographers, from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Luxembourg, Australia, and Argentina, translate their real or imagined journeys to the North for stage and/or screen. This book examines the ways Indigenous subjects and subjectivities have been diminished and/or distorted and considers how that diminishment has fuelled misrepresentation both inside and outside the field of contemporary dance. Where Indigenous presence is represented in dances about the North, it is as discarnate storytellers or “everyman” pastoral figures against backdrops of ice and snow. Indigenous presence is there but it is romanticized, caricatured, flattened. Using these works as moving texts Cauthery argues that, in many regards, these dances are colonizing acts that either ignore or erase the land and people upon which they are based. In analyzing and deconstructing these dances, this book acknowledges the land- and culture-based inheritances embedded in and performed through the works themselves. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in dance studies, theatre and performance studies, and cultural studies, as well as those interested in environmental psychology, human geography, and the expanding field of Arctic humanities.