Expanding Testimony: Dance Performance as a Mode of Witnessing in Richard Move's Lamentation Variation. Issue 3 (2nd September 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Thoms, Victoria
• Is Part Of: Dance chronicle. Volume 42:Issue 3(2019)
• Page Start: 322
• Page End: 341
• Publication Date: 2019-09-02
• Subjects: 9/11 -- testimony -- trauma -- Martha Graham Dance Company -- Lamentation Variations -- Richard Move; Dance -- Periodicals; Dancing; 792.805
• DOI: 10.1080/01472526.2019.1673111
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0147-2526

Abstract

Abstract: In this article I explore dance's potential to serve as a form of trauma testimony. I first define trauma and testimony and consider how literature, the favored medium of testimony in trauma studies, offers ways to think about dance as a means of bearing witness. I further suggest that dance as a vehicle of expression provides as yet under-explored possibilities for testimony because its embodied character offers new forms of affective witnessing in our troubled geopolitical moment. Specifically, I study Richard Move's Lamentation Variation, commissioned by the Martha Graham Dance Company in 2007, and ask how the piece reworks the traumatic dimensions of falling that have so prolifically characterized memories of 9/11.