t h e o r y s l o 0 p —

THE EMANCIPATED DANCER

The dancer is often imagined at the extremes: either as the exploited body, subjected to the choreographer’s will, or as the free spirit, liberated through movement. Both images are too simple. Each captures a partial truth, but taken alone, they flatten the dancer into a single political role — always victim or always escapee. In practice, the figure of the dancer is far less stable. At times, the dancer occupies a subordinate position within a clearly hierarchical structure; at others, they act as an agent of authority, reproducing and enforcing hierarchies over others — apprentices, students, collaborators, or even audiences.

This instability matters. It reveals that domination in dance cannot be reduced to a single, fixed relation — such as choreographer over dancer — nor can freedom be claimed as the dancer’s essential property. Rather, the dancer moves through shifting configurations of power: moments of constraint, moments of resistance, and moments of dominance, often overlapping in a single rehearsal, performance, or career. To attend to the dancer as a political figure is therefore to recognise that domination is multiple, changing form depending on the situation, and that a politics adequate to dance must be capable of confronting it in all its guises.

Historical & Social Shifts

Across history, the figure of the dancer has been positioned within very different regimes of power. In the court ballets of Louis XIV, the dancer’s role was inseparable from the sovereign’s authority. Technique, costume, and choreography were not simply matters of style but of political order, establishing who could appear, how they could move, and in what proximity to the king. The dancer here was both an ornament of power and its disciplined instrument, enacting a form of domination so embedded in ritual that it appeared as grace. The court dancer’s prestige did not negate their subordination; proximity to the centre of power did not mean possession of it.

Modernism recast the dancer in another light: as a vessel for artistic innovation and individual expression. Figures like Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham promoted an image of the dancer as liberated from the strictures of classical form — yet these very innovations introduced new regimes of discipline. Graham’s technique, for instance, became codified and institutionally protected, creating a hierarchy in which only certain bodies, trained in a particular method, could claim legitimacy. Here the dancer could be both a revolutionary against one set of constraints and a gatekeeper enforcing another.

In the neoliberal cultural economies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the dancer has often been reframed as an entrepreneurial subject — adaptable, self-managing, and project-based. The ideal is not stability but perpetual availability: to tour, to freelance, to shift between genres and collaborations. This flexibility is often framed as freedom, but it is bound to precarity, with dancers taking on risks once absorbed by institutions. At the same time, star dancers or those embedded in elite networks may consolidate significant influence, shaping opportunities for others and determining which movements, aesthetics, or identities circulate as valuable.

These shifts show that the dancer’s relationship to domination is not linear, nor is it bound to a single set of roles. It is a position that can oscillate between submission and command, between marginalisation and authority — sometimes within the same body, the same career, or even the same day.

Moments of Escape

If the dancer’s role has often been framed through hierarchies of command and obedience, it has also been a site of evasion. Not all resistance takes the form of open refusal; in dance, it can emerge as something quieter, embedded in the movement itself. Improvisation offers one such possibility. Even within a tightly composed work, a dancer may stretch, bend, or reinterpret the material — shifting timing, inflecting gesture, altering the weight or tone in ways that the choreography cannot fully script. These choices may go unnoticed by the audience, yet they reassert the dancer’s agency within the choreographer’s frame.

In rehearsal, micro-rebellions can take the form of strategic compliance — doing just enough to appear obedient while redirecting the work’s energy in subtler ways. A dancer might deliberately misremember a sequence, introduce an unintended pause, or reinterpret an instruction in a way that shifts its meaning. Such acts are not always heroic; sometimes they are born from exhaustion, boredom, or playful mischief. Yet they can open small cracks in otherwise rigid structures, making space for the dancer’s own priorities to surface.

Failure, too, can be a mode of escape. When a leap falls short, when a turn unravels, or when a body refuses to produce the desired effect, the work momentarily departs from the choreographer’s control. In some cases, this unplanned deviation is absorbed back into the performance, becoming part of the piece; in others, it exposes the fragility of the choreographic authority itself. Failure interrupts the fantasy of perfect execution that many hierarchies depend on, revealing that domination in dance is never absolute.

These moments of escape are often fleeting and do not necessarily overturn the structures in which they occur. But they matter because they remind us that domination is never total: within even the most constrained contexts, dancers can — and do — find ways to move otherwise.

Moments of control: How dancers themselves reproduce hierarchies

While much discourse casts dancers as victims of choreographic authority, it is equally important to note that dancers can become agents of control, enacting and sustaining hierarchies within the structures they inhabit. These moments complicate the idea of the dancer as purely dominated.

Peer-to-peer hierarchy:
Within companies, rehearsal rooms, or training spaces, experienced dancers often wield authority over less experienced ones — offering “corrections,” setting behavioural norms, or even policing stylistic authenticity. Though sometimes framed as mentorship, these gestures can reinforce vertical power structures, mirroring the choreographer–dancer dynamic in miniature. Apprentices and understudies may find their contributions devalued, with knowledge flowing in only one direction.

Gatekeeping expertise:
Dancers may also reproduce exclusivity through the withholding of technical or artistic knowledge from outsiders, whether consciously (to maintain professional scarcity) or unconsciously (by embedding it in inaccessible language and codes of bodily comportment). In workshops with non-professional participants, a dancer might insist on “proper” technique or demean vernacular movement, subtly reasserting their place at the top of a hierarchy of embodied knowledge.

Audience management:
On stage, dancers exert a unique form of control over audiences — not simply through captivating performance but by directing attention, pacing perception, and structuring emotional arcs. The proscenium and theatrical conventions create an implicit power relation: the audience is seated, silent, and gazing, while the dancer acts. Even in immersive or participatory contexts, the dancer often decides the parameters of engagement, setting the limits on how close, how involved, and how disruptive the audience can be.

Internalised discipline:
Having been trained within regimes of strict bodily control, dancers often internalise these norms and apply them to others — from policing posture and deportment in daily life to reproducing certain aesthetic ideals on social media. In these cases, the dancer becomes not only a bearer of movement but also a carrier of disciplinary power.

These moments reveal that domination is not a one-way street between choreographer and dancer; it circulates through the entire ecology of dance, with dancers both subject to and complicit in its reproduction. The same embodied skills that make a dancer capable of subversion can also make them effective agents of discipline.

Political principle: The dancer as a figure of domination’s mutability

The dancer occupies a singular position in political thought: they are at once a subject of control and an active agent in reproducing or transforming that control. Across history, the figure of the dancer has been bound into shifting regimes of domination — from the rigid hierarchies of court performance, through the disciplinary demands of modernist technique, to the precarious self-entrepreneurship of neoliberal cultural economies. What makes the dancer politically potent is not their subjection alone, but the way their position is never static; it mutates in accordance with the structures in which they move. The same plié or arabesque can be an act of deference to royal authority, an emblem of artistic mastery, or a commodity for global circulation, depending on the social field in which it is performed.

This mutability means that domination in dance cannot be reduced to a single, fixed relationship — such as choreographer over dancer, or state over artist. The dancer’s body is a site where multiple forms of control intersect: institutional, aesthetic, economic, interpersonal. Sometimes these forms align to reinforce one another; at other times they collide, creating tensions that open up new possibilities for action. For instance, the improviser may reject the authority of set choreography, only to be captured by market demands for novelty; the classical soloist may appear autonomous on stage while bound to punishing rehearsal regimes.

If we take the dancer seriously as a political figure, then a politics attentive to dance must adopt a similarly mutable approach to domination. It must resist the comfort of locating oppression in a single identifiable place and instead follow how it travels between bodies, institutions, and practices. Such a politics would not only name domination when it comes from the top down, but would also confront its subtler circulations — in the peer-to-peer enforcement of norms, in the internalisation of disciplinary ideals, in the quiet reproduction of exclusions. The dancer reveals that domination is not merely an external force to resist, but an ever-shifting field in which we are always, in some way, moving.

Closing: The dancer as a shifting figure

The dancer is never fixed in place — neither permanently free nor permanently captured. They move through the unstable terrain of power much as they move through space: with steps that can follow a pattern, break from it, or blur the line between the two. To see the dancer clearly is to resist the temptation to anchor them in a single political role. Their subordination and their authority are not separate states but positions they may occupy in quick succession, sometimes in the same moment.

This shifting quality does not make the dancer politically irrelevant; it makes them essential. They show us that domination is not a monolith to be toppled once and for all, but a mutable, circulating force — one that can be embodied, resisted, and enforced by the same person across time. In this sense, the dancer becomes a living diagram of political life under conditions where power is diffuse and mobile.

Attending to the dancer in this way means refusing to search for the one relation that defines them. Instead, it calls for a politics as agile as the body it studies: able to recognise domination in all its guises, to notice the small deviations that make space for agency, and to remain attuned to the ways authority can be both escaped and reproduced. The dancer’s continual movement reminds us that political life, like choreography, is never settled. It must always be rehearsed, improvised, and reimagined — step by shifting step.