Precarious Bodies in Motion: Choreopolitics, Affect, and Flamenco Dissent in Spain

This dissertation explores the political potential of dance and dance performances in public protests whereby dancing bodies are capable of performing politics through actions and movements within the boundaries established by existing power structures. Building upon the insights of political theorist Jacques Rancière, dance theorist André Lepecki, and affect theorist Brian Massumi, this study reveals the micro-political value of dancing in the form of dissensus and as an affective and aesthetic practice in politics. Dissensus, as articulated by Rancière, refers to the collision between the prevailing order and opposing viewpoints that disrupts "the distribution of the sensible" (or common sensual perception) in society. In this sense, this study suggests that the subversive affective intensities of dancing in the form of dissensus not only transgress politics as what is articulated in words, but also, transindividually, spread to other bodies and thus potentially compel them to act and think differently. Within this theoretical framework, this study argues that dissensual dancing not only expresses via the body political messages and alternative ways of living and becoming in motion, but also enables bodies to disrupt the predominant, normative, representational, and choreographic structures of power that control them in certain ways.

Following the insights of critical theorists Gilles Deleuze, Brian Massumi, Judith Butler, François Debrix, and Nigel Thrift, this dissertation methodologically problematizes the idea of a singular mode of knowledge and the operation of normative frames that limit our apprehension of different worlds and lives. Thus, it adopts a more-than-representational mode of thinking, coupled with affect theory to work towards a pluralistic methodological perspective that avoids simplistic dichotomies stemming from established linguistic constructs and structures of meaning. In doing so, this study offers an alternative mode of intelligibility about precarious and resistant dancing bodies in the context of dissensual flamenco performances.

Within the context of flo6x8's protests in Spain (between 2010 and 2019), this study explores how these dance performances affectively destabilized the ways people perceived and understood flamenco as an art form and challenged the physical embodiments and social norms associated with it. By putting the flamenco body at the center of this exploration, the dissertation argues that flo6x8's dissensual dance performances are not only dialectical or antagonistic, in other words, designed to be positioned against relations of economic oppression. Rather, choreographically and affectively, they also unsettle the very categories of historical, social, cultural, and normative understanding and representation of flamenco as an art and of flamenco bodies.