Right to Dance: Dancing for Rights

This anthology from Banff Centre Press is an examination of the relationship between dance and human rights. According to this collection of papers written by dance scholars, practitioners, and artists, there appear to be connections between dance and human rights issues, most frequently in the context of dance being used as a tool for inciting people to violence, as a means of humiliation, and as a means of uniting communities in times of hardship. Dance, as the articles state, is often employed as a nationalistic propaganda tool, as a means of healing individuals and groups after traumatic events, and as a powerful form of theatrical expression and education by artists/choreographers who have undergone or witnessed gross violations of human rights.

The anthology contains the following papers:

• Introduction: Human Rights, Cultural Rights, and Dance in Canada by Naomi M. Jackson;
• Dance, the Church, and Repressive Morals in Catholic Quebec by Iro Valaskakis Tembeck;
• The Thin Edge of the Wedge: Dancing Around the Potlatch Ban, 1921-1951 by Aaron Glass;
• The Show Did Not Go On: An Episode in Canada’s Red Scare by Cheryl Smith, Ph.D.;
• Negotiating Artistic Spaces: Beijing Opera and the Cultural Revolution in China by Margaret Chan;
• Remembering: The Weight of Memory by Peggy Baker and Liz Marshall;
• Sacrifice in the Studio: A History of Working Conditions, Contracts, and Unions for Dance in Canada, 1900-1980 by Amy Bowring;
• Putting it into Words: An Anecdotal History of the Canadian Alliance of Dance Artists - Ontario Chapter’s Professional Standards for Dance by P. Megan Andrews;
• Championing the Individual, Believing in the Dance: Human Rights in the Works of Paula Ross, Jay Hirabayashi, and Judith Marcuse by Kaija Pepper;
• Dance in Action: Six Nova Scotia Stories by Dianne Milligan;
• The Exile of Poetic Imagination: Challenges to the Use of Expressive Arts with Children in Adversity by Christopher Lowry; and
• Human Rights - Not Like a Document, Like a Dance by Lisa Doolittle and Anne Flynn.

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