How the Body Carries Political Meaning Even in Abstract Movement

Every essay on this site starts from the same wager: a body on a stage is never only flesh executing form. The objection always arrives from the same direction — what about abstract movement? Dance without plot or character: Balanchine’s geometry, Merce Cunningham’s chance scores, Trisha Brown’s accumulating systems. Surely there, at last, the body is just a body. I want to spend this essay disagreeing, carefully. The claim I will defend is that political meaning in abstract concert dance does not arrive through story; it is already present in the training, the apparatus, and the frame — the floor, the mirror, the count, the breath, the title in the program. Abstract movement is movement that has removed its alibi, not its meaning. Somatic movement research gives us instruments for noticing this, because somatics — the study of movement from inside the body rather than from its reflection — makes a trained habit visible as a habit. And kinesthetic empathy, the spectator’s musculature quietly simulating what it watches, makes sure none of us watch from nowhere. What follows is a handful of cases, and a method for reading them.

The Myth of the Neutral Body

In dance writing, abstract means the work stages movement without narrative or character. It does not mean the movement is without history, though the two get confused constantly — sometimes strategically.

Consider the technique most often offered as the neutral foundation of concert dance. Ballet’s vertical spine and turned-out feet descend from the court of Louis XIV, who chartered the Académie Royale de Danse in 1661 partly to standardize how nobles held themselves in his presence. Raoul-Auger Feuillet’s notation system, published in 1700, wrote the standard down so it could be reproduced and, by extension, policed. The plié at the top of today’s class is a fossil of courtly etiquette — a body trained to make rank legible — rehearsed daily under the name of basics. Calling it basic is the political move: it converts one court’s preference into everyone’s foundation.

Or take Rudolf von Laban, whose effort analysis — weight, time, space, flow — runs through studios, corporate trainings, and somatic certification programs today. In the early 1930s Laban held positions inside Nazi Germany’s cultural bureaucracy and organized mass movement spectacles; his pageant for the 1936 Berlin Olympics was canceled, and he left for England in 1937. The point is not that effort analysis is therefore tainted. The point is that no vocabulary of the body is politically virgin. Abstract removes the story. The history stays in the tissue.

Agon, 1957: An Abstract Pas de Deux in a Segregated Country

Agon premiered on December 1, 1957, at the City Center in New York: New York City Ballet, a Stravinsky score, no plot, no characters. The title is Greek for contest, and the ballet is a series of dances for four couples, a pas de trois, and a pas de deux. Balanchine built the central pas de deux on Arthur Mitchell — the first Black dancer New York City Ballet had hired, who joined in 1955 — and Diana Adams. Now set the premiere in its year. Brown v. Board of Education was three years old. The Civil Rights Act was seven years away. A Black man’s hands at a white woman’s waist, under stage light, in choreography that claimed to be about nothing, in a country still enforcing segregation, was a political event whether or not anyone in the theater intended it as one.

The abstraction did not mute the charge; it concentrated it. Nobody could wave the moment off as something the story required. There was no story. There were the bodies, and the fact of them. Touring made the reading explicit: dance histories record Southern presenters asking that the pas de deux be quietly dropped from programs, and the company’s answer, in several accounts, was that the ballet would not travel without it. A decade later, after Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder in April 1968, Mitchell left for Harlem and founded Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1969 — an argument that ballet’s vertical hierarchy could be inhabited, and argued with, from the inside.

The Apparatus Carries the Argument

If abstract work carries politics, it usually does so not through themes but through material conditions. This is where a somatic eye earns its keep, because a somatic eye watches the room, not only the dancer. Three quick reads.

The mirror

Studios at the School of American Ballet are walled in mirrors; Martha Graham’s studio, by long tradition, has none. Two pedagogies, two politics of looking. The mirror trains you to see yourself from outside and correct toward a codified ideal — surveillance that becomes portable, because after enough years you carry the mirror with you, adjusting toward an image even in unmirrored rooms. Graham’s mirrorless floor trains proprioception: the sense of the body from inside. Neither room is neutral. Each takes a position on where knowledge of the body lives — in the eye of an authority, or in the dancer’s own tissue. When you watch an abstract work, ask which room that body was made in.

The floor

In January 1972, in a gymnasium at Oberlin College, Steve Paxton set a group of men in gym clothes falling, colliding, and rolling. The evening was called Magnesium, and it became one of the seeds of contact improvisation, which had its first New York performances at the John Weber Gallery that June. Falling is a political proposition. In ballet a fall is an error or a death; in contact it is a destination you reach with someone else’s weight arriving on top of you. Paxton’s small dance makes the same point about stillness: stand long enough and you can watch the standing body’s involuntary corrections — a tremor here, a re-stacking there. Stillness is labor. But I would rather sit with the discomfort than celebrate. Early contact culture spoke a language of universal physics and neutral bodies while the people in that gym were, mostly, young, white, and able-bodied. The floor equalizes weight. The doorway does not.

Breath and the count

Graham’s contraction is an exhale that hollows the torso; the release is the inhale. That is a respiration policy, not a decoration. Lamentation (1930) placed Graham on a bench inside a jersey tube, only her face, hands, and feet free, stretching the fabric into shapes of grief. There is no narrative and no character: mourning is staged as a material condition of a body against cloth. In 1930, a woman claiming public grief without a story to excuse it was already an argument about whose suffering is stageable. Meanwhile, the ballet class counts in eights, and the count disciplines time and breath together — which is precisely what the dance discussed next refuses.

Refusing Spectacle: The “No” Manifesto and Trio A

Yvonne Rainer’s “No” Manifesto, written in 1965 during the Judson Dance Theater years (a history the Museum of Modern Art revisited in 2018 with Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done), is a list of refusals: “No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe… No to moving or being moved.” A manifesto is a paratext that reprograms watching before the dancing starts. Trio A (1966), the best-known section of The Mind Is a Muscle, keeps the promise: continuous, uninflected movement, no pauses, no climaxes, gaze turned away from the audience, nothing repeated exactly — roughly four and a half minutes of task-like action in which the body never performs for you.

The political argument is legible in the form rather than in any theme: the dancer is not a display object, effort is not a commodity, and the spectator’s wish to be seduced is not the contract of the event. Even the seating carried it — the pews of Judson Memorial Church versus the velvet rakes of the opera house. Where you sit shapes what you expect.

One discomfort should stay unresolved, because I do not think it resolves. Refusing seduction is still a relation to an audience — a choreography of the viewer’s desire, control wearing the costume of its opposite. Trio A is not outside the economy of looking; it renegotiates the terms. That difference matters, and it is not innocence.

Virtuosity as an Unexamined Value

Virtuosity gets a free pass in most dance writing, treated as an obvious good rather than an argument. It is not obvious. The thirty-two fouettés of Swan Lake (1895), the arabesque pushed past the shoulder, the penché searching for 180 degrees: extension inflation is measurable if you compare Marie Taglioni’s modest 1832 line with the competition stage of today — Youth America Grand Prix was founded in 1999 — or with any company’s social feed. The more is an economic signal, not a natural fact.

And it is political twice over. First, the standard excludes bodies that cannot or will not produce it. Second, and less often said: historically excluded dancers have had to exceed the standard merely to be admitted. When Misty Copeland became American Ballet Theatre’s first Black female principal in June 2015, the public conversation was full of the double bind — she was celebrated for the very athleticism the institution had demanded as the price of entry. Applause for the hurdle and applause for the person who cleared it belong to the same apparatus.

I am not arguing against virtuosity. I am arguing that it costs too much to stay unexamined. It is also labor made visible, and pleasure, and for some dancers it has been the only door. Holding both readings at once — cost and door — is where criticism should live, not step over.

Paratext: Where Abstract Work Stores Its Politics

Alvin Ailey’s Revelations premiered on January 31, 1960, at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Much of it is abstract by any honest definition: a fan extended in “Fix Me, Jesus,” yellow parasols tilting through “Wade in the Water,” processional lines that reduce worship to its gestural residue — Ailey called his sources blood memories. The political meaning is not smuggled in through mime. It is stored in the frame: the spirituals and gospel on the soundtrack, the title, the program’s account of a childhood in Texas. The movement is abstract; the frame tells you whose abstraction you are watching.

The reverse holds too. A single word on the page — Agon, contest — and suddenly four couples’ geometry is a game with stakes. Titles, program notes, preshow speeches: the paratext is the plain sight where abstract work keeps its politics. Watching only the movement and ignoring the frame is like reading only the sentence and never asking who is permitted to speak.

A Method: Three Questions for Watching Abstract Movement

You do not need a theory degree to read an abstract work politically. You need a place to put your attention. I use three questions, in this order.

1. What has this body been trained in, and what does the training want from it? A ballet body and a contact body answer to different rooms; the plié and the fall are both positions, not facts.
2. What does the room ask of the body? Floor, mirror, count, seat, sightline, breath. Where does the weight go, and who is allowed to stay upright?
3. What is refused? Spectacle, unison, the front, stillness, the count. Every refusal is an argument, whether or not anyone announces it.

Try it on the next livestream before narrative hunger reasserts itself. Give yourself the first sixty seconds and write down one thing: where the weight is. It sounds small. It is not. Weight distribution is a distribution of value.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can a dance be political if the choreographer insists it is abstract?

Yes. Choreographers control intent; audiences read context. Agon was built as plotless form, and a Southern presenter still wanted its pas de deux cut. Abstraction removes the alibi of the story; it does not remove the bodies, the training, or the room. If anything, abstract work is more politically legible, because nothing distracts you from the apparatus.

What is the difference between political content and political form?

Content is what a work is about — themes, subjects, texts. Form is how it is built — technique, structure, apparatus, who dances and under what conditions. A work can carry radical content inside a conservative form, or make its politics entirely in form, as Trio A does by refusing climax and display. Form is usually where the deeper argument lives, because form is what gets rehearsed.

Doesn’t reading politics into everything ruin the pleasure of watching?

It changes the pleasure, and sometimes deepens it. Kinesthetic empathy does not switch off when analysis switches on; reading is itself a sensation. Some pleasures deserve examination anyway. Applause has a politics, and knowing what you are applauding is not the death of enjoyment — it is enjoyment with the receipt attached.

How do I begin spotting political meaning in an abstract work?

Start with the body and the room, not the story: what the training wants, what the space demands, and what the work refuses. Then read the paratext — title, program note, music. Most political meaning in abstract dance is stored in one of those places, in plain sight.

Where This Column Goes Next

This essay is the pilot for a recurring column of close readings, one apparatus per installment. Next: the mirror — what the mirrored studio trains, what the unmirrored studio trusts, and what happens when a choreographer wheels a mirror on stage and turns the apparatus into content. If there is a work, or a single choreographic decision, you want read this way, send it in; the best material for this column has always come from arguments in the lobby. The body on stage is always arguing. Criticism is just learning to hear the argument.