Dance as Activism: Exploring Gun Violence Through Movement and Text

In my thesis, I explore the potential for dance to take on an activist role, serving to springboard conversations and personal understandings of social issues in ways that conventional activism does not access. Through creative and textual research, I created a 20-minute long dance work titled "Alert" that examines the embodied experience of women after incidents of gun violence in the United States. The work considers male rage and rejection, and how women situate their bodies in order to reduce, ignore, or oppose the potential of violence. I also incorporated literary text within my creative process in order to reflect on the similarities and differences between historical questions with war and current day issues with gun violence. Through creative process, I discovered the importance of context and negotiated the balance of explicit versus implicit content. I discuss the ways in which my dancers and I created movement and text for my work and the awareness that artistic work does not exist in a vacuum outside of current events. I conclude by describing my creative work and discussing the potential and limitations of activist art.