UC Berkeley

Choreotopias: Performance, State Violence, and the Near Past uncovers the central role of dance in producing new social and political relationships in México since the 1980s. In the process it considers how performances have worked historically and aesthetically in violent contexts. The 1980s marked an inflection point in the social life of residents in México. A contested presidential election, a deadly earthquake, a receding economy, a changing middle-class, and gender and sexuality political movements created unprecedented conditions. This project uses elements of choreography as metaphoric possibilities for understanding political organization. It highlights under analyzed artists and it explores how corruption and misuse of power shape dance and performance makers and, in turn, how these artists respond to such conditions. I describe the collective communities that use artistic interventions in zones where the State actively works to restrict political organization. Choreotopias foregrounds three main sites where artists contest national projects that control bodies and their actions, even in death. I assess creative practices such as experimental street choreography in the 1980s, collaborations between feminist video artists and punk youth in the late-1980s and 1990s, and dance theatre processes where artists have used forensic science aesthetics since the 1990s. Artists are attuned to the embodied dimensions of history, representative governments, and the national imaginary. Across these visual and embodied forms of expression, artists reveal the limits of the State and, in some cases, offer visions of a better world. Performance studies links gender studies and nationalism studies to construct compelling arguments about the importance of video art, dance, and theater in creating collective communities under the threat of abusive power. This project combines a mix of feminism studies, political philosophy, queer of color critique, performance analysis, and nationalism studies to consider how artists use dance and the choreography of waste to refuse control societies. This interdisciplinary study stresses the importance of creative practices in offering new ways of political formation.

Chapter One, "From Heterotopias to Choreotopias: Dance and Desmadre in Mexico City," examines the punk-aesthetic choreographies created by Asaltodiario, a Mexico City theater and dance troupe formed in 1987. I assess the relationship between choreography and precarity in times of rapid urban development after a deadly earthquake sped up citywide renovation plans. Reassessing Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopias, I argue that choreographic practices offered an interconnectedness that had been ruptured by the structural collapse of the city and the State. I assess Asaltodiario's commitment to valuing the public street as a site on which to change urban life in Mexico City. The artists collaborated with homeless youth and drug addicts. Performances by Asaltodiario followed a then-recent trend in Mexican contemporary dance practices not seen in the cultural sector before the 1980s. I offer the concept I provisionally call choreotopias, or those temporary and spatially bounded "dance floors" that occur in unexpected places. Choreotopias are artistic-political dwelling spaces that rearrange social relationships and create temporary communities, anticipate new social imaginaries, and attend to the historic, present, and future lives of unwanted bodies. The subsequent chapters consider the notion of choreotopias in relationship to gender and death. Chapter Two, "Mosh Pit Desires: Video Feminisms and Punk Performances," examines how disaffected women who are associated with counterculture movements at the end of the twentieth century navigate México's culture of repression. I evaluate the video art projects Nadie es inocente (1986) and Alma punk (1992), created by feminist artist Sarah Minter in collaboration with disaffected youth from the punk rock commons. I analyze Minter's approach to video art and its intersection with punk's multi-sensory and "genre-punking" aspects. The performers all played themselves in these documentary-fiction projects. The content and form of the materials exceeded morally and aesthetically conservative campaigns that attempted to control how women's bodies could move. The final chapter, "Searching for the Missing: Performance, Forensics, and Democracy" offers a compelling analysis of the relationship between performance and forensic practices through an evaluation of artists such as NAKA Dance Theater, Violeta Luna, and Lukas Avendaño. These artists have used visual representations of death, official reports from missing persons' cases, and medical-legal methods to develop their performances. I maintain that the artists use dance and performance investigative aesthetics for public criticism in violent contexts without encumbering the liabilities of journalism—a discipline that became a deadly practice. This project will be of interest to scholars and students in gender studies, nationalism studies, urban studies, performance studies, and Latinx/Latin American Studies.