UCLA

This dissertation investigates contemporary citizenship through an investigation of intermedia choreography and performance during the first decade of the twenty-first century. I theorize the present era as the age of the improvised explosive device (IED) to argue that citizenship has been fundamentally redefined within instable, unpredictable political and social conditions best encapsulated by the signification of the IED. The IED represents one of two twenty-first century phenomena affecting how citizenship is conceptualized, practiced and experienced in which I situate my investigation. The second is the rapid rise of the U.S. surveillance assemblage as part of the post-September 11 U.S. security state, which has similarly transformed the constitutional rights, liberties and protections of citizens around the world as well as the meaning of human presence and embodiment.

Though the dissertation is interdisciplinary in nature, pulling from scholarship across the humanities, it is directly in conversation with citizenship and critical dance studies. Recent theorizations in each highlight such characteristics as embodiment, agency, relationality and collectivity. Close choreographic analysis is the primary methodology; choreography is also a rubric for conceptualizing citizenship as a physically enacted, dynamic relationship between the individual citizen subject, the body politic and the nation-state.

Over the course of the dissertation I theorize seven different models of citizenship. I begin by delineating a new normal habitus of citizenship in the twenty-first century, then propose citizenship as dissonant through an analysis of dances by HIJACK and the William Forsythe Company. Central chapters address citizenship as it references the singular political actor and "the people" of American democracy. I first analyze dances by twentieth-century choreographers Isadora Duncan and Yvonne Rainer, which, I argue, choreograph citizenship, respectively, as incorporative and intersectional. These models provide a foundation for comparing the radical changes discussed in ensuing chapters on British South Asian live artist Rajni Shah, French Algerian choreographer Rachid Ouramdane and African American conceptual artist damali ayo [sic]. I argue that work by these artists proposes citizenship as contaminative, projective and improvisational. The final chapter asks what kind of political association and agency might be imagined by theorizing the political potential of conviviality in relation to participatory projects by Shah and Headlong Dance Theater.