Rose English
A Premonition of the Act
Florian Roithmayrwith, and, or, without

What movement vocabularies, what kinesthetic potentials, best speak to our time? Randy Martin, the great theorist of dance and financialization, wrote of the need for a concept of the kinestheme (like Foucault’s episteme but adapted for motion), a concept that interrogates what kinds of movement are possible in a given place-time and in a given social order. In his essay “A Precarious Dance, a Derivative Sociality,” Martin writes that so many recent movement practices (from hip hop to skateboarding) express a relationship to precarity and partake of “corporal economies where risk counts as its own reward.” Given the austerity-induced precariousness felt by so many, perhaps it is not surprising that one of movement’s tasks should be to enable its practitioners to harness, feel, value, and move with risk itself.