Dancing Revolution

"Smith's project reconfigures the understanding of public space as a site for symbolic contestation of social and political control by investigating historical moments of participatory vernacular dance. Smith focuses extensively on public venues, such as the street, dance hall, and theater, in order to analyze the ways in which participatory public dance--street dance--functioned as a tool for contesting, constructing, or reinventing social order. Utilizing individual case studies that include, in part, the God-intoxicated public demonstrations of the First Great Awakening; the Creolized antebellum theatrical and festival dance of cities as diverse as New Orleans, Albany, and Bristol; the modernism, primitivism, and racial integration of 20th century African American popular dance; and the social role of dance in contemporary transgressive communities, Smith's project spans centuries, geographies, and cultural identities. Smith contends that highly diverse groups from across a very wide span of political and cultural identities have struck upon street dance as an effective and empowering rhetorical strategy. Smith analyzes the particularly explosive contestation of gender, sexuality, race, class, and community identity that occurs when these participatory public dances occur"--