Dancing,Reaching

Abstract

This reflective essay uses an instance of gestural solidarity forged during Petrichor, a senior thesis performance at Princeton University created by transgender artist Bree White, to probe both the “Keep Dancing Orlando” video made in response to the horror of June 12, 2016, and, more broadly, the specific mechanisms through which dance creates communities of shared labor across difference in troubled times. It posits the reach—the moment when outstretched arms move toward, for, and sometimes with another—as the kinesthetic unit incarnating dance’s political-affective potential.