Dance and Authoritarianism

Everyone who watched the opening ceremony of Beijing’s 2008 Summer Olympics can understand the power of dance and mass movement in the service of politics. Public performance and festival at such scale are familiar to us in Nazi Germany, the former Soviet Union, and contemporary North Korea, but this new book addresses lesser-known examples—in Spain, the Dominican Republic, Iran, Croatia, and Uzbekistan—and explores the various political regimes that ruled them. 

Using dance as a lens through which to study political, ethnic, and gendered phenomena, Anthony Shay shows us how dance and mass movement have served as important political tools throughout history and across a variety of authoritarian regimes. Dance and Authoritarianism is a significant and original contribution to the scholarship at the intersection of dance, ethnology, anthropology, cultural studies, and history.

Author Biography

Anthony Shay is professor of dance and cultural studies in the theatre and dance department at Pomona College, USA. He holds a Ph.D. in dance history and theory from the University of California, an MA in anthropology from California State University and an MA in folklore and mythology from UCLA. He is the author of six monographs, including Choreographic Politics: State Folk Dance Companies, Representation and Power (Wesleyan University Press, 2002), which received the CORD prize for Outstanding Dance Publication, and four edited volumes, including the Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity (2016). He is an award winning dancer and choreographer.