Updates on the Microdance

Thinking Through the Portability of Dance in the Internet Era

Part 2

Sorry for the delayed updates on the blog!

Let me take a step back. I think there is a lot of value in thinking abbout what microdances can do but, first, we must consider their relationship to dance in general. I was describing this project to a colleague and I realized that I have not yet ellucidated the reason why this project stands out ot me. I first became interested in the microdance due to the legibility of the dance as a particular dance. Thus, what is interesting about this form of dance is not strictly that it is reproducible but rather that it is also recognizable as a given dance. This particular quality is of import.

A Night at the Ballet: L’Algérie Ma Liberté

This is an older piece that I am still attached to but needs work!

​In the distant past - the year 2009 - the Ballet National Algerien (BNA), under their artistic director, Fatma Zohra Namous Senouci, premiered their ballet L’Algérie Ma Liberté(My Freedom, Algeria), which commemorated the fated struggle for independence that was (and still is) in many people’s minds as the foundational moment of the modern Algerian nation. In the midst of this struggle, and in the immediate aftermath, lay the most crucial of all inquiries: what does it mean to belong to a new, post-colonial nation? What does it mean to be Algerian? How can we achieve independence, not only colonially, but culturally? There are naturally many directions in which this line of inquiry can go and these are not the immediate concern of this essay. I am concerned here with the various ways in which cultural productions in dance speak of a certain idea about nationalism and the nation. To abstract a broader nation from this exercise would defeat the purpose. The goal of this paper then is to grant us a privileged insight into how Algerian nationalism operates or even assent to a universally stable concept of the nation. Rather, in living inside this ballet I will hope to give us insight into the nation as both performative and dynamic. Performative insofar as the national is not predetermined but is rather embodied and sought after.

A New Theory of the Microdance

Towards Understanding How Mimesis Is Compacted, Packaged, and Communicated in the Online Era

This is a work in progress, be nice, share feedback!!

This essay is dedicated to studying what I have termed the “microdance,” a form of dancing popular in microblogging/vlogging platforms such as TikTok but which nonetheless exist outside these media. in particular, I term anything as a microdance that which is designed to be easily picked up and repeated by fans, which in turn is spread virally online.