“Tonight I am dancing in a big, white cube,” reads one of the early projections in “Not About Race Dance” by Gerald Casel. If you’ve witnessed any postmodern dance since, say, the 1960s, that big, white cube might look familiar, comfortable, even default to you.
Casel’s piece, which streams online through the end of December following an in-person run at CounterPulse, aims to defamiliarize the white cube and all its attendant aesthetics. The show points out how postmodern dance derived from choices by predominantly white artists; how the form as a whole often starts from a presumption of whiteness; how dancers of color get perceived differently, often as outsiders, in that dance tradition.
“There is no such thing as pure movement for dancers of color,” Casel told the choreographer Hope Mohr in 2016, a reflection Mohr re-quoted in her recent book,“Shifting Cultural Power.”
“Dancing by brown bodies is read differently than dancing by white bodies,” he added.