Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration explores global relationality within the realm of intercultural collaboration in contemporary dance. Author SanSan Kwan looks specifically at duets, focusing on "East" "West" pairings, and how dance artists from different cultural and movement backgrounds -Asia, the Asian diaspora, Europe, and the United States; trained in contemporary dance, hip hop, flamenco, Thai classical dance, kabuki, and butoh - find ways to collaborate. Kwan acknowledges the forces of dissension, prejudice, and violence present in any contact zone, but ultimately asserts that choreographic invention across difference can be an act of love in the face of loss and serve as a model for difficult, imaginative, compassionate global affiliation. Love Dances contends that the practice and performance of dance serves as a revelatory site for working across culture. Body-to-body interaction on the stage carries the potential to model everyday encounters across difference in the world.

About the Author
SanSan Kwan is Associate Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces (2013) and co-editor, with Kenneth Speirs, of Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects (2004). She remains active as a professional dancer and is currently performing with Lenora Lee Dance.

Reviews
highly original and compelling... a necessary text for practitioners looking to collaborate ethically across cultural, racial, social, and gendered spaces. * grace shinhae jun, Journal of American Drama and Theatre *
Wrought from personal tragedy, SanSan Kwan's poignant Love Dances focuses on the ways intercultural duets model ethical modes for reaching across cultural, racial, national, gendered, and aesthetic divides to destabilize power dynamics between East and West, address trauma and loss, engender tolerance, and most radically, constitute embodied acts of love. Beautifully written, deftly theorized, and deeply moving. * Rebecca Rossen, author of Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance *
Simultaneously heartfelt and critical, Love Dances provides a nuanced analysis of intercultural duets. Through vivid and compelling prose, Kwan mobilizes emotion as a means of rethinking collaboration across the divides of race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, age, and ability. In the process, Kwan reframes not only the promises and pitfalls of intercultural collaboration but also the crises of our current economic and political moment. * Janet O'Shea, author of Risk, Failure, Play: What Dance Reveals about Martial Arts Training *


Awards
Winner of Winner, 2022 De La Torre Bueno Prize, Dance Studies Association.



Book Information
ISBN 9780197514566
Author SanSan Kwan
Format Paperback
Page Count 138
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 227g
Dimensions(mm) 157mm * 241mm * 10mm