This collection of essays focuses how dance and movement engage and enact political questions around agency, mobility, pedagogy, and resistance. Committed to crossing disciplinary boundaries, Power Moves looks to movement knowledge for its radical insights and critical forms of public intervention and pedagogy.

The writers of this collection examine cultural and social patterns in action in the studio, on the stage, and from the street, and in doing so give voice to fresh perspectives from Canadian dance and performance studies on social, political, and cultural values in the twenty-first century. Contributors include Evadne Kelly, Karyn Recollet and Emily Johnson, Angélique Willkie, Christine Mazumdar, Natalie Alvarez, Gabe Levine, and Mary Fogarty, with an introduction and individual contributions from editors Seika Boye and MJ Thompson.

Seika Boye is a scholar, writer, educator, and artist whose practices revolve around dance and movement. She is an assistant professor and director of the Institute for Dance Studies at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. Seika curated the archival exhibition It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900–1970 (2018) and co-curated Into the Light: Eugenics and Education in Southern Ontario (2019). She was an artist-in-residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2018), a Toronto District School Board’s African Heritage Educators’ Network Arts Honoree (2019), and a 2020 recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Ontario Heritage Award (co-curator, Into the Light). Her publications have appeared in numerous academic journals and magazines. She is based in Toronto.

Seika Boye's profile page

MJ Thompson is a Montreal-based writer and teacher working on dance, performance, and visual art. A fan of dance in all its forms, she has been watching and writing about movement and performance for over twenty years. Committed to popular culture and everyday aesthetics, she has written for a wide variety of publications, including Ballettanz, Border Crossings, The Brooklyn Rail, Canadian Art, Dance Current, Dance Ink, Dance Magazine, The Drama Review, The Globe and Mail, Women and Performance, Theatre Journal, and more. Her academic work is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada, and her essays have appeared in several anthologies, including Performance Studies Canada (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2017). Most recently, she received the National Park Service Arts and Sciences Residency, Cape Cod National Seashore, August 2019, where she worked on a long-form essay about the concept of the view as embodied (forthcoming, Departures 2020).

M.J. Thompson's profile page