Att dansa i samtiden: En intervjustudie om dans som kroppsligt och rumsligt motstånd

Sammanfattning: This study explores dance as a bodily and spatial resistance. The aim of the study is to investigate stories about and experiences of working with dance to explore the potential of dance as a resistance strategy. The study is based on qualitative semi-structured interviews with dancers, choreographers and project developers, coupled with a thematic analysis. Based on the interviewees’ stories, the study highlights feminist theories about bodies, spaces, lines and movements with a point of departure in Sara Ahmed’s theorizing of lines and orientations. I argue that the interviewees' statements about their work with dance can be interpreted and understood as strategies of resistance. The interviewees identify, problematize and distance themselves from norms, dance traditions and power structures through an active process of deviation from normative lines and choosing alternative lines, treading paths for their participants or audience. Through alternative body lines and spaces, dance can therefore, in the interviewees' stories, be understood as resistance strategies. Notably, the resistance they carry out is complex and paradoxical because they find themselves in a context and contemporaneity that they try to cope with, in different ways on different lines, through dance.