Arts, Volume 15, Issue 7 (July 2026).
Link to Open Access peer-reviewed journal article https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/15/7/166
This paper is in the Special Issue ‘Bodies on Edge in a Globalized World‘ edited by Dr Rebekah J. Kowal and Dr Gerald Siegmund.
THE PAPER: This article reflects on what dance reveals about the notion of “human-ness” at a time when globalization defines humanity in terms of bounded, isolated bodies that generate capital, are fixed by borders, and recognized through surveillance. Rather than treating humanness as a bounded interior essence, I suggest it emerges at the edge, where sense of self meets otherness. Dance offers a mode of encounter at the periphery of self, where one meets othernesses (floor, music, another dancer). In dancing, the moment becomes discernible through contact with texture, rhythm, and trajectory. Human-ness, then, is not form or possession but impact and relation.
Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the colonial figure of “Human,” (Man1 & Man2) and Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects, I position dance as a practice that unsettles bounded categories of human. Through reflections on the choreographic (for the making of the ballet Sycorax’s Tempest process I suggest that dance, as a method of moving with and in, unearths epistemologies of the periphery. Then human-ness can felt as articulated as intra-active and ecological, constituted through relation rather than containment. With this, human-ness is revealed as also manifested with responsibilities to the network through which its relationality becomes recognisable.
FOCUS: “The world will collapse with or without the agreement of the people inhabiting it. Indeed, the world as we know it has ended several times over, in ways large and small, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. Yes, we are doomed – doomed to adapt, to define our comforts and part with them when we must” (Hanif Abdurraqib, “Lessons for the End of the World,” New Yorker Magazine, February 2, 2025). In his essay, “Lessons for the End of the World,” author Hanif Abdurraquib delves into the relevance of Octavia Butler’s science fiction in foreshadowing worlds of human and ecological collapse. He examines the strategies that enable survival, emphasizing the importance of focusing on immediate necessities rather than succumbing to the temptation of distraction.
In light of the pressing global challenges of our era, including ecological crises, displacement and migration, war, work in neo-liberal economies, digitization and artificial intelligence, the place of the human condition within bureaucratic systems, and the ease with which daily life makes it possible to become inured and distracted, this Special Issue seeks to capture the choreographic and embodied dimensions of the tenuousness of the contemporary global moment. We aim to facilitate a dialogue that transcends borders, nationalities, ethnicities, and economic conditions.