Dancing for fighting

“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution”. This quote frequently attributed to Emma Goldman – whom a fellow militant demanded that she stop dancing, on the grounds that an activist yielding to her passion for dancing would lose all credibility – resonates with many of the recent social mobilizations, which have been marked by dancing and, more broadly, expressive gestures, sometimes circulating across several countries. This issue explores how this phenomenon is re-enacting the repertoires of social protest, by means of several case studies: Un violador en tu camino and its many re-stagings around the world, Danza del derecho de vivir en paz in Chile, the nude dances of the 400 Pueblos in Mexico, the toré mobilized in Amerindian struggles in Brazil, the “DÉMO” performance during the Gezi movement in Turkey, “Danser encore” flashmobs in France, twerking in the streets during feminist mobilizations, reggaetón tutorials in digital spaces... The articles offer conceptual tools for thinking the body’s relationship to politics, vulnerability and non-violence, as well as the “choreographic” knowledge of the forces of law and order. The aim is to understand how dance can be effective: where do its gestures stem from, what do they mean and what do they produce? To what risks do their polysemy and ambiguity expose them? We discover that the act of dancing often opens up new avenues for fights, leading to new questions and, sometimes, new fragmentations in social movements. While showing that dance can be an emancipating “technology of the self” by allowing bodies to connect and be in a state of alert together, this issue aims to bring to light the power relations and paradoxes at work in this activity: under what conditions – in any demonstration occurring in the public space, as well as in other spaces (nightclubs, social networks, socio-medical facilities) – may dancing contribute to transforming the reality?