An Investigation into the New Role of Dance Performance in Public Protests

From the kickline at Stonewall to the dabke in Palestine, dance in street protests and social movements has acquired more and more importance (Carter, 2004), to the point that it can be considered as a 'mode of spatial disobedience' (Blanco, 2013, in Daniel, 2023).We propose the case study of Michael Frye's dance performance (from 00.00 to camera change at 1.23), A Black Man's Heart, at a widely broadcast Black Lives Matter protest in New York City in June 2020 (Talia Mota, 2020).Although this might look like an improvisation, the 'danced march' shows a recognisable structure.While evoking the words of Cynthia Erivo's song Stand up from Harriet, the biopic of abolitionist and civil rights activist Harriet Tubman, the performer develops meaningful individual choreographic sequences where he interacts with the participants around him, thus drawing traditional marching protesters into the context of his performance.In this way, the performance becomes an integral part of the message foregrounded by the march.Drawing on the Functional Grammar of Dance (Maiorani, 2021) and on its application in studies beyond the context of dance like videogames and political speeches (Maiorani & Bucy, 2024) our paper proposes a kinesemiotic approach to the study of this type of movement-based protest.This involves an adaptation of the notions of Move and Minimal Ballet Sequence (Maiorani et al., 2023), as well as that of Movement Turn Construction Unit (Maiorani & Bucy, 2024), and a focus on the merging of physical and contextual space that underpin the theoretical basis of the FGD, and the difference between instantiation and realisation (Maiorani & Wegener, 2023).Our aim is to develop a methodology to analyse this new type of performance and its function within the street protest context.This presentation investigates how dance performance functions as a meaning-making resource in public protest, through a kinesemiotic case study of Frye's A Black Man's Heart.