Les Gray, “The Erotic Blues Dancing Body” (German, Poland, and Serbia)

This summer, I presented at the International Federation for Theatre Research World Congress in Belgrade, Serbia in the Embodied Practice working group. Following the conference, I traveled to Berlin and Krakow to participate in a blues dancing exchanges. It is at these venues that I undertook a process that deepened my embodied knowledge of blues dancing and culture while also participating in auto-ethnography, speaking with informally and formally interviewing white subjects who dance the black diaspora.

As diasporic activists and dancers look for ways to negotiate and respond to systemic oppression, institutional brutality and parts of cultural memory, this project seeks to illuminate the ways in which we perform as erotic dancing bodies a series of interconnected gestures that serve as survival strategies. For the purposes of this project, I examine the Slow Drag, an idiomatic blues dance, in its historical and contemporary contexts with the hope of forming a transhistorical analysis of a dance that has always already contained the erotic residue of black sexualities.