April 2, 2025, 3 – 4 p.m., Ileana Berlogea Hall
Translated into Romanian by ILINCA TAMARA TODORUȚ and D. SARGAN, with a foreword by CRISTINA MODREANU. Published in 2025 by Tact in collaboration with The National Center for Dance Bucharest
Brief presentation of the book:
“Finally translated into Romanian, André Lepecki’s book Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement situates dance at the intersection of contemporary disciplines that analyze today’s power dynamics. The spectacular connections drawn by the author presume the readers possess advanced philosophical knowledge or, at least, are open to putting dance in conversation with such knowledge, giving weight to dance and amplifying its meanings. The book’s chapters invoke, as Lepecki himself states in the Introduction, ‘Roland Barthes’s and Michel Foucault’s critique of the authority of the author, Jacques Derrida’s critique of representation and general economy, Avery Gordon’s notion of the sociological force of the spectral, Anne Anlin Cheng’s reframing of the Freudian notion of melancholia, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of body without organs, Peter Sloterdijk’s unveiling of a kinetic ontology of modernity, Frantz Fanon’s critique of ontology in the colonial condition, and Judith Butler’s recasting of the Austinian performative’. Without having advanced too much into race or postcolonial studies and still not too friendly towards critical feminist studies, the Romanian artistic and academic circles will discover that Lepecki provides signposts to help us articulate an official history of the local contemporary dance, including its atypical institutionalization.”
Cristina Modreanu
“A deceptively slim monograph that is densely packed with complex ideas, rigorous theoretical analysis, and adept readings of transgressive and initially inscrutable contemporary dance and performance pieces […]. Exhausting Dance represents a significant development for dance studies because it does not merely put dance in dialogue with critical theory; rather, it articulates dance’s potentiality as critical theory itself.”
Rebecca Rossen, Dance Research Journal 39, no. 2 (2007), 105-7.
André Lepecki is a Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and Associate Dean of the Center for Research & Study. He works and researches at the intersection of critical dance studies, curatorial practice, performance theory, contemporary dance and visual arts performance. He is the editor of the anthologies Points of Convergence: alternative views on performance (MoMA-Warsaw and Chicago Univ. Press 2016, with Marta Dziewanska), Dance (Whitechapel, 2012), Planes of Composition: dance, theory and the global (Seagull press, 2009, with Jenn Joy), The Senses in Performance
(Routledge 2007, with Sally Banes), and Of the Presence of the Body (Wesleyan University Press, 2004). His single authored books are Exhausting Dance: performance and the politics of movement (Routledge 2006), currently translated in 13 languages, and Singularities: dance in the age of performance (Routledge 2016).