Introduction

This short introductory chapter offers a preview of the substantive analyses of choreopolitical praxis in the chapters to follow, as well as a brief but close and critical reading of the larger institutional and social inequities they help us to contextualize. Persistently, people and societies mobilize material change, compel cultural attitudes and outlooks, and seek to stifle comparably persistent social inequities and the systems and mechanisms of social capital that sustain them. As a choreographer might relay a newly formed sequence of gesture and embodied action to another mover, so too does culture compose our bodies in everyday public space, and at times through deliberately disruptive presentations of our same bodies and their aesthetic potential.