ABSTRACT
Chapter 1, “Movement initiation—Dance and refugee performance,” begins with beginnings. It introduces the idea of “movement initiation,” which within dance practice specifies a point in the body where a movement (“kinetic chain”) originates. The chapter examines the forces that set refugees in motion, as well as the effects that movement initiations have on individual experience. It then makes a close reading of Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite’s work Flight Pattern (2017), for the Royal Ballet in London. Pite speaks with eloquence about the impulse that led her to make a work about refugees, and movement initiations on a body level stand out as a defining feature of her choreography. The chapter concludes with New York City-based Battery Dance, an organization that has taken its “Dancing to Connect” program to over sixty countries. A five-year multi-agency grant is allowing the company to send Dancing to Connect facilitators to seventeen cities across Germany to engage in refugee integration workshops. Battery’s organizational movement initiation results in kinetic chains of dance activity among refugee communities.
