Moving Otherwise is an absorbing, critical, and deep analysis of the Buenos Aires contemporary dance scene, its memories, and its relationships to Argentina's history of institutional violence. Vast in scope, the monograph starts in the 1960s and ends in 2011. It tracks both explicit violence, such as torture and forced disappearance by dictatorships, and slow forms of violence related to economic precarity during the implementation of neoliberalism. Although numerous writings focus on the Argentine dictatorship, violence, economic crisis, and resistance, not much research exists from a dance studies perspective. Victoria Fortuna's Moving Otherwise represents the first monograph that centers dance as a primary analytical lens through which to examine how contemporary dance practices “enacted politics within climates of political and economic violence” (3) and “to trace the politics of Buenos Aires-based contemporary dance on its own terms” (xi). The book's engaging narrative does not hide its political commitment, resulting from several years of profound and detailed research. In so doing, Fortuna successfully dismantles a general belief that local dance was apolitical and did not engage in any political cause on and off the stage.

Two important concepts emphasize the agency of the body and its movements: “poner el cuerpo” (to put the body on the line) and “moving otherwise.” First, the volume gives new voice and body to the expression “poner el cuerpo,” used in Argentina by activists in different social struggles, and in this case, speaks of a dancer's involvement in dance as a political practice. Thus, Fortuna adds a novel perspective regarding Argentina's memories of state violence, which primarily considered the body as object of torture and control. While acknowledging this reality, Fortuna praises the political capacities of the body and its movements, and its role as a source of community and freedom. In her conceptualization, poner el cuerpo becomes a way not only to fight and resist, but also to survive and deal with trauma.

Second, Fortuna offers “moving otherwise” as an analytical concept to demonstrate “how concert dance—and its offstage practice and consumption—offers alternatives to, and sometimes critiques, the patterns of movement and bodily comportment that shape everyday life in contexts marked by violence” (4). She adapts this idea from a statement by Argentine dancer Déborah Kalmar, who referred to the politics of movement during repressive governments. Just as Argentine social and political contexts shifted during the course of history, the concept of “moving otherwise” changes in meaning and function, for example, as a working ethics and methodology, depending on the specific historical contexts in which Fortuna situates her dance analyses. Throughout an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue, the author argues that dance practice creates opportunities for “moving otherwise” while facing different types of violence.

It must be noted that the monograph includes many agents, places, and productions that comprise Buenos Aires contemporary dance practice: rehearsals, classes, dance studios, concert dance plays, video dance, associations, festivals, demonstrations, etc. Different sources build this panorama: testimonies, texts, pamphlets, institutions, union or labor strikes, and first-person experiences, among others. This depiction includes the dominant contemporary dance scene, such as the well-known Teatro General San Martín, to which Fortuna adds novel perspectives, and alternative sites and practices, including expresión corporal classes (a dance form that, through improvisation and creative exercises, aims to democratize dance and explore each body's unique movement potential), a community dance project, or a “danced” prison break. The range of documents uncover perspectives, artistic trajectories, and performances not studied before. Choreographic analysis, dance ethnography, and diverse methodological approaches are employed to examine the remarkable quantity and quality of materials, including archival research from institutional as well as private collections. A companion website provides access to full-length works or clips,Footnote ¹ generously giving the possibility to contrast our opinions with the author's. It also represents a political act, or movement, that democratizes access to Buenos Aires contemporary dance history. Hence, readers learn that contemporary dance “is just as ‘Argentine’ as the tango” (113).

Moving Otherwise contributes to two conceptual matters from a critical point of view. On the one hand, it engages with the well-known issue of dance and politics. While contextualizing Argentine culture and history, Fortuna converses with scholarship from a “situated knowledge” (Mignolo Reference Mignolo2009). She doesn't approach Argentine contemporary dance to contrast her already acquired knowledge. On the contrary, using ethnographic tools, she contributes to writing local history from a “friction” point of view. Anthropologist Anna Tsing's idea of “friction of global connections” helps attend to the “unequal power relations that govern the uneven movement of bodies, ideas, and capital across borders while also making space for the productive possibilities that arise. It accounts for both the hegemonic forces at work in transnational dance circuits as well as dancers’ tactical negotiation—their movements otherwise—within global cultural economies” (13). Thus, local contemporary dance practices are formulated concerning international exchanges, collaborations, and frictions. Fortuna straddles between the classical distinction among “political dance,” or movement practices that advocate for an explicit political cause or activist movement, and “the politics of dance,” meaning the politics involved or materialized in dance practices. The text analyzes dance works that speak explicitly political themes, examines dancer-activists’ or militants’ trajectories, and also “emphasizes how a breadth of danced movements otherwise intervened, often subtly, in the choreopolicing that marked climates of political and economic violence” (9). Five chapters explore a critical concept—mobility, activism, survival, trauma, and cooperative labor—to address the complexities of Buenos Aires contemporary dance practice and its politics.

Providing a comprehensive vision of Argentine “dance” or “dances” redefines “contemporary dance” in general terms. Instead of stating a temporal or aesthetic definition of “the contemporary,” Fortuna “considers the critical work the term can do to manifest how a select set of on- and offstage movements embody politics” (11). Situating the notion of “contemporary” within the specific Argentine context illuminates the term's pluralistic capacity of current usage while attending to different traditions. Contemporary dance is not defined as a stable category, neither locally nor universally, but rather, Buenos Aires–based dance practices are situated within their complex articulations of national identity and transnational artistic, economic, and political exchanges. Fortuna's approach could be considered part of the “epistemologies of the South,” using Boaventura de Sousa's terms (Reference De Sousa Santos2011), arguing that the understanding of the world is much broader than the Western understanding, and that the infinite diversity of the world could and must be activated by seeking pluralistic forms of knowledge. Consequently, the monograph attends to the “cognitive injustice” (de Sousa Reference De Sousa Santos2011) of only one valid knowledge, produced in the Global North, of the contemporary dance definition.

Overall, the book stands out in its own “moving otherwise” as it questions and contributes to established narratives of global contemporary dance, understandings of the relationship between dance and politics, and studies of Argentine dance's relation to violence and political local history. Moving Otherwise: Dance, Violence, and Memory in Buenos Aires has local and transnational importance, and ethnographic and theoretical value, by providing situated knowledge in a “friction.” Significant for scholars in general, and for the Argentine dance community of scholars and practitioners, the monograph offers an expanded, committed, and situated South, analysis of contemporary dance, as well as its relation to violence and sociopolitical matters. By historicizing local dance practices over a long period of time, the book gives voice to its protagonists, and moreover, it gives them/us back a critical but respectful look on them/us. I am a member of both communities—the national (i.e., Argentine dance scholars’ and practitioners’ community) and the transnational, meaning scholarly disciplines in general and especially the international dance studies community. As such, I celebrate Moving Otherwise and encourage everyone to read and teach it to expand our perspectives and assumptions in a friction between the Global North and South.