Abstract

Gerard Samuel, director of the School of Dance at the University of Cape Town, posits, “in no other colonised country were dancing bodies more destructively subjected to disempowerment and disembodiment than in Apartheid South Africa” (Samuel 2011, 41). What exactly could be said to constitute the disempowerment and disembodiment of dancing bodies that Samuel names? Are there any other lenses through which the subjection of the dancing body under apartheid can be analyzed, besides the two offered by Samuel?