The critical potential of dance: Expressivity, affect, and aesthetics
Abstract
This article explores artistic creation as a critical operation in prison, focusing on CORPOEMCADEIA, a contemporary dance project with inmates at Linhó Prison, Portugal. Using a qualitative, ethnographic approach, and drawing on pragmatic sociology, it examines how dance enables embodied, aesthetic engagement that reconfigures prison experience. Through gestures and movement, critique emerges as a sensitive, situated, and nondiscursive practice that reveals moral and subjective tensions. The article argues that, even under constraint, dance can function as a form of poetic justice and political expression, offering alternative ways of being and relating.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Arts and Performance Studies
Contemporary art
education
critique
Theatre and Performance Studies
Publication details
- Journal / source
- DIY Alternative Cultures & Society
- Volume
- 4
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 3–16
- Publication date
- 13 January 2026
- Language
- EN