Motivated by Melissa Ziad's balletic protest within Algeria's Hirak demonstrations, this article recuperates a distinction between the right to assembly and the right to free speech, constitutional guarantees blurred under contemporary rhetoric of association. By applying methods of dance studies to legal interpretation, it shifts crowd theory away from an anxiety of touch toward a copresence that allows for constituent power of the people to be reclaimed. Therefore, it intervenes within a broader discourse of the legal humanities that privileges the logocentric over embodied ways of knowing.

This chapter considers the Festival de Marseille-danse et arts multiple 2017 as a successful apparatus of transition from positions of non-place to place in one of Europe’s most diverse cities. Through its temporary installation, the festival crossed spatial, aesthetic, and thematic divisions of the center and periphery, constructing bridges of movement between these invisible borders. In doing so, this chapter troubles the traditional affirmation that the value of performance is most prominently interpreted during its enactment. Instead, it leverages the spatial turn of French theory to emphasize that the festival's significance extends to the process of coming-to-stage, and highlights participant interactions with the city as facilitated by the festival’s infrastructure. 

Moving beyond speculation on immediate and mediated interpretations of presence that saturate our field, we drift toward new orientations regarding presence that capture a metered togetherness: a disjuncted assembly emerging from both localized and networked logistics. Presence is not always signaled by the coterminous junction of shared time and space, but as the multiple trajectories that emerge in its wake.

2020 was marked by prolific mobilization, with mass protests contrasting the now-normalized shelter-in-place policies of pandemic policy. Global participation for racial justice reached an historic scale and empathy emerged as the word du jour. Written during a moment of isolation and anticipation, this article articulates the unlikely intersection of (physical) rest and (political) unrest as a rise in the critical consciousness of the public (Said: 1983) alongside ‘modernity’s kinetic being’ (Lepecki: 2006). In contextualizing the current political moment as a collective experience of precarity that generated new activism, this article translates the development of critical consciousness from the realm of the discursive and literary to that of the embodied and performative. Yet how do we maintain collective repair without crossing the precipice of exhaustion so that this movement does not fade into a moment but rather remains a refrain repeated once no longer in vogue? To imagine a response, this article moves through critical theory and dance studies in a return to debates on kinesthetic empathy as a source of sustainable repair.

This assembled interview centers both Elaine Mokhtefi and Le premier festival culturel panafricain d’Alger 1969 (PANAF), a festival which she organized and attended as a part of the Algerian Ministry of Information, noting it as an exemplary instance of the power of performance at the nexus of political ideology, activist history, and the subsequent nostalgia for that era of liberation. It is equally an attempt to overcome a distant relationship to each, reflecting on the potential of oral histories to open up new pathways through the past. This history—of entangled international relations negotiated under the guise of a festive performance, a complicated trajectory of global politics which culminated in a remarkable event of celebration and solidarity—remains understudied, a footnote to more "political" concerns of Third World agendas, decolonial reorderings, and capitalist critiques. Yet through Mokhtefi's testimony, interwoven with searching tendrils of archival detail, we can see that this festival was not a superficial exaltation in extravagance, but a pivotal moment in foreign affairs. More importantly, through her personal history, we can trace the central role that women played in these politics, if often unacknowledged. Edited in 2020, it also counters the pejorative label of non-essential labor applied to most cultural activities during the contemporary pandemic response to COVID-19.

When conceptualizing futures and new ways of working within and beyond the field of performance studies, diffractive methods suggest new orientations to a ‘more subtle vision’ (Haraway 1992: 300) that might foreground diversity, integrate non-homogenous perspectives within the field, and find utility through perhaps cacophonous distinctions: to work ‘intra-disciplinarily’.