About the project

Power Moves: Dance, Culture, Politics is a collection of essays that examines the ways in which dance and movement articulate and engage political concerns related to agency, mobility, pedagogy, and resistance. Angélique Willkie’s contribution, “Corporeal Turf: Notes on Blackness and Dramaturgy” offers a critical synthesis of practice-based research and theoretical analysis. Tracing her trajectory as a dance artist alongside her lived experiences of Blackness across multiple geographies, Willkie introduces the concept of corporeal turf as a methodological and theoretical intervention. This concept foregrounds the dramaturgical agency of the performer and emphasizes the body as a site of knowledge production, creative inquiry, and political expression.

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By centering embodied knowledge, Willkie challenges conventional paradigms of dramaturgical praxis and expands the discourse within performance studies. Her analysis interrogates how racialized and marginalized bodies navigate, disrupt, and reconfigure dominant aesthetic frameworks, calling attention to the politics of representation and the centrality of lived experience in artistic and scholarly work. ​Willkie’s text offers a significant intervention in ongoing dialogues at the intersection of race, performance, and critical theory, providing a nuanced framework for understanding the performing body as a site of cultural and political engagement.

Willkie, A. (2025). Corporeal Turf: Notes on Blackness and Dramaturgy. In Power Moves: Dance, Culture, Politics, edited by Seika Boye and MJ Thompson, Roberta Barker, series editor. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press.