Politics today suffers a crisis of evaluation. Millions around the world have taken to the streets to depose governments, but the tendencies of those on the ground, the dispositions of those who assumed positions of authority, the conditions of the institutions have not been so easy to figure out. The political appears at once as a problem of too much and too little. No aspect of human endeavor or expression is beyond deliberate contestation and yet each spirited intervention can leave the sense that not enough was done. Movement everywhere, crescendos of volatility, vertiginous shifts in direction leave an impression of being out of time or adrift in space. The ensuing disequilibrium has proven disorienting to thought and made it difficult to discern direction amidst a thicket of practices moving this way and that.

But surely, moving through disequilibrium, divining ways through spaces made for infinite possibility is what dance knows best. Dance, at least in its Western modernist formulation, is conventionally considered as movement for itself.1 Yet such hard won autonomy has not always secured it a place in the world. Dancers too struggle to make a living; presentation venues strain against diminished support; audiences contend with escalating ticket prices. For dance to move the political beyond arrested development, its knowledge of how bodies are assembled, of how space and time are configured, of how interconnections are valued must be made legible beyond the ends of choreographic endeavor. For a politics that is abundant and undervalued, the question becomes, how can dance be mobilized to think through the present?2 No doubt the present itself is not one thing but many. Indeed politics is the pathway forged through possibility, the realization of purpose in a contentious field of movement. What moves us beyond existing conditions and constraints usually consists of finding a way between obdurate oppositions that threaten to subsume the imagination of generative socialities.

This dilemma pertains to the very language most familiar to thinking political mobilization. On the one hand stands the fluid, distributed, horizontal, decentralized figure of the network. On the other sits the structured, enclosed, vertical and centering institution known as organization.3 It can be observed that the financial crisis which has proven so disruptive to economy and disorienting to politics has positioned network and organization in a paradoxical light. Taking the case...