A choregraphy is a complex dynamic assemblage that relates to the audience in a highly specific way. This way fashions a participatory relational compound which makes the choreography a singular one. In this sense, performances are singular offers for participation; and their respective aesthetic regimes create different modes of participation. Following Rancière's Partage du Sensible and Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, one can say that they share (partage) the distribution of the sensible of choreography. This argument implies a radical reconfiguration of the concept of participation, which counteracts the all too narrow version of political philosophy and representational politics, according to which participation is first and foremost based on an active commitment and a voluntary decision by already constituted subjects. One has to go further, stretch the notion of participation and unfold its issue as a matter of partage. Beneath the wide-meshed macrophysics of politics one can then discover a multiplicity of participatory relations that swarm within every body and its performances, that partition and re-distribute these bodies and generate new thresholds of perception: there are for example intercellular osmotic relations, relations of movement and rest, relations between a body and its exteriority, kinaesthetic relations between bodies, semiotic relations, etc. ... Considering these relations and the modes in which one partakes in them on a molecular, affective, or sensible level means exploring the potential of relational assemblages, that is, their changeability.

This volume is dedicated to the question of how dance, both in its historical and in its contemporary manifestations, is intricately linked to conceptualisations of the political. Whereas in this context the term "policy" means the reproduction of hegemonic power relations within already existing institutional structures, politics refers to those practices which question the space of policy as such by inscribing that into its surface which has had no place before. The art of choreography consists in distributing bodies and their relations in space. It is a distribution of parts that within the field of the visible and the sayable allocates positions to specific bodies. Yet in the confrontation between bodies and their relations, a deframing and dislocating of positions may take place. The essays included in this book are aimed at the multiple connections between politics, community, dance, and globalisation from the perspective of e.g. Dance and Theatre Studies, History, Philosophy, and Sociology.