Where to Gaze?: Cultural Policies for Dance

We are bodies in trajectory. And our movements reflect specific experiences, changes in society and how we produce and reproduce culture. Although in Peru in the last 13 years — taking as a time frame the operational period of the Ministry of Culture— many measures and strategies have been implemented to promote the performing arts, little has been done specifically for dance. In this article I postulate that the logic and characteristics that we asso-ciate with the practice of stage dance in Perú are aligned with the dance industry produced from the Global North —economic value, forms of labour, management strate-gies— and that it has not been carried out an in-depth analysis of the ways to create, produce and participate in dance in our country, which would allow us to introduce a globalized body, collective creation and small formats. For this reason, the policies applied to dance do not yet generate substantial changes for the take-off of the local sector, but rather they deepen the problems associated with cultural industries, and strengthen the Western view of southern bodies.