Popular dances encapsulate the aliveness of Africa's young. Radiating an Africanist aesthetic of the cool, these moves enflesh popular music, saturating mass media platforms and everyday spaces with imageries of joyful transcendence. This essay understands scriptive dance fads as textual and choreographic calls for public embodiment. I explore how three Nigerian musicians, and their dances, have wielded

Joann Kealiinohomoku's Silhougraphs®, traces of the silhouettes of dancers, were her attempt to operationalize her cultural relativist commitments and create a new method of dance analysis. Silhougraphs illuminate underexamined scholarly presumptions, methods, and tools that both contributed to and paralleled the emergence of dance studies as a discipline. Silhougraphs are also a cautionary tale demonstrating

This article discusses the role of colonial oppression in creating conflicting perspectives in the reproduction of dance as Indigenous cultural heritage. The debate on kahiko, the ancient Hawaiian dance, of which practice was severely controlled and then revived through the cultural renaissance, demonstrates that the radical deprivation of the practice has created multiple understandings of the dance

Dance theorists and legal scholars argue that choreography is by nature ill-suited to the conceptual framework provided by copyright, even as there is widespread agreement that works of dance deserve the legal protection and cultural endorsement that its inclusion represents. I reexamine the factors that are often cited as barriers to choreography's suitability for copyright. I argue that choreography

This final issue of this turbulent year across the globe contains a mixed set of articles, the first three of which address theories and practices to be found in “dance and . . .” through time from the late 1960s, the 1970s, and 2016. The following three articles turn the clock back again to consider particular features of American modern dance, then Ballet Russes and blackface, and Genevieve Stebbins

This article examines Eleo Pomare's concept of vitality in his piece Blues for the Jungle (1966) as a black aesthetic approach to choreography. Vitality seeks to connect with black audiences in Harlem by referencing and affirming shared cultural knowledge, conveying an embodied epistemology of the US political economy defined by the lived experiences of Harlem: “Harlem knows.” Using a lens of diaspora

Laura Dean's creative output in minimalist art spans interconnected work in dance, music, and drawing. Throughout the early 1970s, Dean represented her compositional structures as works on paper, which present an expanded visualization of her artistic experimentation with color, symmetry, repetition, and form. Dean rejects the reconstruction of her performance works, instead she advances a notion of

The article examines the hybrid genre of screendance portraiture through the example of 52 Portraits by Jonathan Burrows and collaborators (2016). It unpacks three concepts that are foundational to visual art portraiture and suggests how each might apply to screendance portraits: the truth seeking impulse of portraiture; the portrait transaction, and the relationship between likeness, type and seriality

Dancers and choreographers have always been navigating disability within an ableist representational form. This article questions the ableist histories of modern dance in the United States and seeks to redefine how disability is conceived of within the field of dance. The article explores five themes found within archival research, including overcoming narratives, symbiotic and inseparability of dance

Prompted by Achille Mbembe's reading of how racial assignation functions, this article examines the recurrences of two blackface ballet characters, the Golden Slave in Schéhérazade and the Blackamoor in Petrouchka, on twentieth and twenty-first-century dance stages, in exhibits, research, and pedagogy. The company that first performed these racist stereotypes, the Ballets Russes, has been canonized

In the Gilded Age, Genevieve Lee Stebbins (1857–1934) became a dance soloist admired in New York City's theater world. Stebbins created a foundation from which a new “serious” dance aesthetic emerged and notably inspired the early dance work of Ruth St. Denis and Isadora Duncan; however, she remains an overlooked figure within American dance history. This article chronicles Stebbins's innovations and

T heir torsos bent over from the waist, sixteen dancers clad in Keds sneakers, black tights, and casual tops take turns to roll upright, snapping their fingers as they sway side to side until all are standing in formation. Moving in front of scrims that evoke a city landscape and urban energy, their angular gestures and parallel positions punctuate rhythmic accents in the jazzy score. Groupings change

T his article examines from an artist-researcher perspective the durational solo dance work Likely Terpsichore? (Fragments), which I created for and performed at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford (UK) in April 2018.1 This work emerged as a key part of a wider practice-as-research project probing shifting experiences of temporality when choreography “performs” as museum exhibit.2 The

The blood of Brazil’s three dominant racial strains—Portuguese, Indian and Negro —flows in the veins of supple young Eros Volusia. But the dances that have made her Rio de Janeiro’s outstanding dance artist come straight from African jungles. As a child, Eros Volusia lived in exotic Baía, where the inhabitants, predominantly Negro, have retained the sinuous steps, the pulsing rhythms and the primitive

I mprovisational practices have generally been discussed in relation to the spontaneity of the dance (Bresnahan 2015; Carter 2000; Kloppenberg 2010). As Susan Leigh Foster has pointed out, improvisation can be envisioned as an interaction between the known and the unknown, which unfolds as a continuous moving back and forth and blending of predetermined and spontaneously discovered events (2003, 3–4;

I n the first-ever article written about breaking, performance critic Sally Banes (1981) characterized the dance as “a celebration of the flexibility and budding sexuality of the gangly male adolescent body.” The “macho quality” she found embodied in the form was highlighted in terms of its “ritual combat,” its “sexual braggadocio,” and the “physical risk involved” in executingmovements. Although,

This article examines the practice of the Danish K-pop (Korean pop) cover dance crew CODE9 as an example of the rapid cultural exchange on the Internet that reshapes the diffusion of dance styles and ideas. CODE9 demonstrates K-pop as a “migratory dance practice,” forming a transnational dancing community with modern technology at its center. By adapting and embodying K-pop, CODE9 creates a “Thirdspace”

This article focuses on an analysis of ways in which conflicts between dancing as an act of solidarity, a tool for self-fulfillment, or as a form of an interpretative transformation have been played out in practicing dancing derived from different “African” cultures within a Swedish context. This period embraces African-American theatrical jazz dance during the 1960s and the more contemporary interest

Frevo is an energetic dance from Recife, the capital of Brazil's northeastern state of Pernambuco. Frevo is a dance of resistance because it narrates complex notions of identity that contribute to social empowerment through strategic processes of liberation for marginalized groups. The dance originates from the Brazilian martial art of capoeira and it is carnivalesque because it is performed in crowded

This article considers the ethico-aesthetic potential of British choreographic practices that respond to questions raised by the current sociopolitical moment by staging im/possibilities and dis/orientation and by envisioning alternative understandings of the present. It embraces Karen Barad's new materialist onto-epistemology as an inspiring framework to discuss the significance of choreography that

I rish step dancing1 is, arguably, one of the most globally recognized genres of traditional, culturally specific dance. The descriptor “step” means that the dancing “involves a concentration on foot movements close to the floor in which the tempo of the accompanying music is beaten out by the dancer” (Brennan 1999, 63). The worldwide recognition has been largely due to the stage show Riverdance, created

view toward Bolger’s agency within them. Without this information, though, Bolger’s narrative feels anchored by his work in The Wizard of Oz, around which much of the book’s explication revolves. In fairness, More than a Scarecrow takes on an understandably difficult task; it tries to honor the legacy of a known yet underappreciated performer, even as it tries to complicate that legacy. Van Leuven

T he popular stage seems an unlikely venue for choreographic expressions of expansionist nationalism, yet the passing fad for “Aztec” dancing in the vaudeville theaters of the United States during the early twentieth century demonstrates the durability of images about Mexico that fueled nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny. This imperialist notion held that the United States had a “sacred duty to expand

experience in tango training. Yet taken all together, there is much to recommend in this work. Although it is not a groundbreaking study, it still makes a significant contribution to performance studies on queer tango. Thanks to her ethnographic research in female-only queer tango circuits in Buenos Aires, she pushes the reader to think critically about the “appropriateness” of bodily practices imposed

F or dancers of the German-speaking world, the 1926 publication of Rudolf von Laban’s Choreography, vol. 1 [Choreographie, erstes Heft] marked an important moment. Since the turn of the century, Laban (1879–1958; née Rudolf Jean Baptiste Attila de Varalja) had been hard at work in his schools and workshops across Europe developing a new theory and practice of dance. The slim technical volume, part

Choreographic bodies are empowered by modes of expansion and transgression. Focusing on the energetic processes that lead to such empowerment, this article discusses the perceptual politics of trancelike scenes in the work of contemporary European choreographers and performers. As a body-mobilizing choreographic strategy of out-of-body and out-of-mind experiences, trance is closely linked to critical

A rtistic performance practice has always been tightly intertwined with the exploration of and experimentation with modes of working, collaborating, and producing artwork (Aranda, Wood, and Vidokle 2010). Especially in contemporary performance practice, there is a close connection between new processes of work and the belief that institutional and normative boundaries of performance can be critically

This article analyzes three artistic acts of the subversion of precariousness in the contemporary dance community in Buenos Aires. It explores the participation of dancers in political groups that demand improvement of their working conditions. It examines how Marina Sarmiento's investigation of dance history stages a precarious body as an archive that deals with aesthetic colonialism. And lastly,

that often get overlooked in the efforts to create national dance companies and the broad genre of “West African Dance.” The final chapter, “Dancing in Oakland and Beyond, 1977–1993,” is a hefty 104 pages, but it holds together well. There is growing interest in dance studies scholarship about the role of institutional structures in shaping dance, and Osumare provides a valuable account of the Every

Personal Performance Practice (PPP) refers to a regular activity—differentiated from training and production—popular among contemporary dance artists. Against the backdrop of contemporary neoliberal working conditions, this article analyzes PPP by applying the ambivalent notion of “support” in order to show how PPP makes the daily work of dance visible, encouraging a discussion on the sustaining systems

I n this article, I am interested in the ways in which dance as labor and artist as a specific subjectivity relate to the material conditions of their production within contexts shaped by neoliberal notions of freedom, ideologies of liberal democracy, and the logic of global capitalism. I attend specifically to the tension between an egalitarian ethos, a desire to foster relations that cultivate equality

T his article considers the relationship between the precarious working conditions of dance artists and the ontology of choreographic “works.” I draw on observations and interviews with nineteen “independent” dance artists, based in the UK and the USA (London, Coventry, New York, and Philadelphia),1 describing how their labor is often directed toward temporary projects that result in various forms

A t the dawn of the European refugee crisis, and in the middle of the ongoing sociopolitical and financial crisis in Greece, Greek choreographers started creating dance works that engaged immigrants and refugees. In most such initiatives, improvisation became the tool for bridging the disparity between the professional dancers and the “untrained” participants, who were often the vulnerable populations

Dance’s relation to commercial advertising has, until now, remained a subheading, a sidebar, a footnote within the discourse on screendance, evading the scope of book-length scholarly endeavor. In Consuming Dance: Choreography and Advertising, Colleen Dunagan corrects this omission in dance studies by making the case for a discourse on dance-in-advertising. Collecting and analyzing print, television

phytes. Winkler addresses this by providing a glossary of dance terms at the front of the book and by carefully describing the dances in just enough detail. The only criticism I have (which seems to occur in many biographies of dancers) is that many of the photographs have been reproduced in other books on Fosse, and some of them are poorly rendered. Given Fosse’s attention to detail regarding design

K atherine Dunham (1909–2006) has a large and vast dance repertoire, built while directing and choreographing for her company from the 1930s through the 1960s. Although she was always politically engaged, she rarely addressed social issues explicitly in her choreography (Dee Das 2012). 1 There are, however, a few exceptions, such as her unfinished ballet Christophe, her Popular Front dances of the

A rtistic spaces are activated by the bodies that inhabit them.1 In the context of United States American dance history, these spaces are shaped by the enduring traces of the choreographers’ and performers’ race. For decades, dance historians and theorists have demonstrated how modern dance became racially polarized in the United States. Numerous scholarly texts, including Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s

I n early 2015, five students from Arlon Business School spent a week away from their elite United States MBA program to study and consult with Gauteng Ballet Company (GBC), South Africa’s premiere professional ballet troupe, as the experiential part of a global development course. Arlon Business School and Gauteng Ballet Company, both pseudonyms, had collaborated once before and both were committed

W ord Words was a dance choreographed by Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton in the context of downtown New York City’s interdisciplinary arts milieu of the early 1960s. It was performed only once, as the third work at the Judson Dance Theater’s A Concert of Dance #3, the first in a set of two back-to-back dance concerts held in late January 1963 in the Judson Memorial Church’s gym, according to dance historian

I n the search for new structures of knowledge and alternative ways of thinking and relating with others, the way that some recent dance pieces radically rework the spatial relation between audience and performer deserves serious attention. The kinds of work I am thinking of here are ones that are either performed outside conventional theater spaces or rearrange a theater space in an unconventional

I n her recent contribution to Dance Research Journal, “When is Contemporary Dance?” dance scholar SanSan Kwan draws our attention to the fact that the term contemporary has “multivalent meaning” (2017, 48). Just what is considered to be contemporary and the values attached to it change from genre to genre and from culture to culture. Thus, the term “contemporary dance” cannot signify a particular

He learned from peers who didn’t mince words or coddle hurt feelings, because battling was serious business. He tells me that in the mid-1970s, battling meant combat not competition. This one was led by two b-boying icons: Trac2 and Spy, teenage leaders of their respective crews. Though battles often took place in abandoned buildings, this one was on concrete. No cardboard. They were in Spy’s neighborhood

In this article, I specify and historicize the modes of communication that were at play among practitioners of contact improvisation+ and between the dancers and their audiences throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s. I argue that contact improvisation's turn away from dance as a performed visual medium and toward the tactile experience of the participants exceeds a phenomenological reading

I was interested in space, and then public space as animate, as a personal and political phenomenon, a powerful conveyor and custodian of power, emotion, and meaning [433]. . . . My singular pleasure in site-specific performance beyond its interplay of architecture, urban spaces and dance is that the moment of interaction is largely uncontrolled and uncontrollable in so many respects [442]. . . . The

At 656 pages wide and 31 authors deep, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics collection contains a veritable who's who of US, UK, and EU dance scholarship. It also importantly documents the weight of the loss to the field of coeditor Randy Martin, whose materialist investigations of dance and politics influence the volume's contributions in powerful and explicit ways. Through the dedicated energies

Critics described Pina Bausch's work as “absolutely contemporary” and as being “important dance heritage,” which is precisely the opposite of contemporary, namely, historical. This contradictoriness—though productive in its own right—is symptomatic of the perspective of dance journalism brought to bear on Pina Bausch's later works in particular. But even reviews of her earlier works are a far cry from

Batson, Glenna, and Margaret Wilson. 2014. Body and Mind in Motion: Dance and Neuroscience in Conversation. Chicago, IL: Intellect, University of Chicago Press. Cerny Minton, Sandra, and Rima Faber. 2016. Thinking with the Dancing Brain: Embodying Neuroscience. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Eddy, Martha. 2016. Mindful Movement: The Evolution of the Somatic Arts and Conscious Action. Bristol, UK:

equally concerned with the writer’s engagement with performance as it is her experience of, and struggles with, the act of writing. This slim text projects a distinctive, lyrical voice and at times reads rather like a personal address. Kartsaki’s style aids in capturing some of the intensity of the live, incessantly repeating performances she describes; her hypnotic account of layered repetition within

W riting about their attempt to archive the Occupy Wall Street movement, #JEZ3PREZ & ATCHU declare, “If we believe ‘another world is possible,’ then another archive must also be possible” (2012). Through their “Anarchives,” they seek to reflect a multivocal, decentralized movement through developing not a single collection, but rather a way of connecting and sharing information, much as the movement

U sing a medium shot, the camera tracks the movement of a female dancer in an orange camisole top. She appears to have lost control of her core: movements become initiated with other body parts such as head and shoulder. Meanwhile, some dancers sit on tables with their backs to the camera; this framing purposefully leaves out some of their heads. The solo dancer braces herself on the table and slides

Danielle Goldman is associate professor of critical dance studies at The New School. Author of I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (University of Michigan Press, 2010), she has published articles in Dance Research, Dance Research Journal, Etcetera, Movement Research Performance Journal, TDR, and Women & Performance. As a dancer, she has performed in the work of Sarah Michelson

with Feminists, Nellies, Andro-dykes, and Drag Queens” and remains vital in this constellation of writings. Positing the “hysterical spectator” as a force of world making, George refuses “to separate feminist, queer, and transgender viewership,” avowing all at once as an indivisible coalition of life and work (86). This coalitional practice persists also in the sensibility into which George brought

does acknowledge the role of gender transgression in conceptions and performances of queer, but by foregrounding homosexuality, she recapitulates a key shortfall in later twentieth-century queer theory of eclipsing transgender subjectivity, while using nonnormative gender expression as an enabling notion. The problem with Farfan’s conception of queer arises to a certain extent from her analytical method

A request to give a talk at the 2016 Biennale of Sydney on the notation and dance work of Israeli artist Noa Eshkol (1924–2007), several of whose large, vibrant fabric works called “wall carpets” were on exhibition at the Biennale, led me to visit the town of Holon, Israel, near Tel Aviv.1 There, I spent ten days in January 2016 making daily visits to the Noa Eshkol Centre. During my visit, I talked

In line with the thinking of Laurence Louppe calling for a reevaluation and problematisation of oral sources within a dance history framework, this paper sets out to examine the extensive archive of the Bennington Summer School of the Dance Oral History Project, conducted between 1978 and 1979 and housed today at Columbia University. By taking as a starting point the dancer's voice at the heart of

Garafola, Lynn. 1989. Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. New York: Oxford University Press. Kraut, Anthea. 2016. Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance. New York: Oxford University Press. Novack, Cynthia. 1990. Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Serova, Sonia. n.d. Baby Work. New York, NY:

1. Using Mira Rafalowicz’s ([1978] 1997) four-stage model of shaping process with Arrie Davidson’s work in progress, No Safe Words, we framed a 90-minute workshop that simulated moments of rehearsal process, generating moments for dramaturgs to enter the process, offering explorations of embodied and analytical contribution. 2. Hansen’s article “The Dramaturgy of Performance Generating Systems,” (124–42)

culty achieving domestically. In an astonishing example, Dunham initiated social change when she and her company were denied reservations at an exclusive hotel in São Paulo because they were black. Dunham filed a lawsuit against the hotel and Dunham’s Brazilian lawyer, mobilizing the publicity, then successfully cosponsored a bill in the legislature that made it illegal to discriminate on the basis

I n 1978, Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA) designer Richard W. Kerry constructed paper costumes for choreographer Trisha Brown’s trio Splang during an eight-week residency, but Brown decided not to use the costumes owing to their delicacy and propensity for ripping (Rosenberg 2017, 200; “Final Disposition Form 1978”). In the late 1970s, ODC Dance’s1 artistic director Brenda Way received

This article interrogates the multivalent understandings of the term “contemporary dance” in concert, commercial, and world dance contexts. I argue that placing multiple uses of the term “contemporary” alongside one another can provide insight into the ways that “high art” dance, popular dance, and non-Western dance are increasingly wrapped up with each other and, at the same time, the ways that their