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

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

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

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

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

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

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

D espite the fact that contemporary dance in Morocco is a relatively recent phenomenon, with the first dance companies and training programs emerging in the early 2000s, participation in the art form has grown considerably in the past five to seven years. Today dozens of young people undergo contemporary dance training in the main urban areas of the country. There are many established artistic directors

In 1958, Mahmoud Reda founded the Reda Troupe and put his interpretation of Egyptian folkloric dance on stage. This article analyzes the historical factors that allowed for the Reda Troupe's success and popularity during the Nasser period (1954–1970). Although colonial influences and problematic representational politics are evident in Reda's choreographies, his dances also showcase agency, hybridity

“Whatdo air, breath, andbreathinghave todowith black performance, with Blackpentecostal aesthetics?” Ashon Crawley asks (33). Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, a lush meditation on black living, black precarity, and black aesthetics, provides an answer. Crawley focuses on Black Pentecostalism, a multiracial, multiclass, and multinational Christian sect, a strand of which congealed

Archival evidence of Shakespeare's and Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet s evince patriarchal efforts to efface female rebellion. As Juliet, Lynn Seymour declassifies ballet through recalcitrant stillness and off-balance choreography. Patriarchal institutions enlisted Margot Fonteyn's classifying instinct to efface these balletic transgressions from the archive utilizing strategies corresponding

Representations of war recur throughout art, whether celebrating the glories and heroism of conflict, or depicting its horrors and follies. This paper uses qualitative audience research to examine soldiers' own responses to the representation of soldiers in choreographer Rosie Kay's dance performance 5 Soldiers: The Body is the Frontline. It explores how for military audiences the satisfaction of an

Einav Katan’s Embodied Philosophy in Dance presents a phenomenological reading of Gaga, the movement practice elaborated by Batsheva Dance Company’s artistic director, Ohad Naharin, and employed as a daily training and research practice by Batsheva and many professional and amateur dancers around the world. Katan’s work is praiseworthy for its gesture of layering definitions of Gaga throughout the

lists in the Appendix (435–453), all of six (3%) had Jewish themes (11)—as many as Spanish-themed works—and until the 1960s, his unfamiliarity with Jewish traditions is also quite evident (e.g., 61–2, 205, 210–1). 6. Of course, “archiving” in this sense contradicts Taylor’s definition in The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), making one wonder to what purpose Ross (2015, 423) cites this theory. 7.

Andrea Mantell Seidel’s Isadora Duncan in the 21st Century: Capturing the Art and Spirit of the Dancer’s Legacy fills a critical gap in the extant scholarship on early twentieth-century dance artist Isadora Duncan. Rather than focusing on Duncan’s biography, this text foregrounds Duncan’s choreographic legacy from the perspective of a dancer and scholar who has spent thirty-five years coaching and

The five essays in this issue are quite diverse in terms of subject matter, context, and approach. However, if there is one aspect that links them, it is a concern with historical framing, whether it is to shed new light on a subject through a critical analysis of certain shifts in recent dance practices by addressing the historical precedents from whence they emerged (Kloetzel, Haitzinger, Joncheere)

This essay undertakes to illuminate the work of Randy Martin by surveying a range of theories offering hypothetical answers to the question of why dance seems to generate more energy than it demands, an experience often reported by those who engage in it. Coming from the disparate disciplines of social history, psychology, neurobiology, phenomenology, and aesthetics, these theories do not necessarily

I n his seminal book Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics (1998) Randy Martin proposes to rethink the relation between dance and politics based on his concept of mobilization. He asks what dance and the study of dance can bring to politics given that both are forms of articulation of the social. For Martin, the dynamics of mobilization are already inherent in politics although political

one, with the English National Ballet in Dust (2014). “Through Dust, Khan thus confronts the otherness of ballet through the otherness of his aesthetic of new interculturalism,” remarks Mitra: “On the one hand, he manages to stabilize classicist ballet audiences by taking them out of their comfort zones. On the other he simultaneously creates new audiences for ballet by making the art form speak to

I n over three decades of research, Randy Martin has critiqued failures of capitalism and the Left’s inability to correct social injustices, interrogating relationships between artistic and cultural expressions and the way they are situated within economic and political contexts. Martin’s theories offer tools for analyzing the choreographic agency in works inspired by distinct sociopolitical conditions

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 27 (2): 10–27. Burrows, Jonathan, and Jan Ritsema. 2003. “Weak Dance Strong Questions.” Performance Research 8 (2): 28–33. Burt, Ramsay. 2004. “Constructing Contemporary Dance—Amperdans festival.” Ballet-Dance Magazine (October). Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. London:

A lone tree stands in the midst of a devastated landscape at Rikuzentakata, Japan. At Aceh, Malacca, a whole generation is washed out by the 2004 tsunami. At Beach 116, Far Rockaway, New York City, the entire street is swept away as the sea rolls in from the ocean toward the Jamaica Bay end of the avenue, built on a slope from ocean to bay on a barrier island. These scenes of climate volatility arouse

This article argues that the unrealized ballet Caapora (1915), conceived for choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, and Oscar Araiz's La consagracion de la primavera (1966, The Rite of Spring ) fundamentally shaped the establishment and reimagination of concert dance as a site of modernity in Argentina. Both works danced modernity through imagined pre-Columbian indigenous myths choreographed in Euro-American

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon's French empire conquered much of Europe, the German patriot Friedrich Ludwig Jahn invented the first German national gymnastics program known as Turnen . The idea was to create a new German body and a new form of national discipline. Walking for bodily fitness, to instill national awareness, training on special equipment and rediscovering ancient

In a solo performance entitled Archive (2014), the Israeli choreographer Arkadi Zaides offers a physical and choreographic interpretation of videos collected by the Israeli nongovernmental organization B'Tselem in the context of an operation called “Camera Project.” The footage projected on stage shows only Israelis, but the viewpoint is Palestinian. Starting from this material, Arkadi Zaides performs

by extension, the emancipatory potential of Navanritya/New Dance. She encouraged both performer and spectator to develop a heightened awareness of the gendered implications of traditional dance vocabularies and developed a new idiom capable of enacting a critique of what she viewed as the patriarchal conditioning of female bodies. Sircar “travelled between learned and discovered movement,” as she recast

To me, life is essentially movement, and much of my journey has been living so that I may dance. Now, as a woman of color confronting disabilities as well as heightened awarenesses in my post-cancer reality, I dance to live; my dance has become a functional ritual for the continuance of all of life. I believe that art in some of its highest forms can be healing, thus I create dances to sustain health

Recent scientific study verifies what many Native people have always known: that traumatic events in our ancestors’ lives persist in our bodies, blood, and bones. These events leave molecular scars that adhere to our DNA. Our grandmother’s tragic childhood can trigger depression or anxiety in us, but we have the ability to heal these DNA encodings and change that trait for future generations (Hurley

How to describe my experience? Some Indigenous peoples have prescribed, specific protocols around introductions, but this is not the case where I’m from. Or, if it was this way in the past, we’ve lost the knowledge of those introductory protocols. I respect that we should give space to those who have Indigenous ways of introducing themselves. As an Alutiiq woman who lives in a kind of diaspora from

ous videos that were projected. Instead one will find a number of photographs of some particular work that was performed at various different times. The catalog seems in fact to complete the exhibition, or to be a complementary addition to it. The appendices also contain “the first comprehensive list of exhibitions, performances and biography of Simone Forti” (11). Without claiming to be a catalogue

Nitsitapiw Aakii, the Alone Woman at the center of the story has a vivid dream of Ksiistsikomm, Thunder. The power of Thunder lets loose the mythic figure of Old Man, who can change himself into any form he wishes. In the course of her wanderings, Nitsitapiw Aakii meets Old Man. He gives two gifts: one beautiful and another not anticipated and not beautiful, resulting in decisions that plunge the woman