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 citation, I argue that Pomare's choreographic citations of “vital” ways of moving and knowing in Harlem critique the terms for “proper” national belonging, while articulating diasporic belonging in motion.

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 dances as impermanent. Situating Dean in the context of serial and conceptual art in which the material art object is deemphasized in favor of communicating compositional logic, I argue that Dean presents a choreographic legacy premised on the intentional disappearance of her work in favor of perpetuating ideation and concept.

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. The article shows how 52 Portraits both relies on and departs from the productive counterpoints found within the portraiture tradition. In so doing, the article builds toward an emergent framework for understanding how screendance portraits function.

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 and disability, denial of disability, changing choreographic practices, and disability aesthetics. Examples of these themes are found in primary source documents about and by Martha Graham, Ted Shawn, and Doris Humphrey and contextualized throughout the article with dance and disability studies theorization.

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 as crucial to the emergence of modernism in the performing arts more generally, although consistently Orientalized in the process. The designation of works revolving around racist stereotypes as “masterpieces,” and their constant reiteration, amounts to complicity with racism that is not limited to ballet stages.

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 clarifies misrepresentations of her work in recent scholarship. Unlike other American dance pioneers, there is no public archive dedicated to Stebbins, therefore this article draws upon newly available primary sources to explore Stebbins's foundational work.