In this article, the three co-authors collaboratively address practices of queering in relation to the Parisian choreographer of color Nyota Inyoka (1896–1971), whose biography and identity remain mysterious even after extensive research. Writing from three different research perspectives and relating to three different aspects of her life and work, the co-authors analyze Nyota Inyoka and practices of Queering the Archive, her staging of Shiva as a performance of (culturally) “queer possibility,” and the act of remembering Nyota Inyoka in a contemporary context in terms of queering ethnicity and “cultural belonging.” Juxtaposing and interweaving notions and practices of queering and créolité/creolizing over the course of the article, the co-authors attempt to respect Nyota Inyoka's “right to opacity” (Glissant [1996] 2020, 45) and remember her on her own terms.

This article explores the role a human skeleton played in the queering and shaping of dance modernism. In the early decades of the twentieth century, an important intervention propelling dance toward a modernist aesthetic while disrupting the regulatory norms of gender construction, began in a women's college gymnasium via a skeleton. Two impulses generate this archival-based inquiry: one that traces the history and symbolic formulations of nationalism, race, and gender that followed skeletons into the university as they anchored conceptualizations of the modernist dancing body; and another that locates the intervention of a queer body in dance through this skeleton.

The work of the homosexual Israeli dance pioneer and choreographer Baruch Agadati (1895–1976) queered Jewish dance. His project of Hebrew Dance was a queer take on traditional Jewish dance material mixed with a seemingly queer shift of the antisemitic distortions of this material. Throughout his approach to Jewish dance traditions from a perspective as a nonobservant, secular Jew, Agadati transcended boundaries of religion, secularity, and nation to a complex questioning of how Jewishness could be expressed through modern dance.

During the height of the 1980s AIDS epidemic in the United States, LGBTQ+ Jewish choreographers agitated for gay rights by using Holocaust allusions to address the AIDS crisis. Modernist practices in their work generate a long modernist midcentury that reframes established historical binaries between modernist and postmodernist concert dance modalities. This article argues that choreographers who drew upon Holocaust memory to address the AIDS crisis engendered a queer Jewish imaginary by engaging Jewishness from ethnic Ashkenazi (European) Jewish American lineages of modernist dance as social justice, Jewish cyclical temporal logics, and histories of being scapegoated for societal ills. It demonstrates how Meredith Monk's Book of Days (1988), David Dorfman's Sleep Story (1987), and Arnie Zane's The Gift/No God Logic (1987) fostered Jewish queerness in modernist artistic practices during a time that LGBTQ+ American Jews developed a queer Jewish consciousness. These choreographers’ works connect queer Jewish modernisms to varied temporalities of global modernity.