In the autumn of 2015, on the back of the publication of my monograph Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism (Mitra 2015), I was settling into my Brunel University London-sponsored sabbatical to kick-start my postdoctoral research project, then titled “Historicizing and Mapping British Physical Theatre.” At that stage, this new field of study, methodology, and tone of enquiry felt significantly different from the decolonial spirit of my book, which examines the works of the British-Bangladeshi dance artist Akram Khan at the intersections of postcoloniality, race, gender, sexuality, mobility, interculturalism, and globalization, arguing for his choreographic choices as discerning political acts that decenter the whiteness of contemporary western dance from his position within this center. With this new project I was keen, instead, to investigate the development of “British physical theatre” as an interdisciplinary genre that emerged interstitially between and through its “double legacy in both avant-garde theatre and dance” (Sánchez-Colberg 2007, 21) with a particular emphasis on what the import of the choreographic vocabulary of partnering would have brought to these experiments. Very conscious that the now ubiquitous aesthetic of partnering in contemporary Euro-American theater dance derived its roots from the somatic explorations of contact improvisation, I was intrigued to examine how the genre of British physical theatre would have engaged with choreographic touch from its somatic beginnings in contact improvisation to its politicized and aestheticized manifestation in partnering. I was also conscious, of course, of the role that Steve Paxton, the artist whose name has become synonymous with contact improvisation's inception and development in 1970s United States, had to play in teaching contact improvisation in the dance program at Dartington College of Arts in the United Kingdom (UK) in the 1970s and 1980s. Driven by a need to examine the potential relationship between Dartington's 1970s movement experiments with Paxton and contact improvisation, and the emergence of partnering as a key aesthetic within British contemporary dance, specifically its manifestation in physical theatre, I wanted to interview Paxton himself. Needless to say, I was of course fully aware of the difficulty in making such an important research opportunity materialize. However, within months, the remarkable generosity of our dance studies network, in this instance embodied by Professors Susan Foster and Ann Cooper Albright, and the dance artist Lisa Nelson, led me to the inbox of Steve Paxton himself in November 2015. Paxton was instantly responsive to my e-mail communications, and deeply invested and committed to sharing his experiences and insights with me. We arranged our Skype interview for early 2016, agreeing that this would give me enough time to research existing interviews with Paxton, in print and on video, to ensure that I could delineate my own questions for him in productive ways. The more I researched, the more a feature of the extensive archive of interviews with Paxton revealed itself: the predominant absence of bodies and perspectives of color from the early days of contact improvisation's experiments. This absence, in turn, became more and more present in my thinking.

This article examines the development of theatricality in modern dance by comparing two dances: Mary Wigman's Totenmal (1930) and Hanya Holm's Trend (1937). By looking at the interplay between group and solo choreography, lighting design and themes, this paper will show how Holm combined the skills she learned codirecting Totenmal at the Dancers’ Congress in Munich to her work with American dance artists at the Bennington School of the Dance to create her first important work. It will examine why Trend was successful as a collaborative project, as well as show how it diverged ideologically from Wigman's work in the 1930s.

Through close analysis of primary and secondary source material related to Katherine Dunham's Tango (1954), this article examines the protest message of this dance work within the political and social context of the time. The article focuses first on Dunham's understanding of the Argentine populist political movement known as Peronism, and secondly on the Argentine reception of the piece's protest against Juan Domingo Perón's government. The article argues that, contrary to existing interpretations of the work, Tango articulated with the cultural policies promoted by Perón's government, rather than working as a protest performance against it.

In this essay, I reexamine Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton's 1963 dance Word Words, arguing that this apparently “minimalist” work in fact deployed “underground” strategies, those of female (and male) impersonation. Camp performance, an approach that Rainer soon disavowed, allowed Word Words to explore gender in ways that were not possible by the time Rainer developed Trio A. Word Words did not simply “overwrite” Rainer's (female) gender, as has been suggested alongside similar discussions of Trio A and gender, but destabilized the gender system's binaries: a deeply radical move, even in the context of other Judson performances using camp.

“Activating Whiteness: Racializing the Ordinary in US American Postmodern Dance” explores how the choreographic turn to postmodernism twisted the trope of racial exclusion from a focus on trained bodies to a focus on ordinary bodies. Analyses of Yvonne Rainer's Trio A (1966) and Trisha Brown's Locus (1975) demonstrate how ordinary bodies shape racially exclusive spaces and activate the biopolitical mechanisms of normalization that their choreography allegedly contests. This essay argues that the spaces activated by the bodies that shaped them carry the physical trace of the performers’ race through the enduring invisibility of whiteness.

This article argues that nationalism and international diplomacy are embodied practices, as evidenced through the movement of international ballet dancers in South Africa. Under the apartheid regime, South African professional ballet received generous support from governmental sources. Since the transition to democracy, professional ballet companies have utilized creative strategies to court new sources of support including that of the ruling African National Congress. A key move in this campaign has been “ballet diplomacy” with Cuba—the transnational circulation of dancers, teachers, techniques, and performances in the name of the nation. Professional ballet's buy-in into South African nationalism locates dancers’ bodies in the maintenance and dissemination of state politics.

This essay discusses three recent British contemporary dance works that radically rework the spatial relation between audience and performer. These are Nicola Conibere's Assembly (2013), Katye Coe's (To) Constantly Vent (2014), and Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small's Voodoo (2017). The essay draws on Henri Lefebvre theorization of the social and political production of space to analyze the kinds of reworkings of space-time that these works enact. It argues that the works evade capture by the apparatuses that maintain normative ideologies, not only those governing the reception of art but also the apparatuses of racial classification.