Have you ever wondered what distinguishes dance movement from random motion of the human body? To what degree is ordered or organized motion necessary for communication through dance? The Second Law of Thermodynamics deals with order and disorder, probabilities and tendencies, in physical systems. Can analogies drawn from this physical principle contribute something to our understanding of the nature and meaning of dance?

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, also known as the Law of Entropy or the Law of Increasing Disorder, applies to physical systems in which a number of different configurations are possible. The law states that spontaneous changes in such a system will tend away from an ordered configuration towards the more probable one of greater disorder. An example of this is the distribution of oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the air in a room. Normally these molecules are distributed evenly throughout the room with about 20% oxygen and 80% nitrogen molecules in every region of the room. Since there is an enormously large number of ways in which all of the air molecules can be distributed in this uniform way, such a configuration is very probable. It is also possible, though much less probable, that all the oxygen molecules would congregate in one corner of the room, with the nitrogens elsewhere.

Identity, difference, and translation are important theoretical concepts in the field of translation studies and postcolonial studies. It is a basic assumption of this text that aesthetic and cultural translation is exposed to the paradox of identity and difference and that this paradox is particularly evident in artistic performance practices such as dance and choreography. Focusing on the artistic work of choreographer and dancer Germaine Acogny (Senegal), the text addresses artistic translation practices under postcolonial conditions in the global art market of so-called “contemporary dance.” The aim is to illustrate how contradictory, hybrid, and fragmented the cultural and aesthetic translation process is, how the global art market shapes the artistic strategies of translation, and how aesthetic productivity lies in the impossibility of translating cultural experience artistically.

This article examines Joan Miller's use of choreographic citation in her solos, Pass Fe White (1970) and Homestretch (1973). The solos “read” the desire to embody idealized, feminine whiteness in a critique of institutions for accessing national belonging—celebrity, education, and marriage—satirically exposing the gendered and racialized exclusions of the figure of the abstract “human” as “proper” citizen. Miller's work performs queer, Black feminist, diasporic desires for a world beyond Black and white nationalist logics, refusing to be “properly” placed in national hierarchies of female objecthood, while affirming the capacity to desire differently by proposing alternative terms for belonging in the world.

This essay explores the intersection of concert dance, cultural memory, Black womanhood, and non-linear spacetime from an Afro-European perspective. Inspired by Black feminist methodologies, the text interweaves performance analysis, historical context, interdisciplinary theory including my own concept of perforMemory, and auto-ethnographic experience gained through participant observation. My writing moves along three lines of inquiry tuned in the key of C: contextualizing, conjuring and contemplating. The article offers a case study of I Step on Air, a contemporary dance piece created by Nigerian-German dancer-choreographer Oxana Chi (Berlin/New York) and dedicated to Ghanian-German poet and activist May Ayim. By including an interlude with the choreographer's own creative writing about the piece, the article also provides the reader with the precious perspective of Oxana Chi on her process. The article is a reflection on/of the resonances between movement, writing, and activism. Let's celebrate the power of Black women to resistDance, step by step, move by move, breath by breath…

This article approaches the idea of interdisciplinarity as an aspect of the globalization of pedagogical practices through the teaching of kathak dance in France. Our study positions itself in a didactic research program that tackles the question of interdisciplinarity under the theoretical angle of joint action between teacher and students (Ranganathan 2004; Ranganathan and Petrefalvi 2007; Sensevy and Mercier 2007; Loquet, Roncin, and Roesslé 2007; Loquet 2007). In this program, “didactics” is defined as the science whose object of study covers educational, teaching, and training practices. Our contribution to this program concerns the field of knowledge related to the body, in particular in sports and artistic activities (Loquet 2006). The ambition of research in didactics currently taking place in France is to show that the teacher's action cannot be treated in a unilateral way, independent of the student's action, just as the interactions between teacher and student cannot be set apart from the objects of knowledge that unite them. In this model, we grant a central place to the concept of “milieu,” seen in a general way as the space where the teacher and the students interact.

For the past several years I have taught an advanced writing seminar at New York University's Gallatin School called Writing About Performance. While dance is not the only focus—we write about various forms of live art—it is indeed a central component.

Dance, Politics & Co-Immunity developed out of a symposium organized by the Master in Choreography and Performance at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Germany, which was held with a joint symposium Thinking—Resisting—Reading the Political organized by the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture at the same university in 2010. Whereas the cultural studies symposium asked, “What specific perspectives and methodological consequences arise for the study of culture that are informed by recent deliberations on the relationship of the political and the aesthetic?” (2010), the dance symposium invited participants and contributors to the anthology “to think about the multiple connections between politics, community, dance, and globalization from the perspective of Dance and Theatre Studies, History, Philosophy, and Sociology” (13). As indicated by the title of the cultural studies symposium and some of the key speakers, including Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe, and Judith Butler, the term political is not used as broadly as it might be used in U.S.-based dance studies discourse. Rather, the political is predominantly investigated by both symposia for its resistive potential and from a liberal or post-Marxist stance.

This article interrogates the status of virtuosity in dance through the co-constitutive paradigms of race, gender, and class, accounting for both the term's emergence in journalistic arts discourse and how “queer of color” critique refines its meaning in and for contemporary performance culture (Roderick Ferguson). Virtuosity operates at the supposed border between popular and “high” art, and “Soul” and the mechanical, defining the location of the virtuoso's potential transgression. Discourses of virtuosity in performance are linked to connotations of excess, and examining formal and sociocultural aspects of virtuosic dance reveals under-recognized heterogeneity generated by vernacular influences on high art. Founded in 1994 by Desmond Richardson (as muse) and Dwight Rhoden (as choreographer), Complexions Contemporary Ballet exemplifies how much of “Africanist” choreography resists performing “ontopolitical critique” through stillness, privileging speed, stylistic hybridity, and technical intricacy (Brenda Dixon Gottschild, André Lepecki). I propose and develop the term choreographic falsetto, likening Richardson's virtuosity to that of black “Post-Soul” singers such as Prince, on the one hand, and nineteenth-century virtuoso musicians and composers such as Liszt, on the other (Francesca Royster). Richardson performs queer black masculinity by exploiting hyperbolic technical skills typically reserved for women, expanding upon choreographic aesthetics initiated by George Balanchine, William Forsythe, Alvin Ailey, and Ulysses Dove. Calling upon Theodor Adorno and Max Weber's theories of virtuosity and charisma in music and religion (in addition to Ferguson, Royster, Gottschild, Lepecki, Thomas DeFrantz, Nathaniel Mackey, Joseph Roach, Susan Bernstein, and Gabriele Brandstetter), I account for a historically and cross-culturally prevalent (if relatively forgotten) aspect of virtuosity, namely its position at the meeting point of gender, religion, capitalism, and individualism.