This article examines the conflicting and paradoxical ways in which race and citizenship intersect in late capitalism, and how dancers negotiate these contradictions through their bodily labor. Focusing on South Asian dancers in the UK, I suggest that transnational South Asian dancers have increasingly had to emphasize flexibility and mobility in their bodies and dance practices in order to gain access to mainstream funding, venues, audiences, resources, and touring circuits which have traditionally marginalized non-white dance practices. I argue that “flexible citizenship” is not just a political strategy to negotiate capital; it is also a bodily tactic and an embodied response to the racialization of labor in neoliberal economies. However, there are limits to how far the flexibility of flexible citizenship can stretch. Although the creativity of South Asian dancers and the strength of their bodily practices has helped them to negotiate racial inequalities in Britain, immigration laws, arts funding policies, and employment regulations have immobilized dancers. Addressing the various complexities and contradictions in which transnational bodies are embroiled, this essay is both a tribute to the creative, flexible practices of South Asian dancers as well as an acknowledgment of the limits of flexible citizenship and a critique of neoliberalism's toll on the racialized dancing body.

In this article, original interview material, existing published accounts, and the author's own experience as a contemporary dancer are put in conversation to explicitly address a particular kinesthetic awareness, sensitivity, and curiosity valued and employed by a group of dancers in the practice of contemporary dance, which is referred to as a kinesthetic mode of attention. The research informing this article uses a phenomenological and sociological approach and discusses, in detail, what this mode of attending “is like,” how it is described in different ways by dancers, and how it might be developed and nurtured in training and working in the style of contemporary dance. An overarching aim of this work is to contribute to greater understanding and valuing of the nuances and particularities of kinesthetic intelligence in dance practices and to address the cognitive aspects of dancing.

This article works through ideas of bad/mis-translation in order to explore some of the cultural politics that undergird the construction of the global stage with specific reference to the idea of contemporary choreography in Asian dance. Bound by contesting flows toward heterogeneity and homogeneity, the global stage begs questions about the categories that pose as neutral signifiers—categories that are deployed in organizing “global” programming, and that ultimately over-determine our reception of difference. The article works through examples of artists working with Asian dance, touring their work on the global circuit, and often engaging in some kinds of mis-alignments or bad translations, thus allowing space for complicated questions of difference to emerge.

The overwhelming stench of alcohol hovers in the hotel bathroom as my dance partner lathers a fourth layer of brown body paint onto my belly. “You have to learn how to apply your tan properly,” he admonishes sternly as I squirm under the sting of chemicals burning my skin. After rejecting twelve self-tanning products, I have finally found one that stains my fair skin dark enough for me to “pass” as a professional Latin dancesport competitor. Dancesport refers to a highly stylized version of ballroom dancing performed in competition circuits across the United States, Europe, and Asia. International Style Dancesport encompasses both the standard category, comprised of dances most readily associated with aristocratic ballrooms (e.g., waltzes and foxtrots), and the Latin division. Among the many rituals I scoff at in this sport I love to hate is the mandate that any competitor who wishes to be taken seriously must cover his or her body with brown paint. At twenty-seven dollars a bottle, the German made PROFI-TAN-Intensive-Latin-Color is my product of choice. After three generous coats of the bronze elixir have absorbed into my skin, my “brownface” is complete, and I am ready to withstand an entire evening of competition cha-chas.

In a world where symbolic discourse may be the hallmark of a dominant species, certain human beings stand out for their social isolation. Six nonverbal children, ages six to nine, with dual impairments of vision and hearing, formed one such cluster of humanity within a residential educational setting. This article reports on some features of a study that analyzes the influence of an intensive dance program (Dance) on social and task engagement in these children (Bond 1991). A multi-faceted inquiry was undertaken that combined a two-group experimental design with participant observation and cumulative theorizing. In this “art-science duet” (Bond 1987), qualitative procedures were adopted to interpret patterns of engagement uncovered through quantitative analysis. Results clearly show that Dance was an effective mode of expression, communication and learning for the six children.

The study of dance, let alone “dance anthropology,” is still barely accepted by academia in the schools and universities of the United Kingdom. On the whole, Farnell's 1981 discussion of dance and dance education in England is still relevant. There is, however, a growing awareness among British anthropologists of the critical relevance of dance within the field of anthropology and among dance scholars of the relevance of anthropology to dance studies.

In the last decade or so a number of studies that look at the state of the art within the field of “dance” anthropology have been published in the United States and in Europe (see, for example, Giurschescu and Torp [1991], Kaeppler [1991], Lange [1980], Sklar [1991], and Williams [1986]). It would be more accurate to talk about the anthropology of human movement, as do a number of the writers mentioned above, since the concept “dance,” as known in English and other cognate languages, may not be appropriate cross culturally. I find the term “anthropology of human movement,” however, rather cumbersome, and since it is “dance”—rather than martial arts or signing systems, for instance—that is usually looked at by the authors I will be referring to later, I consider the use of the term “dance anthropology” justifiable.

I first met Edna Ocko in the early 1980s. She was my mother-in-law's best friend from college days, someone who wrote about dance in the 1930s and took a dim view of critics since. My husband was a little in awe of Edna, and the first time she came to the house, I was told to cook an extra pound of pasta because Edna was coming. To my amazement, she was almost as tiny as my grandmother. We had a lot of pasta left over.

Edna Ocko, or Edna Meyers, as we knew her, was a formidable woman. She had been a communist in the 1930s and remained at heart a member of the Party, bonded by decades of friendship to the comrades-in-arms of her youth. She was punchy and articulate, with strong opinions and political convictions that never wavered even when she was named as a communist by Jerome Robbins before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. She was also a first-rate dance critic who knew the difference between art and propaganda, could tell good choreography from bad, and wrote with verve. She was a crack editor, with a nose for a story, who understood intuitively how to balance different voices and views: unsurprisingly, her best days as a dance journalist coincided with the Popular Front, which embraced liberals and leftists alike. Finally, she was an intellectual, curious, well read, stimulated by ideas, who counted even balletomanes like Lincoln Kirstein among her colleagues.

Gaga, a practice developed by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, is one of the most popular training methods on the global dance market. Structured as a metatechnique, or a system for negotiating techniques within one's body, Gaga teaches students to both draw on and reject multiple movement techniques to create their own movement. I consider how the paradigms of choreography, technique, and improvisation are blurred together in the pedagogical model of a metatechnique and how training dancers to shift between choreographer, dancer, and improviser has significant ramifications for understanding their agency. The metatechnique model of Gaga falls in line with neoliberal values of efficiency and a wide range of skills and knowledge; this analysis provides an understanding of recent trends in dance training in relation to contemporary political and socioeconomic structures.

Danzas chuscas are parodic dances performed in indigenous and mestizo villages throughout Mexico. In the village of Yalálag, a Zapotec indigenous village in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, danzas chuscas are performed during religious celebrations, a time when many Yalaltecos (people from Yalálag) who have immigrated to Los Angeles return to visit their families. Since the late 1980s, these immigrants have become the subject of the dances. Yalaltecos humorously represent those who have adopted “American” behaviors or those who have remitted negative values and behaviors from inner-city neighborhoods of Los Angeles to Yalálag. Danzas chuscas such as “Los Mojados” (“The Wetbacks”), “Los Cocineros” (“The Cooks”), and “Los Cholos” (“Los Angeles Gangsters”) comically portray the roles that Yalaltec immigrants have come to play in the United States. Danzas chuscas such as “Los Norteños” (“The Northerners”), “Los Turistas” (“The Tourists”), and “El Regreso de los Mojados” (“The Return of the Wetbacks”) characterize Yalaltec immigrants as outsiders and visitors. And the choreography in dances like “Los Yalaltecos” (“The Residents of Yalálag”) and “Las Minifaldas” (“The Miniskirts”) reflect changes in these immigrants' social status, gender behaviors, and class position. In other words, these dances embody the impact of migration on social, economic, and cultural levels. Through physical humor immigrants and nonimmigrants confront the tensions and uncertainties stemming from Zapotec migration into the United States: community social disorganization, social instability, and changes in the meaning of group identity as it relates to gender, class, ethnicity, and culture.

For B-boys and B-girls in the South Bronx in the early 1980s, this type of event was common. This cardboard square became a haven for self-expression and hope, a source of life. Within these rings of familiar faces, young black and Latino teenagers, almost exclusively male, used breakdance—in Nelson George's words “a serious game, a form of urban vernacular dance” (George 1985, 83)—to earn respect and authority in a neighborhood that provoked feelings of insignificance and hopelessness. Hip hop dance, George continues, “symbolizes hope for the future…. As Fab Five Freddy puts it…what's at stake is a guy's honor and his position in the street. Which is all you have. That's what makes it so important, that's what makes it feel so good” (George 1985, 111). For male teenagers growing up in poor, dangerous neighborhoods, the desire to become someone, to overcome and make it out as a somebody is a powerful drive.

Bronx teenagers found their voices through their bodies. They built up and perfected a large vocabulary of hip hop moves to communicate a wide variety of emotions and messages. Each move merged with the next to create a fluid, poetic language. From the inception of the hip hop culture, and persisting through its various eras—”Old School to the New School through gangsta rap to the latest innovators” (Bing 1998, 58)—hip hop dance has provided the arena for the expression and affirmation of masculinity. Built into this artistry is competition and domination, sexuality and libido, and hero worship.

In 1892 Loïe Fuller, often figured as one of the “mothers” of modern dance, brought an infringement suit in New York against a chorus girl named Minnie Renwood Bemis in an attempt to enjoin Bemis from performing a version of the Serpentine Dance, which Fuller claimed to have invented. The dance, distinctive for its use of yards of illuminated silk fabric, made the American-born Fuller famous in Europe and spawned a host of imitators on both sides of the Atlantic.

Intent on staking her proprietary claim on the dance, Fuller took the precaution of submitting a written description of it to the U. S. Copyright Office. Ultimately, however, the judge for the U.S. Circuit Court denied Fuller's request for an injunction on the grounds that the Serpentine Dance told no story and was therefore not eligible for copyright protection. Although Fuller clearly regarded her expressive output as intellectual property, dance at the time lacked legal recognition as a copyrightable category in its own right and merited protection only if it qualified as a “dramatic” or “dramatico-musical composition.”

While researching dance within the Occupied Palestinian Territories, comments made by the choreographers of local performance troupes resonated in my mind because they exemplify how foreign hegemony controls notions of modernity. The first was a lament: “But can't they understand that this is our contemporary dance?” It followed the rejection of the group's application to a European contemporary dance festival, on the basis that their dance production was not contemporary enough and that it would be better suited to a folkloric festival. For those engaged in creative innovation in dance, this rebuke can feel like being sent to a home for the elderly: packed off to a place where everybody dances in circles, reminiscing about the glorious golden past of their own particular civilization. The second comment cropped up in numerous conversations with local dance practitioners and audiences: “I don't like the modern dance.” This comment was generally directed at any foreign or local dance production that did not fit within nostalgically imagined impressions of dance in times gone by.

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.

Discussions about globalization tend to fall somewhere between two poles. One invokes the paranoia of what Appadurai (1996) refers to as a McDonaldization of the world, in which local practices, identities, and economies give way to the homogenizing mandates of capitalism. The other rejoices over the emergence of so-called hybrid cultural forms, interpreted as signs of the resilience of non-Western societies, as harbingers of the dawn of some new age of multicultural understanding, or as proof of the political power of consumers (Garcia Canclini 1995). Both views often underestimate the complexity of the relationship between the local and the global, and lose from view the fact that this relationship can be understood only in terms of historical conditions operating in specific contexts. While capitalism plunders the world, littering its path with Tommy Hilfiger, Pizza Hut, and the ever-popular sitcom Friends, there are many examples of the ways in which local populations do not passively consume what is thrown at them, but actively reinterpret and selectively combine elements of mass-mediated culture within preexisting frameworks and markets (Diawara 1998; Feld 1988; Martinez 1999). Moreover, the indigenization of global culture opens up the possibility of alternative experiences of modernity, which do not fall under the rubric of American culture but instead refer to other geocultural identities (Ching 2000).

Most individuals who spend serious time with children recognize that children are not simply small versions of adults. Not only are their bodies different, but they also think differently. The dance educator, just like other educators, must attempt to see the world from the child's point of view if the teaching-learning process is to be successful.

One framework for conceiving the world from the child's point of view comes from Jean Piaget, a scientist who was interested in the development of cognitive skills used in science—ordering, classifying, inferring, thinking in propositions, and hypothesizing. Such skills are important not only in science, but in any logical use of the intellect. Inasmuch as dance educators claim interest in the child's intellectual as well as emotional and physical self, an understanding of Piaget's theories may generate valuable insight. Yet neither Piaget nor his many followers who have applied his theories to specific areas of education have examined dance education through this lens.

For the past thirteen years, I have been traveling to the United States from my home country of Germany, first as a graduate student in California and later as a professor living in New York. Every time I pass through immigration, I am asked a series of questions regarding my final destination and my occupation. The latter always leads to some confusion, because when I am asked what I do, my accent seems to turn “dance history” into “dentistry.” Forced by phonetics to use the term “dance studies,” when confronted by the blank face of the customs officer, I inevitably embark on an explanation of what “dance studies” might be. Just in the moment when I finally see some comprehension of my profession lighting up the officer's face, the question is asked: “And we pay you to do this?”

I constantly find myself in the position of having to explain my work. Usually I avoid a long-winded, defensive justification by comparing dance studies to one of its neighboring disciplines: “It is like art history, just writing about dance instead of paintings.” That usually does the trick, but it leaves a foul taste in my mouth. I know that dance studies isn't like art history and I certainly don't want it to be.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, Filipino men patronized the popular American social institution of the taxi dancehalls, comprising nearly one quarter of the taxi dancehall patrons in major cities such as Detroit and Los Angeles (see Cressey 1932). Taxi dancehalls were at the height of their popularity during this period, often serving as a key site of sociality amongst and between immigrants. Women were employed as dancers for hire, and men, predominantly immigrants, were their principal patrons. Filipinos, workers and students alike, came dressed in McIntosh suits, eager to spend their hard-earned wages on taxi dancers. Here, Filipino men made rare social contact with women—taxi dancers who were largely white, occasionally Mexican, and very rarely Filipina (see Meckel 1995 for a detailed study of taxi dancers). Filipinos would purchase their dance tickets, choose their favorite girl within a group of taxi dancers, and move to the music of a live band. For ten cents per dance number, slow or fast, Filipino men could choose to dance with the same dancer until their tickets ran out or opt for the pleasures of another. Like a taxi ride, each dance came with a ticketed price and the expectation of a tip, either in the form of a drink, a sandwich, or perhaps even a marriage proposal.

The demand for ultra-leanness imposed on today's ballerina has evolved over primarily the last thirty years, and did not characterize the traditional classical ballet that dominated the field during its preceding four hundred years. Evolving public taste has tended to prefer increasingly slender figures, and the more Olympian levels of performance dancers must now exhibit further reinforce the demand for extreme leanness.

The author's forty years of dance education experience and performance of classical ballet have made her aware that excellent training has become ever more widely available to the younger members of our society. Their rigorous training— continued well into the high school years—supports the achievement of a high level of technical and aesthetic perfection. Today's elite classical dancers are trained to make ever more revolutions in ever more complex and faster paced turns, and to do quicker and more intricate allegro work. They are trained to execute more complex jumps with greater elevation, and to sustain their balances with less preparation time. Furthermore, as the quality and quantity of professionally-oriented ballet schools have increased dramatically, today's dancer is facing an exponentially increased level of competition.

Increasingly demanding techniques and more intense levels of competition require today's dancers to meet what are, in the author's view, extreme standards of leanness. Each year among the hundreds of beautifully trained dancers who audition for the few vacancies available in professional ballet companies, many are rejected on sight because they do not project the proper, or ideal, body image: long legs, long arms, long neck, oval shaped head; a body of excellent proportions; and, perhaps of greatest importance, a “bone-thin” frame. Ballet masters recognize that extreme leanness enables the dancer to become more energy-efficient, physically articulate, and agile; it facilitates partnering and pointe dancing; and projects an aesthetically pleasing athletic, or sylph-like, image to the public that subsidizes the art.

Ballet and modern dance are aesthetic endeavors which utilize the human body as their primary instrument of expression. It therefore has been suggested by some dance theorists and authorities that competent aesthetic performance in these idioms requires support from enhanced physiologic capabilities including flexibility; muscular strength, power, and endurance; and cardiovascular endurance (American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation, 1974, p. 405; Arnheim, 1980, pp. 74-85; Fitt, 1988, pp. 318-319; H'Doubler, 1974, pp. 150-151). However, original scientific investigations of dance physiology are in their infancy and have not yet fully substantiated these commonly held assumptions.