The dancer Mademoiselle Mercédès performed in the most important music halls of the Parisian Belle Époque, such as the Folies-Bergère and the Olympia. Her exotic pseudonym reflects the Hispanophilia of this period in France, but she was neither a Spanish dancer nor a native imitator. On the contrary, she displayed great versatility as a dancer and actively participated in the transition to modernity with the dancer Loïe Fuller and the choreographer Madame Mariquita. However, who is behind this artist's name? This research reveals that at least three women used this nickname and only one of them has been previously identified: Julienne Mathieu (1874–1943), who, after her stage career, became one of the most prolific actresses in early cinema. This case study explores the implications of using a pseudonym by a secondary figure in the dance world in fin-de-siècle Paris.

This article focuses on how dance companies have restaged three of the original automata characters from the ballet Coppélia (Arthur Saint-Léon, 1870), described as the “Negro,” the “Moor,” and the “Chinaman.” In conversation with scholarship on the racialization of objects and the object-ification of humans, I claim these characters embody and reenact the ontological effects of slavery and colonialism, in which notions of human and object collapse into one another. I further argue that such processes vary among the roles, illuminating ways the white colonialist perspective constructs the imagined Chinese body differently than the Black body through human-object relations. As a contribution to discussions within the ballet world surrounding the use of blackface and yellowface, this article exposes how ballet choreography both participates in and reveals object-centered acts of racism through embodiment practices.

Human rights scrutiny processes in some Australian parliaments require consideration of whether rights-limiting legislation is reasonable, justifiable, and proportionate. The Queensland Human Rights commissioner has raised concerns of this becoming a “perfunctory ‘tick and flick’ exercise” in which decision-makers perform the “dance steps to [rights] derogation”—a concern emulated by others. Taking this notion of “tick and flick” and “dance steps” literally, this article explores movement and form in the composition of parliamentary human rights scrutiny reports. Drawing from Marie Jacob and Anna Macdonald's notion of legal documents as material, somatic, and metaphorical forms, this article analyzes the choreographic and calligraphic forms in these reports. Through exploring the forms themselves alongside interview data about parliamentary human rights scrutiny practices, this article speculates on whether form has bearing on the process of parliamentary human rights scrutiny, and how form shapes the substance of both the reports and human rights themselves.

This article foregrounds imagination to consider how African diasporic conditions converge with choreographic expression. The analysis “un/maps” dominant understandings of the choreographic process of mid-twentieth-century African American choreographer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham by expanding Kamau E. Brathwaite's (1993) concept of Tidalectics beyond the Caribbean to the wider African diaspora and a distinctly Caribbean comprehension of diasporic imagination. Utilizing datasets and visualizations created by the project, Dunham's Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry, this article traces how the concept of Brazil is imagined and reimagined within Dunham's archive from 1937 to 1962. In doing so, it considers the complex positionality of Dunham as both a pioneering minoritized woman navigating the politics of race, gender, and financial precarity, and someone who yielded their imperial privilege as a US citizen through their career to bring nuance to Dunham's narrative as a canonical dance figure.

In the 1840s, the polka craze established lead/follow partner dancing as the normative social dance structure in the Atlantic world. In the process, it imposed a choreographed performance of bourgeois heteropatriarchy (originally developed with the waltz) on Europe's colonies and post-colonies. However, a central mechanism of the lead/follow system in social partner dance is the woman's body attitude, and as the nature of that attitude changes, so do the associated dances. In the Americas, women acculturated to African-rooted principles of polycentricity disrupted the equilibrium of the lead/follow dynamic, catalyzing the creation of new partner dance forms and techniques. On the one hand, this resulted in an intensification of the lead/follow system such that men could now control and shape the dissociated parts of their partners’ bodies. On the other hand, it also seeded the fissioning and eventual dissolution of the dance partnership itself.

Contemporary interdisciplinary collaboration practices offer visions of new modes of assembly. This article traces a curatorial model of interdisciplinary collaboration, exploring how artists activate curation as a methodology of creation. I refer specifically to the creative practice of the award-winning Queer trans/mogrifying multidisciplinary artist and futurist Sage Ni'Ja Whitson, and their series The Unarrival Experiments. I reflect on Whitson's curatorial practice as a sacred methodology rooted in Yorùbá cosmologies, theatrical jazz aesthetic, and concepts of dark matter, superfluidity, and unarrival. I trace how Whitson's use of curatorial frameworks supports ease in the impossible, builds layers of multiplicity and simultaneity, resists institutional hegemony and power structures, and crafts systems of queer kinship and care for communities, ancestors, and futures. I outline the criteria of coexistence through which they imbue curatorial practices into their collaborations, generating what I describe as a “third space.” For Whitson, this fertile space of sustained difference is a portal to an alternate institution of darkness, interdependent sovereignty, and superfluidity. I conclude by unfolding the possibilities of Whitson's third space as a forward-facing methodology of how to move through the impossible together and envision new collective futures.

Motivated by Melissa Ziad's balletic protest within Algeria's Hirak demonstrations, this article recuperates a distinction between the right to assembly and the right to free speech, constitutional guarantees blurred under contemporary rhetoric of association. By applying methods of dance studies to legal interpretation, it shifts crowd theory away from an anxiety of touch toward a copresence that allows for constituent power of the people to be reclaimed. Therefore, it intervenes within a broader discourse of the legal humanities that privileges the logocentric over embodied ways of knowing.

This article explores the cultural figure of the ropedancer and focuses on the influential performance of Philippe Petit in two of his walks. The high-wire walker plays a significant role discussed within three frameworks: a philosophical and urban discussion offering interwoven perspectives; the iconic walk at the World Trade Center in New York in 1974; and Petit's high-wire crossing performed in Jerusalem's geopolitical context in 1987. Ropedancing is an “abyssal choreography”—a movement at a high altitude above the depth with maximum control on the verge of losing balance. As related to specific walks, this movement embodies a dialectic agency. It transcends local narratives but empowers and critically exposes them. It requires meticulous discipline and unbounded creativity, and it is linked to oppositional positions between which the ropedancer can unsettlingly fluctuate. This movement activates danger or crisis while moving over the abyss as a vector connecting places, times, and events.

Director Luca Guadagnino's film Suspiria (2018) depicts the dancer Susie Bannion joining a dance academy secretly run by a coven of witches in Berlin during the German Autumn of 1977. This article analyzes how Mary Wigman's Hexentanz II, contemporary dance, and horror film practices inform Susie's neo-expressionist movement form, which is also steeped in the discourse surrounding the RAF (Red Army Faction), the West German far-left militant organization, and fascism. I argue that “historical breathing”—breaths and sighs—takes on a sensorial mode by surveying the past and current situation of the dance school. By inhaling, Susie embodies the dance Volk (1948) and can feel its vexed choreographic history—its occult origins and Ausdruckstanz practices. Furthermore, her dance futilely attempts to comes to terms with the Nazi past but inevitably replicates the violence of the RAF.

Countering the historiographic under-representation of Greek modern dance, this article focuses on early twentieth-century dance artist Vassos Kanellos. Combining Western/European choreographic inputs and local, often traditional, elements, Kanellos rearticulated the inscription of Greek dance in historical time—beyond a sole focus on antiquity—and anchored it in a nationally marked space and in the specificity of a posited Greek “race.” Informed by new modernist studies, this article reads Kanellos's practice as a reflection of the country's process of constructing a hegemonic national identity against a background in which Greece constituted both Europe's subaltern periphery and the foundation of its genealogical narrative.

This article examines Antonia Mercé La Argentina's stay in Manila in 1929 and the creation of her solo La Cariñosa as a case study to analyze the place of Spanish dance as both colonizing and colonized on the basis of the cultural legacies since Romanticism, when Spanish dance was an exoticized and racialized “Other dance” in relation to the canon and hierarchies of Western dance. La Argentina's supposed homage to the Filipino people in the creation of a solo that stylized their national dance performed for Western audiences continued the exercise of colonial power. The result of those processes of appropriation would be the creation of a repertoire of “Hispanic essences” of that constructed postcolonial “community”; a catalogue equivalent to the rock-hard monumentality of a Hispanidad—the commemoration through Columbus statues and colonial architecture—now celebrated from the body, its performativity, its symbolism, and its gesture.

This article examines contrasting strategies that the practitioners of Acehnese dance in two Indonesian cities, Yogyakarta and Banda Aceh, sagely create to legitimize their participation in the arts in today's increasingly conservative religious climate in Indonesia. Islam in Yogyakarta has drifted away from a historically syncretic, localized form and toward a more conservative form. This shift has impacted Yogyakarta's Muslim dancers’ views on which kind of arts they deem appropriate to take part in. In particular, as they seek to maintain their religious identity and practice religious principles in order to be connected to a modern, globalized Islam, they choose to leave a local dance tradition for Acehnese dance, a tradition that originated in a province three thousand kilometers away. In Banda Aceh, the post-tsunami period (2004–present) sees religious leaders’ contestations toward the performing arts becoming part of the province's administrative system under sharia law, posing new challenges and risks.

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.

This article examines a pivoting moment in Chinese modern dance history—a four-year US-China dance exchange project known as the Guangdong Modern Dance Experimental Program that occurred as part of China's Reform Era cultural policies. Based on my intertwined positions of outside insider and artist-scholar, this article examines the interaction between competing kinesthetic values, pedagogical approaches, and conceptions of the modern crystallized in the Guangdong program, an inquiry that defies conventional narratives of Chinese modern dance. I propose the concept of “mis-step” as an aperture to rethink corporeal encounter and dance circulation in global spaces. “Mis-” indicates contingency beyond expectations; “-step” suggests productivity of that contingency. “Mis-step” thus highlights the rich potential of indeterminacy and proposes to theorize transnational dance history beyond “right” or “wrong.” Through mis-step, this article submits a sensual experience of global encounter that centers on perplexity. This awkward yet meaningful experience constructs a crucial component of globalization reality.

This article examines Film Studies of the Dance, a dance film created in 1935 by Blanche Evan, Lionel Berman, and David Wolff. The film premiered Evan's new system of dance training, Functional Technique, to the 1930s New York revolutionary dance community. I analyze the film and Functional Technique inside of the debates over technique and content that preoccupied left-wing modern dancers in this period. Ultimately, Film Studies of the Dance emerges as a collaborative attempt by Evan, Berman, and Wolff to create new approaches to dance and film that would unify form and content to further socially conscious art making.

This article examines how mayfield brooks uses spatial, discursive, and vestibular disorientations to intervene within anti-Black regimes of perception in their Improvising While Black (IWB) workshops, which draw from their ongoing life/art project by the same name. Drawing from insights gathered through my participation in IWB workshops as well as through conversations with brooks and other workshop participants, I examine what brooks's guided disorientations do, that is, what they produce kinetically, perceptually, and relationally among participants. I show how brooks's disorientations expand on Sachi Sekimoto and Christopher Brown's conceptualization of racialized regimes of perception by revealing a set of choreographic tropes that undergird those regimes. These include perceiving from a vertical posture, leading movement from the head, navigating based on visual cues while inhibiting responsivity to other senses, turning away from cultural and ancestral context, and relating to self and others as individuals. Drawing on examinations of disorientation within contemporary dance practice and critical race theory, I argue that brooks guides participants into disorienting improvisations that draw attention to, refuse participation within, and generate otherwise possibilities to this choreography.

This article interrogates “contact,” understood by Global North contemporary dance discourse as choreography that is mobilized by shifting points of physical touch between two or more bodies, by attending to inherent, and often ignored, power asymmetries that are foundational to such choreographic practices. This “unmaking of contact” is undertaken by deploying the lenses of race, caste, and gender in order to argue for an intersectional, intercultural and inter-epistemic understanding of “choreographic touch” that may or may not involve tactility. It starts by examining contact improvisation (CI), and its now ubiquitous choreographic manifestation of partnering, as an aesthetic that can work in colonizing ways on South Asian dancers who train in primarily solo classical dance forms. The article then moves on to place South Asian bodies, philosophies, and discourses at the heart of its interrogation of choreographic touch, and foregrounds the culturally specific politics and powers that govern them.

This article approaches dance through the lens of new materialist theories (speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, thing theory, posthumanism, etc.), considering the possibility that objecthood need not align with inertness and movement need not be excluded from the realm of the substantive. Deploying a practice-based methodology informed by participation in works by Simone Forti and Maria Hassabi, as well her own movement investigation, the author considers theoretical positions that counter the persistent association of dance with ephemerality while also broadly questioning the relationship between dance and theory.

This conversation emerges from the Afro-Feminist Performance Routes's biennial gatherings at Duke University that have taken place since 2016. Hinging on the work of Lēnablou (Guadeloupe), Rujeko Dumbutshena (Zimbabwe, United States), Sephora Germain (Haiti), Yanique Hume (Jamaica, Cuba, Barbados), Jessi Knight (United States), Halifu Osumare (United States), Luciane Ramos-Silva (Brazil), and Jade Power Sotomayor (Puerto Rico, United States), the focused residency has nurtured embodied dialogues centered on African-derived dance practices and gender, femininity, womanhood, femme, and feminisms. What follows is a scripted simulation of conversations generated in roundtables, workshops, performances, and interviews, as well as around dinner tables and during late-night chats. We've woven together the artists’ statements under two umbrella themes—embodied philosophies and contours of diaspora—in order to highlight the relationship between creative practice and lived experience, between singularity and collective, between precarity and the everyday, between AfroFem and becoming.