This article examines some recent dance exhibitions where a strong speculative involvement of choreographers from the so-called trend of “conceptual dance” has been at stake. Both the open question of the history of dance and performance and the possibility for choreographic thinking to engage with the forms of the exhibition display became objects of experimentation in important projects and museum pieces conceived by Boris Charmatz, Xavier Le Roy, and La Ribot. In turn, the latter activated further concerns around the way dancers and choreographers address the question of heritage and its transmission; in this regard, examples of Richard Move and Jérôme Bel are also brought in the discussion. The article considers these shifts within the hypothesis of a dance museum currently engaging with a wider statement and critique about the “time-based arts” (a term first coined in the context of film, video, and new media museum conservation) and the ongoing new, time-related configurations of the exhibition space.

In 1975, German choreographer Kurt Jooss created his last dance, Dixit Dominus, for Swedish-based Indian dancer Lilavati Häger. After Rani Nair reconstructed what is often seen as a “minor” work, she then created Future Memory (2012) to engage more directly with her inheritance, from caring for the personal things and stories that surrounded the piece to re-working its promise of dancing between European and Indian forms. Working outward from my position as dramaturg and historian for this project, this essay addresses the potential and precariousness of contemporary dance's experiments with redoing history at the intersection of multiple contested legacies.

This article examines the late Indian choreographer Chandralekha's final work Sharira (2001), an intense duet between a woman and a man, as a challenge to heteronormative codes that govern the performance of Indian sexuality. This challenge is relayed in two ways: first, through a haunting triangle motif of the yoni (vagina in Sanskrit), that is evoked repeatedly through the controlled parting of the female dancer's legs, reminding us that her body is both a harbinger of life and a center of sexual agency. Second, the piece critiques heteronormativity through an über-slowing down of choreographic time, which emphasizes the materiality of the female body and the extremes it can execute. The article proposes that these two choreographic strategies are efficacious in rewriting heteronormative codes surrounding Indian sexuality only because they work interdependently. It is only because the female performer is able to part her legs in hyper-slow-motion that the evocations of her yoni move beyond the realm of an objectified, sexual body part that is to be occupied and consumed by a male partner. Instead it becomes a powerful emblem of her ability to contain and spawn sexual desire as well as to create, sustain, and give birth to life.

The article analyzes an artistic project that is situated on the dividing line between the realm of performance and of exhibition. The Musée de la Danse in Rennes, France, contests the dichotomies of object and experience and introduces a notion of exhibition-as-performance. In so doing, the “Dancing Museum” suggests new perspectives on, and comprehensions of, the materiality involved in both museal and performance-based modes of presentation.

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.

Several films of 1935 catapulted tap dancers Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Eleanor Powell to movie stardom. Robinson's The Littlest Rebel and Powell's Broadway Melody of 1936 utilize a cinematic formula that intercuts the virtuosic footwork of the tap artists with giant close-ups of their toothy grins. The experience for contemporary spectators can be unnerving, as magnified lips, teeth, and eyes dominate the screen and interrupt the pleasure of watching expert tap. While the close-up smile and the choreography of the camera helped the film industry reproduce the excitement of live performance, these dance scenes also mobilize constructions of black masculinity and white femininity, through editing techniques that create multilayered narratives of power, intimacy, and submission. Robinson's close-up can be read as a depiction of racial subservience, as audiences are confronted with the smiling minstrel mask and the perpetuation of the legacy of minstrelsy in Hollywood. Powell's smile in close-up emphasizes her feminine sexual availability and evokes the voyeuristic camera shots of beaming, passive showgirls. The interplay in these two movies between the extremes of the tap dancer's body, the smile and feet, offers an opportunity to examine tap virtuosity within Hollywood's rigid system of racial and gender stereotypes.

By renaming the Choreographic National Center in Rennes and Bretagne as the Musée de la danse in 2009, the French choreographer Boris Charmatz has indirectly raised new questions on both museum and dance ontologies, opening up the possibility of an enriched interdisciplinary discourse on the relationship between movement-based arts and museums/art institutions. This essay explores the changing museum and dance landscape over the past few decades, considers how museums have been theorized, and their relationship to, and engagement with, audiences; and asks what role choreography and dance can play in this new institutional context.

This essay argues that Trio A suspends dramatic form and develops an autonomous aesthetic process, called ambulatory performance. To explain this concept, it turns to Michel de Certeau, who claims that walking eludes formal unity and makes “spaces” for phenomena excluded from representation: everyday life, which is composed of ceaselessly moving singular “footsteps.” In this way, ambulatory performance emulates cinema, whose successive motion also relays quotidian experience. In order to identify a common theoretical basis for dance and media, the essay then relates this successive motion to the concept of automatisms, which film scholars have used to challenge medium specificity in response to the rise of digital cinema.

Although the face possesses potent social and symbolic meaning, the “dancing face” is rarely addressed in dance scholarship. In spite of its neglect, the face participates choreographically in the realization of aesthetic codes and embodied conventions that pertain to different dance styles and genres. I therefore turn to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's (1987) theory of “faciality” to understand the semiotic coding of the face in relation to the Busby Berkeley chorus girl. Although their work offers an important critique of universalist theorizations of facial expression, I argue that “facial choreography” offers scope to dismantle the legibility of the face that is produced through the overcoded “abstract machine of faciality.” To do so, I introduce the concept of a “choreographic interface” to explore how facial expression enters into a choreographic relationship with other faces and bodily territories. With this in mind, I explore two dancing bodies that engage the face in ways that complicate existing modalities of facial expression. I analyze a hip-hop battle and a neo-burlesque striptease number to show how the mobility and ambiguity of facial choreography opens a dialogic space through which meaning is generated and social and political critique take place.

This article examines the treatment of the pelvis in the Pilates exercises “Single Leg Stretch” and “Leg Circles.” The teaching practices of the hips, as commonly explained in Pilates educational manuals, reinforce behaviors of a noble-class and racially “white” aesthetic. Central to this article is the troubling notion of white racial superiority and, specifically, the colonizing, prejudicial, and denigrating mentality found in the superiority of whiteness and its embodied behaviors. Using the two Pilates exercises, I illuminate how perceived kinesthetic understandings of race in the body may be normalized and privileged. By examining the intersections between dance and Pilates history, this article reveals the ways embodied discourses in Pilates are “white” in nature, and situates Pilates as a product of historically constructed social behaviors of dominant Anglo-European culture.

The search for the “centre”… For a dancer, this word resonates physically first of all. Not so long ago, the dancer, when he was training, was systematically told to “find his centre”. But today, it is generally acknowledged that the body has no centre, and he doesn't miss it. The body of modern times has no need for a centre, because that absent centre, the core which would enable one to feel reassured, isn't there, has ceased to be there. For in the void of a body expropriated of its centre, there is room for dance.

In this article, I examine the work created by Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite for her company Kidd Pivot, placing it within a larger tradition of dance-theater that combines text and movement, and traffics openly in big emotions and even bigger narrative structures. I argue that Pite's use of text does not just offer a way into, or a representational gloss on, her otherwise abstract movement vocabulary, but also a means of affectively and even kinesthetically re-experiencing that movement post-performance. I focus on Pite's three most recent evening-length programs for Kidd Pivot, and on the different modes of textual address employed therein (voice-over narration, projection, live speech). My goal in analyzing the choreographer's narrative scripts alongside her physical ones is to highlight, on the one hand, the materiality of words within the total sensory environments created by Pite through her dance-theater performances and, on the other, to emphasize their consequentiality in helping to make somatic sense of one's memories of those performances.

This article provides an account of improvisational artistry in live dance performance that construes the contribution of the dance performer as a kind of agency. Andy Clark's theory of the embodied and extended mind is used in order to consider how this account is supported by research on how a thinking-while-doing person navigates the world. I claim here that while a dance performer's improvisational artistry does include embodied and extended features that occur outside of the brain and nervous system, that this can be construed as “agency” rather than “thought.” Further I claim that trained and individual style accounts for how this agency acquires its artistic nature. This account thus contributes to the philosophy of improvisation in dance performance in a way that includes motor as well as cognized intentions.

DRJ: It has now been five years since your manifesto “For a Dancing Museum” first appeared. As is well known, this manifesto led you to become director of the Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne (2009). Do you believe you have achieved the goals you stated as crucial for a dancing museum, i.e., to displace the idea of “Center” from the institution; to dismantle the “nationalism” always lurking under the adjectival “national”; to move the focus from the noun “Dance” to the actioning of the verb “Dancing” in defining this museum?

Ballet faced formidable obstacles in establishing itself as a “home-grown” transplant at mid-century. Scholars have emphasized choreographic efforts to cultivate a nationally identifiable style during the period, focusing primarily on the emergence of Balanchine and neo-classicism. Yet the role of dancers in the Americanization of ballet largely has not been probed. This article examines the part that Maria Tallchief, daughter of a “full-blooded” Osage Indian father and Scotch-Irish mother, and the first American ballerina to reach prima status, played in changing public perceptions of ballet in the mid-twentieth century. Between 1952 and 1954, national magazines such as Dance magazine, Holiday, and Newsweek featured images of Tallchief on their covers, lending visual credibility to claims that ballet, which many at the time considered a “foreign” dance form, had come of age in the U.S. I argue that iconographic portrayals of Tallchief's face, legs, and feet, which illustrated the dancer's physical assimilation of Balanchine's approach to dance technique, along with narratives of her personal story, advanced an account of ballet's Americanization that placed the dancer, as much as if not more than Balanchine, at center stage. I then illuminate how Tallchief's exemplification of self-discipline and initiative bolstered nostalgic arguments about the successful “citizenship” of white ethnic immigrants, while also promoting arguments about the viability of Indian assimilation during the tribal termination era. When seen in the contemporaneous contexts of ballet's Americanization and societal debates over Native American citizenship, Tallchief's story is seen to complicate the meanings of “assimilation” and “citizenship” in postwar America.

On the cover of both of these two books are photographs of women in loose white pants—arms extended, wrists twisted, each wearing concentrated facial expressions; both seen from front and back as if doubling in a mirror. Perhaps suggested by the reaching gesture, the bodies seem to implore the viewer. It is as if movement is held out and yet in abeyance, incomplete within the image, thus awaiting further fulfillment and explanation. As with the images, both books grapple with the conundrum of how movement communicates to a viewer, and how feelings might be evoked, whether kinesthetically or choreographically. Similar but different—one more historical, the other more fragmented—they also address the timely question of empathy in creative practice.

From the outset, I have to admit I am partial to new scholarship on the Ballets Russes, particularly interdisciplinary scholarship that offers new perspectives on staged dance as an art form. Hence, two recent books on a company famous for striving for the total work of art effect sounded like an absolute feast. I may have set my expectations high, but these books actually exemplify how easily dance becomes secondary to music and set design in discussions of past performance, and how “interdisciplinary” studies often are anything but. In both books, the analyses offered of dance are, for a dance scholar, implausible, specious, even outright incomprehensible, and the dance-related topic emerges as servile to agendas of other disciplines, namely those of music and art history.