This essay undertakes to illuminate the work of Randy Martin by surveying a range of theories offering hypothetical answers to the question of why dance seems to generate more energy than it demands, an experience often reported by those who engage in it. Coming from the disparate disciplines of social history, psychology, neurobiology, phenomenology, and aesthetics, these theories do not necessarily conflict with one another nor do they agree about dance's energizing capacity. Taken together, however, they lend greater insight into Martin's concept of “mobilization,” and the analysis of them answers Martin's call to evaluate dance from within the presumption of conditions of abundance rather than scarcity.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon's French empire conquered much of Europe, the German patriot Friedrich Ludwig Jahn invented the first German national gymnastics program known as Turnen. The idea was to create a new German body and a new form of national discipline. Walking for bodily fitness, to instill national awareness, training on special equipment and rediscovering ancient German dance forms all became part of the new body culture. It is out of this movement with its nationalist and later racist culture that much of the modern gymnastics and dance movements in Germany gained their ideologies. This article sketches some stages of this social and physical continuity, from the resistance to the French to the establishment of the racial state in 1933 and to the provision of a Nazi aesthetic by German modern dancers.

This article focuses on Randy Martin's concept of mobilization and its relationship to Christoph Menke's philosophical category of force—being the grid rather than the movement, being the potential to move rather than movement in space and time, force and mobilization align. They are rallying calls for change and transformation, for different articulations of bodies and social kinesthetic energies. They both are impersonal nonsubjectified vehicles for an open process of doing and undoing, which is a political process.

This article investigates the three versions of Mary Wigman's Hexentanz (Witch Dance) in the context of the different political regimes in which they were performed. The changing cultural milieus shaped—through Wigman's imagination if not necessarily consciously—the works' forms and iconographies. The witch figure relates to preindustrial, pre-Christian Germanic identity and sparked considerable interest among völkisch and indeed Nazi groups. Wigman's dances present a kaleidoscope of different treatments of the witch motif, encompassing (variously) the life reform movement, an intercultural fusion with oriental performance traditions, and a strand of paganism that also influenced National Socialism. They converge, however, around a unifying critique of modernity.

Dancer. Teacher. Choreographer. Writer. Passionate Amateur Mime and Mask-Maker. Wannabe Puppeteer. Founder, Director of Daystar: Contemporary Dance-Drama of Indian America. Acknowledged ‘pioneer’ of native modern dance USA. My father's insight: One day you will realize that you were blessed to be a descendant of the original peoples of this land.

This article argues that the unrealized ballet Caaporá (1915), conceived for choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, and Oscar Araiz's La consagración de la primavera (1966, The Rite of Spring) fundamentally shaped the establishment and reimagination of concert dance as a site of modernity in Argentina. Both works danced modernity through imagined pre-Columbian indigenous myths choreographed in Euro-American concert dance forms. In Argentina, “unmarked” ballet and modern dance forms signaled a universalized cultural advancement aligned with the West, while indigenous myths staged “marked” Latin American origins that held racial difference at a distance from the modern present. Caaporá and Consagración negotiated the “marked” and the “unmarked” toward different ends. While Caaporá strove to “Argentinize” European ballet at the turn of the century, Consagración marked the move to claim concert dance as Argentine at midcentury. By focusing on the role of indigenism in these two works, this article contributes to scholarship on the modernist negotiation of the marked and unmarked in Latin American concert dance as a strategy for staging—and transcending—the nation.

To me, life is essentially movement, and much of my journey has been living so that I may dance. Now, as a woman of color confronting disabilities as well as heightened awarenesses in my post-cancer reality, I dance to live; my dance has become a functional ritual for the continuance of all of life. I believe that art in some of its highest forms can be healing, thus I create dances to sustain health, harmony, and balance of all forms of life and interconnected relationships—the dance of ecology.

This article explores Randy Martin's approach to dance studies at the dawn of the discipline in a set of essays written between 1992 and 1998 regarding dance, ethnography, and representation. On one hand, the Marxian basis of Martin's analysis is foregrounded in this article as Martin's working method, and on the other, a theory of the audience (the relation of the spectator to the dance) is identified as what links dance to socialism in Martin's thought; this is the main theoretical motor of his use of dance as an analytic method for social thought.

A phenomenon that defines how dance practices in Argentina developed during the 1960s was the fact that those working in the field were compelled to deal with the political sphere, both at an institutional level and vis-à-vis militants. By studying how Oscar Aráiz's Rite of Spring and Ana Itelman's Phaedra were received, I analyze the position occupied by these artistic practices in a context of widespread social contestation. An attempt will be made to analyze their critical potential on the basis of the figure of a utopian subversion associated with a struggle over sexual freedom in the face of dictatorial power.

The first part of the twenty-first century has been marked by particularly fraught social and racial tensions in the United States, brought to awareness internationally by the Black Lives Matter protest movement that started in 2014 and the vitriol espoused by the 2016 Republican presidential candidate. Randy Martin's work offers paradigms for interrogating the relationships between dance and its sociopolitical contexts that are highly relevant at this historical juncture. Drawing on some of Martin's key concepts, this article explores choreographic agency and creative strategies in dances that respond to issues of social injustice, mass incarceration, and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Works by Joanna Haigood (Zaccho Dance Theatre), Amie S. Dowling, filmmaker Justin Forbord, and Kyle Abraham (Abraham.In.Motion) focus on narratives of oppression and disenfranchisement yet also inspire resistance and hope.

How to describe my experience? Some Indigenous peoples have prescribed, specific protocols around introductions, but this is not the case where I'm from. Or, if it was this way in the past, we've lost the knowledge of those introductory protocols. I respect that we should give space to those who have Indigenous ways of introducing themselves. As an Alutiiq woman who lives in a kind of diaspora from my island home of Kodiak in Alaska— and my villages of Port Lions and Afognak—I don't always know how to describe my experience. I am an artist. I live in Canada. I make dance, video, photos, texts.

In a solo performance entitled Archive (2014), the Israeli choreographer Arkadi Zaides offers a physical and choreographic interpretation of videos collected by the Israeli nongovernmental organization B'Tselem in the context of an operation called “Camera Project.” The footage projected on stage shows only Israelis, but the viewpoint is Palestinian. Starting from this material, Arkadi Zaides performs, by extraction, imitation, and repetition, a (self-)analysis of the contemporary Israeli body, following a procedure reminiscent of Avi Mograbi's for film. What is the specific nature of these images whose very mode of capture emblematizes the conflict situation? What might be the contribution of an approach that puts the dancer's kinesthetic knowledge to work? How far does this offering force us to think about the “documentary” potential of dance performance, which is too often brushed aside or played down?

I am a performer working primarily as a choreographer. My approach to dance making is multi-faceted – I design immersive containers for performance using sound, textiles, film, and paper.

This article focuses on the idea of choreography as a possible medium of protest. Dealing with the media theory of Niklas Luhmann in the framework of social communication, and adopting Randy Martin's idea of an interrelation of (danced) movement and politics, the focus lies in the moments of migration of gestures from everyday life into art and then into the realm of politics. By analyzing the example of the Istanbul Duran Adam and the performance of choreographer Ehud Darash in Tel Aviv, I address the key question in which moments and what kind of formats choreography serves as a medium of protest by blurring the boundaries between everyday life, art, and politics.

Kia ora, tenei te mihi kia koutou. Warm greetings to you all. My culture shares ‘tikanga’, a way of doing, a conceptual framework based on notions of ancestral continuum and the passing down of codes, which embed land, sea, and sky within our consciousness. As the descendants of oceanic navigators, we as contemporary Maori still follow ancient practices of mapping to situate and connect place to person. In our traditional greeting, I would recite my ‘pepeha’—an oratory statement that places my ‘mana’ (power, authority) beneath the status of a tribal mountain, of our river, of our canoe (from our first navigators) of our meeting house (acknowledging the name of our first ancestor). Finally after all of these many genealogical citations, only then would we say our own name. Our name is always last, because we humbly do not put ourselves first. The land and all that has come before us is first and so it shall be for the next generation and the one after that. When Maori greet each other we constantly listen to find connective histories. Most likely we are distantly related and in doing so, it balances the space between where we may find mutual cooperation. In times long gone, these recitations would sometimes mean the difference between life and death, love and war. Reciprocity went both ways, and intertribal trauma inflicted upon one generation could be rebalanced in the next, perhaps killing, perhaps intermarriage. Contemporary Maori now deal with balances of other torn and shredded histories. But we are blessed with the knowledge that what was broken before, can and should be restored for the next. Tihei Mauriora. Let there be life.

This essay uses as its case study the reconstruction of an East German Vietnamese socialist folk dance Spring in Vietnam (1969) to reflect on Randy Martin's 1998 conviction that Dance Studies has the potential to embody and materialize solutions to intellectual and political issues that have been left out of other academic disciplines. Written as a play script, the essays performs a remobilization of Dance Studies and its potential to reflect on its disciplinary authority.