This is a brief introduction to a conversation about dance, race, and technology indirectly initiated by one of Bill T. Jones's blog entries on the New York Live Arts website after reading Tiffany Barber's article “Ghostcatching and After Ghostcatching, Dances in the Dark” in the April 2015 DRJ issue. Paul Kaiser of the Open Ended Group and cocreator with Bill T. Jones of Ghostcatching wrote a letter to the editor followed by Barber's response.

This essay was used (in a previous form) as opening remarks for the United Kingdom's Society of Dance Research conference “Dancing Economies” in 2015. Structured around a collection of musings prompted by global issues, such as the Greek economic crisis, the Black Lives Matter movement, the European migrant crisis, and the pernicious effects of neoliberalism on the arts, the essay is my attempt to make connections between these events and the significance of dance studies in today's complicated political landscape.

I'm a choreographer and I make performance installation. I am from a very small town on the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska. I'm Yup'ik on my father's side, and my Alaska family is from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. I share this because it's where I'm from, and it's also where my work is from: the physical place of Alaska, and the confluence of my heritage and performance work.

This dialogue between artist and dramaturg documents the creation of Dee(a)r Spine, Sam Mitchell's adaptation of the Yaqui Deer Dance, performed on Kumeyaay territory at the University of California, San Diego. Weaving reflections on dance, dramaturgy, and methodology, this article posits that dancing offers a pathway to the repatriation of Indigenous memory and kinship, a way to honor the trajectories of those whose connections with their communities have been interrupted by settler-colonialism. Dancing as a repatriation methodology, we argue, carves a healing space of sensate self-representation that centers on Indigenous forms of knowing and leaves no one behind.

A lone tree stands in the midst of a devastated landscape at Rikuzentakata, Japan. At Aceh, Malacca, a whole generation is washed out by the 2004 tsunami. At Beach 116, Far Rockaway, New York City, the entire street is swept away as the sea rolls in from the ocean toward the Jamaica Bay end of the avenue, built on a slope from ocean to bay on a barrier island. These scenes of climate volatility arouse in coastal communities a sense of vulnerability, of risk as a way of life. It is a daily choreography of uncertainty whose underlying structures shape the performance work of the movement-based theater company Harmattan Theater, which I started in 2009.

This article discusses ways that Indigenous dance is an ontological praxis that is embodied and telluric, meaning “of the earth.” It looks at how dancing bodies perform in relationship to ecosystems and entities within them, producing ontological distinctions and hierarchies that are often imbued with power. This makes dance a site of ontological struggle that potentially challenges the delusional ontological universality undergirding imperialism, genocide, and ecocide. The author explores these theoretical propositions through her participation in Oxlaval Q'anil, an emerging Ixil Maya dance project in Guatemala, and Dancing Earth, an itinerant and inter-tribal U.S.-based company founded by Rulan Tangen eleven years ago.

Interwar French dance and the critical discourses responding to it have until recently been an underdeveloped research area in Anglo-American dance studies. Despite common patterns during the first half of the twentieth century that may be observed between the dance capitals of Berlin, Paris, and New York, some noteworthy differences set the French dance world apart from that of Germany or North America. Whereas in Germany and the United States modern dance asserted itself incontrovertibly in the persons of two key figures—Mary Wigman and Martha Graham, respectively—no such iconic nativist modernist dancer or choreographer emerged in France. Ilyana Karthas's When Ballet Became French indicates the predominance of ballet in France, and this would seem an inevitable consequence of the failure of modern dance to take hold there through at least one dominant figure. Franz-Anton Cramer's In aller Freiheit adopts a more multidimensional view of interwar French dance culture by examining discourse that moves outside the confines of ballet. A variety of dance forms were encouraged in the milieu of the Archives Internationales de la Danse—an archive, publishing venture, and presenting organization—that Rolf de Maré founded in Paris in 1931. This far-reaching and open-minded initiative was unfortunately cut short by the German occupation (1940–1944). As Cramer points out: “The history of modern dance in Europe is imprinted with the caesura of totalitarianism” (13). Although we are somewhat familiar with the story of modern dance in Germany, we know very little about it in France.

This article hopes to evoke even a glimmer of the rare, far-reaching, and intensely probing, brilliant person, mentor, colleague, and critical thinker, Randy Martin, in a form that might open up traditionally demarcated spaces on the page and in discussion. It is intended as tribute to a person who so deftly and intentionally opened up spaces for thought and imagining.

In this personal essay, artist and professor Karen Finley reflects on her relationship with her colleague and mentor, Randy Martin

This article focuses on the work of Squamish dance artist S7aplek (Bob Baker) and the ways in which the assertion, negotiation, and enactment of Chiax (Squamish protocol) is vital to his artistic process and performance. Unceded Squamish territory includes the lower mainland of Vancouver, Howe Sound, and the Whistler corridor in British Columbia. Through an analysis of two of S7aplek's collaborations, I argue that his practice affirms Squamish land rights, epistemology, and hereditary privileges among diverse audiences and collaborators. Grounded in Chiax, these assertions of sovereignty are an embodiment of politics and self-determination that I refer to as dancing sovereignty.

This article explores Vancouver-based multi-media collective Skookum Sound System's Ay I Oh Stomp's (2012) mobilization of “decolonial gesturings” as they create a future imaginary attentive to the past, critiquing the present, and venturing into the beyond. These gestures activate Indigenous futurities through traditional style Kwakwaka'wakw dance and choreographies of sea travel, popping as a “street dance” of holds and releases, and the mobilization of digital polychromatic shifting and looping. I illustrate how the video is a form of radical imagination tantamount to social change, and how it remixes dance, movement and gestures that “jump scale” out of colonial cartographies.

When Gabriele Brandstetter published Tanz-Lektüren: Körperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde in 1995, German dance studies hardly existed. The book was a pioneering effort that exerted considerable influence on dance studies in Germany as it developed over the next decades. Now, twenty years later, Tanz-Lektüren has been translated into English, and its appearance is most welcome. The book's importance is not merely historical; on the contrary, it has much to offer today's anglophone reader, particularly in Brandstetter's use of Aby Warburg's theories to analyze dance imagery and movement patterns. Important, too, is her inclusion of numerous writers and artists whose views on dance are little known, or at least little analyzed, in English.

This article meditates on the interconnectedness of the making and meaning of an Indigenous contemporary dance work that draws on intergenerational Jicarilla Apache basket weaving practices. Rulan Tangen choreographed the piece, performed by Anne Pesata, which is inspired by Pesata's lived experiences as a Jicarilla Apache woman and fifth generation basket weaver. Tangen—who identifies as mixed culturally, including Native, Polynesian, and European heritages—founded and directs Dancing Earth: Indigenous Contemporary Dance Creations, an intertribal company which originated in 2004. Tangen created the piece in February 2014 to honor Pesata and other Indigenous women leaders. The choreographer's commitment to undertaking projects that respond to Native elders' contemporary concerns and dancers' interests also guides its themes. Alongside music, the piece uses recorded voiceover that Pesata created and spoke. The voiceover makes transparent Pesata's familial connections with basket weaving and other Jicarilla Apache epistemologies and practices. The dance also elucidates relationships between basket weaving and Pesata's movements throughout, culminating in the creation of a figurative basket. According to Pesata, the dance “tells the story of the journey that you go through in making a basket from start to finish.”