In this article, I investigate the historical precedents of site-adaptive dance. After walking through the mobility discourse as applied to site-specific art by such scholars as Miwon Kwon, Fiona Wilkie, and Victoria Hunter, I examine the mobile site works of North American choreographers Ann Carlson, PearsonWidrig DanceTheater, Eiko & Koma, and Stephan Koplowitz as exemplary of early attempts to take site dance on tour. Finally, I argue for the value of employing the lens of adaptation to analyze such works, both for the field of site performance and for the larger cross-disciplinary dialogues that could be activated.

In the 1960s, the initial decade of the Cuban Revolution, policies of proletarianization of culture intersected an economic model built upon the heroic labor of the New Man—the ideal revolutionary and communist worker. Adapting the practice of ballet to this Marxist context, ballet dancers took their art to the working classes through popular performances and outreach events in farms and factories. Given the centrality of manual work to the revolution's ideology, dancers drew upon their own physical labor both in ballet and agriculture to establish an even stronger association with the working classes and embody the New Man's morality. Known for their strict work ethic, Alicia Alonso and other ballet dancers became public examples of hard work for the nation—one way of fulfilling the politico-pedagogical role that the state expected from artists. At the same time, media representations of female dancers’ labor enabled formulations of the New Man's gendered counterpart: the New Woman.

This essay reflects on a collaboration between a neuroscientist and a dance scholar that took the form of a scientific study testing the cognitive benefits of Filipino martial arts (FMA). This piece reflects on the collaboration as it raised methodological issues regarding disciplinarity and cross-disciplinary exchange. This discussion extends to an examination of the intellectual underpinnings and assumptions of the sciences and the humanities, signaling where they can meet and why it is not only productive but also imperative that they do so.

This article analyzes two contemporary pieces, Faustin Linyekula's La Création du Monde 1923–2012 and Vera Mantero's A mysterious thing said e. e. Cummings, which respond to dance productions presented in Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century by criticizing their “negrophilic” attitude. The article juxtaposes the analysis of these two contemporary pieces with rereadings of the historical choreographies/events of the 1920s to which they refer, namely, Les Ballets Suédois's La Création du Monde (1923) and Josephine Baker's performances. Theoretically revisiting historical works that developed within such a “negrophilic” framework alongside contemporary pieces relating to them can be taken as attacking this very framework, trying to “undo” the Eurocentrism inherent in its cannibalistic processes. Such a perspective may allow for the acknowledgement of plural, multiple views of Africanistic presences in an otherwise “negrophilic” context.

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.

In 1958, Mahmoud Reda founded the Reda Troupe and put his interpretation of Egyptian folkloric dance on stage. This article analyzes the historical factors that allowed for the Reda Troupe's success and popularity during the Nasser period (1954–1970). Although colonial influences and problematic representational politics are evident in Reda's choreographies, his dances also showcase agency, hybridity, and artistic collaboration. The agency of both Mahmoud Reda and his troupe during the Nasser period was central to the group's artistic success and longevity.

This article examines how choreographer Zab Maboungou uses philosophical themes about the “self” positioned in time and space to reappropriate subjecthood through a contemporary African dance vocabulary. I suggest that in deploying such methods—which I describe as an “embodied Africanist metaphysics”— Maboungou challenges the rhetoric of the European Enlightenment that continues to influence constructions of race today. Maboungou's choreography and pedagogy effectively undermine implicit assumptions that align whiteness and European aesthetics with universal subject-hood and creates a productive space for the presentation and development of contemporary African dance in Montreal (and North America more generally).

Since being listed as intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO in 2010, Kalbeliya dance from Rajasthan is now generally conceptualized as an ancient tradition from India. However, this same dance practice, also known as a form of “Indian Gypsy” or “snake charmers’” folk dance, appears to have originated as recently as the 1980s. This article gives an account of the swift development of Kalbeliya dance from its first appearance on stage in 1981 to the present. Ethnographic research with Kalbeliya dancers’ families has elucidated how this inventive dance practice was formed to fit into national and transnational narratives with the aim of commercializing it globally and of generating a new, lucrative livelihood for these Kalbeliya families. As a new cultural product of Rajasthani fusion, the dance finds itself at the crossroads of commercial tourism and political folklorism and is grounded in neo-orientalist discourses (romanticism and exoticism).

This article interrogates the multivalent understandings of the term “contemporary dance” in concert, commercial, and world dance contexts. I argue that placing multiple uses of the term “contemporary” alongside one another can provide insight into the ways that “high art” dance, popular dance, and non-Western dance are increasingly wrapped up with each other and, at the same time, the ways that their separations reveal our artistic, cultural, and political prejudices, as well as the forces of the market.

In the 1784–85 London season, there was a conjunction between Shakespeare's Macbeth and three of the most thrilling artists of the eighteenth century: the dancer Geltruda Rossi, the actress Sarah Siddons, and the artist Henry Fuseli. They were thrown into figurative proximity when a commentator on Rossi's performance wrote in the Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser: “Madame Rossi, in Lady Macbeth, impresses one more with the recollection of Fusili’s [sic] painting, than of Mrs Siddons’s representation—indeed comparison would be doing an injustice to our critical and admired English performer.” While we know much about the art of Siddons and Fuseli, we know little about Rossi's performances, which makes the Morning Herald’s parallel worth exploring as an example of eighteenth-century London ballet d'action.

Archival evidence of Shakespeare's and Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliets evince patriarchal efforts to efface female rebellion. As Juliet, Lynn Seymour declassifies ballet through recalcitrant stillness and off-balance choreography. Patriarchal institutions enlisted Margot Fonteyn's classifying instinct to efface these balletic transgressions from the archive utilizing strategies corresponding to early modern textual editing practices.

This article examines the work of Annie Payson Call (1853–1940) who was during her lifetime a highly regarded teacher of her method of bodily education and a prolific author. I place Call's work against the background of American Delsartism, the flourishing of health movements, and innovations in dance forms of the period. I suggest that Call, a now forgotten figure, can be seen as a contributor to a lineage in American approaches to movement that place bodily awareness and sensory knowledge at the heart of movement experience and training. The first half of the article introduces the reader to key concepts in Call's movement philosophy and outlines her method of training bodily awareness and releasing muscular tension. The second part looks at characteristics of Call's writing to shed light on the hereto neglected aspect of somatics and somatic education: the role of language and imagination in writings about movement.

In a society in which display of the body and dancing in public is controversial, the growth of contemporary dance festivals and training workshops demonstrates the changing face of Morocco's moral and political economies. This article explores the training of young dancers who are striving to embody a new Muslim corporeality and at the same time achieve professional artistic recognition in Moroccan society. Using ethnographic methods, the article focuses on the attraction of novices to contemporary dance activities, as seen through the “cultivation of the soul” in improvisational and choreographic practices related to local spiritual traditions, providing them with a niche in the global arts market and an “authentic” identity as Moroccans.

Representations of war recur throughout art, whether celebrating the glories and heroism of conflict, or depicting its horrors and follies. This paper uses qualitative audience research to examine soldiers' own responses to the representation of soldiers in choreographer Rosie Kay's dance performance 5 Soldiers: The Body is the Frontline. This article explores how for military audiences the satisfaction of an internalized sense of authenticity allowed them to accept the performance as a legitimate representation; at the same time the presentation of war in a choreographic language meant that the performance was also abstracted, with theatrical and stylized elements that were far from authentic as a documentary. This paper proposes that it was the combination of authenticity with theatricality that generated empathetic investment and made 5 Soldiers an articulate witness to the military experience.

The Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA) was a program of the US federal government that employed dancers, performers, and other artists to provide public service in municipalities across the country from 1974 to 1982. This article focuses on dancers who participated in the CETA program. It describes this important source of government funding for dance and the arts that has been largely overlooked in scholarship. Through an analysis of one New York City CETA dance community performance site, it reveals the tensions present in the construct of “dance as public service.” This case study is offered as an exemplar of how the largest CETA arts program in the United States served a wide range of artists and communities. Through an analysis of two CETA dance performances at the Arthur Kill Correctional Facility in New York City, the article questions who was served by dance as public service.