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 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.

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.

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.

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.

As authors who contributed to an edited volume, we were startled to learn that editors added a subtitle that broadly declared French balletic supremacy. This text, entitled The Opera Ballet: Three Centuries of Supremacy Beginning with Louis XIV [Le Ballet de l'Opéra: Trois siècles de suprématie depuis Louis XIV] (Auclair and Ghristi 2013), presents the notion of “supremacy” as a seductive value, and it is disturbing, to say the least. It is first and foremost a false assertion. The editors cannot seriously suppose that the Paris Opera Ballet, during the course of three centuries, occupied a position of dominance; and such a notion requires, in any case, detailed discussion establishing the criteria that are considered to define and delimit said domination. Such a title participates in a type of competition better identified with nation states, capitals, or European theaters after the seventeenth century. To suggest that the Paris Opera Ballet has always existed as a place of cultural “supremacy” is first of all to ignore the question of métissage, and to overlook how the institution adopted exogenous knowledge and savoir-faire; it is a rejection of dance history that occurred elsewhere, entirely separate or sometimes in opposition to the productions of this single cultural institution. Most disturbing of all is the highlighting of the notion of “supremacy,” or a superiority and power over others. By valuing the notion of domination, the editors encourage readers to envision dance and the broader world in terms of inferiority and superiority (between classes, genders, nations, and cultures). The Paris Opera Ballet may have acted in the service of such an ideology in the past, and may do so again in the future; however, the role of a scholarly publication should be to analyze discourses of propaganda, not to reproduce them.