This article questions how the historically revisionist history of “the West,” as initiated by Thomas Hanna, informs systems of inclusion, exclusion, and power within the field of “somatics.” Hanna, who coined the term somatics, sought in so doing to root the burgeoning field in a “Western” tradition of philosophy and science that he fundamentally misconstrued. Meanwhile, Hanna's work to formulate a historically and philosophically Western basis of a somatic field continues to provide cover for white somatic practitioners whose institutionally minted somatic forms extract philosophical and practical knowledge from non-white body-mind practices internationally. Subsequent accounts of somatics consequently articulate both the Western history of somatics and its “non-Western influences” on false grounds. This article theorizes the colonial and Western supremacist holdovers within a somatic field that nonetheless gives lip service to postcolonial discourse. Finally, by rebuilding an approach to the “deep time” history relating sōma and somatics, this article proposes how the field of somatics could reground its understanding of the “first-person experience of the body,” informed by Afropessimism, Black Accelerationism, and Afrofuturist thought.

This article examines how mayfield brooks uses spatial, discursive, and vestibular disorientations to intervene within anti-Black regimes of perception in their Improvising While Black (IWB) workshops, which draw from their ongoing life/art project by the same name. Drawing from insights gathered through my participation in IWB workshops as well as through conversations with brooks and other workshop participants, I examine what brooks's guided disorientations do, that is, what they produce kinetically, perceptually, and relationally among participants. I show how brooks's disorientations expand on Sachi Sekimoto and Christopher Brown's conceptualization of racialized regimes of perception by revealing a set of choreographic tropes that undergird those regimes. These include perceiving from a vertical posture, leading movement from the head, navigating based on visual cues while inhibiting responsivity to other senses, turning away from cultural and ancestral context, and relating to self and others as individuals. Drawing on examinations of disorientation within contemporary dance practice and critical race theory, I argue that brooks guides participants into disorienting improvisations that draw attention to, refuse participation within, and generate otherwise possibilities to this choreography.

This article examines a pivoting moment in Chinese modern dance history—a four-year US-China dance exchange project known as the Guangdong Modern Dance Experimental Program that occurred as part of China's Reform Era cultural policies. Based on my intertwined positions of outside insider and artist-scholar, this article examines the interaction between competing kinesthetic values, pedagogical approaches, and conceptions of the modern crystallized in the Guangdong program, an inquiry that defies conventional narratives of Chinese modern dance. I propose the concept of “mis-step” as an aperture to rethink corporeal encounter and dance circulation in global spaces. “Mis-” indicates contingency beyond expectations; “-step” suggests productivity of that contingency. “Mis-step” thus highlights the rich potential of indeterminacy and proposes to theorize transnational dance history beyond “right” or “wrong.” Through mis-step, this article submits a sensual experience of global encounter that centers on perplexity. This awkward yet meaningful experience constructs a crucial component of globalization reality.

This article examines Film Studies of the Dance, a dance film created in 1935 by Blanche Evan, Lionel Berman, and David Wolff. The film premiered Evan's new system of dance training, Functional Technique, to the 1930s New York revolutionary dance community. I analyze the film and Functional Technique inside of the debates over technique and content that preoccupied left-wing modern dancers in this period. Ultimately, Film Studies of the Dance emerges as a collaborative attempt by Evan, Berman, and Wolff to create new approaches to dance and film that would unify form and content to further socially conscious art making.

In my ethnographic fieldwork in the contemporary dance scene in Brussels, I followed closely which struggles Moya Michael had to overcome as a South African maker in the European contemporary dance sector trying to sell her work. As a female artist of color, she cannot escape the fetishistic gaze emphasizing her exoticized body, a body imagined as exotic vis-à-vis institutional whiteness. This article examines how the work environment in the continental European contemporary dance sector forms a breeding ground for the fetishization of Afrodiasporic artists. After unpacking the general issues related to identity in the European contemporary dance sector, this article continues to discuss the dance solo Khoiswan, which Michael created in 2018 as the first part of an ongoing series called Coloured Swans. In this choreographic work, Michael centers and explores her multilayered identity on her own terms.