This article presents a polycentric Africanist reading of Dada Masilo's Giselle, which debuted in South Africa in 2017. Although ballet was used as a tool of colonization in South Africa, establishing cultural and aesthetic norms from a European paradigm, while undermining Indigenous arts and excluding non-white artists, I argue that Dada Masilo's choreographic choices employ the narrative of Giselle to decolonize through ballet. Masilo's choreography indigenizes the ballet, transforming local and global practices through an Indigenous lens. Dada Masilo's Giselle embodies African philosophies such as ancestorism, as well as gender fluidity and complementarity. It mobilizes techniques such as signifyin(g), comedic resistance, code-switching, battling, shouting, and critically reappropriating Tswana and diasporic movements in order to convey a distinctly South African version of the European ballet. This work transcends the romantic love of Giselle in order to convey a decolonial love by centering South African ways of knowing and being in the world.

This article examines how and why Cuban modern dancers and their scholars cite several white US dancers as forebearers in their nationalistic, anti-imperialistic, and anti-racist dance tradition. I use “contamination” to analyze this complicated topic, which threatens to unfairly center US dancers at Cubans’ expense or to romantically caricature Cubans defying US imperialism with a nationalist hybrid. Multidirectional, indeterminate contamination moves us away from narratives about US culture as a homogenizing force or a vanquished one. Contamination also importantly connotes stink, given that it is a product of imperialism and capitalism bringing far-flung people into close encounters. US contamination in Cuban modern dance histories, then, pushes attention to the shadowy reaches of the unseemly and incongruous—stylistic impurity, structural racism, historiographic neglect, revolutionary disaffection, and failure. Seeing the regrettable provides a fuller picture of the past, including the often-overlooked reality of shared damage and destructibility.

This article examines Antonia Mercé La Argentina's stay in Manila in 1929 and the creation of her solo La Cariñosa as a case study to analyze the place of Spanish dance as both colonizing and colonized on the basis of the cultural legacies since Romanticism, when Spanish dance was an exoticized and racialized “Other dance” in relation to the canon and hierarchies of Western dance. La Argentina's supposed homage to the Filipino people in the creation of a solo that stylized their national dance performed for Western audiences continued the exercise of colonial power. The result of those processes of appropriation would be the creation of a repertoire of “Hispanic essences” of that constructed postcolonial “community”; a catalogue equivalent to the rock-hard monumentality of a Hispanidad—the commemoration through Columbus statues and colonial architecture—now celebrated from the body, its performativity, its symbolism, and its gesture.

This article examines contrasting strategies that the practitioners of Acehnese dance in two Indonesian cities, Yogyakarta and Banda Aceh, sagely create to legitimize their participation in the arts in today's increasingly conservative religious climate in Indonesia. Islam in Yogyakarta has drifted away from a historically syncretic, localized form and toward a more conservative form. This shift has impacted Yogyakarta's Muslim dancers’ views on which kind of arts they deem appropriate to take part in. In particular, as they seek to maintain their religious identity and practice religious principles in order to be connected to a modern, globalized Islam, they choose to leave a local dance tradition for Acehnese dance, a tradition that originated in a province three thousand kilometers away. In Banda Aceh, the post-tsunami period (2004–present) sees religious leaders’ contestations toward the performing arts becoming part of the province's administrative system under sharia law, posing new challenges and risks.

This article examines notions of “sisterhood” by focusing on an all-women's lion dance company called Gund Kwok, based in Boston's Chinatown. Gund Kwok, which limits membership to those who identify as female and Asian American, provides a space for women to perform this traditional male-only dance style. Company members have created a community of “sisters” to address layers of gendered and racial oppression. Despite concerns that scholars have raised about how community formations, such as sisterhoods, can be overly idealistic and potentially harmful, this study highlights the role of sisterhood in Gund Kwok and the important functions it serves for the group. It argues that Gund Kwok is a diverse community that draws from the ideology of sisterhood as a way of articulating Asian American cultural identity outside the scope of Western cultural frameworks and the dance's patriarchal tradition.