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.

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.

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).

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.

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.