Choreographic bodies are empowered by modes of expansion and transgression. Focusing on the energetic processes that lead to such empowerment, this article discusses the perceptual politics of trancelike scenes in the work of contemporary European choreographers and performers. As a body-mobilizing choreographic strategy of out-of-body and out-of-mind experiences, trance is closely linked to critical and utopian ideas, bodily transgressions, and crossed boundaries. While Mary Wigman treats trance as an incantation which contains the powers that it unleashes, contemporary choreographers like Doris Uhlich or Meg Stuart, expose the body to powers that nearly disintegrate it. As opposed to Wigman-style modernism, contemporary dance stages movement as a tremendous event that exposes performers and audiences to experiences of transgression.

This article examines Rudolf Laban's theory of dance as it developed in his written and stage works from 1919 to 1926. Specifically, it shows how Laban defined dance as a form of positive liberty, which provided the anchor of what I label as his “embodied conservatism,” a conceptual and practical orientation of movement toward the goal of reshaping society according to principles of harmony as universal law. Bridging the history of dance with the history of political thought, I argue that Laban's theory of dance offered a theory of politics in response to social and political fracture during the Weimar Republic.

The opening decades of the twentieth century saw a passing fashion for “Aztec” dancing in the vaudeville theaters of the United States. Russian classical dancers Kosloff and Fokine tapped the orientalist currents of the Ballets Russes, adopting the Aztec as superficial signs of the American. Conversely, works by Shawn and film director Cecil B. DeMille, which served as points of reference for the Russians, represented a continuation of equally orientalist attitudes toward Mexico's past, forged during the realization of the United States’ policy of Manifest Destiny. The emergence of a cadre of trained dancers from Mexico, trained by students of Kosloff and Shawn, would bring a distinctively different perspective on the presentation of their heritage to the dance stage, one that was no longer based in the imagination of an expansionist America.

This article examines Alma Guillermoprieto's use of embodied knowledge in her memoir Dancing with Cuba. Descriptions of embodiment reveal her struggle to reconcile the values of modern dance with Ernesto Guevara's symbolic New Man—the ideal revolutionary used to promote physical labor as the means to a socialist utopia. I argue that Guillermoprieto solves this crisis by turning toward language, in particular language that activates the kinesthetic imagination—an archive of embodied experiences dancers rely on to engage choreography. An emphasis on embodied knowledge in the memoir shows how crucial dancing bodies are to the literary archive of the Revolution.

Considerable differences exist between Irish step dancing competitions in the current era and those which were held in the late nineteenth century. This article traces the evolution of step dancing competition praxes in Australia, exposing the multiple transformations which have occurred over time. It focuses on the shift from cultural representation to individual aesthetics and the ways in which this change has resulted from disparate influences both within the genre itself and from the broader sociocultural status of Irish immigrants in Australia.