In 2012, Susan Manning, Rebecca Schneider, and Janice Ross collaborated across their home institutions of Northwestern University, Brown University, and Stanford University, respectively, to found a research initiative interrogating the field of dance studies. This manifold project, Dance Studies in/and the Humanities, receives funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through 2015 and includes a series of public roundtable discussions. This conversation—abridged from the original event—took place during two such roundtables at Brown University in June 2013, and it features substantial contributions from scholars Michelle Clayton, Mark Franko, Nadine George-Graves, André Lepecki, Susan Manning, Janice Ross, and Rebecca Schneider. Speakers address what dance studies may need, want, or do in this current historical moment. Manning articulates her experience being “inside” and “beside” dance studies through teaching in an integrationist/assimilationist model that promotes dance as a subfield in humanities (and occasionally social science) departments. Franko asserts that dance studies formed as a result of an epistemological break in the 1980s and adds that interdisciplinary frameworks can also support this relatively new field.

Through embracing the partiality that comes with interdisciplinarity, Clayton encourages participants to investigate generative misunderstandings. Ross provides a comprehensive account of the crisis in the humanities, and Lepecki connects this crisis to the permanent state of war in the U.S. and emphasizes the importance of theory in dance studies. Falling short of Afro-pessimism, George-Graves calls for dance studies to infiltrate the upper echelons of higher education administration, and Schneider articulates post-structuralism's link to the Global South while calling for more scholarly representation from this area of the world. Through exploring possibilities for embodied knowledge, reenacting post-structuralism, and embracing partiality, these scholars address the expanding aperture of dance studies in a global economy. Topics identified for future discussion include decentering the whiteness of dance studies transnationally, exploring how dance studies methodologies are currently utilized in academia, and expanding dance studies beyond the American academy.

Anna Sokolow (1910–2000), an American Jewish choreographer known for her social statements, led the workers dance movement and performed as a soloist with Martha Graham. She imbued her dances Strange American Funeral (1935) and Case History No.— (1937) with proletarian ideology that spoke to 1930s working- and middle-class audiences aligned with values of revolutionary and modern dance. These choreographies spoke to a political atmosphere focused on social justice while they appealed to a broad dance-going public. Sokolow's Graham training engendered a modernist aesthetic in her choreography that led critics to consider her work universal instead of marked as coming from a working-class left-wing Jewish dancer. This article argues that while narratives about Sokolow's work downplay her Communist affiliations, these ideals played a critical role in her choreography and in her navigation of international Communist circles. As Sokolow's choreography reinforced her politics, so too did her affiliations support her dance work.

This article works through ideas of bad/mis-translation in order to explore some of the cultural politics that undergird the construction of the global stage with specific reference to the idea of contemporary choreography in Asian dance. Bound by contesting flows toward heterogeneity and homogeneity, the global stage begs questions about the categories that pose as neutral signifiers—categories that are deployed in organizing “global” programming, and that ultimately over-determine our reception of difference. The article works through examples of artists working with Asian dance, touring their work on the global circuit, and often engaging in some kinds of mis-alignments or bad translations, thus allowing space for complicated questions of difference to emerge.

By focusing on a 2003 dance residency program sponsored by the U.S. State Department, this article locates twenty-first century American cultural diplomacy in a post-9/11 political context. The article focuses specifically on collaboration between San Francisco–based Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and Kolkata, India–based Tansuree Shankar Dance, which grew from the 2003 residency, to consider how artists find ways to facilitate cultural diplomacy that might be a blueprint for future American cultural diplomacy efforts. The article also addresses, however, the limits of that collaboration—limits that highlight the central tension of American cultural diplomacy: a desire to build relationships of so-called “mutual understanding” while also forwarding American national interests.

Can contemporary choreography claim to challenge the societal status quo by producing liberatory or transgressive work, or has it rather become enshrined in the logic of capitalism and establishment culture? This paper looks critically at twenty-first-century participatory, collaborative modes of performance to investigate how their corresponding aesthetic choices and working methods reflect (often implicit) political stances, such as manifestations of democracy. Using examples from several Western countries, current trends will be assessed against the backdrop of 1960s and 1970s performance theory and practice by assessing the ramifications of the shifting fault lines between dance/performance, the market economy, and political ideologies.

At the first National Dance Congress and Festival, which was held in New York in May 1936, Edna Ocko, the dance editor of New Theatre Magazine, told the assembled delegates, “One cannot minimize the importance of an artist's social point of view, for it is he who, bringing his ideas before vast audiences, can organize and direct social thought” (25). Noting that young, politically aware choreographers had already embraced the political potential of dance, Ocko listed several topical social themes recently explored in choreography, including the need for “Negro and white unity”—an assertion championed by other speakers and formally adopted in the final session of the gathering when the delegates passed the following resolution: “Whereas the Negro People in America have been subject to segregation and suppression which has limited their development in the field of creative dance, be it resolved that the Dance Congress encourage and sponsor the work of the Negro People in the creative fields” (Ocko 1936, 27 and “Resolutions” 1936, 94).

This article interrogates the status of virtuosity in dance through the co-constitutive paradigms of race, gender, and class, accounting for both the term's emergence in journalistic arts discourse and how “queer of color” critique refines its meaning in and for contemporary performance culture (Roderick Ferguson). Virtuosity operates at the supposed border between popular and “high” art, and “Soul” and the mechanical, defining the location of the virtuoso's potential transgression. Discourses of virtuosity in performance are linked to connotations of excess, and examining formal and sociocultural aspects of virtuosic dance reveals under-recognized heterogeneity generated by vernacular influences on high art. Founded in 1994 by Desmond Richardson (as muse) and Dwight Rhoden (as choreographer), Complexions Contemporary Ballet exemplifies how much of “Africanist” choreography resists performing “ontopolitical critique” through stillness, privileging speed, stylistic hybridity, and technical intricacy (Brenda Dixon Gottschild, André Lepecki). I propose and develop the term choreographic falsetto, likening Richardson's virtuosity to that of black “Post-Soul” singers such as Prince, on the one hand, and nineteenth-century virtuoso musicians and composers such as Liszt, on the other (Francesca Royster). Richardson performs queer black masculinity by exploiting hyperbolic technical skills typically reserved for women, expanding upon choreographic aesthetics initiated by George Balanchine, William Forsythe, Alvin Ailey, and Ulysses Dove. Calling upon Theodor Adorno and Max Weber's theories of virtuosity and charisma in music and religion (in addition to Ferguson, Royster, Gottschild, Lepecki, Thomas DeFrantz, Nathaniel Mackey, Joseph Roach, Susan Bernstein, and Gabriele Brandstetter), I account for a historically and cross-culturally prevalent (if relatively forgotten) aspect of virtuosity, namely its position at the meeting point of gender, religion, capitalism, and individualism.

The radical innovations of African-American artists with artistic form during the 1960s and 1970s, according to black performance theorist Fred Moten, led to a new theorization of the avant-garde. His book, In the Break: The Radical Aesthetics of the Black Tradition, discusses the poetry and jazz music of artists, from Amiri Baraka and Billie Holiday to Charles Mingus, and extols their radical experimentation with the structures and conventions of aurality, visuality, literature, and performance dominant in European art and aesthetics. In this essay, I consider the implications of these processes of resignification in relation to the choreographic legacy of the artist, Eleo Pomare, whose work and career during this period was both experimental and radical and, I will suggest, critical to the formation of a transnational, multiracial conception of modern dance.

Although scholars, including myself, use Blood Memory to quote Martha Graham as evidence, other academics and dancers themselves have asserted that Graham did not write or construct the “autobiography.” The cross-reading of archives uncovers the narrative history of the making of Blood Memory, and how Graham, editors, and handlers constructed and reconstructed the book. In conclusion, by reading Graham's extensive oral histories and early writings, both scholars and dancers can recover the voice of the choreographer and woman.

The article analyzes kongonya dance as it occurs in everyday Zimbabwean spaces. Tracing its origins, utility, and metamorphosis, I studied kongonya dance in its performed world; observed kongonya being danced at a pungwe, a gala, and a political function; and watched kongonya being performed on state television. Through participant-observations, respondent testimonies, and personal interviews of dancers and nondancers for all these contexts, pertinent data on kongonya were collected. The article contends that kongonya has both a human and inhuman face, having been transformed from a dance for the people into a dance against the people—a phenomenon at the mercy of political manipulators. Despite kongonya having creatively promoted the nationalist cause of the 1970s Zimbabwean liberation party, kongonya has been abused in the postcolonial state in an attempt to placate citizens, suppress dissension, and (also) in the hopes of reinvigorating the waning fortunes of the ruling party, ZANU PF. Initially, kongonya reflected an apparently more national outlook than an ethnic one, but lately it has revealed rather hegemonic traits. Regrettably, politicians sought to manipulate the malleability of dance and harness kongonya's national character to an exclusionist political agenda.

This article both argues for and contests the discourses of transformation that characterize the production and reception of neo-burlesque striptease. Through an experiential, ethnographic, and critical methodology, I reflect on how this genre engenders performances of transformation through the passage of dress to undress, at the performer–spectator exchange, and through shifting corporeal values, changing representations of female eroticism and the reclaiming of a nostalgic femininity within the neo-burlesque mise-en-scène. Yet in line with critical debates in cultural studies, I seek to question the extent to which utopian notions of transformation occur beyond the level of the “performance text” to incorporate change in the economic and social realities of neo-burlesque performers and audiences. In response I argue that neo-burlesque striptease is a site of class privilege in which performers have the necessary economic and intellectual capital through which to stage a critique of the striptease body, which could not necessarily be replicated in other sites of production. Yet I also recognize that neo-burlesque performance offers important opportunities for personal and social transformation through the ways in which women experience their disrobed bodies in an affirmative public space and through the creative control they exercise in the construction of their bodily display.

This article is an ethnographic study of Bharata Natyam choreographies performed in venues across Colombo, Sri Lanka, during the ethnically divisive civil war. The compositions reveal the strategies of female choreographers who are using dance to address the war in a climate that often silences citizens from discussing the topic in public. I illuminate the discreet negotiations of ethnic identity taking place within choreographies, informed by circulating meanings ascribed to the dance, the ethnic compositions of the bodies dancing and watching, and the shifting experience of living in the city during an escalating civil war.

This article examines the intertwined discourses and debates of classicism, linguistic regionalism, caste, and gender in the case of South Indian dance. By focusing on the dance form, Kuchipudi, from Andhra Pradesh, the first administrative region in India formed on the basis of language, this study exposes the important connections between identity politics and the creation of cultural icons, such as classical dance. This study deconstructs the paradox of Kuchipudi's classicization, as it has become historicized as a symbol of masculine, Brahminical, Telugu culture, on the one hand, and the projects of Indian modernity, which center on the iconicization of the female dancer, on the other.

Through archival, discursive, and ethnographic analysis, this article examines how the construction of classicism in Kuchipudi dance creates and supports hegemonic versions of Telugu history. This focus extends previous studies of Indian classical dance by sustaining questions about the reification of the Kuchipudi dancing body, the implications that this has regarding the fate of hereditary courtesan dancers, and the discursive strategies that allow Brahmin male history and female dance practice to coalesce.

This recent exhibition in Budapest assembles a fascinating documentation of the life and work of Dr. Alice Madzsar-Jászi (Photo 1), who, from her first opening of a dance school in 1912 to her untimely death in 1935, wove an intricate path through the cultural, political, and artistic avant-gardes of modern Hungary. At the turn of the century, just ten years before Madzsar launched her school, Isadora Duncan had made her solo debut in Budapest, where her improvisation to Strauss's “Blue Danube Waltz” had affected the Hungarian audience like “an electric shock” (Duncan 1927: 74). Madzsar was one of the key figures to channel that early modernist shock into the collective body electric in an increasingly diversified set of dance-related body practices, including free dance, movement culture for women's health, avant-garde theater, worker's sport, recitation choruses, and collective spectacles (Photo 2).

Dance artists often suggest that working with interactive technology can produce the experience of bi-directionality in which the performer is perceptually aware of the manner in which movement directly produces changes in the performance environment. In addition, it is suggested that the performer can also become aware of the manner in which the technologies affect the dancer's performance. Drawing on phenomenology, some have argued that experiences of bi-directionality call for a reconsideration of the manner in which the moving body interacts with technological devices. I draw on Albert Borgmann's philosophy of technology to examine this approach and argue that it overlooks important issues concerning contextuality and the nature of the technological devices that are utilized in interactive performance.

Over the years, screendance has generated flurries of interest within the scholarly dance community, only to watch that interest wane again and again with shifting academic trends. The past decade, however, has seen a slow-churning energy that may result in a more sustainable conversation around dance onscreen, much of which has been fueled by screendance artists and programmers themselves. A number of volumes of interest to academia have emerged as screendance artists have made homes for themselves in university settings. For makers of dance onscreen, Katrina McPherson's Making Video Dance: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dance for the Screen (2006) and Karen Pearlman's Cutting Rhythms: Shaping the Film Edit (2009) are especially noteworthy. After Sherril Dodds's important historical and analytical book Dance on Screen: Genres and Media from Hollywood to Experimental Art (2001), however, screendance scholarship was not positioned to capitalize and build on Dodds's provocation. Liz Aggiss and Billy Cowie's edited collection Anarchic Dance (2006) offers a wonderful model for gathering together the creative work of a team of artists and scholarly writing about their work, but like Envisioning Dance on Film and Video (2002), a collection that was pulled together under Judy Mitoma's direction, the tone is somewhat self-congratulatory and the analysis is tepid. Finally, two books have come out that will stand alongside Dodds's to re-ignite conversations in the screendance field and in Dance Studies generally, and will do so in a generative and critical way: Douglas Rosenberg's Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image (2012) and Erin Brannigan's Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (2011).