This article interrogates “contact,” understood by Global North contemporary dance discourse as choreography that is mobilized by shifting points of physical touch between two or more bodies, by attending to inherent, and often ignored, power asymmetries that are foundational to such choreographic practices. This “unmaking of contact” is undertaken by deploying the lenses of race, caste, and gender in order to argue for an intersectional, intercultural and inter-epistemic understanding of “choreographic touch” that may or may not involve tactility. It starts by examining contact improvisation (CI), and its now ubiquitous choreographic manifestation of partnering, as an aesthetic that can work in colonizing ways on South Asian dancers who train in primarily solo classical dance forms. The article then moves on to place South Asian bodies, philosophies, and discourses at the heart of its interrogation of choreographic touch, and foregrounds the culturally specific politics and powers that govern them.

Popular dances encapsulate the aliveness of Africa's young. Radiating an Africanist aesthetic of the cool, these moves enflesh popular music, saturating mass media platforms and everyday spaces with imageries of joyful transcendence. This essay understands scriptive dance fads as textual and choreographic calls for public embodiment. I explore how three Nigerian musicians, and their dances, have wielded scriptive prompts to elicit specific moved responses from dispersed, heterogenous, and transnational publics. Dance fads of this kind productively complicate musicological approaches that insist on divorcing contemporary African music cultures from the dancing bodies that they often conjure. Taken together, these movements enlist popular culture as a domain marked by telling contestations over musical ownership and embodied citizenship.

This conversation emerges from the Afro-Feminist Performance Routes's biennial gatherings at Duke University that have taken place since 2016. Hinging on the work of Lēnablou (Guadeloupe), Rujeko Dumbutshena (Zimbabwe, United States), Sephora Germain (Haiti), Yanique Hume (Jamaica, Cuba, Barbados), Jessi Knight (United States), Halifu Osumare (United States), Luciane Ramos-Silva (Brazil), and Jade Power Sotomayor (Puerto Rico, United States), the focused residency has nurtured embodied dialogues centered on African-derived dance practices and gender, femininity, womanhood, femme, and feminisms. What follows is a scripted simulation of conversations generated in roundtables, workshops, performances, and interviews, as well as around dinner tables and during late-night chats. We've woven together the artists’ statements under two umbrella themes—embodied philosophies and contours of diaspora—in order to highlight the relationship between creative practice and lived experience, between singularity and collective, between precarity and the everyday, between AfroFem and becoming.

As a woman Palestinian dancer and choreographer in Israel, Sahar Damoni performs within multiple contexts of cultural, gendered, and political oppression, employing her bodily art to challenge these structures, most poignantly through dances that express and evoke pleasure and sensual joy. Offering a detailed ethnography of three of Damoni's performances within one year in Israel/Palestine, I argue that an examination of her artistry provides unique insight into the intricate workings—and transgressions—of gender, ethnic, and national boundaries through the movement of the body in dance.

Rumba guaguancó, a sub-genre of Afro-Cuban popular dance, has been widely defined as a dance of courtship, characterized as a male pursuit of a woman's sex. The article analyzes alternative meanings of the sub-genre articulated in the pedagogical practices of black women rumba dancers. Insights were gleaned from the author's own dance training in Havana while conducting original ethnographic research between 2009 and 2018. What the author terms “a black feminist choreographic aptitude” taught by rumberas (women rumba dancers) speaks to the pointedly gendered valances of worsening racialized class inequality in contemporary Cuba. Building on Blanco Borelli's theory of “hip(g)nosis,” the article interrogates the racialized and gendered discourses historically reproduced through dominant definitions of rumba, limiting women of African descent to sexual objects. The study argues for increased critical attention to pedagogy as a hermeneutical tool, centering those subjects historically marginalized from the production of knowledge about their bodies.

Joann Kealiinohomoku's Silhougraphs®, traces of the silhouettes of dancers, were her attempt to operationalize her cultural relativist commitments and create a new method of dance analysis. Silhougraphs illuminate underexamined scholarly presumptions, methods, and tools that both contributed to and paralleled the emergence of dance studies as a discipline. Silhougraphs are also a cautionary tale demonstrating the ways culturally sensitive research commitments and methods can unintentionally yet decisively reiterate tools and logics of racist typologies.

This article seeks to correct prevailing narratives of French ballet modernism, which exclude one of its earliest and most significant choreographers, Madame Mariquita. Although long overshadowed by the Diaghilev enterprise and by dancers such as Isadora Duncan, Mariquita's experiments with creating dances that drew on ancient Greek imagery while ballet mistress at the Paris Opéra-Comique in the early 1900s were central to ballet culture in France at a pivotal moment in dance history. This article discusses Mariquita's nascent ballet modernism through her choreography of Greek dances as well as her engagement with early twentieth-century French dance and broader cultural trends.

This essay analyzes Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company's 2009 work Fondly Do We Hope…Fervently Do We Pray and its centering of Black women in US American history and contemporary choreographic practices. While the work's revisionist representation of national history could be understood as activist in terms of its desire to activate the spectator, this essay centers what performance might do for Black women performers and their personal practices of artistry and activism over what impulses toward social justice Black women's performances might galvanize in their audiences. Attributing FDWH's transformative potential to its aesthetic combination of postmodernism and sentimentalism and its erotic historiography, I theorize the work as a choreohistory, a mode of cultural production wherein the ordering of movement and the ordering of the past interanimate one another.

This article discusses the role of colonial oppression in creating conflicting perspectives in the reproduction of dance as Indigenous cultural heritage. The debate on kahiko, the ancient Hawaiian dance, of which practice was severely controlled and then revived through the cultural renaissance, demonstrates that the radical deprivation of the practice has created multiple understandings of the dance among different practitioners. Of primary importance in these respects is the intergenerational divide within the dance community, manifest in the critical perspective of the post-renaissance variant of kahiko, which highlights the “continuity” of the practice through the colonial rupture.

This essay explores the intersection of concert dance, cultural memory, Black womanhood, and non-linear spacetime from an Afro-European perspective. Inspired by Black feminist methodologies, the text interweaves performance analysis, historical context, interdisciplinary theory including my own concept of perforMemory, and auto-ethnographic experience gained through participant observation. My writing moves along three lines of inquiry tuned in the key of C: contextualizing, conjuring and contemplating. The article offers a case study of I Step on Air, a contemporary dance piece created by Nigerian-German dancer-choreographer Oxana Chi (Berlin/New York) and dedicated to Ghanian-German poet and activist May Ayim. By including an interlude with the choreographer's own creative writing about the piece, the article also provides the reader with the precious perspective of Oxana Chi on her process. The article is a reflection on/of the resonances between movement, writing, and activism. Let's celebrate the power of Black women to resistDance, step by step, move by move, breath by breath…

This article approaches dance through the lens of new materialist theories (speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, thing theory, posthumanism, etc.), considering the possibility that objecthood need not align with inertness and movement need not be excluded from the realm of the substantive. Deploying a practice-based methodology informed by participation in works by Simone Forti and Maria Hassabi, as well her own movement investigation, the author considers theoretical positions that counter the persistent association of dance with ephemerality while also broadly questioning the relationship between dance and theory.

Dance theorists and legal scholars argue that choreography is by nature ill-suited to the conceptual framework provided by copyright, even as there is widespread agreement that works of dance deserve the legal protection and cultural endorsement that its inclusion represents. I reexamine the factors that are often cited as barriers to choreography's suitability for copyright. I argue that choreography is better suited to the copyright regime than it appears, so long as we recognize that the artistic standard for substantial similarity should be different from the legal standard.

“Super Fluid/Super Black: Translations and Teachings in Transembodied Metaphysics” was originally commissioned as a keynote lecture for the 2020 Collegium for African Diaspora Dance (CAAD) conference, Fluid Black::Dance Back. It is a hybrid text that centralizes Black Transgender and Nonbinary experiences in a conversation of futurity in African Diasporic spirituality, dance traditions, and performativities. Furthermore, “Super Fluid/Super Black” interrogates beingness through an exploration of astrophysics and global attempts at Black erasure in an attempt to uncover new strategies of collectivizing under dance that dismantle cisheteronormativity at their core.

This article examines Joan Miller's use of choreographic citation in her solos, Pass Fe White (1970) and Homestretch (1973). The solos “read” the desire to embody idealized, feminine whiteness in a critique of institutions for accessing national belonging—celebrity, education, and marriage—satirically exposing the gendered and racialized exclusions of the figure of the abstract “human” as “proper” citizen. Miller's work performs queer, Black feminist, diasporic desires for a world beyond Black and white nationalist logics, refusing to be “properly” placed in national hierarchies of female objecthood, while affirming the capacity to desire differently by proposing alternative terms for belonging in the world.