This essay reflects on a collaboration between a neuroscientist and a dance scholar that took the form of a scientific study testing the cognitive benefits of Filipino martial arts (FMA). This piece reflects on the collaboration as it raised methodological issues regarding disciplinarity and cross-disciplinary exchange. This discussion extends to an examination of the intellectual underpinnings and assumptions of the sciences and the humanities, signaling where they can meet and why it is not only productive but also imperative that they do so.

In 1958, Mahmoud Reda founded the Reda Troupe and put his interpretation of Egyptian folkloric dance on stage. This article analyzes the historical factors that allowed for the Reda Troupe's success and popularity during the Nasser period (1954–1970). Although colonial influences and problematic representational politics are evident in Reda's choreographies, his dances also showcase agency, hybridity, and artistic collaboration. The agency of both Mahmoud Reda and his troupe during the Nasser period was central to the group's artistic success and longevity.

This article interrogates the multivalent understandings of the term “contemporary dance” in concert, commercial, and world dance contexts. I argue that placing multiple uses of the term “contemporary” alongside one another can provide insight into the ways that “high art” dance, popular dance, and non-Western dance are increasingly wrapped up with each other and, at the same time, the ways that their separations reveal our artistic, cultural, and political prejudices, as well as the forces of the market.

In a society in which display of the body and dancing in public is controversial, the growth of contemporary dance festivals and training workshops demonstrates the changing face of Morocco's moral and political economies. This article explores the training of young dancers who are striving to embody a new Muslim corporeality and at the same time achieve professional artistic recognition in Moroccan society. Using ethnographic methods, the article focuses on the attraction of novices to contemporary dance activities, as seen through the “cultivation of the soul” in improvisational and choreographic practices related to local spiritual traditions, providing them with a niche in the global arts market and an “authentic” identity as Moroccans.

The Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA) was a program of the US federal government that employed dancers, performers, and other artists to provide public service in municipalities across the country from 1974 to 1982. This article focuses on dancers who participated in the CETA program. It describes this important source of government funding for dance and the arts that has been largely overlooked in scholarship. Through an analysis of one New York City CETA dance community performance site, it reveals the tensions present in the construct of “dance as public service.” This case study is offered as an exemplar of how the largest CETA arts program in the United States served a wide range of artists and communities. Through an analysis of two CETA dance performances at the Arthur Kill Correctional Facility in New York City, the article questions who was served by dance as public service.