This article is dedicated to analyzing existing cultural tensions between nationalism and neo-imperialism through the prism of oral narratives of ballet training in post-Soviet Ukraine. I present and reflect on the results of a three-month-long ethnographic field study, which took place at a primary state-sponsored ballet school in Ukraine—the Kyiv State Choreographic School. My article seeks to investigate the role and position of Ukrainian state-sponsored ballet at a crossroads of political and cultural crisis, when a new identity may rise from the ruins of a previously constructed cultural monolith of Soviet ballet. I explore the complex history and present condition of classical ballet training in Kyiv, Ukraine, and reveal it as both a contested cultural space and an important barrier to political radicalization. I show that ballet training centers of Ukraine successfully resist co-optation by both neo-imperial and nationalist ideologies, forming robust and inclusive dancing communities that in many ways mirror structures of modern Ukrainian society.

This article foregrounds imagination to consider how African diasporic conditions converge with choreographic expression. The analysis “un/maps” dominant understandings of the choreographic process of mid-twentieth-century African American choreographer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham by expanding Kamau E. Brathwaite's (1993) concept of Tidalectics beyond the Caribbean to the wider African diaspora and a distinctly Caribbean comprehension of diasporic imagination. Utilizing datasets and visualizations created by the project, Dunham's Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry, this article traces how the concept of Brazil is imagined and reimagined within Dunham's archive from 1937 to 1962. In doing so, it considers the complex positionality of Dunham as both a pioneering minoritized woman navigating the politics of race, gender, and financial precarity, and someone who yielded their imperial privilege as a US citizen through their career to bring nuance to Dunham's narrative as a canonical dance figure.

Motivated by Melissa Ziad's balletic protest within Algeria's Hirak demonstrations, this article recuperates a distinction between the right to assembly and the right to free speech, constitutional guarantees blurred under contemporary rhetoric of association. By applying methods of dance studies to legal interpretation, it shifts crowd theory away from an anxiety of touch toward a copresence that allows for constituent power of the people to be reclaimed. Therefore, it intervenes within a broader discourse of the legal humanities that privileges the logocentric over embodied ways of knowing.

This article focuses on how dance companies have restaged three of the original automata characters from the ballet Coppélia (Arthur Saint-Léon, 1870), described as the “Negro,” the “Moor,” and the “Chinaman.” In conversation with scholarship on the racialization of objects and the object-ification of humans, I claim these characters embody and reenact the ontological effects of slavery and colonialism, in which notions of human and object collapse into one another. I further argue that such processes vary among the roles, illuminating ways the white colonialist perspective constructs the imagined Chinese body differently than the Black body through human-object relations. As a contribution to discussions within the ballet world surrounding the use of blackface and yellowface, this article exposes how ballet choreography both participates in and reveals object-centered acts of racism through embodiment practices.

This spatial and contextual approach to the performance of assembly takes Dîner en Blanc, an annual pop-up picnic, as a case study. Ethnographic and choreographic analyses of the 2018 picnic event in Vancouver, Canada, ground a critique of the dynamics of site specificity and host/guest relations that drive this local expression of a global event. Drawing on a range of performance and decolonial theorists, this place-based movement analysis of the event foregrounds the recolonizing implications of staging aesthetically whitewashed culinary choreographies on the unceded and traditional territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

Countering the historiographic under-representation of Greek modern dance, this article focuses on early twentieth-century dance artist Vassos Kanellos. Combining Western/European choreographic inputs and local, often traditional, elements, Kanellos rearticulated the inscription of Greek dance in historical time—beyond a sole focus on antiquity—and anchored it in a nationally marked space and in the specificity of a posited Greek “race.” Informed by new modernist studies, this article reads Kanellos's practice as a reflection of the country's process of constructing a hegemonic national identity against a background in which Greece constituted both Europe's subaltern periphery and the foundation of its genealogical narrative.

This article explores the cultural figure of the ropedancer and focuses on the influential performance of Philippe Petit in two of his walks. The high-wire walker plays a significant role discussed within three frameworks: a philosophical and urban discussion offering interwoven perspectives; the iconic walk at the World Trade Center in New York in 1974; and Petit's high-wire crossing performed in Jerusalem's geopolitical context in 1987. Ropedancing is an “abyssal choreography”—a movement at a high altitude above the depth with maximum control on the verge of losing balance. As related to specific walks, this movement embodies a dialectic agency. It transcends local narratives but empowers and critically exposes them. It requires meticulous discipline and unbounded creativity, and it is linked to oppositional positions between which the ropedancer can unsettlingly fluctuate. This movement activates danger or crisis while moving over the abyss as a vector connecting places, times, and events.

This article explores the Ring Shout as a corporeal conjuring of Black-togetherness. Theoretically, I embrace the notion of assembly in ways that offer new comprehension around both implicit and explicit modes of embodiment in constant play within Black cultural modes. I turn to the research of Katrina Hazzard-Donald, Dr. Yvonne Daniel, and M. Jacqui Alexander for theoretical grounding regarding diasporic Afro-spiritualities, while artists such as Talley Beatty, Reggie Wilson, and Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott) provide landmarks for the artistic and aesthetic discourse of the text. I introduce a concept, AfrOist, as a navigation through and toward a recontextualization of centralized Africanist tendencies. With this shift, cultural inheritances are remembered and claimed.

Human rights scrutiny processes in some Australian parliaments require consideration of whether rights-limiting legislation is reasonable, justifiable, and proportionate. The Queensland Human Rights commissioner has raised concerns of this becoming a “perfunctory ‘tick and flick’ exercise” in which decision-makers perform the “dance steps to [rights] derogation”—a concern emulated by others. Taking this notion of “tick and flick” and “dance steps” literally, this article explores movement and form in the composition of parliamentary human rights scrutiny reports. Drawing from Marie Jacob and Anna Macdonald's notion of legal documents as material, somatic, and metaphorical forms, this article analyzes the choreographic and calligraphic forms in these reports. Through exploring the forms themselves alongside interview data about parliamentary human rights scrutiny practices, this article speculates on whether form has bearing on the process of parliamentary human rights scrutiny, and how form shapes the substance of both the reports and human rights themselves.

The dancer Mademoiselle Mercédès performed in the most important music halls of the Parisian Belle Époque, such as the Folies-Bergère and the Olympia. Her exotic pseudonym reflects the Hispanophilia of this period in France, but she was neither a Spanish dancer nor a native imitator. On the contrary, she displayed great versatility as a dancer and actively participated in the transition to modernity with the dancer Loïe Fuller and the choreographer Madame Mariquita. However, who is behind this artist's name? This research reveals that at least three women used this nickname and only one of them has been previously identified: Julienne Mathieu (1874–1943), who, after her stage career, became one of the most prolific actresses in early cinema. This case study explores the implications of using a pseudonym by a secondary figure in the dance world in fin-de-siècle Paris.

Through curtain calls in Eurocentric theatrical dance forms, dance artists, audience members, and staff coordinate how dance concerts end and participants disperse. Nevertheless, despite the widespread use of such practices, the rituals of bows and applause have largely eluded critical inquiry. This article offers dance practitioners choices toward thoughtfully negotiating the processes of engagement and disengagement in groups contingently assembled for dance events. A brief historical inquiry introduces how such behaviors may enact deeply embedded, power-laden agendas of relationship. Then, curtain calls are revealed as complex spaces of intersubjective negotiations, iterative of numerous possible functions at work.

This interview with Eleo Pomare focuses on his role as the choreographer of mature creative works that intermingle with his formation as a Black artist and activist after he returned from Europe to live and work in New York in the mid-1960s. It begins with discussion of his creative work in the community during the period of the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights. Pomare reflects upon his early training and choreographic experiments as well as describes the construction of some of his best-known performance works. He ends with some thoughts on political advocacy and his influence on dance policy and dance criticism, and throughout the conversation Pomare shares insights about his philosophy as a Black dance artist.

Contemporary interdisciplinary collaboration practices offer visions of new modes of assembly. This article traces a curatorial model of interdisciplinary collaboration, exploring how artists activate curation as a methodology of creation. I refer specifically to the creative practice of the award-winning Queer trans/mogrifying multidisciplinary artist and futurist Sage Ni'Ja Whitson, and their series The Unarrival Experiments. I reflect on Whitson's curatorial practice as a sacred methodology rooted in Yorùbá cosmologies, theatrical jazz aesthetic, and concepts of dark matter, superfluidity, and unarrival. I trace how Whitson's use of curatorial frameworks supports ease in the impossible, builds layers of multiplicity and simultaneity, resists institutional hegemony and power structures, and crafts systems of queer kinship and care for communities, ancestors, and futures. I outline the criteria of coexistence through which they imbue curatorial practices into their collaborations, generating what I describe as a “third space.” For Whitson, this fertile space of sustained difference is a portal to an alternate institution of darkness, interdependent sovereignty, and superfluidity. I conclude by unfolding the possibilities of Whitson's third space as a forward-facing methodology of how to move through the impossible together and envision new collective futures.

Director Luca Guadagnino's film Suspiria (2018) depicts the dancer Susie Bannion joining a dance academy secretly run by a coven of witches in Berlin during the German Autumn of 1977. This article analyzes how Mary Wigman's Hexentanz II, contemporary dance, and horror film practices inform Susie's neo-expressionist movement form, which is also steeped in the discourse surrounding the RAF (Red Army Faction), the West German far-left militant organization, and fascism. I argue that “historical breathing”—breaths and sighs—takes on a sensorial mode by surveying the past and current situation of the dance school. By inhaling, Susie embodies the dance Volk (1948) and can feel its vexed choreographic history—its occult origins and Ausdruckstanz practices. Furthermore, her dance futilely attempts to comes to terms with the Nazi past but inevitably replicates the violence of the RAF.

In the 1840s, the polka craze established lead/follow partner dancing as the normative social dance structure in the Atlantic world. In the process, it imposed a choreographed performance of bourgeois heteropatriarchy (originally developed with the waltz) on Europe's colonies and post-colonies. However, a central mechanism of the lead/follow system in social partner dance is the woman's body attitude, and as the nature of that attitude changes, so do the associated dances. In the Americas, women acculturated to African-rooted principles of polycentricity disrupted the equilibrium of the lead/follow dynamic, catalyzing the creation of new partner dance forms and techniques. On the one hand, this resulted in an intensification of the lead/follow system such that men could now control and shape the dissociated parts of their partners’ bodies. On the other hand, it also seeded the fissioning and eventual dissolution of the dance partnership itself.

In this article I discuss the process of choreographing “traditional” and “folk” dances in the former Yugoslavia, aligned with Yugoslav socialist ideologies that glorified the collective cultural authorship of the people, which allowed for these dances to adopt a new dimension as they took the form of a choreographed spectacle. I explain how Yugoslav choreographers utilized archival research to create a repertoire of choreographic representations of Yugoslav identity in constructing what I theorize as heritage choreography. Reflecting on how ideology moved the collective body of the Yugoslav people through choreographed works deemed as heritage, I broaden the understanding of choreographing that differs from Western concert dance practices. Furthermore, I provide alternative examples of dance making that are rooted in local understandings of spectacle, thereby enriching the conversation about what the act of choreographing entails.