I write. I edit. I teach. I curate conferences. I am a full professor at Arizona State University (ASU), a large research-one public university, specializing in dance history, theory, and ethics. Here I reflect on these different processes, recognizing that these labels represent different avenues by which I manifest larger existential concerns. Driving this self-analysis is the cancer diagnosis I received in January 2023 and subsequent grueling treatments that interrupted my planned research agenda. Instead, what became urgent was making meaning of the strategies that have allowed me to navigate my academic career to date. In the process, I realized that I wanted to cultivate a poetic ‘voice’ to more accurately convey the underlying creative life force that drives all areas of my life and is helping me to survive. I hope through this process to inspire others in higher education to take stock of their efforts, especially in the face of major changes in their lives and the dance field more generally.

In Kuwait, women are prohibited from dancing in public; however, dancing in private spaces is allowed. As a result of government censorship, socio-cultural values, and commercial marketability examples of women dancing in Kuwaiti film and television are exceedingly rare. However, recently, Manaf Abdal’s steaming television series Mohammed Ali Road (2020) included representations of Kuwaiti women performing a zar dance. Although the scene was shown in other countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, the scene was censored by the Kuwaiti Ministry of Information. Following the censorship of the zar dance featured in Mohammed Ali Road, the actress, Hessa Al-Nabhan, who performed the dance, noted that while she respected the decision to censor the scene, she felt that the dance “has nothing to do with ethics or moral issues” (in Alelah 2020). Her father, a well-established Kuwaiti actor, Jassim Al-Nabhan, publicly expressed that the decision to censor the zar dance scene in Mohammed Ali Road was “a disappointment” and stated that, “not showing [the dance] means that we are not showing the historical events accordingly with credibility. It’s a scratch for the history” (Al-Marsd News 2020).

Valencia, 2019, a queer tango festival: I had a first dance with [—], a transman I did not know. While I began with a typical “lead or follow” gesture, he offered only a leading position, and, intuiting that he wished to wholly occupy a “traditional” leading role, coded masculine, I stepped wholly into an extremely “feminine” mode of following: qualities I did not articulate at the time but might now gloss as extreme permeability and a kind of steady softness, an extreme availability and willingness I rarely, if ever, deploy while dancing with cis, straight men. Feeling increasingly sure of my intuition, noting the assertion in his lead, I melted a little further into his arms, softening the muscle tone in my chest, letting each lead reverberate through my body. Though we did not speak of it then, he later confirmed that our dynamic had given him something desired but not always offered.

Ever since dance was established as a theatrical art form in Western Europe, it has had a constitutive relationship with other dramatic, plastique, and musical arts. In being described as relying on these other art genres, dance works were often regarded as secondary creations. Ballets, for example, were works likened to narrative tableaux that tell stories without words, with music as their indispensable accompaniment, animating the dancing bodies. In the early 20th century, however, the relationship of dance to other art genres was fundamentally shifting. Towards the end of the 19th century, art works were to be envisaged on the basis of a musical model instead of plastique arts hitherto, and dance as an individual art genre was thereby to be redefined, independently of other art genres, as its own medium, its own material for human creative activity. In dance the human body was being recognized as its medium, and the body’s nature, as encompassed in the “plastique,” was to be scrutinized. The usage of the term “plastique” in dance must then have evolved.

In 2016, a New York Times dance critic devalued the genre of Chinese dance dramas by reducing a performance of Dragon Boat Racing (Shawanwangshi 沙湾往事) by the Guangdong Song and Dance Ensemble to “kitschy spectacle.” This review exemplifies illiteracy of Chinese dance dramas based on bias against maximalist deployment of spectacle filtered through a Cold War influenced understanding of Chinese aesthetics that is exacerbated by American ignorance of Chinese history. This dismissive review contrasts with the warm reception the Chinese language press gave this contemporary piece (2014 premiere) and the regional and national awards it won in China (Liu 2014). Chinese critics generally describe it as an original choreographic work grounded in the specifics of local Cantonese culture (F Wu 2014; She 2018). This positive reception aligns with my experience watching the piece with a mostly Chinese diaspora audience at the Merriam Theater in Philadelphia in January 2018.1 This article addresses the gap in understanding, examining the dynamics that shaped the development of Chinese dance dramas as a genre as well as the forces shaping American reception of it. I assert that key to the mistranslation is differing understandings of the maximalist deployment of spectacle, which is connected to fissures in the field of dance between supporters of classical ballet and modern dance. I argue that the use of the aesthetic is a celebration of China’s economic development and an assertion of belonging in modernity. But, in the United States its reception is shaped by aesthetic hierarchies developed during the Cold War.

In November 2016, Tatiana Navka—former Olympic champion and wife of Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s press secretary—and her skating partner, actor Andrey Burkovsky, performed a Holocaust-themed ice dance on Ice Age, a Russian competition show similar to Dancing with the Stars.1 Sporting concentration camp uniforms emblazoned with Jewish stars, their mouths frozen into grins, the pair skated a routine inspired by Roberto Benigni’s 1997 Holocaust film Life Is Beautiful. Although well-received in Russia, the performance caused an international uproar. There were dozens of stories in mainstream Western news sources, Jewish and Israeli newspapers, and ironic commentary from Jewish comedians including Sarah Silverman (“Oh those wacky Holocaust victims”), Michael Ian Black (“This might be offensive if they didn’t take such care to recreate all the wonderful ice dancing going on at Aushwitz [sic],” and the Daily Show’s Adam Lowitz (“Judges can’t give Holocaust victims bad scores, they’ve been through enough”). There was also swift condemnation from Holocaust and Jewish studies scholars on twitter and a pointed response from Miri Regev, then Israel’s Culture Minister, who proclaimed that Holocaust themes are “not for dance and not for reality,” adding, “Not one of the six million danced.”2