One of my favorite childhood memories is from my first dance class. I ran into the studio and started jumping, jumping, jumping literally for joy when I noticed suddenly that I was not alone. There were other children in class, and they were all jumping too. We jumped together, spontaneously in sync, oblivious to what must have been looks of parental incredulity peeking through the door. The teacher stopped us well before anyone fell to the floor but not so soon as to mistake the extraordinary (teachable) moment. Human beings can bond together through rhythmical movement and expressions like joy, and dance is fundamentally about making those connections: to self, to others, to the world, and beyond. In sixty seconds, our little dance community was born.

Laurence Louppe once advanced the intriguing notion that the dancer is “the veritable avatar of Orpheus: he has no right to turn back on his course, lest he be denied the object of his quest” (Louppe 1994, 32). However, looking across the contemporary dance scene in Europe and the United States, one cannot escape the fact that dancers—contrary to Orpheus, contrary to Louppe's assertion—are increasingly turning back on their and dance history's tracks in order to find the “object of their quest.” Indeed, contemporary dancers and choreographers in the United States and Europe have in recent years been actively engaged in creating re-enactments of sometimes well-known, sometimes obscure, dance works of the twentieth century. Examples abound: we can think of Fabian Barba's Schwingende Landschaft (2008), an evening-length piece where the Ecuadorian choreographer returns to Mary Wigman's seven solo pieces created in 1929 and performed during Wigman's first U.S. tour in 1930; of Elliot Mercer returning in 2009 and 2010 to several of Simone Forti's Construction Pieces (1961/62), performing them at Washington Square Park in New York City; or Anne Collod's 2008 return to Anna Halprin's Parades and Changes (1965), among many other examples.

Deportations and the threat of removal are choreographic strategies of the nation-state's ever-growing monopoly of movement through border securitization and immigration enforcement, which persists into the twenty-first century. While literature and the visual arts have received critical and popular attention by considering forced family separations, dance remains overlooked. Analyzing dance performances that relate directly to deportation teaches us not only about the painful impact of forced removal: it instructs us to decode, move and maintain relationships as aliens and citizens amid the increasing control of motion in the United States and the cruel joke offered by a nation of immigrants.

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 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

This article closely examines oral histories of b-boys Aby and Kwikstep, b-girl Baby Love, and poppers Cartoon and Wiggles, and the social choreography necessary to navigate the streets of the South Bronx in the 1970s and 1980s that has an indelible link to four core battling principles as articulated by 1970s b-boy Trac2: survivalism, strategizing, nomadism, and illusionism. By comparing and contrasting foundational elements of battling techniques with life lessons about growing up in the Bronx, the comparison signals the impact of “outlaw culture” within hip-hop, and the counterdominant sensibilities taught in battle cyphers.

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.

Ananya Dance Theatre generates a framework for “contemporary dance” as choreography which enacts its solidarity with the land of Native peoples. Artistic director Ananya Chatterjea mobilizes her contemporary aesthetic, “Yorchhā,” through the company's alliance with Indigenous peoples’ worldviews on land and water protection, especially through their relations with Dakota and Anishinaabe persons. Dance analysis of the pieces “Moreechika: Season of Mirage” (2012), “Shaatranga: Women Weaving Worlds” (2018), and “Shyamali: Sprouting Words” (2017) shapes contemporary dance through its engagement with Native persons’ caretaking labor for the environment and the position of these relations in the choreography. A practice of humility emerges as the cornerstone of solidarity in contemporary dance due to the necessity for longstanding Native invitation and engagement, Indigenous narratives and embodiment in the dance pieces, and lessons learned from the pitfalls in intersecting techniques such as Ananya Dance Theatre's with Native people's lifeways and knowledges.

This article focuses on the idea of choreography as a possible medium of protest. Dealing with the media theory of Niklas Luhmann in the framework of social communication, and adopting Randy Martin's idea of an interrelation of (danced) movement and politics, the focus lies in the moments of migration of gestures from everyday life into art and then into the realm of politics. By analyzing the example of the Istanbul Duran Adam and the performance of choreographer Ehud Darash in Tel Aviv, I address the key question in which moments and what kind of formats choreography serves as a medium of protest by blurring the boundaries between everyday life, art, and politics.

This article is an anthropological exploration of the role of dance in tourism-led entrepreneurship and tourism-led mobilities in Cuba. Based on ethnographic research and employing an autoethnographic lens, the article examines the imaginaries and gendered performances of Cubanness that play out in touristic settings as part of dance trips organized on the island for international tourists. Women are the main target audience for these dance programs, which oftentimes reveal the reproduction of racial stereotypes that contributed to the growing popularity of Cuba as a tourist destination. Dance teachers come to establish a broad spectrum of relations that are influenced by inequalities of resources and unequal access to mobility, since it is the (usually) white European and North American dancing tourists who take up space as central dancing figures, co-creating the cultural script that fetishizes Cuban Black bodies, especially in settings such as salsa schools or popular dance venues.