This article deals with the representation of Kenyan national identity through dance. It analyses the reenactment of a series of ethnic dances at Bomas of Kenya, a cultural center located just outside Nairobi and part of the network of National Museums of Kenya. As an institution resulting from a strategic political investment in both Kenya's immaterial heritage and the tourist industry, since its inception in the early 1970s Bomas of Kenya has played an important role in conveying the idea of ethnic harmony and national unity. The comparison with Cut Off My Tongue (2009), the show by Kenyan writer and performer Sitawa Namwalie in which dance is interwoven with political satire to frame reflections on negative ethnicity, serves to highlight the implications that different approaches to dancing bodies, through such concepts as identity, embodiment, archive, and memory, could have for a meaningful political future.

John Cranko's only ballet for the Batsheva Dance Company in Israel, Ami-Yam, Ami-Ya'ar (Song of My People—Forest People—Sea, 1971) is described in a program note as “A Nation and Man Move in Parallel Cycles from Death to Regeneration.” It has remained unique in Cranko's choreographic corpus and in the Batsheva repertoire. Based on recently discovered film evidence, I reread Cranko's largely forgotten project and discuss its problematic and controversial reception in Israel and abroad, in light of Adorno's statement that “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism.” I situate it as a landmark in tackling the Holocaust in dance in Israel as of 1971. I problematize the ethics and aesthetics of representation in Cranko's ballet on the grounds of Giorgio Agamben's discussion of testimony and in reference to Jacques Derrida's reading of Paul Celan.

Against the backdrop of a four-year study into dance for people with Parkinson's, I examine one woman's claim that dancing makes her feel beautiful, and, as such, is fundamental to her well-being. I debate the challenge that this claim poses to those who argue that beauty in dance is at best unimportant, at worst disenfranchising. In debating this challenge, I create a link between aesthetics and health through a reformulation of the value of beauty in the context of chronic illness and well-being. This link then allows me to discuss how feeling lovely could become relevant and meaningful within the context of participating in dance.

This article compares Rudolf von Laban's and Mary Wigman's practices and theories of gestural flow with Walter Benjamin's theory of gesture as interruption. For Laban and Wigman, gesture mirrors a vitalist understanding of life that is based on the rediscovery of transhistorical continuities between human and cosmic energy. Benjamin's Brechtian gestures address inscriptions and manipulations of bodies, which provide comment on the conditions of society by subjecting to critique the essentializing aspects of historical and vitalist flow. Addressing in particular forms of vibration as both enriching and destabilizing the gestural from its margins, my article explores how vibratory energy indicates a self-reflexive theory of media, but also a revolutionary charge, in Benjamin; how it engenders a politically ambivalent process of transmission between dancers and audience in Laban; and how it becomes an actual mode of movement in Wigman. The historical inquiry contributes to a genealogy of vibration in contemporary dance.

The written history of German sword dance has seen a number of quaint twists. With the rediscovery in 1455 of a short Tacitus quote (98 C.E.) presumably proving the existence of the sword dance in ancient Germanic times, claims were soon made that it had persisted for millennia. From the late nineteenth century onward, nationalists and body culture theorists, each in their way, favored the idea of revitalizing an ethnic German dance form. This article aims to delineate the respective discourses, and illustrates these by portraying the choreographic renditions of an imagined German sword dance tradition by Olga Desmond and Harald Kreutzberg.

This article explores the process of reimagining Martha Graham's 1935 “lost” work, Imperial Gesture, into a complete work for performance. The solo was last performed by Graham in 1938 and constitutes the first political solo of her career. With no musical score, no notation score, and scant archival evidence, Graham dancer, régisseur, and contemporary choreographer Kim Jones pieced together the fragments left behind. Beginning in 2011, Jones assembled a team of artists in order to reimagine Imperial Gesture for the Martha Graham Dance Company. This article discusses how Jones found primary and secondary sources including thirty-two, unpublished, photographic images by Barbara Morgan; a space diagram by set designer Arch Lauterer; a poem, “Imperial Gesture for Martha Graham,” by John Malcolm Brinnin; and numerous critical reviews from the 1930s. Jones was inspired to imagine and express Graham's sense of activism and social justice within this “lost” work. The dance is a portrait of the undoing of an arrogant despot. Although mainstream critics had little to say about Imperial Gesture, arts critics for Communist and Leftist publications reviewed Imperial Gesture as an example of politically charged art that argued against fascism. The process of reimagining opens up the possibility for a deeper investigation of Graham's work as both publicly and personally political. Additionally, the creative act of reimagining her lost work adds new repertory to the Martha Graham Dance Company for a new generation of Graham dancers and new audiences. In so doing, it also opens a path for a new historiography of Graham's work and legacy.

In 1999, Bill T. Jones, in collaboration with digital artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, presented an installation at the intersection of dance, drawing, and digital imaging. Ghostcatching featured Jones's previously improvised movements recorded using motion capture technology. In 2010, Kaiser, Eshkar, and Marc Downie of the OpenEndedGroup revised Ghostcatching into a new piece titled After Ghostcatching, composed of unused sequences of Jones's movement and sound captured for Ghostcatching. This essay focuses on the extended relation between Ghostcatching and After Ghostcatching to track a shift from so-called identity politics to a discourse of post-racialism over a ten-year period in U.S. history. A consideration of various media—motion capture technology, digital art and imaging, and improvised, virtual dance—as well as formal analysis of each piece, highlight the political effects and visual implications of each work in a racially mediated world. In this article, I question the status of Jones's raced, sexed, and gendered body within neoliberal fantasies of post-racialism. In spite of the persistence of visible markers such as skin color that are mobilized to construct racial subjects, with the development of digital imaging and new visual technologies, to what degree is race actually visual? That is, how are race and the racialized body in motion subject to and determined by specific media, i.e., photography and digital art, improvised dance and choreographic form? This analysis of Ghostcatching and After Ghostcatching reveals how each piece tests the boundaries of choreographic form and digital imaging technologies as well as the category of race as inherently visual—a test that posits race as technology itself in visual, haptic, and spatial terms.

In this article, original interview material, existing published accounts, and the author's own experience as a contemporary dancer are put in conversation to explicitly address a particular kinesthetic awareness, sensitivity, and curiosity valued and employed by a group of dancers in the practice of contemporary dance, which is referred to as a kinesthetic mode of attention. The research informing this article uses a phenomenological and sociological approach and discusses, in detail, what this mode of attending “is like,” how it is described in different ways by dancers, and how it might be developed and nurtured in training and working in the style of contemporary dance. An overarching aim of this work is to contribute to greater understanding and valuing of the nuances and particularities of kinesthetic intelligence in dance practices and to address the cognitive aspects of dancing.

This essay draws on personal experience as it investigates the intersection of ethics, political activism, and dance performance. It considers the manner in which artistic and ethical convictions can shape the critical reception of dance that intentionally engages social justice issues, and it draws on ethical theory in order to investigate the manner in which personal ethical beliefs can determine a dance artist's approach to such work.

This article chronicles the formation and first season of the dance company Ballet Caravan (1936–1940) with a special focus on the role of Lincoln Kirstein in the troupe's founding. This account of the Caravan's early history draws upon an array of primary sources to offer new perspectives on the company's relationship to modern dance circles and its parent organizations (the American Ballet and School of American Ballet, co-founded by Kirstein and George Balanchine in 1934). It traces Ballet Caravan's touring activities during 1936 (including its debut at Bennington College) and details ballets created for the company by Lew Christensen, Eugene Loring, and William Dollar, as well as previously unknown early choreographic work by Erick Hawkins. This account reveals that Ballet Caravan was initially conceived of neither as a dancer-driven initiative nor a deliberate attempt by Kirstein to pursue an American artistic agenda (as it has been previously understood by scholars), but rather was a practical response to institutional crises in the larger Balanchine–Kirstein ballet enterprise. The American Ballet and Ballet Caravan thus reveal themselves in 1936 as more contiguous than distinct, sharing personnel and aesthetic values, as well as the involvement of Balanchine himself.

In this article, I explore the way that the creation and presentation of Lloyd Newsom's Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men (1988) for DV8 confronted the choreographer, performers, and audience with questions about the ethics of sex and romance and the treatment of gay men during the AIDS crisis. To analyze the complex affective relationships within and around the piece, I follow Emmanuel Levinas's ethical theory of the face in conjunction with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's related theory of faciality, which I interpret as referring to a disciplinary situation in which subjects are created through a process of terrorizing and shaming.

This essay brings the work of Georges Perec, the experimental twentieth-century French writer, into contact with dance. It considers ways that Perec's writing and post-modern dance share certain compositional processes and categories, such as Perec's four “fields” (the “sociological,” “autobiographical,” “ludic,” and “fictive”) and concerns (such as time, attention, and exhaustion); aspects of autobiography, such as acts of disclosure and mystification, and resistance to conventions of self-representation; the central place of the body; and the ways these forms so differently express, suggest, or evade what cannot be said in words. Written from the perspective of a dancer/scholar, it explores the experiences of dancing as they connect to ideas articulated or suggested in Perec's writing, and it demonstrates ways that dance may be created and viewed through a Perec-ian lens.

By many recent accounts, dance and theory are natural bedfellows—an art form and a form of critique that are inherently unstable, difficult to discuss. Both are notoriously impervious to systematic accounts because they are in states of physical and conceptual motion, perpetually underdetermined.

In the past decade, a growing discourse has developed among choreographers, dance artists, and their collaborators, who are eager to articulate their processes, practices, and working methods through different types of writing and publication. Artists’ books, objects, and online platforms—from Thomas Lehmen's Schreibstück (2002) and FUNKTIONEN tool box (2004), to BADco's Whatever Dance Toolbox (2011) in collaboration with Daniel Turing, and the Forsythe Company's project Motionbank (2010–2013)—have contributed to what we may describe today as the “publishing of choreographic ideas,” as proposed by Scott deLahunta (2015). Jeroen Peeters, editor of Are We Here Yet? (2010), which focuses on the work of Meg Stuart, emphasizes the discourse intrinsic to dance making, while Mårten Spångberg invites artists to “write their own history,” with projects such as The Swedish Dance History (2009–today), to give but one example. Alongside these developments, practice-as-research, which involves dance making and writing, is becoming more established within university settings; and presentations of/on artistic research are now common in conferences, symposia, and other sites of knowledge exchange. We could argue then that the development of an artist's theory of knowledge, which scholars such as Susan Melrose (2007) have been encouraging since the early 2000s, is now well under way both within and without the academy.

Dance, Politics & Co-Immunity developed out of a symposium organized by the Master in Choreography and Performance at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Germany, which was held with a joint symposium Thinking—Resisting—Reading the Political organized by the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture at the same university in 2010. Whereas the cultural studies symposium asked, “What specific perspectives and methodological consequences arise for the study of culture that are informed by recent deliberations on the relationship of the political and the aesthetic?” (2010), the dance symposium invited participants and contributors to the anthology “to think about the multiple connections between politics, community, dance, and globalization from the perspective of Dance and Theatre Studies, History, Philosophy, and Sociology” (13). As indicated by the title of the cultural studies symposium and some of the key speakers, including Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe, and Judith Butler, the term political is not used as broadly as it might be used in U.S.-based dance studies discourse. Rather, the political is predominantly investigated by both symposia for its resistive potential and from a liberal or post-Marxist stance.