This essay undertakes to illuminate the work of Randy Martin by surveying a range of theories offering hypothetical answers to the question of why dance seems to generate more energy than it demands, an experience often reported by those who engage in it. Coming from the disparate disciplines of social history, psychology, neurobiology, phenomenology, and aesthetics, these theories do not necessarily conflict with one another nor do they agree about dance's energizing capacity. Taken together, however, they lend greater insight into Martin's concept of “mobilization,” and the analysis of them answers Martin's call to evaluate dance from within the presumption of conditions of abundance rather than scarcity.

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.

This article explores Randy Martin's approach to dance studies at the dawn of the discipline in a set of essays written between 1992 and 1998 regarding dance, ethnography, and representation. On one hand, the Marxian basis of Martin's analysis is foregrounded in this article as Martin's working method, and on the other, a theory of the audience (the relation of the spectator to the dance) is identified as what links dance to socialism in Martin's thought; this is the main theoretical motor of his use of dance as an analytic method for social thought.

The first part of the twenty-first century has been marked by particularly fraught social and racial tensions in the United States, brought to awareness internationally by the Black Lives Matter protest movement that started in 2014 and the vitriol espoused by the 2016 Republican presidential candidate. Randy Martin's work offers paradigms for interrogating the relationships between dance and its sociopolitical contexts that are highly relevant at this historical juncture. Drawing on some of Martin's key concepts, this article explores choreographic agency and creative strategies in dances that respond to issues of social injustice, mass incarceration, and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Works by Joanna Haigood (Zaccho Dance Theatre), Amie S. Dowling, filmmaker Justin Forbord, and Kyle Abraham (Abraham.In.Motion) focus on narratives of oppression and disenfranchisement yet also inspire resistance and hope.

Over the last century perennial surges in the popularity of Latin American couple dance genres such as tango and rumba in the United States have served as lightning rods for debate on issues of morality, performance, and identity. These “crazes” have fueled the collective American imagination, reinforcing a type of Latin American exotica that prevailed throughout the twentieth century and into the next. Consequently, they have also fostered an entirely new style of performance as white Americans borrowed—or perhaps better stated, appropriated—these genres for their own. For instance, the two styles of tango performed by ballroom dancers today, some one hundred years after its introduction to American audiences in theaters and exhibition performances, is sufficiently distant from its Argentine roots to be considered an entirely different dance employing different movements, rhythms, and musical accompaniment.

This article explores this particular brand of cross-cultural borrowing through an ethnographic accounting of a salsa dance formation team in central Illinois. Salsa is the latest of the Latin dance crazes, and since the earl. 1990. the genre has experienced increased attention from mainstream American audiences who have invested significant resources in order to learn to dance salsa. Formation teams are presentational performance ensembles, in this case combining salsa; ballroom; and staged, theatrical dance, and generally draw their enthusiasts from ballroom dance circles.

Dance is frequently described as being “about” movement. “Dance,” writes Ann Daly, “although it has a visual component, is fundamentally a kinesthetic art” (Daly 1992, 243). Audience experiences of dance can therefore be conceptualized in terms of responses to movement, most prominently in terms of what has been described as “kinesthetic empathy.” What does it mean, however, to watch, respond to, or appreciate movement? And how does the historical and theoretical concept of kinesthetic empathy relate to contemporary audiences' articulations of the experience of watching dance?

This article sets out to answer these questions by exploring different kinds of kinesthetic and empathetic responses and pleasures (and indeed displeasures) articulated by spectators of live dance across different styles and contexts. Pleasure is of particular importance to audience studies because it relates to motivations. Why do people seek out dance performances to watch? What are they looking for in the experience? In this context, we are interested in kinesthetic empathy as a mode of engaging with dance that can give pleasure to spectators and can be a strong motivating factor in why people choose to watch dance.

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.