Identity, difference, and translation are important theoretical concepts in the field of translation studies and postcolonial studies. It is a basic assumption of this text that aesthetic and cultural translation is exposed to the paradox of identity and difference and that this paradox is particularly evident in artistic performance practices such as dance and choreography. Focusing on the artistic work of choreographer and dancer Germaine Acogny (Senegal), the text addresses artistic translation practices under postcolonial conditions in the global art market of so-called “contemporary dance.” The aim is to illustrate how contradictory, hybrid, and fragmented the cultural and aesthetic translation process is, how the global art market shapes the artistic strategies of translation, and how aesthetic productivity lies in the impossibility of translating cultural experience artistically.

Choreographic bodies are empowered by modes of expansion and transgression. Focusing on the energetic processes that lead to such empowerment, this article discusses the perceptual politics of trancelike scenes in the work of contemporary European choreographers and performers. As a body-mobilizing choreographic strategy of out-of-body and out-of-mind experiences, trance is closely linked to critical and utopian ideas, bodily transgressions, and crossed boundaries. While Mary Wigman treats trance as an incantation which contains the powers that it unleashes, contemporary choreographers like Doris Uhlich or Meg Stuart, expose the body to powers that nearly disintegrate it. As opposed to Wigman-style modernism, contemporary dance stages movement as a tremendous event that exposes performers and audiences to experiences of transgression.

This article introduces the digital humanities and dance studies project Mapping Touring, and employs it in an analysis of Denishawn's touring prior to and immediately following the company's 1925–26 tour to Asia. Situated within the archival turn in dance, Mapping Touring emphasizes the possibilities of spatial and comparative analysis for touring dance artists, with information about their location and repertory drawn from archival sources, gathered and stored in a database, and plotted on interactive maps. With Denishawn as a case study, I contend that digital mapping can make visible some of the implications of travel and touring for the circulation and spread of theories of embodiment contained in dance repertory.

At the dawn of the European refugee crisis, and in the middle of the ongoing sociopolitical and financial crisis in Greece, Greek choreographers started creating dance works that engaged immigrants and refugees. In most such initiatives, improvisation became the tool for bridging the disparity between the professional dancers and the “untrained” participants, who were often the vulnerable populations of refugees and asylum seekers. In this essay, I question the ethics and aesthetics of these methodological approaches utilized for staging encounters between natives and migrants through dance. In particular, I consider the significance of improvisation as potentially perpetuating hierarchical inequalities in the framework of Western concert dance, while I also highlight the ways that such artistic endeavors end up presenting immigrants and refugees as “Others.”

This article examines Rudolf Laban's theory of dance as it developed in his written and stage works from 1919 to 1926. Specifically, it shows how Laban defined dance as a form of positive liberty, which provided the anchor of what I label as his “embodied conservatism,” a conceptual and practical orientation of movement toward the goal of reshaping society according to principles of harmony as universal law. Bridging the history of dance with the history of political thought, I argue that Laban's theory of dance offered a theory of politics in response to social and political fracture during the Weimar Republic.

Frevo is an energetic dance from Recife, the capital of Brazil's northeastern state of Pernambuco. Frevo is a dance of resistance because it narrates complex notions of identity that contribute to social empowerment through strategic processes of liberation for marginalized groups. The dance originates from the Brazilian martial art of capoeira and it is carnivalesque because it is performed in crowded, often violent streets during carnival, when power hierarchies are disrupted. Through this ethnographic research, I consider how frevo practitioners engage in cultural resistance using a practice that I call “carnivalesque improvisation.”

Contemporary dance in Senegal emerged and thrives at the interstices of the local and the global. Multiple expectations and values, of which gender and sexuality are no small part, converge at the site of creation and production, enlisting choreographers to navigate oftentimes conflicting ideologies. Based on ethnographic research, this article examines three works by Senegalese men that employ gender and sexual transgressions alongside the artists’ seemingly contradictory verbal articulations of their work. Using the local-global entanglement as an analytical framework, I argue that these works offer ambiguous assemblages of masculinities that challenge conventional masculinity in Senegal, thereby elucidating the potentiality for contemporary dance to transcend singular meaning-making capacity.

This article analyzes three artistic acts of the subversion of precariousness in the contemporary dance community in Buenos Aires. It explores the participation of dancers in political groups that demand improvement of their working conditions. It examines how Marina Sarmiento's investigation of dance history stages a precarious body as an archive that deals with aesthetic colonialism. And lastly, it discusses the emergence of an aesthetics of precariousness in Fabian Gandini's work, which brings artistic ethics to the fore. The argument proposed in this article asserts that working conditions, history, and aesthetics represent three dimensions of contemporary dance practice that operate simultaneously and determine the precariousness in the Argentinian dance community.

The opening decades of the twentieth century saw a passing fashion for “Aztec” dancing in the vaudeville theaters of the United States. Russian classical dancers Kosloff and Fokine tapped the orientalist currents of the Ballets Russes, adopting the Aztec as superficial signs of the American. Conversely, works by Shawn and film director Cecil B. DeMille, which served as points of reference for the Russians, represented a continuation of equally orientalist attitudes toward Mexico's past, forged during the realization of the United States’ policy of Manifest Destiny. The emergence of a cadre of trained dancers from Mexico, trained by students of Kosloff and Shawn, would bring a distinctively different perspective on the presentation of their heritage to the dance stage, one that was no longer based in the imagination of an expansionist America.

This article considers the ethico-aesthetic potential of British choreographic practices that respond to questions raised by the current sociopolitical moment by staging im/possibilities and dis/orientation and by envisioning alternative understandings of the present. It embraces Karen Barad's new materialist onto-epistemology as an inspiring framework to discuss the significance of choreography that troubles accepted patterns of relationality and engages in a creative-critical remapping of experience.

This article examines Alma Guillermoprieto's use of embodied knowledge in her memoir Dancing with Cuba. Descriptions of embodiment reveal her struggle to reconcile the values of modern dance with Ernesto Guevara's symbolic New Man—the ideal revolutionary used to promote physical labor as the means to a socialist utopia. I argue that Guillermoprieto solves this crisis by turning toward language, in particular language that activates the kinesthetic imagination—an archive of embodied experiences dancers rely on to engage choreography. An emphasis on embodied knowledge in the memoir shows how crucial dancing bodies are to the literary archive of the Revolution.

This article analyzes ways in which dance as labor and artist as a specific subjectivity relate to the material conditions of their production within contexts shaped by neoliberal notions of freedom, ideologies of liberal democracy, and the logic of global capitalism. The discussion focuses on contemporary dance practices that embody some of these values by striving to be more egalitarian, thus giving performers more agency in how they participate in creative processes that lead to a collectively created performance work. This analysis emphasizes the tension between these collaborative practices and modes of producing and distributing financial and symbolic, as well as cultural forms of capital in ways that resist and/or reproduce exploitative aspects of capitalism. Examining some works by Yvonne Rainer, Xavier Le Roy, and Tino Sehgal enables the theorization of the entrepreneurial artistic archive as well as practices of crediting creative labor in relation to notions of capital, ownership, collaboration, and consequently who dance-art makers and performers become as politically progressive artists.

Project-based work is common within “precarious” working contexts. Within contemporary dance, short-term funding opportunities often result in the production of “sharings,” works in progress, and one-off performance events. This paper considers the relationship between the outputs of projects and the ontology of choreographic “works.” Drawing on Frédéric Pouillaude's conception of choreographic works as both public and resistant, I examine entities produced through projects, which, borrowing a term from choreographer Hamish MacPherson, I label “work-sketches.” Furthermore, I reflect on the correlation between “immaterial labor” and the concept of the choreographic work, thinking through the commodity form of work-sketches and probing the relationship between socioeconomic contexts and dance work ontology.

In 2016, director George C. Wolfe and choreographer Savion Glover created Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed, a backstage musical about the 1921 show Shuffle Along, noted for its all-black cast and creative team. Although Wolfe proclaimed dance to be the most important aspect of the original musical, his production does not mention Shuffle Along’s original choreographer, Lawrence Deas, nor does it examine the labor of choreography. These omissions expose how dance on Broadway remains subordinate to other aspects of a musical, thus reproducing racist and sexist logics about embodied performance.

Considerable differences exist between Irish step dancing competitions in the current era and those which were held in the late nineteenth century. This article traces the evolution of step dancing competition praxes in Australia, exposing the multiple transformations which have occurred over time. It focuses on the shift from cultural representation to individual aesthetics and the ways in which this change has resulted from disparate influences both within the genre itself and from the broader sociocultural status of Irish immigrants in Australia.