Critics described Pina Bausch's work as “absolutely contemporary” and as being “important dance heritage,” which is precisely the opposite of contemporary, namely, historical. This contradictoriness—though productive in its own right—is symptomatic of the perspective of dance journalism brought to bear on Pina Bausch's later works in particular. But even reviews of her earlier works are a far cry from perceiving the artist in a consistent manner, some even going so far as to criticize her for being “outdated.” Apparently, Bausch's art continuously poses a challenge for dance critics because it defies easy categorization in aesthetic terms, thereby undermining the implicit postulates and classificatory criteria underlying dance reviews. There is—at least in the German-speaking area—broad consensus regarding the functions of today's dance reviews as a text genre: as a translation of dance into language, dance reviews describe, analyze, and judge. With a focus on reviews of pieces by Pina Bausch, this essay proposes to investigate how dance is translated (“trans-posed”) by considering the questions: what do reviews do when they put things into words? How are their own seemingly firm categorizations and postulates thereby destabilized or at least opened to debate?

In the autumn of 2015, on the back of the publication of my monograph Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism (Mitra 2015), I was settling into my Brunel University London-sponsored sabbatical to kick-start my postdoctoral research project, then titled “Historicizing and Mapping British Physical Theatre.” At that stage, this new field of study, methodology, and tone of enquiry felt significantly different from the decolonial spirit of my book, which examines the works of the British-Bangladeshi dance artist Akram Khan at the intersections of postcoloniality, race, gender, sexuality, mobility, interculturalism, and globalization, arguing for his choreographic choices as discerning political acts that decenter the whiteness of contemporary western dance from his position within this center. With this new project I was keen, instead, to investigate the development of “British physical theatre” as an interdisciplinary genre that emerged interstitially between and through its “double legacy in both avant-garde theatre and dance” (Sánchez-Colberg 2007, 21) with a particular emphasis on what the import of the choreographic vocabulary of partnering would have brought to these experiments. Very conscious that the now ubiquitous aesthetic of partnering in contemporary Euro-American theater dance derived its roots from the somatic explorations of contact improvisation, I was intrigued to examine how the genre of British physical theatre would have engaged with choreographic touch from its somatic beginnings in contact improvisation to its politicized and aestheticized manifestation in partnering. I was also conscious, of course, of the role that Steve Paxton, the artist whose name has become synonymous with contact improvisation's inception and development in 1970s United States, had to play in teaching contact improvisation in the dance program at Dartington College of Arts in the United Kingdom (UK) in the 1970s and 1980s. Driven by a need to examine the potential relationship between Dartington's 1970s movement experiments with Paxton and contact improvisation, and the emergence of partnering as a key aesthetic within British contemporary dance, specifically its manifestation in physical theatre, I wanted to interview Paxton himself. Needless to say, I was of course fully aware of the difficulty in making such an important research opportunity materialize. However, within months, the remarkable generosity of our dance studies network, in this instance embodied by Professors Susan Foster and Ann Cooper Albright, and the dance artist Lisa Nelson, led me to the inbox of Steve Paxton himself in November 2015. Paxton was instantly responsive to my e-mail communications, and deeply invested and committed to sharing his experiences and insights with me. We arranged our Skype interview for early 2016, agreeing that this would give me enough time to research existing interviews with Paxton, in print and on video, to ensure that I could delineate my own questions for him in productive ways. The more I researched, the more a feature of the extensive archive of interviews with Paxton revealed itself: the predominant absence of bodies and perspectives of color from the early days of contact improvisation's experiments. This absence, in turn, became more and more present in my thinking.

This article examines the development of theatricality in modern dance by comparing two dances: Mary Wigman's Totenmal (1930) and Hanya Holm's Trend (1937). By looking at the interplay between group and solo choreography, lighting design and themes, this paper will show how Holm combined the skills she learned codirecting Totenmal at the Dancers’ Congress in Munich to her work with American dance artists at the Bennington School of the Dance to create her first important work. It will examine why Trend was successful as a collaborative project, as well as show how it diverged ideologically from Wigman's work in the 1930s.

This essay asks the question whether and in what respect the work of German choreographer Pina Bausch can be considered to be contemporary. Building on Peter Osborne's definition of the contemporary as “a disjunctive unity of present times,” I aim to extract the conceptual concerns of Bausch's work that thus far have received little critical attention. In so doing, I first consider the temporal relations articulated in Bausch's work, particularly her relation to the past that comes to define the present, exposing its claims to unity as a fiction. Second, I focus on the medial aspects of Bausch's work, including her 1988/89 film, The Plaint of the Empress. By making the media aspect of Bausch's work the center of my attention, I argue that it is precisely the work's media saturation that allows for its contemporary distribution, display, and formatting. It is here that Bausch's contemporaneity as a principle of work and a working principle can be found.

In line with the thinking of Laurence Louppe calling for a reevaluation and problematisation of oral sources within a dance history framework, this paper sets out to examine the extensive archive of the Bennington Summer School of the Dance Oral History Project, conducted between 1978 and 1979 and housed today at Columbia University. By taking as a starting point the dancer's voice at the heart of the educational project conceived by Martha Hill and Mary Jo Shelly, a different dance history of the thirties begins to emerge, bringing to the fore the dancer's evolving experience that constitutes a true Bennington archive, set against the backdrop of the “Big Four” ultimately not part of the project.

This essay examines Jay Pather's site-specific work Cityscapes (2002) within a theoretical discussion of the conjuncture and disjuncture of space and race in South Africa. Jay Pather, a South African of Indian ancestry, an innovative choreographer and curator of site-specific works, creatively uses space to inspire social change by providing access and challenging exclusions—social, cultural, political—of black and colored South Africans during apartheid (1948–1994) and after. A progressive vision underlies his avant-garde work expressed via a hybrid choreographic palette of South African classical and popular dance styles, Indian classical dance, modern and contemporary dance. His choreography is performed across South Africa and the African continent as well as in Denmark, Mumbai, and New York City.

This article analyses Thierry De Mey's screendance One Flat Thing, reproduced based on William Forsythe's dance of the same name. The filmmaker creates a heightened atmosphere of otherworldliness by drawing on the choreographer's own conception of it: from romantic ballet and the technique of disfocus. In addition to filming Forsythe's main dance, the screendance includes five movement sequences that do not appear in the original choreography. Their interspersion into the filming of the main dance contributes strikingly to the alien landscape: (1) the architectural composition of the tables, (2) the dancers’ exaggerated, disjointed movements, (3) the filmic editing through juxtaposing cuts, and (4) the close-ups for intimacy and deterritorialization. By more prominently integrating Forsythe's deconstructive aesthetic, De Mey creates an enhanced otherworld through the medium of screendance that is not possible to achieve with live dance.

Through close analysis of primary and secondary source material related to Katherine Dunham's Tango (1954), this article examines the protest message of this dance work within the political and social context of the time. The article focuses first on Dunham's understanding of the Argentine populist political movement known as Peronism, and secondly on the Argentine reception of the piece's protest against Juan Domingo Perón's government. The article argues that, contrary to existing interpretations of the work, Tango articulated with the cultural policies promoted by Perón's government, rather than working as a protest performance against it.

Noa Eshkol (1924–2007) was an Israeli dance artist who developed a movement notation system in collaboration with her colleague, the architect Avraham Wachman. Consideration of Eshkol's dance values, particularly as they pertain to dance's basis in movement, understood as a material that can be “thought,” like music, by means of a notation system, and the role of the dancers as the work's primary audience, can contribute to the ongoing task of investigating dance modernism and its variety of authorship and spectatorship modes.

In this article, I specify and historicize the modes of communication that were at play among practitioners of contact improvisation+ and between the dancers and their audiences throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s. I argue that contact improvisation's turn away from dance as a performed visual medium and toward the tactile experience of the participants exceeds a phenomenological reading and instead needs to be considered in light of anarchist theories of mutual assistance in which group behavior supports individual development. At the same time, however, Steve Paxton, the founder of the form, became concerned precisely with its opacity for an audience. I locate this ambivalent engagement with the performance of a participatory action in the edited video recordings that Paxton made together with Lisa Nelson, Nancy Stark Smith, and Steve Christiansen. These mediated videos, aligned with the rise of video art, paradoxically aim to spark a stronger connection than Paxton thought was possible during the live demonstrations of the form.

In this essay, I reexamine Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton's 1963 dance Word Words, arguing that this apparently “minimalist” work in fact deployed “underground” strategies, those of female (and male) impersonation. Camp performance, an approach that Rainer soon disavowed, allowed Word Words to explore gender in ways that were not possible by the time Rainer developed Trio A. Word Words did not simply “overwrite” Rainer's (female) gender, as has been suggested alongside similar discussions of Trio A and gender, but destabilized the gender system's binaries: a deeply radical move, even in the context of other Judson performances using camp.

Choreographers have begun experimenting with artist-driven archives using digital technologies, exhibitions and installations, and live performance as a way to generate new work from their own archival materials and increase access to their body of work for audiences. This article focuses on three recent artist-driven archive projects by notable American choreographers Eiko & Koma, Bebe Miller Company, and Jennifer Monson. Drawing on interviews with the choreographers as well as on analyses of the three projects, I suggest that these projects' most important contribution is the idea that archives are not separate from a choreographer's body of work, but are indeed a part of his or her creative process and artistic production.

“Activating Whiteness: Racializing the Ordinary in US American Postmodern Dance” explores how the choreographic turn to postmodernism twisted the trope of racial exclusion from a focus on trained bodies to a focus on ordinary bodies. Analyses of Yvonne Rainer's Trio A (1966) and Trisha Brown's Locus (1975) demonstrate how ordinary bodies shape racially exclusive spaces and activate the biopolitical mechanisms of normalization that their choreography allegedly contests. This essay argues that the spaces activated by the bodies that shaped them carry the physical trace of the performers’ race through the enduring invisibility of whiteness.

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.

At 656 pages wide and 31 authors deep, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics collection contains a veritable who's who of US, UK, and EU dance scholarship. It also importantly documents the weight of the loss to the field of coeditor Randy Martin, whose materialist investigations of dance and politics influence the volume's contributions in powerful and explicit ways. Through the dedicated energies of Martin's fellow coeditors Rebekah Kowal and Gerald Siegmund, the volume updates an editorial burden assumed by earlier collections and field progenitors: interpreting dance's irreconcilable relationship to politics, a tension that the volume's contributors do not promise to reconcile. But what the text does, and with great urgency, is to revise and update long-standing debates on dance's politics of representation while also flagging hierarchical issues internal to dance research as areas for future investigation.

This article argues that nationalism and international diplomacy are embodied practices, as evidenced through the movement of international ballet dancers in South Africa. Under the apartheid regime, South African professional ballet received generous support from governmental sources. Since the transition to democracy, professional ballet companies have utilized creative strategies to court new sources of support including that of the ruling African National Congress. A key move in this campaign has been “ballet diplomacy” with Cuba—the transnational circulation of dancers, teachers, techniques, and performances in the name of the nation. Professional ballet's buy-in into South African nationalism locates dancers’ bodies in the maintenance and dissemination of state politics.