Long before I became a committed academic, long before I was a college professor teaching dance history, long before terminal degrees and professional titles, I chanced upon an exhibition of early dance photographs at the Rodin Museum in Paris. I bought the small catalogue, and from time to time I would page through the striking black and white images searching for dancing inspiration. I always paused at a certain one of Loïe Fuller. There she is, radiant in the sunlight of Rodin's garden, chest open, arms spread like great wings, running full force towards the camera. It is an image of a strong, mature woman, one who exudes a joyful, yet earthy energy. A copy of this photograph taken in 1900 by Eugène Druet currently hangs above my desk.

With a nod to the meanings embedded in historical study, Walter Benjamin once wrote: “To dwell means to leave traces” (1999, 9). Indeed, traces are the material artifacts that constitute the stuff of historical inquiry, the bits and pieces of a life that scholars follow, gather up, and survey. The word itself suggests the actual imprint of a figure who has passed, the footprint, mark or impression of a person or event. These kinds of traces are omnipresent in the case of Loie Fuller. Some traces are more visible than others, some more easily located. But all traces—once noticed—draw us into another reality.

BDG: Seán, I want to start with something that you said yesterday about never having been able to do Bill's [Bill T. Jones's] movement the way he did it—or was it the way he wanted it done? Could you talk about that?

SC: The way he did it. Bill has a very inventive, deeply personal, and unique way of moving, perhaps because he didn't come up through the sort of modern dance training sought by many African-American dancers. People in college told Bill that he should go to New York to be “finished” by Alvin Ailey and he really did not have an interest in that. Bill studied dance with Percival Borde and contact improvisation with Lois Welk and was a track star in high school and college. He did a lot of musical theater in high school with an English teacher he loved very much. Bill was about dancing his own way.

Arnold Genthe's 1915 photograph of Anna Pavlova, taken as she leaps into the air, is perhaps the earliest photograph of free movement in dance (Fig. 1). Unlike many other early images, with long exposure times necessitating static poses or wires to hold up the dancers, this photograph depicts actual movement. This claim to authenticity and actuality is a powerful part of its appeal; looking at the image, viewers are sure that they are witnesses to a faithful reproduction of Pavlova dancing, that they are seeing the dance of the past. Considered in this manner, the photograph is an example of the revelatory power of the camera to show us what has been.

However, Genthe's photograph is not a powerful image simply because it is, authentically, of a dancer in motion. It might have mechanically frozen its subject in time, but the photograph communicates movement beyond the moment it depicts—beyond, in a sense, what it reveals photographically to what it evokes in the mind of the viewer. Viewers are able to see movement in details indicative of motion: the flowing fabric of the costume, Pavlova's bodily posture with raised and powerfully muscled thigh, the elevated arm gestures, and the sharply bent and thrusting toes. Additionally, the degree of blur in the photograph provides an indistinctness that is suggestive of something in motion; oddly, the partial obscurity of the picture prompts viewers to imagine more than they can see. All of these elements are evocative indications of movement; they are neither documentary nor part of what can be called photographic revelation, but are instead representational.

For the past few years, critics, fans, and even Bill T. Jones himself have been talking about the artist's move from explicitly political, identity-based works to an investigation of aesthetics and pure movement. They talk about the more conventional makeup of Jones's current ensemble—the fact that Lawrence Goldhuber and Alexandra Beller are no longer in the company, dancers described in the New York Times as “imperfect” because “chubbier than the norm” (Dunning 2002). They discuss the fact that Jones rarely uses text these days and is no longer confrontational. He dances to Beethover and performs at Lincoln Center with the Chamber Music Society. In a 1997 mterview with Richard Covington, Jones explains this shift in his work by stating, “It's not quite as sexy to talk about. What was being said in those earlier works was as important as how it was being danced. Here, I'm trying to think about how it's danced first, trusting that the political, social, all those things are in our bodies literally, and in the eyes of the beholder” (Covington 1997).

A growing number of practitioners in the international community of choreographers and performers has begun to experiment with computer-assisted work linking dance and new technologies. This hardly comes as a surprise, since dance-on-film and videodance had already attracted considerable attention, at least since the 1980s. Earlier experiments, such as the astonishing films by Maya Deren, take us back to the 1940s, and today's motion capture-based animations find their historical roots in late nineteenth century motion studies in chronophotography and early cinema (Muybridge, Marey, Méliès). Furthermore, dancemakers, researchers, and teachers have used film or video as a vital means of documenting or analyzing existing choreographies. Some scholars and software programmers published tools (LabanWriter, LifeForms) that attracted attention in the field of dance notation and preservation as well as among choreographers (e.g., Merce Cunningham) who wanted to utilize the computer for the invention and visualization of new movement possibilities.

Robert Morris's dance Site (Fig. 1) premiered in February 1964 at the Surplus Dance Theater in New York City. Choreographed and performed by Morris, Site also featured the visual artist Carolee Schneemann and several sheets of four-by-eight foot plywood. Although it may seem odd to include these wooden panels among the performers, they assumed an active role in the choreography. Ironically, it was Schneemann who provided the background scenery. Nude and covered in white paint, she sat motionless throughout the performance, recreating the pose and persona of Edouard Manet's famous 1863 painting of Olympia while Morris manipulated the large wooden boards. In a graceful duet with inanimate partners, Morris spun the rectangular planes from a point on the ground, maneuvered them around his body, lifted them over his head, caressed their even form as he slowly moved his hand across one edge, and balanced the panels on his back as he moved across the stage. Not only did Morris never dance with Schneemann, he did not even seem to notice her.

In a career spanning over forty years, Robert Morris has produced theoretical articles, paintings, videos, installations, and environmental art in addition to his work in dance; nevertheless, the American artist remains best known for his Minimalist sculptures of the 1960s (Figs. 2 and 3). Like the works of his colleagues Donald Judd and Carl Andre, Morris's spare, geometrical objects of that period were three-dimensional and called attention to issues of site and artistic context. They also resisted past artistic conventions based in subjective methods of composition, expressivity, and metaphor. Morris, however, distinguished himself among this group of visual artists by the emphasis he placed on the viewer's bodily relationship with the art object, a distinction that derives directly from his unique involvement in avant-garde dance.

This essay is a descriptive analysis of a 2000 encounter with Mayan “mambo” dancing in a mountain community, an encounter that challenges assumptions about prevalent notions of exoticism, identity, and cultural authenticity. Traveling in Guatemala with a group of international scholars, I witnessed a public performance of the transnational mambo by costumed Guatemalans that was not mambo, not Mayan, and not social. Male performers, in celebration of Corpus Christi, dressed as Disney-style costume characters and executed routines to merengue music while nondancing participants watched the spectacle. This contradictory display of dancing encouraged me to reflect on the impact of popular social dance and to examine the complicated meanings communicated by performers who incorporate body-based art into indigenous social and economic paradigms. The performers' unique interpretation of mambo dance within the context of a public Corpus Christi festival underscored discrepancies between institutional perceptions of the mambo and the popular reuse of dance motifs. At the same time, the performance, which used clowning as a mechanism to engage the audience, inverted the solemnity of the religious feast day.

Onstage, a nineteenth-century German girl waits for her first encounter with the Middle East, which will come courtesy of Tchaikovsky and the many years of choreographic evolution that have preceded the current version of The Nutcracker in which she is performing. The girl's name is Clara (or sometimes Marie), and she has come to a fantasy land, where a lively Spanish dance has been given in her honor. Now, there is softer, slower music with a steady, insistent rhythm and a snaking melody carried by an English horn. Dancers glide onto the stage wearing gauzy harem pants and jeweled headdresses, their faces impassive, their gait deliberate and stately. Who are they? Clara's face seems to ask, and what will they do? Certainly it will be like nothing she has ever seen before because they are dressed like people from far away, a hot climate perhaps, where no one moves quickly and different customs prevail. There is a woman who walks like a princess, with a cool, internal gaze and limbs that stretch out imperially. A consort picks her up and swirls her arched figure around as if she were in need of a breeze. Then they stand side by side, pausing as if transfixed by a greater power, their hands drifting above them with palms facing the sky. When they disappear, Clara stares after them, wondering, no doubt, where they came from and what on earth that was all about.

Nearly twenty years ago, I took a graduate seminar on postcolonial theory with Edward Said in the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University. It was a heady experience: competitive grad students and young faculty members vied for his imperious (I realize the irony of the word in reference to Said!) attentions. We read novels—potent, searing, difficult novels—alongside some of the theorists of political struggle who would indelibly alter my understanding of what cultural resistance could mean. Said's recent death, which of course coincided with a period of distressing shifts in political tides, has placed pressure on those of us engaged with cultural analysis to probe even more deeply the significance of anticolonial struggle in cultural forms. As a dance scholar, I have found myself reflecting on the ways in which postcolonial theory might inform my understanding of the power of choreography to affect political change—but also on the ways in which dance can inform our readings of postcolonial theory.