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are a far cry from perceiving the artist in a consistent manner, some even going so far as to criticize her for being “outdated.”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?

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.

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.

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.

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.