This article examines the late Indian choreographer Chandralekha's final work Sharira (2001), an intense duet between a woman and a man, as a challenge to heteronormative codes that govern the performance of Indian sexuality. This challenge is relayed in two ways: first, through a haunting triangle motif of the yoni (vagina in Sanskrit), that is evoked repeatedly through the controlled parting of the female dancer's legs, reminding us that her body is both a harbinger of life and a center of sexual agency. Second, the piece critiques heteronormativity through an über-slowing down of choreographic time, which emphasizes the materiality of the female body and the extremes it can execute. The article proposes that these two choreographic strategies are efficacious in rewriting heteronormative codes surrounding Indian sexuality only because they work interdependently. It is only because the female performer is able to part her legs in hyper-slow-motion that the evocations of her yoni move beyond the realm of an objectified, sexual body part that is to be occupied and consumed by a male partner. Instead it becomes a powerful emblem of her ability to contain and spawn sexual desire as well as to create, sustain, and give birth to life.

Several films of 1935 catapulted tap dancers Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Eleanor Powell to movie stardom. Robinson's The Littlest Rebel and Powell's Broadway Melody of 1936 utilize a cinematic formula that intercuts the virtuosic footwork of the tap artists with giant close-ups of their toothy grins. The experience for contemporary spectators can be unnerving, as magnified lips, teeth, and eyes dominate the screen and interrupt the pleasure of watching expert tap. While the close-up smile and the choreography of the camera helped the film industry reproduce the excitement of live performance, these dance scenes also mobilize constructions of black masculinity and white femininity, through editing techniques that create multilayered narratives of power, intimacy, and submission. Robinson's close-up can be read as a depiction of racial subservience, as audiences are confronted with the smiling minstrel mask and the perpetuation of the legacy of minstrelsy in Hollywood. Powell's smile in close-up emphasizes her feminine sexual availability and evokes the voyeuristic camera shots of beaming, passive showgirls. The interplay in these two movies between the extremes of the tap dancer's body, the smile and feet, offers an opportunity to examine tap virtuosity within Hollywood's rigid system of racial and gender stereotypes.

Although the face possesses potent social and symbolic meaning, the “dancing face” is rarely addressed in dance scholarship. In spite of its neglect, the face participates choreographically in the realization of aesthetic codes and embodied conventions that pertain to different dance styles and genres. I therefore turn to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's (1987) theory of “faciality” to understand the semiotic coding of the face in relation to the Busby Berkeley chorus girl. Although their work offers an important critique of universalist theorizations of facial expression, I argue that “facial choreography” offers scope to dismantle the legibility of the face that is produced through the overcoded “abstract machine of faciality.” To do so, I introduce the concept of a “choreographic interface” to explore how facial expression enters into a choreographic relationship with other faces and bodily territories. With this in mind, I explore two dancing bodies that engage the face in ways that complicate existing modalities of facial expression. I analyze a hip-hop battle and a neo-burlesque striptease number to show how the mobility and ambiguity of facial choreography opens a dialogic space through which meaning is generated and social and political critique take place.

This article examines the treatment of the pelvis in the Pilates exercises “Single Leg Stretch” and “Leg Circles.” The teaching practices of the hips, as commonly explained in Pilates educational manuals, reinforce behaviors of a noble-class and racially “white” aesthetic. Central to this article is the troubling notion of white racial superiority and, specifically, the colonizing, prejudicial, and denigrating mentality found in the superiority of whiteness and its embodied behaviors. Using the two Pilates exercises, I illuminate how perceived kinesthetic understandings of race in the body may be normalized and privileged. By examining the intersections between dance and Pilates history, this article reveals the ways embodied discourses in Pilates are “white” in nature, and situates Pilates as a product of historically constructed social behaviors of dominant Anglo-European culture.

Ballet faced formidable obstacles in establishing itself as a “home-grown” transplant at mid-century. Scholars have emphasized choreographic efforts to cultivate a nationally identifiable style during the period, focusing primarily on the emergence of Balanchine and neo-classicism. Yet the role of dancers in the Americanization of ballet largely has not been probed. This article examines the part that Maria Tallchief, daughter of a “full-blooded” Osage Indian father and Scotch-Irish mother, and the first American ballerina to reach prima status, played in changing public perceptions of ballet in the mid-twentieth century. Between 1952 and 1954, national magazines such as Dance magazine, Holiday, and Newsweek featured images of Tallchief on their covers, lending visual credibility to claims that ballet, which many at the time considered a “foreign” dance form, had come of age in the U.S. I argue that iconographic portrayals of Tallchief's face, legs, and feet, which illustrated the dancer's physical assimilation of Balanchine's approach to dance technique, along with narratives of her personal story, advanced an account of ballet's Americanization that placed the dancer, as much as if not more than Balanchine, at center stage. I then illuminate how Tallchief's exemplification of self-discipline and initiative bolstered nostalgic arguments about the successful “citizenship” of white ethnic immigrants, while also promoting arguments about the viability of Indian assimilation during the tribal termination era. When seen in the contemporaneous contexts of ballet's Americanization and societal debates over Native American citizenship, Tallchief's story is seen to complicate the meanings of “assimilation” and “citizenship” in postwar America.

On the cover of both of these two books are photographs of women in loose white pants—arms extended, wrists twisted, each wearing concentrated facial expressions; both seen from front and back as if doubling in a mirror. Perhaps suggested by the reaching gesture, the bodies seem to implore the viewer. It is as if movement is held out and yet in abeyance, incomplete within the image, thus awaiting further fulfillment and explanation. As with the images, both books grapple with the conundrum of how movement communicates to a viewer, and how feelings might be evoked, whether kinesthetically or choreographically. Similar but different—one more historical, the other more fragmented—they also address the timely question of empathy in creative practice.

It appears to be a ritual among salsa dance scholars to open by sharing a personal salsa experience. I will follow their lead: My introduction to Los Angeles–style salsa came on a Saturday night in the spring of 1999, when I had the pleasure of taking a tour of the city's salsa scene with dance scholar Juliet McMains. Already an established professional ballroom dancer, McMains was just beginning her graduate studies at the University of California–Riverside where I was visiting faculty, having recently co-edited a collection on Latin/o American social dance. Lucky for me, McMains was among the many brilliant students who enrolled in my class on race and dance. The night of our tour, she invited a handsome friend and fellow ballroom dancer to partner first one of us, then the other, throughout the night. He drove us around the city as we stopped at a cramped restaurant-turned-nightclub in a strip mall, at a glamorous ballroom in Beverly Hills, then ended the night downtown at a massive disco in a former movie palace, the Mayan nightclub.