Between 1958 and 1961, Jerome Robbins's Ballets: U.S.A. company toured to European arts festivals with a repertory of new and existing works, most of which remain in performance more than six decades later. Cold War political and artistic imperatives intersected in choreography that circulated visions of “American” innovation and youthful vitality, danced to an eclectic range of scores by a mixed-race cast. Archival documentation of the funding process reveals discussions about aesthetic priorities and the choreographer's responsibility to the US government. Analysis of press coverage of the performances also considers the extent to which diplomatic objectives were achieved.

The Zimbabwean writers Catherine Buckle and Nyaradzo Mtizira reimagine kongonya dance in their works Beyond Tears: Zimbabwe's Tragedy (2002) and The Chimurenga Protocol (2008), respectively. Both the European-born Buckle and the black Zimbabwean Mtizira harness the dance to evoke the post-2000 jambanja experiences associated with Zimbabwe's controversial “Third Chimurenga,” or the fast-track land reform program, beginning in 2000. Their contrasting depictions of dance epitomize the differing views on Zimbabwe's land reform program. Largely, whereas Buckle's novel is a memoir which personalizes a farmer's encounters with dancing African/Zimbabwean “land invaders,” Mtizira's is a panegyric that collectively reimagines a nation's defiant revolution against purported forces of Western imperialism. Both writers’ representations of the post-2000 Zimbabwe's dance performances are therefore colored and compromised by racial subjectivity.

The dominant narrative regarding breaking history is that the dance developed as an “exclusively male” expression of inner-city “machismo.” In this study, I challenge this narrative by bringing in the voices of breaking's often-neglected founding practitioners. By juxtaposing primary testimonies with mainstream representations, I aim to show how women have histoirically played a critical role in the dance, and how hegemonic discourse has obscured our understanding of hip-hop's beginnings. I also consider how uncovering the role of women in breaking's history reframes prevailing conceptualizations of its gender performance.

This article analyzes the processes of branqueamento (whitening) contained within the ideology of mestiçagem (racial miscegenation) through the work of Brazilian dancer, choreographer, and dance pedagogue Eros Volúsia (1914–2004) in the context of the establishment of the myth of racial democracy in early twentieth-century Brazil. I argue that Eros Volúsia not only embodied Brazil's allegedly harmonious racial mixture through her stylized “folk” dances, but her bailado brasileiro (Brazilian ballet) in fact choreographed Brazil's modernity and aspirations of whiteness. I compare Volúsia's prominent career as a performer and pedagogue in Brazil with her brief film career in the United States, where Volúsia had the opportunity to follow in Carmen Miranda's footsteps and become the next “Brazilian bombshell,” but instead chose to return to Brazil, where she was able to maintain her white privilege and her status as author and artist.

This article argues that the performance of a dance entails varying degrees of openness and spontaneity and that, on these terms, any dance can be considered improvised. The first part substantiates this claim, whereupon the second part deals with the contingent question as to how dancers then handle openness and spontaneity differently in improvisation practices. To answer this question, the article turns to enactive and phenomenological clarifications of agency—our capacity to perform acts—and by analyzing the improvisation of Danish performer Kitt Johnson, indicates how this clarification can help us understand the different ways agency is exercised when improvising.

This essay examines from an artist-researcher perspective the durational solo dance work Likely Terpsichore? (Fragments), created for and performed at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology (UK) in 2018. It asks how dance's presence in the archaeological museum might allow an alternative visibility for ancient female bodies previously rendered only partially visible by history. It makes a claim for dance in the archaeological museum as a subversive act of radical archaeology, in terms of how, by playing on notions of dismembering/remembering histories, it seeks to disrupt received notions of how we view and understand ancient history and culture.