This article deals with the representation of Kenyan national identity through dance. It analyses the reenactment of a series of ethnic dances at Bomas of Kenya, a cultural center located just outside Nairobi and part of the network of National Museums of Kenya. As an institution resulting from a strategic political investment in both Kenya's immaterial heritage and the tourist industry, since its inception in the early 1970s Bomas of Kenya has played an important role in conveying the idea of ethnic harmony and national unity. The comparison with Cut Off My Tongue (2009), the show by Kenyan writer and performer Sitawa Namwalie in which dance is interwoven with political satire to frame reflections on negative ethnicity, serves to highlight the implications that different approaches to dancing bodies, through such concepts as identity, embodiment, archive, and memory, could have for a meaningful political future.

This article compares Rudolf von Laban's and Mary Wigman's practices and theories of gestural flow with Walter Benjamin's theory of gesture as interruption. For Laban and Wigman, gesture mirrors a vitalist understanding of life that is based on the rediscovery of transhistorical continuities between human and cosmic energy. Benjamin's Brechtian gestures address inscriptions and manipulations of bodies, which provide comment on the conditions of society by subjecting to critique the essentializing aspects of historical and vitalist flow. Addressing in particular forms of vibration as both enriching and destabilizing the gestural from its margins, my article explores how vibratory energy indicates a self-reflexive theory of media, but also a revolutionary charge, in Benjamin; how it engenders a politically ambivalent process of transmission between dancers and audience in Laban; and how it becomes an actual mode of movement in Wigman. The historical inquiry contributes to a genealogy of vibration in contemporary dance.

In this article, original interview material, existing published accounts, and the author's own experience as a contemporary dancer are put in conversation to explicitly address a particular kinesthetic awareness, sensitivity, and curiosity valued and employed by a group of dancers in the practice of contemporary dance, which is referred to as a kinesthetic mode of attention. The research informing this article uses a phenomenological and sociological approach and discusses, in detail, what this mode of attending “is like,” how it is described in different ways by dancers, and how it might be developed and nurtured in training and working in the style of contemporary dance. An overarching aim of this work is to contribute to greater understanding and valuing of the nuances and particularities of kinesthetic intelligence in dance practices and to address the cognitive aspects of dancing.

In this article, I explore the way that the creation and presentation of Lloyd Newsom's Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men (1988) for DV8 confronted the choreographer, performers, and audience with questions about the ethics of sex and romance and the treatment of gay men during the AIDS crisis. To analyze the complex affective relationships within and around the piece, I follow Emmanuel Levinas's ethical theory of the face in conjunction with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's related theory of faciality, which I interpret as referring to a disciplinary situation in which subjects are created through a process of terrorizing and shaming.

In the past decade, a growing discourse has developed among choreographers, dance artists, and their collaborators, who are eager to articulate their processes, practices, and working methods through different types of writing and publication. Artists’ books, objects, and online platforms—from Thomas Lehmen's Schreibstück (2002) and FUNKTIONEN tool box (2004), to BADco's Whatever Dance Toolbox (2011) in collaboration with Daniel Turing, and the Forsythe Company's project Motionbank (2010–2013)—have contributed to what we may describe today as the “publishing of choreographic ideas,” as proposed by Scott deLahunta (2015). Jeroen Peeters, editor of Are We Here Yet? (2010), which focuses on the work of Meg Stuart, emphasizes the discourse intrinsic to dance making, while Mårten Spångberg invites artists to “write their own history,” with projects such as The Swedish Dance History (2009–today), to give but one example. Alongside these developments, practice-as-research, which involves dance making and writing, is becoming more established within university settings; and presentations of/on artistic research are now common in conferences, symposia, and other sites of knowledge exchange. We could argue then that the development of an artist's theory of knowledge, which scholars such as Susan Melrose (2007) have been encouraging since the early 2000s, is now well under way both within and without the academy.