This article introduces the digital humanities and dance studies project Mapping Touring, and employs it in an analysis of Denishawn's touring prior to and immediately following the company's 1925–26 tour to Asia. Situated within the archival turn in dance, Mapping Touring emphasizes the possibilities of spatial and comparative analysis for touring dance artists, with information about their location and repertory drawn from archival sources, gathered and stored in a database, and plotted on interactive maps. With Denishawn as a case study, I contend that digital mapping can make visible some of the implications of travel and touring for the circulation and spread of theories of embodiment contained in dance repertory.

Frevo is an energetic dance from Recife, the capital of Brazil's northeastern state of Pernambuco. Frevo is a dance of resistance because it narrates complex notions of identity that contribute to social empowerment through strategic processes of liberation for marginalized groups. The dance originates from the Brazilian martial art of capoeira and it is carnivalesque because it is performed in crowded, often violent streets during carnival, when power hierarchies are disrupted. Through this ethnographic research, I consider how frevo practitioners engage in cultural resistance using a practice that I call “carnivalesque improvisation.”

Contemporary dance in Senegal emerged and thrives at the interstices of the local and the global. Multiple expectations and values, of which gender and sexuality are no small part, converge at the site of creation and production, enlisting choreographers to navigate oftentimes conflicting ideologies. Based on ethnographic research, this article examines three works by Senegalese men that employ gender and sexual transgressions alongside the artists’ seemingly contradictory verbal articulations of their work. Using the local-global entanglement as an analytical framework, I argue that these works offer ambiguous assemblages of masculinities that challenge conventional masculinity in Senegal, thereby elucidating the potentiality for contemporary dance to transcend singular meaning-making capacity.

This article considers the ethico-aesthetic potential of British choreographic practices that respond to questions raised by the current sociopolitical moment by staging im/possibilities and dis/orientation and by envisioning alternative understandings of the present. It embraces Karen Barad's new materialist onto-epistemology as an inspiring framework to discuss the significance of choreography that troubles accepted patterns of relationality and engages in a creative-critical remapping of experience.

In 2016, director George C. Wolfe and choreographer Savion Glover created Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed, a backstage musical about the 1921 show Shuffle Along, noted for its all-black cast and creative team. Although Wolfe proclaimed dance to be the most important aspect of the original musical, his production does not mention Shuffle Along’s original choreographer, Lawrence Deas, nor does it examine the labor of choreography. These omissions expose how dance on Broadway remains subordinate to other aspects of a musical, thus reproducing racist and sexist logics about embodied performance.