This article explores Randy Martin's approach to dance studies at the dawn of the discipline in a set of essays written between 1992 and 1998 regarding dance, ethnography, and representation. On one hand, the Marxian basis of Martin's analysis is foregrounded in this article as Martin's working method, and on the other, a theory of the audience (the relation of the spectator to the dance) is identified as what links dance to socialism in Martin's thought; this is the main theoretical motor of his use of dance as an analytic method for social thought.

This essay was used (in a previous form) as opening remarks for the United Kingdom's Society of Dance Research conference “Dancing Economies” in 2015. Structured around a collection of musings prompted by global issues, such as the Greek economic crisis, the Black Lives Matter movement, the European migrant crisis, and the pernicious effects of neoliberalism on the arts, the essay is my attempt to make connections between these events and the significance of dance studies in today's complicated political landscape.

This article focuses on Randy Martin's concept of mobilization and its relationship to Christoph Menke's philosophical category of force—being the grid rather than the movement, being the potential to move rather than movement in space and time, force and mobilization align. They are rallying calls for change and transformation, for different articulations of bodies and social kinesthetic energies. They both are impersonal nonsubjectified vehicles for an open process of doing and undoing, which is a political process.

This article hopes to evoke even a glimmer of the rare, far-reaching, and intensely probing, brilliant person, mentor, colleague, and critical thinker, Randy Martin, in a form that might open up traditionally demarcated spaces on the page and in discussion. It is intended as tribute to a person who so deftly and intentionally opened up spaces for thought and imagining.

The first part of the twenty-first century has been marked by particularly fraught social and racial tensions in the United States, brought to awareness internationally by the Black Lives Matter protest movement that started in 2014 and the vitriol espoused by the 2016 Republican presidential candidate. Randy Martin's work offers paradigms for interrogating the relationships between dance and its sociopolitical contexts that are highly relevant at this historical juncture. Drawing on some of Martin's key concepts, this article explores choreographic agency and creative strategies in dances that respond to issues of social injustice, mass incarceration, and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Works by Joanna Haigood (Zaccho Dance Theatre), Amie S. Dowling, filmmaker Justin Forbord, and Kyle Abraham (Abraham.In.Motion) focus on narratives of oppression and disenfranchisement yet also inspire resistance and hope.

A lone tree stands in the midst of a devastated landscape at Rikuzentakata, Japan. At Aceh, Malacca, a whole generation is washed out by the 2004 tsunami. At Beach 116, Far Rockaway, New York City, the entire street is swept away as the sea rolls in from the ocean toward the Jamaica Bay end of the avenue, built on a slope from ocean to bay on a barrier island. These scenes of climate volatility arouse in coastal communities a sense of vulnerability, of risk as a way of life. It is a daily choreography of uncertainty whose underlying structures shape the performance work of the movement-based theater company Harmattan Theater, which I started in 2009.