This essay explores the intersection of concert dance, cultural memory, Black womanhood, and non-linear spacetime from an Afro-European perspective. Inspired by Black feminist methodologies, the text interweaves performance analysis, historical context, interdisciplinary theory including my own concept of perforMemory, and auto-ethnographic experience gained through participant observation. My writing moves along three lines of inquiry tuned in the key of C: contextualizing, conjuring and contemplating. The article offers a case study of I Step on Air, a contemporary dance piece created by Nigerian-German dancer-choreographer Oxana Chi (Berlin/New York) and dedicated to Ghanian-German poet and activist May Ayim. By including an interlude with the choreographer's own creative writing about the piece, the article also provides the reader with the precious perspective of Oxana Chi on her process. The article is a reflection on/of the resonances between movement, writing, and activism. Let's celebrate the power of Black women to resistDance, step by step, move by move, breath by breath…

This article analyzes three artistic acts of the subversion of precariousness in the contemporary dance community in Buenos Aires. It explores the participation of dancers in political groups that demand improvement of their working conditions. It examines how Marina Sarmiento's investigation of dance history stages a precarious body as an archive that deals with aesthetic colonialism. And lastly, it discusses the emergence of an aesthetics of precariousness in Fabian Gandini's work, which brings artistic ethics to the fore. The argument proposed in this article asserts that working conditions, history, and aesthetics represent three dimensions of contemporary dance practice that operate simultaneously and determine the precariousness in the Argentinian dance community.

Critics described Pina Bausch's work as “absolutely contemporary” and as being “important dance heritage,” which is precisely the opposite of contemporary, namely, historical. This contradictoriness—though productive in its own right—is symptomatic of the perspective of dance journalism brought to bear on Pina Bausch's later works in particular. But even reviews of her earlier works are a far cry from perceiving the artist in a consistent manner, some even going so far as to criticize her for being “outdated.” Apparently, Bausch's art continuously poses a challenge for dance critics because it defies easy categorization in aesthetic terms, thereby undermining the implicit postulates and classificatory criteria underlying dance reviews. There is—at least in the German-speaking area—broad consensus regarding the functions of today's dance reviews as a text genre: as a translation of dance into language, dance reviews describe, analyze, and judge. With a focus on reviews of pieces by Pina Bausch, this essay proposes to investigate how dance is translated (“trans-posed”) by considering the questions: what do reviews do when they put things into words? How are their own seemingly firm categorizations and postulates thereby destabilized or at least opened to debate?

This article explores the process of reimagining Martha Graham's 1935 “lost” work, Imperial Gesture, into a complete work for performance. The solo was last performed by Graham in 1938 and constitutes the first political solo of her career. With no musical score, no notation score, and scant archival evidence, Graham dancer, régisseur, and contemporary choreographer Kim Jones pieced together the fragments left behind. Beginning in 2011, Jones assembled a team of artists in order to reimagine Imperial Gesture for the Martha Graham Dance Company. This article discusses how Jones found primary and secondary sources including thirty-two, unpublished, photographic images by Barbara Morgan; a space diagram by set designer Arch Lauterer; a poem, “Imperial Gesture for Martha Graham,” by John Malcolm Brinnin; and numerous critical reviews from the 1930s. Jones was inspired to imagine and express Graham's sense of activism and social justice within this “lost” work. The dance is a portrait of the undoing of an arrogant despot. Although mainstream critics had little to say about Imperial Gesture, arts critics for Communist and Leftist publications reviewed Imperial Gesture as an example of politically charged art that argued against fascism. The process of reimagining opens up the possibility for a deeper investigation of Graham's work as both publicly and personally political. Additionally, the creative act of reimagining her lost work adds new repertory to the Martha Graham Dance Company for a new generation of Graham dancers and new audiences. In so doing, it also opens a path for a new historiography of Graham's work and legacy.