Search

Resumo: O trabalho retoma algumas teses do teórico da dança André Lepecki (2008), com o objetivo de apontar limites de sua aposta na recusa do movimento como caminho de ruptura com a modernidade e com determinada noção de coreografia. Para tanto, efetua-se uma leitura crítica da narrativa da história da dança desenvolvida em uma obra desse autor, para que então sejam propostos três nuançamentos da noção de movimento, a fim de apontar, desse modo, que a articulação entre dança e movimento não é necessariamente unívoca e nem sempre tem as mesmas implicações com relação a dado projeto político ou metafísico característico da modernidade.

Since the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of migrant domestic workers from the Philippines have moved to Hong Kong. As they filled the city’s growing demand for care work, they also altered the city’s art practice and cultural landscape. In this article, I propose to consider a double meaning of ‘domesticity’ ‐ in both the language of motherhood and motherland ‐ as a productive framework to investigate the migratory experience of Filipina domestic workers. Focusing on Cedric Maridet’s Filipina Heterotopia and Xyza Cruz Bacani’s We Are Like Air, I examine how ‘domesticity’ has become particularly pertinent to understanding the ‘border’ through the movement of bodies and the global transferral of care labour.

In the first part of the article, the author analyses the appearance of the director and the changes in his position in Slovenian theatre from the second half of the 19th century to the present day. In this context, he is particularly interested in the changes in theatre directing that took place in the second half of the 20th century with the emergence of collective theatre. The author methodologically combines historical and comparative analysis, as these processes still take place today, when devised theatre and other forms of theatrical creation are increasingly spoken and written about, moving away from the conventional process by which a playwright writes a dramatic text as a literary work of art and the director then transforms it into a theatrical work of art. There are more and more performances in contemporary Slovenian theatre in which a pre-written dramatic text is not crucial for the final product of the creative process. The two most commonly used terms for this type of performance are po motivih (based on the motifs) and avtorski projekt (auteur performance). Although the terms are not synonymous, both terms imply a devised type of theatre. The author compares group creation with the devised way of creating and points out that although these are practices that can take place in parallel, they cannot be equated. The author concludes that for collective theatre, the specific relationship between the creative group and the director’s position is constitutive. In contrast, for devised theatre, the relationship between the creative group and the playwright’s position is crucial. Finally, the author also touches on the connections between postdramatic and post-directors’ theatre and the emergence of the creative group as a collective subjectivity.

Современный танец – глобальный феномен, однако национальные и этнические аспекты регулярно проявляются и в содержании, и в форме постановок, и в судьбах артистов. Акрам Кхан – один из самых известных и высокооплачиваемых танцоров и хореографов нашего времени: член Ордена Британской Империи за заслуги в области танца с 2005 г., он – создатель множества балетов, представляемых различными труппами, а также автор и исполнитель сольных представлений. Каждое из его выступлений – событие, предлагающее новое видение как формы, так и содержания современного танца. Настоящая статья написана на основе многолетних исследований южноазиатской танцевальной культуры, а также личных бесед Светланы Рыжаковой с Акрамом Кханом в 2017 и 2019 гг. и анализа особенностей его семейной истории, творческого пути и особенности художественной деятельности. Обсуждение проблем этнокультурной идентичности, отношения к языку и к телу, исторической памяти, социальной напряженности, «своего» и «чужого», понятию родины, а также тех путей и способов, с помощью которых современность можно отражать на сцене легли в основу наших разговоров. Contemporary dance is a global phenomenon, but national and ethnic aspects are regularly manifested both in the content and in the form of performances, and in artists’ life-stories. Akram Khan is one of the most famous dancers and choreographers of our time. Member of the Order of the British Empire for Dance Merit since 2005, he is the creator of numerous ballets performed by various troupes and the author and performer of solo programs. Each of his performances is an event that offers a new vision of both the form and the content of contemporary dance. This essay is based on personal conversations of Svetlana Ryzhakova with Akram Khan in 2017 and 2019, as well as observations and analysis of his family history, career and artistic activity. Akram Khan was born and raised in England, but his parents are migrants from Bangladesh, a Muslim, although a very Westernized family. Problems of ethnic and cultural identity, personal attitudes towards language and the body, historical memory, social tension, “friends and foes”, homeland, as well as how modernity can and should be reflected on stage formed the basis of our conversations and reasoning of Akram Khan.

This article presents and discusses solo dance practices developed by Katrín Gunnarsdóttir during the years 2014–2020. She started to develop her practices with the solo work Saving History (2014), a chronological charting of her relationship with borrowing movement. As a consequence of that process she became interested in exploring the virtuosity of slowly morphing one movement into another, and that research developed into another solo work, Shades of History (2016). The act of warming up and getting ready for a performance formed the basis of the third solo, Dancing (to) (2020). Through this series of solo performances, Katrín has realized her ongoing interest in dancing labour, performing the archive and a focus on the dancing rather than the dancer.

Director and playwright Stan Lai premiered his marathon play Ago in Shanghai at the end of 2019. Staged in his signature “lotus pond” theatre-in-the-surround, Ago is fueled by Lai’s cross-cultural sensibilities and Buddhist philosophy. If theatre is an art of illusion-making and life is like a dream, Lai turns theatre-going into a ritual of self-encounter and self-reflection, where an illusion mirrors a dream.

The article explores Mojisola Adebayo’s two-hander STARS (preliminary workshop performance, Ovalhouse, 2018) through the lens of Afrofuturism. The play will be discussed in regard to future-making technologies. By analysing the overt as well as subtle references to science fiction and its tropes, this article lays out how Afrofuturism informs the play and how it is formative in liberating the main character. Furthermore, questions of violence against women, forms of resistance, and the function of the imagination will be examined. Adebayo deftly weaves Afrofuturist concerns into the everyday experiences of marginalised groups who face discrimination and exclusion, irrespective of whether their marginalisation is based on culture, gender, or age. Through this, the play offers ways of dealing with bodily and historical trauma and exclusion, while simultaneously addressing violent and harmful practices and power relations. The play may be set in the present and deals with current issues, but its performance of the future – in regard to resistance and liberation – proves to be its central feature.

This article examines the recent explosion of British dystopian plays, analysing their changing characteristics from the 1990 s to the 2010 s. After an initial brief look at precursors, it then focuses on examples of new writing which tackle the idea of dystopia in the absurdist manner typical of the 2000 s. In a third step, the focus is on the dystopian drama of the 2010 s and its more conventionally structured plots, which at the same time increasingly include ironic and parodistic elements. It becomes clear how this comparatively new genre is able to shake off the constraints of traditional dystopian writing and develop recognisable characteristics of its own. Throughout, emphasis is put on the “reality” of the plays’ fictional worlds, on the usage of the stage space, and on how the audience’s relationship with the stage is constructed as a double bind of distance and closeness.

Collage – the insertion of ready-made materials into artworks or texts – is a technique that has been used in all art forms since the experiments of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes and has, in its different shapes, often been used in theatre performances as well. The British theatre group Forced Entertainment provides a contemporary example of a (post-)avant-garde vocabulary that actively borrows from and transforms the practices of their precursors. They employ a palimpsest-like layering of visual and verbal elements, which I will here define as performative meta-collages. In this article, I will discuss their practice and take a look at the ways in which Forced Entertainment’s performative meta-collages verbalize and produce “future” in one of their recent performances, End Meeting for All, which imagines a scenario that takes place “a year and a day” after the beginning of the COVID-19-triggered lockdown in the spring of 2020.

On the Fourth of July, 1860, the New York Times introduced readers to a new persona treading the minstrel boards: Matinées are the order of the day, two at both the Bowerys, at George Christy's, at Bryant's, and at the Palace Gardens. Here “versatile performers” and “talented danseuses” will diversify the hours of patriotic emotion with comic pantomime and grand “Japanese ballets,” led by “Little Tommy.” Japan has dropped a little into the sere and yellow leaf, perhaps, for the natives, but for the “strangers from the provinces” the land of blacking may still have charms, and we desire that “all such” may understand that the Japan of their dreams will be on exhibition to-night at Miss Laura Keene's Theatre.

This article discusses the role of colonial oppression in creating conflicting perspectives in the reproduction of dance as Indigenous cultural heritage. The debate on kahiko, the ancient Hawaiian dance, of which practice was severely controlled and then revived through the cultural renaissance, demonstrates that the radical deprivation of the practice has created multiple understandings of the dance among different practitioners. Of primary importance in these respects is the intergenerational divide within the dance community, manifest in the critical perspective of the post-renaissance variant of kahiko, which highlights the “continuity” of the practice through the colonial rupture.

This article is a very short guide to navigating institutional racism within universities. Focal points of this piece are how institutional racism works, how it can be diagnosed, and how one can invent ways to survive it. The first section of this article is an overall analysis of how institutional racism is set up, particularly in the humanities and arts departments of North American universities. The second section is a step-by-step guide to surviving institutional racism in the university, and particularly in graduate programs. This article is distilled through and explained by first-hand experiences and observations and is written both to archive the structure and affect of the current atmosphere of institutional racism and to document and propose some strategies of awareness and resistance.

Dance theorists and legal scholars argue that choreography is by nature ill-suited to the conceptual framework provided by copyright, even as there is widespread agreement that works of dance deserve the legal protection and cultural endorsement that its inclusion represents. I reexamine the factors that are often cited as barriers to choreography's suitability for copyright. I argue that choreography is better suited to the copyright regime than it appears, so long as we recognize that the artistic standard for substantial similarity should be different from the legal standard.

A war of history and memory over the Great Patriotic War (WWII) between the Soviet Union and Germany has been raging in Vladimir Putin’s Russia for almost two decades. Putin’s Kremlin deploys all of the mythmaking machinery at its disposal to correct narratives that demonize the Soviet Union and reflect badly on post-Soviet Russia. Victory Day, celebrated annually on 9 May with parades, concerts, films, theatre, art, and music, plays a crucial role in disseminating the Kremlin’s counter narratives.

Nancy Stark Smith passed away due to ovarian cancer on 1 May 2020. Her dedication to contact improvisation for nearly half a century—as a dancer, teacher, writer, and editor—contributed to its development and will continue to inform its ongoing vitality. But much remains uncertain for the future of contact improvisation. Complicated by the challenges of Covid-19, what sort of bodies will result from the practice going forward, and how might the form itself change?

During the late 1920s and ’30s, performative populism played a major role in the politics of the American Deep South. In the gubernatorial campaigns of three of the most prominent populist politicians of the era—Huey Long, Theodore Bilbo, and Eugene Talmadge—performance skills and entertainment were key strategies for gaining voter support and crafting personas within a popular imaginary.

Swiss director Milo Rau holds a mirror up to theatre to call into question its assumptions, conventions, and relationship to daily life. Rau’s nonfictional story of the murder of Ihsane Jarfi takes place within two overarching narratives with different timeframes—what happens on the stage now, and what happened beyond the stage then. His dramaturgy cautions against both suspension of disbelief and catharsis and against confusing the fictional with the real.

espanolEscribiendo en respuesta al ensayo de Sartre sobre literatura comprometida, Adorno proclamo: “No es el momento para obras de arte politicas; mas bien, la politica ha migrado a la obra de arte autonoma, y ha penetrado mas profundamente en obras que se presentan a si mismas como politicamente muertas”. Hoy, los teoricos del “giro social” en el arte han rechazado completamente a Adorno, adoptando en cambio un nuevo tipo de compromiso en el arte. En este ensayo, revisito esta larga disputa sobre la “eficacia” social del arte en sus formas clasicas y contemporaneas. Al preguntarme como debemos entender la labor politica del arte en nuestros dias, examino dos teorias del efecto, basadas en un analisis del “giro comunicativo” de Habermas: una que alego que conduce a una reduccion sociologica de lo politico en el arte; y otra que sugiero que ofrece una base para entender la eficacia politica del arte, comprendida en terminos de lo que yo llamo una teoria del efecto politico “perlocutiva” o “aleatoria”. EnglishWriting in response to Sartre’s essay on engaged literature, Adorno proclaimed: “This is not the time for political works of art; rather politics has migrated into the autonomous work of art, and it has penetrated most deeply into works that present themselves as politically dead”. Today, the theorists of the “social turn” in art have all but rejected Adorno entirely, embracing instead a new kind of commitment in art. In this essay, I revisit this longstanding dispute about the social “efficacy” of art in both its classical and contemporary forms. In asking how we are to understand a political work of art today, I examine two theories of effect, based on an analysis of Habermas’s “communicative turn” –one that I allege leads to a sociological reduction of the political in art; and the other that I suggest provides a basis for understanding art’s political efficacy grasped in terms of what I call a “perlocutionary” or “aleatory” theory of political effect.

This article discusses an experiment in combining personal archival digital images, including those taken at various dance performances or rehearsals, in which the phenomenon of interruption was both discovered and investigated. The composite images were shown at a Space, Race, Bodies cultural studies and activist conference with the theme of ‘Walls’, held in 2018 in Aotearoa New Zealand. Parallel with discussing the process of creating these images and considering their effects, the article draws on the experience of exhibiting at the conference to explore relations between poetics and politics. The idea of interruption can be a key to this relation. With its rich history in the modernist performing arts and film, interruption facilitates making connections through difference.

Laura Dean's creative output in minimalist art spans interconnected work in dance, music, and drawing. Throughout the early 1970s, Dean represented her compositional structures as works on paper, which present an expanded visualization of her artistic experimentation with color, symmetry, repetition, and form. Dean rejects the reconstruction of her performance works, instead she advances a notion of dances as impermanent. Situating Dean in the context of serial and conceptual art in which the material art object is deemphasized in favor of communicating compositional logic, I argue that Dean presents a choreographic legacy premised on the intentional disappearance of her work in favor of perpetuating ideation and concept.

This article examines Eleo Pomare's concept of vitality in his pieceBlues for the Jungle(1966) as a black aesthetic approach to choreography. Vitality seeks to connect with black audiences in Harlem by referencing and affirming shared cultural knowledge, conveying an embodied epistemology of the US political economy defined by the lived experiences of Harlem: “Harlem knows.” Using a lens of diaspora citation, I argue that Pomare's choreographic citations of “vital” ways of moving and knowing in Harlem critique the terms for “proper” national belonging, while articulating diasporic belonging in motion.

By focusing on surviving costumes of the 1913 production ofThe Rite of Spring, this article asks how a close examination of costumes and their role in historical performance practice can change our understanding of a canonical work of art. It argues for methodological pluralism in examining material remains together with manuscript annotations, images and reviews of the production rarely considered in previous research and, consequentially, for a critical examination of all previous claims, including the so-called reconstruction (1987) ofThe Rite of Spring. Compared with designs and costumes of other productions by the Ballets Russes company, those of the 1913 production explain much of the contradictory ways in which the work figured in discourses relating to art and modernism in France and Russia at the time. Most importantly, the costumes exemplify a particular tradition of making theatre that has been obscured by the prevailing Orientalist view of the Ballets Russes company that is hegemonic in what is claimed to be ‘known’ aboutThe Rite of Springand its reception.

This paper offers a conspectus of several online dance archives made in the context of the Portuguese research project TKB. The online searches we conducted from 2018 to the end of 2019 suggested four broad categories of resources for what one may call ‘online dance archives’. Aiming to observe how dance resources are available on the internet, we made each category correspond to a different operation – to collect (to build up a collection), to accumulate (to gather almost random material), to store (to organize according to a set of rules), to assemble (to compose and curate material). And we posed the same set of questions: for each of these categories: what is the mission of the archive, who are its subjects and objects, and which community of users does it bring together? The outcome is both a general overview, and the possibility of a comparative approach. Our original motivation has been to survey and to analyse a sample of available online resources for dance documentation and/or archiving, in order to feed TKB future projects and experiences. Starting from the TKB project perspective, and aiming at categorizing the different approaches to storage, curation, ownership and availability reflected by those archival platforms, we finally identified three major challenges in the relation between dance and the digital archive: the question of access, the ontology of dance and archive – what it is, what it has been, and what ‘dance and archiving’ can become in the future –, and the ‘Will to archive’ (cf. Lepecki 2010 ). Each one of these challenges will eventually provoke new questions as to the future of the TKB project and of its team of researchers, and the nature of the work they may undertake.

This article explores Alan Bennett’s Single Spies (1988), an espionage double bill comprising “An Englishman Abroad” and “A Question of Attribution,” proposing that the personalizing of social, political, and historical themes, as well as the astute documentation of a decaying Englishness and its class system in both plays, are representative of the work of a playwright whose output deserves serious critical attention. The study focuses on how Bennett historicizes the actions of his infamous protagonists (Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt) while challenging assumptions regarding patriotism. Single Spies is a Cambridge Five franchise, demonstrating the playwright’s characteristic wit, irony, and reflection on personal and national identity, illusion, and sacrifice. The one-act plays each deal with a key figure in the notorious Cambridge spy ring, enhancing the dramatic effect through the use of onstage theatrical and visual allusions. In the first play, references to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c 1599), together with English music, highlight Burgess’s duality and the bitter reality of his post-defection life in Russia, while the second play is notable for its use of two paintings (Titian and a Venetian Senator and Allegory of Prudence) as key images and conceits suggesting the gradual uncovering of the Cambridge Five. The paper therefore suggests that Bennett’s ability to lift the veil of personal and institutional secrecy, while airing his own ambivalence, confirms him as a skillful, if academically undervalued, commentator on Englishness.

Dance historians have long relied on institutional archives when reconstructing the past. Yet archives are notoriously incomplete and biased, promoting certain voices and leaving others out. This article offers a case study of what is lost when we look only at official archives. My focus is on turn-of-the-twentieth-century Paris, a time and place long thought to have been devoid of creative ballet choreography. I begin with a brief inventory of the state archives and compare those records to information recovered from the press, then demonstrate how different historical narratives can be constructed when comparing these two documentary sources. I conclude with an example of how fragmentary archives can skew history through a case study of Madame Mariquita, a once celebrated choreographer who has been left out of canonic history.

Oral archives are important components of dance archives but are not frequently discussed. In this context I am looking at the George Balanchine Foundation's Interpreters Archive and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's and Bojana Cvejić’s publication entitled The Choreographer's Score, the latter as basis for a possible archive. The oral descriptions provided in those projects transmit a form of knowledge about dance and choreographic practice that cannot be offered through physical demonstration and haptic exchanges of body postures and movement qualities alone. The oral transmission of information works here differently from written discourses, but both forms of documentation of dance can be seen as informing each other, providing traces of the choreographic practice that counteract the ephemerality of dance performances.

The paper situates current developments in British theatre within wider trends towards dystopia and (post-)apocalyptic writing. A central focus is on the role of posthuman elements in dystopian plays which are used to create a constant and pervasive, but mostly unspecific sense of crisis. Two recent works by female playwrights – Dawn King’s Foxfinder (2011) and Stef Smith’s Human Animals (2016) – are compared and related back to Caryl Churchill’s seminal Far Away (2000) to elucidate how the nonhuman comes to be perceived as a threat and how this leads to, and/or supports, a dystopian system and its violent measures. Moreover, both Foxfinder and Human Animals manage to combine absurdist elements that border on the surreal with more or less pronounced didactic implications for the audience, although these connections are realised in different ways by the two playwrights. In this manner, post-apocalyptic dystopian theatre of the early 21st century can become revolutionary rather than regressive.

This article analyzes Anne Washburn’s wildly popular, and often controversial, Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play (2012) by focusing on the principal retellings that shape Mr. Burns and delineating how Washburn’s adaptations produce the thematic content of the play. Washburn deftly interweaves a variety of high and low culture source material within the plot. Pandemic and apocalyptic tropes provide the ecofictional narrative base to adaptations of Stephen King’s The Stand (1978), Euripides’s Orestes, Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991), and a variety of episodes of The Simpsons (1989–). Through these retellings, Mr. Burns metatheatrically chronicles how stories shape listeners and their cultures. When the stories told simply pander to the materialism, greed, and commodification that permeate contemporary global capitalist culture, then society proliferates those solipsistic values. Washburn ultimately argues that, in what may seem like apocalyptic times, storytelling as embodied in the theater arts must instead advocate humanitarian collectivist values.

The article discusses the Batsheva Dance Company Archive Project, conducted by a team I headed in the years 2012–2015. 1 The analysis of this project will assist in understanding both its significance as an archival act of documenting the past, and its influence on the company's present and on Israeli dance. The method of analysis will include a description of the different practices involved in constructing a dance archive; a contextual discussion of archival practices; and a theoretical discussion, principally in the context of changes in current archiving practices and developments in critical thinking about dance as a discipline. The description of the course of events in this article mainly relies on my personal experience and involvement as director of the Batsheva Dance Company Archive Project. The different proceedings, goals, considerations and decisions were documented in monthly reports and in the project's concluding document, and so assisted in tracing the chronicle and details of events. 2

Employing an interdisciplinary sociopolitical framework, I examine Philip Osment’s play This Island’s Mine (1988) and demonstrate how it interrogates and repudiates Margaret Thatcher’s neoconservative authoritarian populism. Specifically, I argue that Osment’s play constitutes not only a damning indictment of Thatcherism, but also an enduring work that speaks directly to our present sociopolitical conjuncture, which has witnessed varied forms of reactionary populism sweep nations throughout the international community.

While a most original and creative playwright in contemporary Ireland, Marina Carr is still unmistakably influenced by her male predecessors. This article will argue that her most renowned work By the Bog of Cats . . . (1998) is a bold rewriting of W. B. Yeats’s Purgatory (1938). Like Yeats’s play, By the Bog of Cats . . . focuses on abandonment, betrayal, and murder as its main sources of trauma. While Carr’s play is a direct descendant from Purgatory in terms of its theme, plot, and symbolism, Carr rewrites Yeats’s pathetic, shiftless Old Man into a daring, strong, and responsible woman who may be embittered by her domestic trauma, but instead of escaping, she eventually faces up to her own guilt and crime. Hester is not a flat, helpless victim but a complex, well-rounded woman full of agency, passion, and honesty as well as vices. This way, Carr rewrites both the stereotypical stage image of Irish women and the unredeemable Old Man.

This article relates an oral history research project conducted with the Italian members and ex members of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. The creation and the use of oral sources is questioned as being the software working in the body-archive considered as the hardware of dance memory and its transmission. Pina Bausch's post-memory is regarded as the active dialogue and interaction between macro and micro memories emerging from the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch dancers' bodies.

"This article represents a closer examination of the triadic perspective of creating, performing and appreciating a performative event. This type of analysis is directly linked to choreological studies, a domain which is not yet part of the Romanian academic field, but, in essence, it does exist through other forms of theatrical studies and practices. I localize every scholarly aspect in current performative practices, more precisely, in that of physical and dance theatre. Through this article I would like to bring more attention to the way these forms of performing arts are created, performed and spectated by individuals who are able to deal with all three processes. Therefore, this analysis will have a more personal mark, thanks to the interviews integrated, with two internationally known artists in physical theatre: Hannes Langolf and Rob Hayden. It is a closer unveiling of how processes of transaction function within a piece of work. It is a way of constant questioning every participant in an artistic event should confront him/herself with. Keywords: choreology, movement, physical theatre, creator, performer, spectator, interview, Hannes Langolf, Rob Hayden"

This article examines the role of pugilistic gesture and form in queer performance, focusing on Franko B’s Milk & Blood (2015) and Cassils’s Becoming an Image (2012). Walsh considers how pugilism functions as a mode for “working out” queer fights—personal and cultural—that offers us a performative complement or reverse-orientation to Sigmund Freud’s psychologically centered idea of “working-through” (1914). Reading these pugilistic performances along the slide between working through and working out—their psychic and material practices and effects—allows us to perceive the body as both the object of loss and trauma and, in practiced form, the key instrument of processing change. It compels us to keep the body at the center of debates of traumatic intervention and negotiation in queer studies and beyond, as the fighting bodies themselves appear to insist.

The author focuses on the features of the artistic embodiment of the actor’s images, based on the creative concept and aesthetic vision of a particular artist, a member of the Creative Union of the World of Art. The article reveals the innovative use of the retrospection technique in their work, highlights the main elements of genre modification. The study is based on the material of individual groups of images belonging to different artists, but formed according to a similar typology, thus, the urgent need for a closer and more versatile view of the theater portrait as one of the key forms in the genre system of the period under consideration becomes obvious. A system analysis of the genre is used, studying the set of artistic tools that artists use to most adequately implement their ideas. An analysis of the main components of the artistic structure reveals the genre features of the ballet portrait as an important vector of the individual search for artists of the “World of Art” association.

Katherine Dunham travelled the world for decades as a choreographer, dancer, teacher, scholar, writer, and activist. This essay develops the ‘everyday’ as an intersectional analytic through which to understand the global method tying Dunham’s transnational mobility to her practices of making-do as an African-American female artist in the mid-twentieth century, and the ways the ongoing pursuit of solvency propelled her, her performers, and her work into the world. Our critical mixed methods approach scales up from a manually curated itinerary of Dunham’s daily locations over four years (1950–3), to the politics of the everyday they cumulatively reveal. Analyzing transnational travel patterns of stays and returns can rebalance the geography of Dunham scholarship, including revealing the centrality of nightclub and other non-concert performances to sustaining the company over time. Looking further into the archives, we turn to a paradigm of friction and flexibility in order to elaborate the many factors that shaped Dunham’s touring pathways, as well as the ways that Dunham’s bodily wellbeing haunts her relentless momentum. Focusing on the bodies in the data from a perspective that combines dance studies with digital humanities points to the ways digital methods can evidence and elaborate bodily experience on- and offstage.

This article analyzes the processes ofbranqueamento(whitening) contained within the ideology ofmestiçagem(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 herbailado 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 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.

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 Remnant Dance Project, Culaccini, developed site-specific dance movement in response to the waters of the Taleggio Valley, Italy, during the Nature, Art and Habitat Residency (NAHR) (2018). The intention was to respond to the Enna River system through documenting dance movement made in the region via film, photography and reflective writing. The practice-led research process was shared on the daily blog, ‘The drop of the day’. At the close of the NAHR, a short dance film, Performing Water, was made to further interrogate the nature of site-specific dance-making in water and the notion of what constitutes ‘site-dance’ in this context. In our journey of water-dance discovery, unique marks have remained on each other, the site and on things we have made, like the traces of a water vessel: culaccini. The dance made for the project was immersive and focused, constructed to invite interpretation through the use of symbolism and imagery. Progetto Culaccini sviluppa un movimento di danza site-specific in risposta alle acque dei torrenti della Val Taleggio, Italia (2018). L’intenzione è quella di rispondere al sistema del torrente Enna documentando il movimento di danza fatto sul luogo attraverso film, fotografia e scrittura riflessiva. Questo processo di ricerca guidato dalla pratica venne condiviso quotidianamente sul blog: La goccia del giorno. Al termine della residenza Natura, Arte e Habitat, la produzione di un cortometraggio di danza ha permesso l’analisi e approfondimento della danza site-specific in acqua e la nozione di ciò che costituisce la ‘danza’ in questo contesto. Nel nostro viaggio di scoperta della danza nell’acqua, segni unici rimangono impressi uno sull’altro, il luogo e le cose che abbiamo fatto, come le tracce di un vessello d’acqua: i culaccini. La danza fatta in questo contesto è stata immersiva e focalizzata; costruita per invitare l’interpretazione attraverso l’uso di simbolismo e immagini.

Viewing Nelisiwe Xaba’s Fremde Tänze (2014) in Berlin and Chicago revealed differing levels of meaning in the work. In Berlin the work exposed and parodied the white gaze of the black female dancer, while in Chicago the work vivified the gap between the responses of black and white spectators. The reception of Fremde Tänze in the two cities demonstrates the workings of “cross-viewing,” the moments when spectators from distinct social locations watch one another watching.

This article discusses philosopher Richard Shusterman’s artistic collaboration with Yann Toma which entails the use of costume, photography and public performance. The project advances the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics and raises questions about conventions of professional philosophy, including what philosophers conventionally wear and how philosophical inquiry is advanced. Aspects of costume theory and contemporary movement performance are used to analyse Shusterman’s autobiographical methodology and the project’s performative aims.

Nelisiwe Xaba’s Fremde Tänze opens up questions of contemporary implications of dance history. Situated within the cultural politics of dance in Germany, especially funding programs such as Tanzfonds Erbe (dance funds heritage), Xaba’s work and the curatorial frame of the Julius-Hans-Spiegel-Zentrum project contest the notion of “cultural heritage” from a postcolonial perspective.

The idea of the “Anthropocene” is rapidly gaining currency as an ecocritical lens through which to view theater and performance. But as a lens for critical analysis, the concept of the “Anthropocene” is problematic, primarily because it fails to differentiate among humans, many of whom are in conflict precisely because the benefits and costs of the “Age of Man” have been distributed unevenly. Neo-Marxist critics take such conflicts into fuller account in their argument that a better nomenclature and concept for our epoch is the “Capitalocene,” a term that captures the fact that our ecological crises have been precipitated not by humans in some undifferentiated and generalized way, but more specifically by the global spread of capitalism and its socio-economic-ecological injustices. These are also conflicts at the heart of many plays, both historical and recent. This essay offers an overview of a number of works that might productively be categorized as “Tragedies of the Capitalocene,” insofar as they dramatize stories that trace the dynamics of “Capitalocene” exploitation of both human and nonhuman resources. Plays considered include Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1992), Rahul Varma’s Bhopal (2001), Kia Corthron’s A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick (2010), Annabel Soutar’s Seeds (2012), Robert Schenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle (1991), and Colleen Murphy’s The Breathing Hole (2017).

This essay looks at how four contemporary South African plays use performance to render, address, and acknowledge personal and national trauma. By staging acts of cruelty that happen as “ordinary” experience, as perpetual pain, or as representation of life-in-crisis, these plays not only question and complement the national narrative by telling stories that have not found a stage or a listener before, but they also inform and speak to topical societal issues in South Africa such as that of apathy to violence and the question of complicity. Yael Farber and Lara Foot employ a distinctly South African theatre language that draws on theatrical concepts of the European avant-garde, especially those of Antonin Artaud, as well as on the tradition of oral storytelling and ritual to render cruelty as the “ordinary” and crisis as an ongoing condition in the sociohistorical context of apartheid and the apartheid-influenced post-1994 world. By excavating, tracing, and acknowledging “ordinary” cruelty as experienced personally and collectively, the plays explore revelations about the human condition, open up a discussion on the nature of memory or (collective) amnesia, on trauma, complicity, and the crucial role of the witness.

This article discusses how in Howard Barker’s recent work the idea of the subject’s crisis hinges on the introduction of an impersonal or transpersonal life force that persists beyond human agency. The article considers Barker’s metaphorical treatment of the images of land and stone and their interrelationship with the human body, where the notion of subjective crisis results from an awareness of objective forces that transcend the self. In “Immense Kiss” (2018) and “Critique of Pure Feeling” (2018), the idea of crisis, whilst still dominant, seems to lose its intermittent character of singular rupture and reveals itself as a permanent force of dissolution and reification. In these plays, the evocation of nonhuman nature in the love relationships between young men and elderly women affirms the existence of something that goes beyond the individual, which Barker approaches with a late-style poetic sensibility.

Since the British EU Referendum in 2016, there has been an ongoing media narrative of division: Remain voters against Leave voters, experts against ordinary people, the capital rich against the capital poor, and metropolitan centres against regional peripheries. This article explores the way in which theatre might offer a response to the perceived failure in understanding between these entrenched positions, using the lens of place. Making an argument for an ideological and dramaturgical shift from questions of voice – which have so far dominated theatrical critical discourse in response to Brexit – to place, I explore the potential of this change in focus and scale in relation to Matt Hartley’s play Here I Belong (2016) which toured with Pentabus Theatre – a professional rural touring company from the Midlands – to rural communities across England in 2016 and 2018. It is through this contact with rural communities that I propose that theatre can make a critical intervention: telling smaller stories about local places offers a way to reconnect with such communities during this crisis of communication.

This article examines short plays as a political aesthetic of crisis using examples from Black Lives, Black Words (2015–2017) at the Bush Theatre, London, which respond to concerns arising from the #BlackLivesMatter movement about Black deaths in police custody. I focus on Black women playwrights’ portrayals of Black mothers’ anxieties about protecting their sons, and of Black mothers and sisters grieving the loss of sons, brothers, and fathers in incidents where excessive force is deployed by the police. I consider how Black Lives, Black Words connects to the radical aesthetics of the 1960 s Black Arts Movement by promoting the use of theatre for activist purposes. I argue that the politicising potential of the Black Lives, Black Words initiative is accentuated by the use of a short play format as a political Black aesthetics for responding to contemporary crises. By analysing pivotal moments in a sample of the fifteen-minute plays, I demonstrate how the content of the plays combines with their performance styles to maximise the potential for audience empathy despite their short playing times.

Over the past decade, ‘immersive’ has arguably been one of the most overused terms to describe theatre productions that aim to involve audiences in unconventional ways. With the mainstream success of specific ‘immersive’ productions, this trend goes beyond the theatre and arts industry. From games distributors to Westfield shopping centres, just about every organisation seems to be discussing how ‘immersive’ events can give their product an edgier public profile or increase sales. The need for a post-immersive manifesto comes from an assumption that the use of the term immersive is not helpful. And, in many ways, the use of the word ‘immersive’ to describe theatre productions can often be detrimental to the contract of expectations set up with audience members, guests, players, participants. This experimental manifesto is the result of five years of partnership between Technoculture, Arts & Games (Concordia University, Montréal) and ZU-UK (G.A.S. Station and MA in Contemporary Performance at University of Greenwich, London).

This article presents Richard Alston's re-visioning of Chopin's music through two works: Such Longing (in two versions, 2005/2015), and Mazur (2015). Alston rescues the composer from dance associations with romance and sweet sentiment and celebrates his more robust, bolder and darker gamut of expression. The article includes detailed analysis of a range of solos and duets (for two men as well as for a woman and a man). Alston is widely regarded as an exceptionally musical choreographer, and the article identifies a particular choreomusical style emerging from his work. There is discussion of structural aspects, involving both music and dance, pursuing the dynamic interaction between them, and of creative processes and changes in the dances through the history of their performance. A landmark feature of Alston's choreomusical style is to allow rhythmic detail to shift more than most other choreographers would wish, encouraging subtle changes of relation to musical beat and bar-line as movement phrases ‘breathe’ within performance. I also foreground my own analytical process, which draws from music theory as well as dance principles. Film clips and music examples, some of which incorporate aligned notes on the choreography, illustrate my analyses.