Considered in tandem, The Bloomsbury Companion to Dance Studies, edited by Sherril Dodds, and Futures of Dance Studies, edited by Susan Manning, Janice Ross, and Rebecca Schneider, comprise just over a thousand pages. Read together, the two volumes remind one of the Roman deity Janus: The Bloomsbury Companion casts its gaze backward to take stock of the field of dance studies as it currently stands in sixteen chapters written by some of the most well-respected names in the field. Futures, on the other hand, looks ahead to offer an audacious prognosis, with twenty-eight essays written by a cohort of postdoctoral fellows, many of whom have already established themselves not just as emergent scholars but as leaders within the field of dance studies.

Edited anthologies such as these have become a mainstay of academic publishing in dance. It is unsurprising, therefore, that both volumes are impeccably researched, insightful, and timely. They offer fresh perspectives on well-worn subjects, introducing readers to entirely new sites and modes of conducting dance research, while eschewing geographical and chronological constraints. Their pairing, however, also amplifies the challenges of curating—never a neutral endeavor—and archives the need for further critical analysis and, more importantly, change. Within the larger ecosystem of academic publishing, edited anthologies such as these ensure the privileging and circulation of certain ideas and of certain curatorial agendas, and facilitate the possibility of their reification and eventual canonization. As such, any twenty-first-century anthology of dance studies must be evaluated not only for the rigor of its scholarship or for its turn of phrase, but for its engagement with anti-racist epistemologies and the related work of decolonization.

In a field as disparate, decentralized, and even at times disembodied as dance studies, any work that aims to give “an absolute account of the field” (xiii) as The Bloomsbury Companion to Dance Studies editor Sherril Dodds writes, “presents an impossible task” (1). Yet Dodds, with her self-deprecating humor and scholarly commitment to popular dance, seems to be one of the few people who could have pulled it off in a way that offers, as she writes in her acknowledgments, an illustration—in a single volume— of “dance as a subject of intellectual enquiry” (xiii–xiv) and as it stands during a specific point in time.

Dance studies, as it exists within the United States, has historically centered scholarship produced in the United States to the exclusion of scholarship and perspectives from elsewhere. Dodds, who trained in the UK but now works in the United States, succeeds in redressing this imbalance, at least insofar as the English-speaking world is concerned. Contributions from UK-based scholars such as Sarah Whatley (writing on “Digital Dance”) and Anna Pakes (“Dance and Philosophy”) take their rightful place among American scholars such as Mark Franko (“New Directions”) and Susan Manning (“Dance History”). The book is organized into chapters that investigate a “substantial body of research that has emerged as a distinctive area of enquiry in the field,” such as “Dance and Politics,” “Practice-as-Research,” “Dance Ethnography,” and “Screendance,” among other “ideas and interests” (xiii) that characterize the field in the early twenty-first century. They each offer an overview of key developments or themes within a subfield of dance studies, generally followed by one or more case studies to generate more nuanced dialogue. As such, Dodds achieves her goal of creating a volume that is especially useful for graduate students and scholars new to the field of dance studies.

In “Dance and Identity,” Prarthana Purkayastha offers an astute, and at times highly entertaining, interrogation of dance scholarship as it pertains to identity politics, minority narratives, historiography, and the increasingly popular notion of decolonizing dance studies. (See, for example, the Dance Studies Association's 2020 special issue of Conversations across the Field of Dance Studies, titled “Decolonizing Dance Discourses [Banerji and Mitra, 2020],” which grew out of two gatherings on decoloniality organized for the 2019 DSA conference, Dancing in Common, at Northwestern University.) The introduction to Purkayastha's chapter comprises a poignant, uncomfortable, yet ultimately humorous challenge to the conventions of formal academic writing. In her conclusion, she draws upon the work of Melissa Blanco Borelli and others to suggest that “alternative narrative modes such as conversation, gossip and rumor can become useful allies in resisting institutionalized archives [and that this] methodology highlights the decolonizing mission of current dance studies and sets in motion a choreography of rabble-rousing” (194), thus offering a practical blueprint for the necessary work of decolonization.

Drawing upon the work of philosopher Chantal Mouffe, Juan Ignacio Vallejos defines “politics” as separate from “the political” (146) in his chapter on (you guessed it) “Dance and Politics.” He asserts, however, that “we should not automatically associate dance politics with actions of criticism and resistance to the established power” (147) and cites the example of European court ballet of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as reinforcing cultural hegemony. Building upon this premise, Vallejos then shifts his focus to two case studies from Argentina: the 1983 premiere of Alejandro Cervera's Dirección Obligatoria (Compulsory Direction) and the recent political activism of three Buenos Aires–based organizations—Foro Danza en Acción (Dance in Action Forum), TIM (Teatro Independiente Monotributista: Self-Employed Independent Theatre), and Escena Política (Political Scene). Vallejos reminds readers that “being a politically engaged artist is to understand that there is no apolitical art” (151). His chapter equips readers with both the theory and the vocabulary to analyze a variety of dance practices, whether overtly “political” or not.

In “Dance Pedagogy,” Edward C. Warburton draws from an array of disciplines— ranging from philosophy to anthropology—to illustrate the importance of social learning in human evolution. He offers several illuminating etymologies of key terms in dance education (especially useful given the growing popularity of the somewhat nebulous field of “somatics”) and identifies two important approaches to learning: “One side uses education to mean the preservation and passing down of knowledge and the shaping of youths in the image of their traditions. The other side sees education as preparing a new generation for the changes that are to come, readying them to create solutions to problems yet unknown” (101). To his credit, Warburton delineates his interest in concert dance pedagogy early on in his chapter, rather than letting his biases go unacknowledged or promoting the myths of neutrality and universality that often accompany pedagogical appraisals of ballet and modern dance. He also references acclaimed pedagogues and scholars Nyama McCarthy-Brown and Ojeya Cruz Banks in noting a shift beyond culturally relevant pedagogy toward culturally sustaining pedagogy (85–86). His chapter leaves readers wondering how pedagogical case studies that don't center Western concert dance might illuminate further possibilities.

Other notable chapters include “Popular Dance” by Dodds, which pulls no punches with regard to the “logocentric hierarchy of the written ‘archive’” (280), and “Dance History” by Manning, which argues against “the nation-state model [of] choreographic families” (303) in the historiography of modern dance in favor of transnational approaches. “Screendance,” by Harmony Bench, traces the history of an emerging field before focusing on the work of Lil Buck, known for his Memphis Jookin’ style, and in “Dance Ethnography,” Yvonne Daniels juxtaposes a compelling, personal account of the challenges inherent to ethnographic fieldwork with a history of dance ethnography within the United States, rightfully reclaiming the pioneering work of Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus.

The Bloomsbury Companion is also bookended by three particularly useful chapters: at the beginning is Rachel Fensham's introductory chapter on “Research Problems and Methods,” and at the end are Lise Uytterhoeven's “A to Z of Key Concepts in Dance Studies” and an “Annotated Bibliography” compiled by Elizabeth Bergman. Uytterhoeven offers definitions of terms such as “aesthetics,” “dramaturgy,” “decoloniality,” “diaspora,” “intersectionality,” and “improvisation,” deftly avoiding, in the case of “improvisation,” the unspoken Eurocentrism that tends to accompany the term in most dance department course catalogues. In defining “choreography,” a term so ubiquitous within our field as to be applied universally, she reminds us that the word originated “as a contraction of the Greek terms for movement and writing” (423) in the eighteenth century. (Not so universal after all.)

Bergman's bibliography, which “showcases the diversity of scholarly interests and methodologies across dance studies” (407), comprises one of the volume's most useful features for educators and beginning graduate students, especially with its lists of academic journals and online resources. It also reflects, however, greater challenges, especially in terms of how entries are selected and categorized. One wonders, for example, why Nadine George-Grave's monograph on the Whitman Sisters finds itself listed among “Popular dance” and not “Dancing histories”; why Brenda Dixon-Gottschild's “Digging the Africanist Presence” didn't make the cut; and why scholars like Jacqui Malone and Katrina Hazzard-Gordon are left out entirely. Bergman acknowledges that the bibliography's subcategories are inadequate, but she also notes how these types of taxonomies remain “operational in the organization of conferences, curriculum, and journals” (407). As such, the process of curation reflects the continued legacies of Eurocentrism and systemic racism in the dance world—and the ways in which the field of dance studies remains complicit.

Furthermore, of the sixteen contributors to the anthology, thirteen are white—the majority being white women. This imbalance, perhaps more than anything else, is the volume's greatest downfall, especially when it goes unspoken and unacknowledged as it does in much of our field.

Futures of Dance Studies is as audacious as its title would suggest, and the volume's editors, Manning, Ross, and Schneider, are well aware of this, confessing at the outset, “Futures of Dance Studies is an outrageously arrogant title. In fact, one editor refused to consider a volume so named because he believed that the title would become meaningless as soon as the volume appeared in print. But we understand the word ‘futures’ differently, because for us, it indicates not only time to come but a very present and even persistent investment, trajectory, dream” (3).

The collection of twenty-eight essays was made possible in part by two recent initiatives. First, the six-year Dance Studies in/and the Humanities project supported with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2012–2018), which enabled the book's editors to appoint postdoctoral fellows in dance at their institutions (Northwestern University, Stanford, and Brown respectively). The project also supported summer intensives for early-career scholars to share research and strategize about strengthening the field of dance studies. Second was the historic 2017 merger of the Congress on Research in Dance and the Society of Dance History Scholars into the Dance Studies Association.

Acknowledging the tendency of earlier anthologies to draw “a distinction between ‘ethnographic’ and ‘historical’ approaches” (6), Futures is organized thematically around seven keywords: “archives,” “desires,” “sites,” “politics,” “economics,” “virtuosities,” and “circulations.” A review of this nature cannot do justice to each of the essays but will instead examine one keyword in its entirety (“archives”), to give an indication of the breadth and scope of the work, and then highlight some of the more interesting essays from the remainder of the text.

“Archives” kicks off with Hannah Kosstrin's “Kinesthetic Seeing: A Model for Practice-in-Research,” through which she examines the process of conducting embodied archival research through her investigation of Anna Sokolow. Kathryn Dickason turns to religious iconography to illustrate the role of dance in fomenting both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in “King David in the Medieval Archives: Toward an Archaic Future for Dance Studies.” This was one of the volume's most surprisingly interesting essays, complete with a challenge to the “presumed Renaissance origins of ballet” (50) and a compelling argument for dance studies to look further back more often.

Next up is Joanna Dee Das, who plumbs the “colonialist archive” (57) (including souvenir postcards from the Columbian Exposition of 1893) in the impeccably researched “Dancing Dahomey at the World's Fair: Revising the Archive of African Dance.” This is followed by Gillian Lipton's extremely nuanced and thorough “Critical Memory: Arthur Mitchell, Dance Theatre of Harlem, and the Rise of the Invisible Dancers,” and finally Laura Karreman's “Breathing Matters: Breath as Dance Knowledge,” which invokes the work of Belgian philosopher Luce Irigaray to consider the use of breath by Mary Wigman, Martha Graham, and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.

Considered collectively, these essays invite readers to reconsider what constitutes an archive: both material culture and the body itself are ascribed with greater importance than usual, mapping a way forward for future dance scholars. Furthermore, “Archives” spans both centuries and continents, even if most of the dance we're seeing is still rooted in Europeanist traditions and aesthetics. The editors also acknowledge that “the keywords titling the seven sections provide only one possible approach to Futures of Dance Studies” (6) and suggest additional “thematic and theoretical links” between sections, thus succeeding in their aim “to reveal a rich dialogue around the keyword” (7).

In the remaining sections of the text, five essays pointed to especially interesting, innovative, and even radical future(s) of the field. First, Clare Croft's “Lesbian Echoes in Activism and Writing: Jill Johnston's Interventions” (situated within the “Desires” keyword section of the volume) acknowledges both the whiteness and homophobia of not only the Judson scene specifically but also of radical, second-wave feminism in general. Offering an analysis of Johnston's 1971 onstage make out session as political activism, Croft explores how the “lesbian feminist provocateur” (117) returned a “politics of gender and sexuality into the often depoliticized realm of postmodern dance” (120).

In the “Sites” section, Rachel Carrico shifts the lens of dance studies, persistent in its New York City focus, to the Big Easy. “Second Line Choreographies in and beyond New Orleans” examines the work of three Black choreographers in translating the African American and Afro-Creole tradition of second lines to the concert stage in the years following Hurricane Katrina: Camille A. Brown, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and Latanya d. Tigner. Staged adaptations of social dance forms, especially Black social dance forms, comprise a unique challenge, but Carrico complicates the “binary value judgements of street-to-stage adaptations either as appropriation or appreciation” (205) by examining the choreographers’ methods, including local research and community building, along with “choreographic approaches that communicate New Orleans's unique place within the African Atlantic diaspora” (205). The analysis of socially conscious choreography rooted in vernacular dance also serves to generate conversation surrounding best practices for choreographers interested in the staging of social dance forms.

In their introduction to the “Economics” section of the volume, the editors ask, “How have the economics of neoliberalism altered the dance scene in Europe, Great Britain, and the United States?… How can quantitative methods familiar from the social sciences complement the qualitative methods of (auto)ethnography, movement description, and performance analysis to probe the intersection of dance and economics?” (339). Anusha Kedhar provides a fascinating answer to these questions in “Breaking Point? Flexibility, Pain, and the Calculus of Risk in Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” in which she illuminates, through ethnographic research, how neoliberal economic policies and aesthetic preferences exacerbate the existing precarity of freelance work for South Asian dance artists in Britain by requiring proficiency in both western theatrical dance and classical Indian dance forms. The attention paid to economics is both useful and prescient, especially as new Covid-era initiatives such as Creating New Futures: Working Guidelines for Ethics & Equity in Presenting Dance & PerformanceFootnote ¹ and the Dance Artists’ National CollectiveFootnote ² reimagine ethical compensation practices for the labor of dance.

In the “Virtuosities” section, Rebecca Chaleff's excellent “Dance of the Undead: The Wilis’ Imperial Legacy” offers a compelling analysis of European colonialism and the performance of whiteness. She interrogates issues of race, gender, sexuality, spectatorship, alterity, heteronormativity, and queerness, as performed in one of ballet's most enduring classics. As such, her critique is both illuminating and timely—indeed, she cites both the “problematic assertions” (415) of Alexei Ratmansky in 2017, and the continued celebration of Misty Copeland's “exceptionalism” (415) in the essay's introduction. Revealing how “figures such as Wilis not only carry forward the sexist and racist ideologies that produced their characterization but also conceal those ideologies within the cultural legacies of Romantic ballet” (428), Chaleff complicates existing scholarship, offering a twenty-first-century analysis of a nineteenth-century ballet.

Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson's “Flesh Dance: Black Women from Behind” (housed, perhaps not unsurprisingly in “Desires”) is easily the most provocative essay of the volume. Johnson coins the term “flesh dance” to describe a “choreographic/sonic coupling through which hip hop lyrics direct black women to move in sexually mimetic ways,” simultaneously policing “black intimacy and gender while extending a vehicle through which individual and communal pleasure might be instantiated” (155). She asks readers, “Might we be able to move beyond understanding explicitly libidinal dance as derogatory (and, as such, bankrupt of feminist possibility) and toward an analytic in which pleasure is cojoined to pain—where power might be appropriated, usurped, and reigned through the execution and mastery of the flesh?” (155).

If nothing else, this essay will prove itself a valuable resource as more and more students of the WAP generation enter the university (if you don't know what WAP is—or missed the controversy surrounding the 2020 music video starring Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion—google it. But not on your university computer). More importantly, Johnson offers an analysis that examines stereotypes, their history, and their cultural currency, combined with a long overdue reappraisal of the terms “social” and “vernacular” dance.

That is not to say that Futures is without its faults. Whereas the volume's thematic organizational structure attempts to avoid the history/anthropology dichotomy that replicates the problematic binary of us/them, or western concert dance/so-called world dance (a term that has no place in the future of dance studies),Footnote ³ it is in the final keyword section, “Circulations,” that five of the most geographically diverse essays are housed. Ranging in scope from Iran to South Asia to Mexico and intended to decenter “dance studies from away from the US and European axis” in favor of “mapping a truly global account of bodies in motion” (449), the “Circulations” section groups together the sort of topics and dance forms that would have been considered “ethnic” or “cultural” in decades past. In this way, “Circulations” functions as a stand in for the Global South. A true consideration of dance in its most globalized context would have benefited from a reminder (à la Joann Keali'inohomoku)Footnote ⁴ (2000) that all dances are ethnic, rather than simply replacing one euphemism for “ethnic dance” (i.e., the well-intentioned but obsolete “world dance”) with another: “circulations.”

It must be remembered, of course, that both anthologies were published before the Covid-19 pandemic brought much of our industry to its knees, forcing us to reconsider the already fractured relationship between capitalism and the performing arts. Both volumes were also published prior to the brutal murder by police of George Floyd and the resulting resurgence, perhaps due in no small part to frustrations wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic, of both action and rhetoric surrounding the dismantling of white supremacy. In this light, and considered in tandem, both volumes take steps in the right direction. Put simply, The Bloomsbury Companion offers an assessment of the field of dance studies as it currently stands, warts and all, whereas Futures of Dance Studies offers a series of possible pathways forward. The editors’ combined efforts in scholarship, mentorship, and curation are helping to shift the dialogue while fostering a new and more diverse generation of dance scholars, leaders, and indeed, futures. Yet there remains the sad fact of the dance forms that don't even get a mention, and the scholars and scholarship that defy Europeanist conventions and therefore are denied the support and inclusion in these types of endeavors, however well intended.