Contemporary halling, seen in theatrical dance works by the Norwegian choreogaphers Hallgrim Hansegaard and Sigurd Johan Heide, exists in a fluid interplay between traditional dance and influences from other cultures. This article examines how typical halling moves are negotiated and “remixed” through practices taking place inside and outside of the Nordic sphere. Hansegaard and Heide can be seen as representatives of “wayfinding artists,” influenced by migrant practices through moving, “wayfinding” in and out of the Nordic region.

“The Great Migration” considers danced formations of latinidad in Los Angeles. Through close analysis of the spectacularized “migration” within one east Los Angeles County nightclub, the author argues that the politics of Mexican migration interlock with salsa dance practices.

”Dance, dear body, do not think,” the message attributed to the serpent in Paul Valéry's poem “La jeune parque,” lends biblical connotations to the duality between body and mind, between dance and philosophy. A similar duality between movement and thought is found in Valéry's “L'âme et la danse” (1921), a mock Platonic dialogue in which three Greek philosophers respond to a group of dancers performing in front of them. In “L'âme et la danse” the action unfolds between the eminent philosophical figures of Socrates, Eryximachus and Phaedrus, and Athikte, a young woman dancer. More than a dialogue; it is a drama through which philosophy confronts dance, in which the philosophers, who are men, confront the dancers, who are women, and across the course of which the dancers are voiceless.

In this essay, I explore a confrontation between philosophy and dance through the tension between the roles Valéry accords to men and women in philosophical discourse. Women dance, men think. Freeing the dancer from the fetters of philosophical thought is akin to liberating women from the need to bother themselves with intellectual matters. Athikte, as the voice of dance, introduces an entirely different range of philosophical issues from those which, on the surface, animate the dialogue. But, above all, Athikte illustrates how an unproductive tension between philosophy and dance can be intensified through the uncritical preservation of gendered roles within philosophical discourse.

Have you ever wondered what distinguishes dance movement from random motion of the human body? To what degree is ordered or organized motion necessary for communication through dance? The Second Law of Thermodynamics deals with order and disorder, probabilities and tendencies, in physical systems. Can analogies drawn from this physical principle contribute something to our understanding of the nature and meaning of dance?

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, also known as the Law of Entropy or the Law of Increasing Disorder, applies to physical systems in which a number of different configurations are possible. The law states that spontaneous changes in such a system will tend away from an ordered configuration towards the more probable one of greater disorder. An example of this is the distribution of oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the air in a room. Normally these molecules are distributed evenly throughout the room with about 20% oxygen and 80% nitrogen molecules in every region of the room. Since there is an enormously large number of ways in which all of the air molecules can be distributed in this uniform way, such a configuration is very probable. It is also possible, though much less probable, that all the oxygen molecules would congregate in one corner of the room, with the nitrogens elsewhere.

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 examines Joan Miller's use of choreographic citation in her solos, Pass Fe White (1970) and Homestretch (1973). The solos “read” the desire to embody idealized, feminine whiteness in a critique of institutions for accessing national belonging—celebrity, education, and marriage—satirically exposing the gendered and racialized exclusions of the figure of the abstract “human” as “proper” citizen. Miller's work performs queer, Black feminist, diasporic desires for a world beyond Black and white nationalist logics, refusing to be “properly” placed in national hierarchies of female objecthood, while affirming the capacity to desire differently by proposing alternative terms for belonging in the world.

For the past few years, critics, fans, and even Bill T. Jones himself have been talking about the artist's move from explicitly political, identity-based works to an investigation of aesthetics and pure movement. They talk about the more conventional makeup of Jones's current ensemble—the fact that Lawrence Goldhuber and Alexandra Beller are no longer in the company, dancers described in the New York Times as “imperfect” because “chubbier than the norm” (Dunning 2002). They discuss the fact that Jones rarely uses text these days and is no longer confrontational. He dances to Beethover and performs at Lincoln Center with the Chamber Music Society. In a 1997 mterview with Richard Covington, Jones explains this shift in his work by stating, “It's not quite as sexy to talk about. What was being said in those earlier works was as important as how it was being danced. Here, I'm trying to think about how it's danced first, trusting that the political, social, all those things are in our bodies literally, and in the eyes of the beholder” (Covington 1997).