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).

There is a growing body of knowledge about movement behavior (as it is variously called--kinesics, nonverbal communciation, expressive movement, body language, etc.). Increasingly anthropologists, psychologists, researchers in child development, etc. are attending to body movement. One could argue that although this is still a relatively underdeveloped area of research and that studies we have now will probably be rendered quite obsolete in five years, there is enough of a picture of what can be done and may be discovered to talk about it as a field in its own right. Further, one could argue that the preliminary research techinques and findings of movement research may, even at this point, be useful and relevant to research in dance. As an introduction to the topic a survey of some of the most important behavioral studies of body movement will be presented, followed by a discussion of a dance film and then implications of a practical, methodological, empirical, and theoretical nature that may be of interest to dance researchers.

For purposes of discussion, this survey is divided into three parts according to those studies which deal with (1) movement and expression of emotions, (2) movement style (from individual to cultural), and (3) movement in interaction.

It seems that the most common assumption about body movement is that it reveals inner emotions or attitudes. Darwin first made this idea the subject of serious scientific study in 1872 when he published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

“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.

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.

Identity, difference, and translation are important theoretical concepts in the field of translation studies and postcolonial studies. It is a basic assumption of this text that aesthetic and cultural translation is exposed to the paradox of identity and difference and that this paradox is particularly evident in artistic performance practices such as dance and choreography. Focusing on the artistic work of choreographer and dancer Germaine Acogny (Senegal), the text addresses artistic translation practices under postcolonial conditions in the global art market of so-called “contemporary dance.” The aim is to illustrate how contradictory, hybrid, and fragmented the cultural and aesthetic translation process is, how the global art market shapes the artistic strategies of translation, and how aesthetic productivity lies in the impossibility of translating cultural experience artistically.

Dance, Politics & Co-Immunity developed out of a symposium organized by the Master in Choreography and Performance at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Germany, which was held with a joint symposium Thinking—Resisting—Reading the Political organized by the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture at the same university in 2010. Whereas the cultural studies symposium asked, “What specific perspectives and methodological consequences arise for the study of culture that are informed by recent deliberations on the relationship of the political and the aesthetic?” (2010), the dance symposium invited participants and contributors to the anthology “to think about the multiple connections between politics, community, dance, and globalization from the perspective of Dance and Theatre Studies, History, Philosophy, and Sociology” (13). As indicated by the title of the cultural studies symposium and some of the key speakers, including Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe, and Judith Butler, the term political is not used as broadly as it might be used in U.S.-based dance studies discourse. Rather, the political is predominantly investigated by both symposia for its resistive potential and from a liberal or post-Marxist stance.