{"title":"Ralph Lemon’s Trickster Historiographies: Unsettling Nostalgia in Postmodern Dance through the Soul Train Line","authors":"Marisa Plasencia","doi":"10.1017/s0149767726100941","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0149767726100941","url":null,"abstract":"<jats:italic>Rant #6</jats:italic> (2025), an hour-long immersive dance performance created by choreographer and visual artist Ralph Lemon, marked the end of his retrospective “Ceremonies Out of the Air” held at MoMA PS1 in New York. In reference to Lemon’s acts of creativity— daily drawings, poetry, sculptures, and movement phrases— the retrospective highlighted the many rituals or ceremonies that Lemon has created “out of the air” in response to his decades-long examination of Black history, death, and regeneration. Closing out the exhibit in March of 2025, <jats:italic>Rant #6</jats:italic> constructed a three-dimensional experience for audience members surrounded by performers on various stages that danced in continuous references to Lemon’s previous works. As Lemon shouted into a microphone, sharing a speech on liberation, <jats:italic>Rant #6</jats:italic> represented a closure. Its use of trance, repetition, and duration, with flashes of Lemon’s vast movement repertoire, enveloped viewers in a whirlwind of his artistic gestures.","PeriodicalId":44926,"journal":{"name":"DANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2026-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149251246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dancing Refractions, Dancing Disjunctions: Indian Devadāsī s in Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère (1877)","authors":"Afreen Sen Chatterji","doi":"10.1017/s014976772610093x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s014976772610093x","url":null,"abstract":"The opening of Ramsay Burt’s <jats:italic>The Male Dancer</jats:italic> always moves me: “Had I been younger I might have tried to become a professional dancer; I have ended up writing about dance instead” (1995, 1). Every time I read this, I think, “Well, this is it. This is the story of my life.”","PeriodicalId":44926,"journal":{"name":"DANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL","volume":"64 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2026-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149251247","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Embodied Hauntings: Monstrosity and Dance as Sites of Historical Reckoning and Agency in Suspiria (2018) and Midsommar (2019)","authors":"Natalie Zervou","doi":"10.1017/s0149767726100862","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0149767726100862","url":null,"abstract":"In the closing scenes of <jats:italic>Suspiria</jats:italic> <jats:sup>1</jats:sup> , a group of women of varying ages, dressed in loose, wavy clothing, sit on short stools, forming a semicircle in the dark basement of a <jats:italic>Tanzakademie</jats:italic> in 1970s Berlin. A summoning ritual is underway, and the camera pans out to reveal two more female bodies arranged in a star shape; their faces are obscured by their long, wavy hair, hanging in front of them like veils. One dancer’s knees are turned inward, resting against the bare ribs of another body. The dancer’s limp wrists are held up by a woman with long grey curls covering her exposed breasts. She is mouthing the word “geboren” (German for “being born”). The camera frame keeps expanding to reveal a line of naked female dancers standing in front of them. They rise and fall to the floor as if already possessed by the entity they seek to summon. They start on their knees, jerk their torsos abruptly, and open their chests to the ceiling. They soon contract again, curling their spines and resting their heads on the floor, before they repeat the sequence. On the sidelines, a monstrously deformed female figure, with sagging flesh full of glistening blisters and poorly healed wounds, watches them gleefully. She is anticipating her rebirth, which, if successful, would signal a return to dark historical times.","PeriodicalId":44926,"journal":{"name":"DANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2026-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149251249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Intermedial Dance and Acéphalic Butoh: Damien Jalet’s and Nawa Kōhei’s Vessel (2016)","authors":"Jonathan W. Marshall","doi":"10.1017/s0149767725100636","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0149767725100636","url":null,"abstract":"Nawa Kōhei’s gallery shows mounted under the title <jats:italic>Vessel</jats:italic> (2016-19) used techniques of bodily distortion to explore what Nawa called “the idea of ‘liquefying’ and ‘dissolving’” the human body as “represented by the distinctive ‘headless’ pose”—or what the Surrealist Georges Bataille christened in 1936 “the acéphale” (Nawa et al. <jats:italic>Arario</jats:italic> ; Jalet et al. 2019; Woo-hyun 2019). Christine Chiu’s review of the gallery exhibition described how: <jats:disp-quote> twenty life-sized sculptures of human figures in seemingly impossible, contorted poses were arranged in a single row, their faces hidden or missing. The perfectly contoured black bodies are coated with shimmery silicon carbide powder, and were dimly lit by faint spotlights … These strategically arranged androgynous figures are not single entities but parts of a sum, jumbles of body parts that are assembled into a larger puzzle. Together, they prime viewers to contemplate notions of identification and anonymity, gender and sexuality (Chiu 2018). <jats:sup>1</jats:sup> </jats:disp-quote>","PeriodicalId":44926,"journal":{"name":"DANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2026-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147478377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Vulnerable Relations: Redefining Lead and Follow in Asian American Dancesport","authors":"Crystal Song","doi":"10.1017/s0149767725100648","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0149767725100648","url":null,"abstract":"This essay seeks to limn the vulnerabilities of partnering in competitive ballroom dancing. It argues that for racialized and gendered subjects who fall beyond dancesport’s normative range of aesthetic legibility, lead and follow becomes an especially fraught—yet potentially reparative—mode of relation. It brings sustained ethnographic focus to the Asian American amateur dancesport community in New York City, which not only represents a growing presence in a predominantly white industry, but unsettles its racially charged conventions of skill, prestige, beauty, and belonging. From this position, it maps a field of vulnerable relations: between Asian American amateurs and the dancesport industry, in which they remain largely marginal and illegible figures, but also between Asian American male leads and female follows. Building on partner dance scholarship that complicates assumptions about lead and follow as a one-way flow of power, it treats the embodied mechanics of dancesport partnering as a dialogic practice of mutual vulnerability, in which both dancers effectively lead and follow each other. It also attends to the aesthetic, pedagogical, and social rules that put pressure on competitive couples—demanding resilience, even detachment, at the expense of that mutual vulnerability. In parsing what is contradictory, even compromising, about Asian American dancesport practice, this essay theorizes lead and follow as a mode of relation that involves opening ourselves up, and remaining open, to risk—but also, to the possibility of exquisite moments that can only be co-created.","PeriodicalId":44926,"journal":{"name":"DANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2026-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147478376","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"We Walk Until the Deaths Stop: Sentiment and Corporeality on the Migrant Trail","authors":"Janet O’Shea","doi":"10.1017/s0149767725100715","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0149767725100715","url":null,"abstract":"Every year, beginning on Memorial Day, a group of 35 to 85 <jats:sup>1</jats:sup> activists walk from Sásabe, Mexico to Tucson, Arizona, USA over eight days, through the arid, rugged terrain of the Sonoran Desert. They walk through soaring desert temperatures, along dirt roads and highways, enduring hot spots, blisters, and leg cramps, as shade gradually disappears with little to block the rising sun. At night, walkers sleep in tents or on tarps. Participants carry small white crosses emblazoned with the names and ages at death of migrants who perished while trying to complete a perilous journey undetected. Some are labeled “Deconocido/a” (Unknown) to memorialize someone whose remains have not yet been identified. Periodically, over the course of each day’s journey, participants conduct a role call in honor of the dead, with each walker reciting the name of the person they commemorate as the group responds with the word “¡Presente!” to “indicate that the life and death of the migrant whose name was read is recognized and witnessed” (Mankel 2021: 104). Participants undertake this journey to highlight the scale of death in the desert and its individual ramifications. <jats:sup>2</jats:sup>","PeriodicalId":44926,"journal":{"name":"DANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL","volume":"111 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2026-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147478246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Spectacular Suffering: Holocaust Representation in Competition Dance","authors":"Rebecca Rossen","doi":"10.1017/s0149767724000135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0149767724000135","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In November 2016, Tatiana Navka—former Olympic champion and wife of Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s press secretary—and her skating partner, actor Andrey Burkovsky, performed a Holocaust-themed ice dance on <span>Ice Age</span>, a Russian competition show similar to <span>Dancing with the Stars.</span><span>1</span> Sporting concentration camp uniforms emblazoned with Jewish stars, their mouths frozen into grins, the pair skated a routine inspired by Roberto Benigni’s 1997 Holocaust film <span>Life Is Beautiful.</span> Although well-received in Russia, the performance caused an international uproar. There were dozens of stories in mainstream Western news sources, Jewish and Israeli newspapers, and ironic commentary from Jewish comedians including Sarah Silverman (“Oh those wacky Holocaust victims”), Michael Ian Black (“This might be offensive if they didn’t take such care to recreate all the wonderful ice dancing going on at Aushwitz [sic],” and the Daily Show’s Adam Lowitz (“Judges can’t give Holocaust victims bad scores, they’ve been through enough”). There was also swift condemnation from Holocaust and Jewish studies scholars on twitter and a pointed response from Miri Regev, then Israel’s Culture Minister, who proclaimed that Holocaust themes are “not for dance and not for reality,” adding, “Not one of the six million danced.”<span>2</span></p>","PeriodicalId":44926,"journal":{"name":"DANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2025-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144927827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Queer/Tango/Theory: Gendered Semiosis, Dancing the Binary, and Dancing on Out","authors":"Luna Beller-Tadiar","doi":"10.1017/s0149767724000184","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0149767724000184","url":null,"abstract":"<p><span>Valencia, 2019, a queer tango festival: I had a first dance with [—], a transman I did not know. While I began with a typical “lead or follow” gesture, he offered only a leading position, and, intuiting that he wished to wholly occupy a “traditional” leading role, coded masculine, I stepped wholly into an extremely “feminine” mode of following: qualities I did not articulate at the time but might now gloss as extreme permeability and a kind of steady softness, an extreme availability and willingness I rarely, if ever, deploy while dancing with cis, straight men. Feeling increasingly sure of my intuition, noting the assertion in his lead, I melted a little further into his arms, softening the muscle tone in my chest, letting each lead reverberate through my body. Though we did not speak of it then, he later confirmed that our dynamic had given him something desired but not always offered.</span></p>","PeriodicalId":44926,"journal":{"name":"DANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2025-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144928215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Why Were New Dances in the Early 20th Century So Often Described as Plastique?","authors":"Akiko Yuzurihara, Machiko Sato","doi":"10.1017/s0149767724000147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0149767724000147","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Ever since dance was established as a theatrical art form in Western Europe, it has had a constitutive relationship with other dramatic, plastique, and musical arts. In being described as relying on these other art genres, dance works were often regarded as secondary creations. Ballets, for example, were works likened to narrative tableaux that tell stories without words, with music as their indispensable accompaniment, animating the dancing bodies. In the early 20th century, however, the relationship of dance to other art genres was fundamentally shifting. Towards the end of the 19th century, art works were to be envisaged on the basis of a musical model instead of plastique arts hitherto, and dance as an individual art genre was thereby to be redefined, independently of other art genres, as its own medium, its own material for human creative activity. In dance the human body was being recognized as its medium, and the body’s nature, as encompassed in the “plastique,” was to be scrutinized. The usage of the term “plastique” in dance must then have evolved.</p>","PeriodicalId":44926,"journal":{"name":"DANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2025-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144927824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Self-Reflexivity of a Dance Scholar: The Place of Structured Improvisation, Care, and Debate","authors":"Naomi M. Jackson","doi":"10.1017/s0149767724000160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0149767724000160","url":null,"abstract":"<p>I write. I edit. I teach. I curate conferences. I am a full professor at Arizona State University (ASU), a large research-one public university, specializing in dance history, theory, and ethics. Here I reflect on these different processes, recognizing that these labels represent different avenues by which I manifest larger existential concerns. Driving this self-analysis is the cancer diagnosis I received in January 2023 and subsequent grueling treatments that interrupted my planned research agenda. Instead, what became urgent was making meaning of the strategies that have allowed me to navigate my academic career to date. In the process, I realized that I wanted to cultivate a poetic ‘voice’ to more accurately convey the underlying creative life force that drives <span>all</span> areas of my life and is helping me to survive. I hope through this process to inspire others in higher education to take stock of their efforts, especially in the face of major changes in their lives and the dance field more generally.</p>","PeriodicalId":44926,"journal":{"name":"DANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2025-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144928547","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}