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Susan Harewood and John Hunte reveal a wealth of information and insight about how the range of Barbados dance and policy on that island helps form identities, from the historical dances, to efforts after independence to use dance to promote nation building, to developing the government-funded Barbados Dance Theatre Company, to that uniquely Barbadian organization, the Landship. Issues of class, of who gets government subsidy, of emphasis on the African-derived or European-derived come to the fore within their framing question of decency and indecency. The wukking up to soca and calypso at Crop Over, Barbados' carnival season, is contrasted with a resurgence of ballroom dancing, liturgical dance, and new dance companies.

This chapter examines the concert dance tours of Alvin Ailey's dance company called the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in the US during the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1960s, the company was very busy touring various parts of the US and the company found itself consistently setting attendance milestones. However, during the 1970s, extensive touring wore on the company whose members found little artistic development in strings of one-night performances. Thus, from 1971, two- to three-month tours became commonplace.

Janet Reed devotes herself to family life and to becoming a visiting professor of dance at Bard College and Vassar College. Reed also joined the Dance Panel for the U.S. Department of State’s Cultural Exchange Program and then moved to Seattle to become the director of the Pacific Northwest Dance Company School. She invited many former associates to trach at the school, including Todd Bolender and Melissa Hayden.

This chapter considers how Martha Graham’s dancing and choreography functions as a limit case for American freedom in the history of cultural diplomacy. Cultural diplomacy often exported images of “freedom” as a hallmark of American society. Graham’s work, sometimes characterized as “sexy,” became an example of the kind of daring work that could be created in an American context as it challenged norms around women’s performance of gender and sexuality, but it also—especially when it became a congressional target for censorship for those challenges to sexual norms in 1963—showed the limits of freedom. The work was, in the end, not too sexy, but just sexy enough. Too, Graham created and passed on to her dancers “the diva stance,” a disordering of gender norms done explicitly through the body. Specifically, the chapter focuses on Graham’s Phaedra, and the company’s performances in Asia in 1974, specificay performances of Graham’s Diversion of Angels.

This chapter examines various metaphors that Pandit Chitresh Das and his dancers employed to represent diversity within the Chitresh Das Dance Company, and ways they discussed ethnic and racial difference in the first years of the 21st century, the period of the author’s primary fieldwork. In this community, technical virtuosity was long considered the great unifier, an emphasis that culminated in Pandit Das’s creation and development of a practice he called kathak yoga. In addition to analyzing kathak yoga’s physical, musical, and technical mechanics and performance practice, this chapter addresses its philosophical foundations, exploring how it might appeal to Americans of diverse backgrounds.

This chapter offers an interpretation of the integrated dance theatre of the Restless Dance Company as involving a process of turning away from the determinations of intellectually disabled bodies in medical discourses using the Deleuzian concepts of ‘becoming’ and ‘affect’. It contends that bodies with intellectual disability are constructed through specific systems of knowledge and argues that performance spaces can offer radically new ways of being affected by people with disabilities. It also highlights the importance of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's works in providing models for understanding minor or politically marginalised knowledge systems.

Leah Stein is the Leah Stein Dance Company's artistic director, and she is recognized for utilizing both urban and wild environments. She had been able to create performances in places such as her home town in Philadelphia, Poland, and British Columbia. Her collaborations with sculptors, composers, and poets, result in several places being made accessible. Stein drew most of her initial inspiration from the physics of movement, the forces of nature, and the various elements of the natural environment. In choosing sites for her performances, she tends to select places that are often seen as unremarkable, since these less-considered sites are attributed with a lot of life. Stein considers “resonate” as one of the important concepts she applies, and how the various environmental elements interact.

Chapter two experiences the urban terrain of Hong Kong as a kinesthetic dramatization of Hong Kong's unsteady relationship to Chineseness. Through a somatic mapping of the city the chapter examines Hong Kong's particular postcolonial predicament — its return to the mainland after 100 years of British rule — and attendant cultural identity crisis. As a place through which things and people from every direction cross and recross, Hong Kong sometimes seems like a place without any actual land, just an intricate network of transit systems in kinetic suspension. The chapter explores a dance piece called Revolutionary Pekinese Opera (1997) by City Contemporary Dance Company and a series of public protests by the spiritual group Falun Gong, both of which occurred around the time of Hong Kong's handover to China. Both choreographies reveal Hong Kongers' efforts to apprehend the city during a time of uncertainty. The chapter argues that both the dance piece and the protests served as critiques of the forces of global capitalist flow that tend to motivate the everyday choreography of the streets of Hong Kong. At the moment of the handover these two choreographies strove to make visible the bodies handed over through this transfer of sovereignty. This chapter suggests that alternate kinetic forces can work to inject blips, stutters, and stillness into a habitus otherwise dominated by free flow.

This chapter focuses on the collaboration between the Trey McIntyre Project from Boise, Idaho, and the Korea National Contemporary Dance Company from Seoul, Korea—a key example of the “collaborative turn” in American cultural diplomacy, a hallmark of twentyfirst century approaches to dance-in-diplomacy. It follows the two companies as they tour the United States with a new piece, The Unkindness of Ravens, created by McIntyre. Featuring dancers from both countries the United States and Korea, the project was funded by the State Department after TMP’s tour of Asia through DanceMotion USA.

Tudor claimed that in his seminal work Untitled, electronic components were discovered as “natural objects” as they were patched in a feedback loop creating a giant oscillator which generated sounds without exterior input. But his description of the piece as “part of a never-ending series of discovered works” calls into question its very status as a standalone “work.” Turning to its performance history appears to only complicate the puzzle. Despite his aim to perform everything live, the proliferation of modular instruments forced Tudor to record the output of his setup in advance and use this recording as input source in subsequent performances. He would later create Toneburst, which realized the no-input principle without the aid of pre-recorded sources. Shortly before his death, Tudor revived Toneburst for other musicians of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to perform. A close examination of recordings reveals that the same three source tapes were used not only in all performances of Untitled, but also in all performances of Toneburst after its revival. This surprising discovery, along with Tudor’s use of the linguistic indeterminacy inherent in the title of Untitled to solve a conundrum he faced in the revival, is used to depict the complex oscillation between work and performance in Tudor’s live-electronic music.

This chapter outlines the author’s personal journey when first working with physically integrated casts for two site-specific productions. Lessons and strategies pertinent to issues of accessibility and how to create for and direct integrated casts are shared. Working with AXIS Dance Company in California brought about an awareness of how to select sites, how to generate creative content with performers, new ideas for audience design, rehearsal protocols that incorporate how surfaces impact performers in wheelchairs, the need for adequate time for warm-ups and breaks, costumes issues, and ideas for creating content appropriate for both abled and disabled performers.

One of Tudor’s last projects used an instrument custom-made for him using the neural network chip that had just been developed. The Neural Synthesizer began as an attempt to build a universal instrument that would synthesize the proliferation of his modular devices. But the actual mechanism of the analog chip, which happened to be an extensive array of amplifiers, shifted the nature of the endeavor, causing a return to the no-input works from the 1970s. In this way, the neural network instrument, used against its usual purpose of extracting patterns from past examples, nonetheless found a strange connection with reminiscences of Tudor’s own past. The analyses of Neural Syntheses and Neural Network Plus, two series of works Tudor made using his new synthesizer, further brings up the issue of memory concerning the performance of his music, which is different every time yet open to revivals, something he tried to capture by setting a number to each performance. This also connects to the problem of how Tudor thought of passing his music on to others so that they could be performed in his absence, a natural concern in the last years of his life, but also something that reflected his lifelong interest in the role of memory and reminiscence in music.