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This chapter revisits key debates over documentation and authenticity in the emergence of queer studies, which it considers through the work of a contemporary choreographer who engages in a process of what he calls “fictional archiving.” By reimagining black queer aesthetics as always already central to the development of postmodern dance and other contemporary aesthetic innovations, the chapter shows how this performance enacts a form of “critical shade” on white normative histories and pedagogies of dance, fashion, and performance.

This chapter considers three dimensions of a queer dance ontology: being, doing, and making. The tri-parte exploration assumes that there is something called queer, and it can be done, and made, as dance. Through exploration of a collaborative queer work “theory-ography 4.5—a we still queer here” created by SLIPPAGE:performance|culture|technology, the chapter demonstrates that dance enhances queer visibility. A consideration of the essential participation of viewing/recognition that defines queer, the chapter concludes that while dance emerges from being and doing, perhaps, its contents are brought into focus by the making of its various audiences who can narrate the queerness at hand.

In twenty-first-century urban Chinese contemporary dance, gender and female sexuality are often constructed in ways that reinforce patriarchal and heterosexual social norms. Although “queer dance” as a named category does not exist in China, it is possible to identify queer feminist perspectives in recent dance works. This essay offers a reading of representations of gender and female sexuality in two works of contemporary dance by Beijing-based female Chinese choreographers: Wang Mei’s 2002 Thunder and Rain and Gu Jiani’s 2014 Right & Left. Through choreographic analysis informed by ethnographic research in Beijing’s contemporary dance world, this essay argues that Thunder and Rain reinforces patriarchal and heterosexual social norms common in Chinese contemporary dance, while Right & Left disrupts such norms. Through its staging of unconventional female-female duets and its queering of nationally marked movement forms, Right & Left offers a queer feminist approach to the presentation of women on the Chinese stage.

This essay attends to origin stories of queerness and dance from the author’s younger years, to suggest that his contemporary manifestations of queer dance emerge from contexts that may not traditionally be labeled as “queer” or “dance.” He describes dance pedagogies offered by his Indian aunties in Ghana, to explain how they inform his queer choreographies and politics as a drag queen performing in the multicultural US nightclub and online. Specifically, he considers how he creates his drag persona, LaWhore Vagistan, blending Bollywood vocabulary and music with drag queen performance in a way that exceeds a colonizing, patriarchal, femme-phobic gaze.

This chapter examines the relationship between blackness, queer vulnerability, and the mechanics of movement and dance. It uses anecdotes to make an argument for downward movement and concaveness as movement techniques, responses to the physical threats intrinsic to black ontology. It examines the relationship between those movements and shapes in the black body to an emergent style of performance called “queer dance.” This relationship might be identified as a type of “freak technique”—and always already othered practice. The chapter also considers a more familiar relationship to gravity in terms of making interventions into dominant narrative arcs in dance as well as capitalist America. It argues that these interventions are made complete by their pairing with recovery—it is not only the get-down that steals movement away into blackness and potential queerness, but its coupling with the get-back-up.

The essay uses poetic, descriptive, and conceptual writing approaches to articulate how the choreographic strategies of RMW(A) & RMW emerged from their historical and political contexts. The work references the 1990s and the early 2000s as historical moments influenced by the AIDS epidemic and the Internet revolution. It proposes that the notion of a queer object and action might be used to differentiate the kinds of desire that are negotiated between the performers and the audience through these choreographic approaches over time. RMW(A) & RMW is described as a practice that adapts to the unstable notion of what queer dance means for these two differently female bodies as their lives move apart and come together. The essay describes the experience of being inside the work as well as narrates the personal histories that shaped the choreography and practice of RMW(A) & RMW.