If ever there was a common denominator to discussions of dance dramaturgy, it must be the notion that this field stretches the disciplinary boundaries of dance scholarship, which is precisely the focus of exploration in the New World Choreographies book series, edited by Rachel Fensham and Peter M. Boenisch. Hansen and Callison have collected reflections by a host of influential, international voices on the current state of dance dramaturgy from perspectives including creative practice, post-structuralist philosophy and cognitive psychology. Published one year after Katalin Trencsényi and Bernadette Cochrane's edited collection New Dramaturgy: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice (2014), this book, too, is concerned with widening the geographical scope of scholarship on dramaturgical practices beyond the European context. It is therefore a welcome addition to a growing body of research on new dramaturgy, several years after Cathy Turner and Synne K. Behrndt's essential text Dramaturgy and Performance (2008), which had made initial steps in evaluating a number of predominantly European choreographic practices in a dramaturgical light.

The editors and authors skillfully historicize the turn-of-the-millennium discourses on dance dramaturgy, which were characterized by a sense of anxiety about the power relationships in choreographer–dramaturg collaborations. The editors locate this anxiety in a ‘fear of an authoritarian mediator and keeper of predetermined models, ideas, or concepts . . . migrated from conventional theatre institutions with the term dramaturgy’ (p. 4), identified by Myriam Van Imschoot in her 2003 Women and Performance article ‘Anxious Dramaturgy’. Over a decade later, this new collection of texts rightly moves the discourse from anxiety about the figure of the dramaturg, traditionally framed as holder of knowledge in the theory/practice dichotomy, to relationality and agency through a distributed dramaturgical awareness. Artists in the field have not become paralysed by critiques of the troublesome politics of dance dramaturgy and have instead continued to find productive ways to bypass such problems; the book places these recent practices at the heart of its scholarly focus. Each contributor highlights different ways in which the field itself creates new paradigms to guide both scholarly discourse and creative practice, in an attempt to continue to liberate these from the limits of binary thinking. Not relying on a stable dramatic text to shape the creation, the dance-makers contributing to and discussed in the book propose new ways of conceptualizing the creative process in dance dramaturgy.

André Lepecki's chapter introduces the notion of ‘actualization’, shifting the scholarly focus from an authorial desire located in the makers to an ‘authorial force’, owned by the work-to-come itself (p. 60). Freya Vass-Rhee theorizes the dramaturgical function in the creative process of the Forsythe Company as ‘distributed’ (p. 91) and ‘enacted’ (p. 100). Most striking in Forsythe's creative devising process is the strategic use of dramaturgical silence to ‘render performances radically open for both the ensemble and its audience’ (p. 100). Vida Midgelow dissolves the distinctions between performer and maker and between artist and audience through her discussion of ‘dramaturgical consciousness’ in improvisation (p. 108). Nanako Nakajima and koosil-ja’s contribution discusses the role of dance dramaturgy in using media to make traditional Noh theatre accessible to a wider audience and connect it to contemporary issues (p. 163). Bonnie Brooks considers the transnational work shaped by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in exploring ‘dance presenting’ and ‘audience dramaturgy’ (p. 184) in Jerusalem, creating a dialogue between voices from Israel, Canada, the US and the UK.

The key concept advanced by the authors in this collection is that dance dramaturgy is a fundamentally embodied and relational practice, distributed among collaborators and shaped by local contexts. Overall, the book offers a timely dance-focused set of interventions in the discourses on new dramaturgies, useful to those working in dance and devised performance.