Following the premise that the dancing body should be examined ‘not as a reflection of individual or cultural values, but as culture’ (p. 7), Foster gathers a range of critical perspectives on the discourse of world dance today. Her collection challenges Curt Sachs's 1937 assertion of an underlying universalism uniting all dance forms under the ‘common function of providing an ecstatic alternative to quotidian life’ (p. 4), arguing that today each dance must be considered alongside its complex histories of Western colonialism and, more recently, globalization. Hammergren thus doubts that a ‘global consensus’ (p. 15) could be achieved, as national boundaries persist and confine migrating dance cultures to local power dynamics even as they cross countries more easily. Her case studies of three different generations of Indian dancers/choreographers in Sweden point to the increasing difficulty for comparative dance studies within an at times too easily unified discourse on ‘Indian dance’.

The range of articles makes Foster's collection both methodologically and thematically an invaluable resource far beyond dance, and relevant for anyone in performance and theatre studies wrestling with the complexity of writing history from a global perspective. Within the eight essays, readers encounter world dance in various cross-cultural settings while being introduced to innovative approaches towards analysing and writing dance history from a postcolonial perspective. As such, the book takes a decisive stance towards the continuous ‘decolonization project’ which has become a major concern across the humanities. Still, the majority of examples appear to be written from within the USA and thus miss the rather significant contribution being made, for example, by contemporary African dance on the world stage today. The physical experience and geographical locatedness of each scholar informs the case studies and makes for an interesting reading as the writing itself is hands-on the moving bodies, from ‘sweating saris’ (p. 56 ff.) to ‘red-stained feet’ (p. 119 ff.). A shared Foucauldian interest in the intertwined histories of the dancing body, language and power is at the core of the contributions and points to previously subjugated discourses and knowledges. However, the clear methodological focus bears its own limitation within as it poses the pressing question whether there is still any room for an aesthetic debate of formal aspects in world dance practices. Such a widening of analytic scope could perhaps allow for further discussion beyond the prevalent concern over identity politics.

Precisely at this point, Briginshaw and Burt come in: as a collaborative project, their jointly written volume brings together a selection of dance writings since the 1980s alongside interviews with Peter Pabst and Meredith Monk. The authors’ IFTR position paper from 1998, included in the back of the volume, is of special interest as it highlights significant theoretical debates within the field and provides for an inspiring vision of dance studies in the new millennium. Briginshaw and Burt provide a model of writing that critiques an overconcern with identity as it implies the recent theoretical turn towards an ethics of performance analysis and writing. While some of the early essays and introductory sections in the volume read like a self-searching exercise, the compilation, overall, demonstrates the evolution of dance studies over the past decades. The authors’ concern over self-reflexivity and process appears even more important bearing in mind that dance as an academic discipline has only recently gained institutional anchorage within higher education and research. Starting with their shared 1970s concern over feminist theory and identity, Briginshaw and Burt move towards ever more daring philosophical explorations of Deleuze and Agamben. Both books discussed here consider dance as culture, yet the ethical expansion of discourse analysis may prove that dance does not so much illustrate cultural theory as instantly originate its own movement-based terms.