At 656 pages wide and 31 authors deep, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics collection contains a veritable who's who of US, UK, and EU dance scholarship. It also importantly documents the weight of the loss to the field of coeditor Randy Martin, whose materialist investigations of dance and politics influence the volume's contributions in powerful and explicit ways. Through the dedicated energies of Martin's fellow coeditors Rebekah Kowal and Gerald Siegmund, the volume updates an editorial burden assumed by earlier collectionsFootnote ¹ and field progenitors: interpreting dance's irreconcilable relationship to politics, a tension that the volume's contributors do not promise to reconcile. But what the text does, and with great urgency, is to revise and update long-standing debates on dance's politics of representation while also flagging hierarchical issues internal to dance research as areas for future investigation.

In contrast to extant anthologies, in this work dance functions as both a liability and a resource for the study of bodies and power across the critical arts and humanities. Contributors offer nuanced readings of politically oriented dances, analyze political enactments using dance methods, and critique oppressive norms of practice, policy, and production internal to dance scholarship. Highly memorable essays critique issues that hold dance back as an inclusive and global area of study and offer historically informed accounts of silences that undergird intellectual and artistic research in dance, such as the enduring subordination of non-Western epistemologies as a condition of dance's disciplinary ascendancy in the United States and Western Europe. This reflexive turn in critical dance studies has been long coming. It marks an arrival point and documents a discernable willingness among dance scholars and practitioners to put dance's disciplinary hierarchies and exclusions to the test.

In the volume's introduction, Martin, Kowal, and Siegmund acknowledge the conjectural “and” situated between the terms “dance” and “politics” in the book's title as an undefinable tension that forms the book's central problematic. Contributions are split into two parts, with a palpable degree of overlap across the five sections. Authors in Part 1 (“Dancing Structures”) consider the structural constraints of dance's political economy (section 1) and the politics of choreography (section 2), embodiment (section 3), and history (section 4), respectively. The essays in the second half (“Dancing Interventions”) refresh running debates on dance's political resignification (5), and renegotiation (6) in turn. I will refer readers to the volume introduction for the coeditors’ thoughts on Martin's theoretical influence and use this space to unpack each essay's contributions and limitations for readers invested in dance's political entanglements, broadly construed.

Section 1, “Dance's Political Economy,” introduces five essays that consider dance's politics of transmission, commodification, and organization across an array of institutional contexts. Continuing her long-standing tango with questions of cultural assimilation, appropriation, and ownership (1997, 1999), Jane Desmond's opening essay “Tracking the Political Economy of Dance” follows dance performances on Broadway, the Hawaiian tourist industry, and African American concert dance to reveal how specific artists are deauthorized and reauthorized as dances traverse mainstream, transnational, and nonprofit dance venues. Desmond's account of the interventionist production politics of the late “Baba” Chuck Davis, in particular, takes a critical leap forward for dance studies by highlighting Davis's nonprofit organizational practices, an underexamined area of dance study.

Susan Leigh Foster's “Dance and/as Competition in the Privately Owned US Studio” intertwines her prior work on the politics of US dance training (Reference Foster and Desmond1997, Reference Foster2010) with her later work on power and empathy (Reference Foster2011) to connect competitive commercial dance training and performance to the neoliberal commodification and circulation of affective labor under late capitalism. In addition to offering a valuable pocket history of the ascension of competition dance studios as a cottage industry (a market that forms a pipeline to many US academic dance programs),Footnote ² Foster looks at how affective codes proliferate across studio training and commercial dance performances and argues that this circulation problematically fuels mainstream absorption of toxic able-isms, racisms, sexisms, and hetero-norms. While this materialist turn in Foster's work pivots away from her long-standing preoccupation with political semiotics inside dance studies, her approach does not sacrifice her lifelong promotion of “body theorics” (Reference Foster1995) in that she peppers the text with surgical movement descriptions for which she is well known.

Staging academic dance institutions as political battlegrounds, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild's “Racing in Place: A Meta-Memoir on Dance Politics and Practice” places the practice of dance research under the analytical spotlight to track race-based roadblocks that endure and continue to thwart the advancement of African diasporic dance scholars in the field. She uses the literary form of a memoir to connect her own vocational itinerary and foundational ideas on the trenchant Europeanisms that undergird US dance representation and training to larger gatekeeping practices in academic dance research, hiring, recruitment, advancement, promotion, and curricular design. While Dixon-Gottschild generously cites colleagues whose work and activism have pushed back against such structural exclusion during her career, her essay also remembers the labor involved in demanding inclusion as a deeply and problematically racially marked exercise. An indefatigable spirit, Dixon-Gottschild demonstrates clear institutional fatigue. She closes her call for structural reform with a question, “Do we care?” and challenges future generations to take collective care, in a coalitional sense, of the necessary project of dismantling policies of silence and nonaction that stall the advancement of antiracist work in US academic dance.

Moving from memoir to manifesto in format, M. Cynthia Oliver's offerings in “Epiphanic Moments: Dancing Politics” sound a different battle cry, asking artists and scholars to consider the contradictory hierarchies that form the infrastructural inheritance of US concert dance makers. Writing from her perspective as an artist researcher-practitioner, Oliver's second person address unfolds a list of “do's and don'ts” in an attempt to chronicle the vexed exercise of navigating the contingent support mechanisms that artists confront in the field in practice. Her performative text summons dance's white matriarchies, gay patriarchies, and double-sided compliments as gatekeeping mechanisms that demand further historical and ethnographic attention. While her text does not do that work, Oliver's important voice reminds scholars that working artists are a vital and often untapped resource for debates on dance's culturally contingent politics of production.

Readers invested in the reenactment of mass movement in dance and protest will be interested in Kai Van Eikels's philosophical claim, in the closing essay, “Performing Collectively”: namely, that dance's political promise lies not in its resultant product but in its function as a collective promise to continue moving within the unknowable and irreducible social phenomenology of the group. To promote a politics of process through dance as central to dance's power to (re)make the world, Van Eikels resuscitates Aristotle's notion of prattein—the carrying out of political action—versus the initiation an act (archein) or an action-product (poein) as a less product-focused framework. In an edited collection that queries how dance functions as a site of convening power, this shift from dance's ontological “what” to its processual “when” and choreographic “how” is significant.

Section 2, “The Politics of Choreography,” weighs the political limits and affordances of “choreography” and the “choreographic” as conceptual containers to unpack how power circulates within and, importantly, without dance. Gabrielle Klein's “Urban Choreographies: Artistic Interventions and the Politics of Urban Space” opens this cluster of texts by suggesting an interdependent—not oppositional—relationship between aesthetics and politics. Refusing the partitioning of dance and protest performances as distinct historical and/or political formations (articulated, for example, in Foster Reference Foster2003), Klein isolates performances that intervene as both dance and protest at once. What results is a brief genealogy of dance protests that connects early movement choirs to politically engaged twenty-first-century arts collectives (the Berlin ensemble LINGA is her example) to highlight the theatricality inherent in these stagings and to theorize their symbiotic relationship as domains of collective will in action.

One of the few offerings to radically reject embodied legibility and representation as evidence of dance's political ontology, André Lepecki's piece, “The Politics of Speculative Imagination in Contemporary Choreography,” situates power in conceptual dance works that refuse to representationally abide by dance's preoccupation with embodied discipline, training, and representation. Through detailed readings of pieces by Brazilian Gustavo Ciríco, American Trajal Harrell, and Danish dance artist Mette Ingvartsen, Lepecki claims that such “speculative” choreographies depend on a vanished body and rely on the movement of narratives, ideas, and thought to render their political potential. Echoing a claim made fervently in radical Black and Black feminist discourses, Lepecki insists that speculative choreographies draw attention to the body's absence and, in so doing, enact a politically affirmative protest against dance's “perceptual-semiotic-kinetic regime” (160). A powerful assertion of the politically productive abstraction of the body as a strategy of semiotic “mismanagement” in dance, Lepecki's work commands critical consideration of the body's unintelligibility as a political stance among artists and a political strength of dance work.

Maintaining his ongoing refusal to assign ontological power to dance as a cultural product (Reference Franko2006), Mark Franko's “Toward a Choreo-Political Theory of Articulation” looks at dance reception as an articulatory process that carries political potential in its ability to join heterogeneous people and parts. To evidence this conjunctive relation, Franko invokes Laclau and Mouffe's (Reference Laclau and Mouffe1985) assertion that political democracy requires conflict internal to its interdependent relations. Such permanent antagonisms, for him, hold power to articulate or disarticulate common understandings and, when applied to dance historiography, can produce radical revisions that uproot canonical understandings of dance (171). Ultimately an argument for articulation as a means of reanimating and reambulating historical moves made on dance's behalf, Franko challenges future researchers to revisit homogeneous understandings of dance production and reception as reductive areas of dance historiography.

In an essay strikingly devoid political economic commentary or metacommentary on dance's internal politics of production, coeditor Gerald Siegmund's “Rehearsing in-Difference: The politics of Aesthetics in the Performances of Pina Bausch and Jérôme Bel” assigns power to the choreographic and aesthetic practices of two dominant choreographers through Rancierian orientations that, in Siegmund's view, “give dancers and mentally challenged people voice and agency” (188). While his readings of representational strategies that repetitively engage and dislodge the stable notion of a “self” in Bel and Bausch anchors power dance's politics of representation, it seems no longer permissible for dance scholars to answer structural oppressions with strictly representational arguments. If, as Siegmund suggests, dance's capacity to produce power stems from dance's ability to make us “see and hear what we have already seen and heard but differently,” then Bausch's and Bel's stage presentations of nonnormative bodies should be considered as a structural condition of their practical complicity in neoliberalized structures of state and market recognition that prey upon difference and seek every opportunity to fold its fetishized display into the institutional brand (183).

Another representational analysis follows by way of Bojana Cvejić’s “Problem as a Choreographic and Philosophical Kind of Thought.” The piece searches for political critique in conceptual dance works that dispense with modern/postmodern binaries and representational politics by posing problems. Following recent work from the veritable darlings of the EU conceptual art festival and biennial circuit, Cvejić maintains that the “problem-posing’” compositional approaches of Xavier Le Roy, Jérôme Bel, Mette Ingvartsen, Tino Sehgal, and Jonathan Burrows collectively challenge the lure of legibility and unified connection (associated with modernism) and resist staging movement as a strictly objective burden (associated with postmodernism) to which the body is physically and historically tied (203). She pinpoints these artists’ deployment of disjunctive movement inventions, erratic temporal unfoldings, and disjointed audience-performer relations as a nascent compositional paradigm in its own right, one that resists the traps and tropes of representation by casting audiences in an apprenticeship relation to the unconscious and unseen.

The five contributors offering ideas in section 3, “The Politics of Embodiment,” revise understandings of the political phenomenology of dance and nondance repertoires of embodied action and (re)production. Ann Cooper Albright's “The Politics of Perception” invokes the writings of queer phenomenologist Sarah Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2004) to argue that somatic dance practices like Body-Mind Centering, contact improvisation, and release techniques effectively cultivate individual and shared conditions of perception. Experientially these forms, in Cooper-Albright's view, engender a level of shared responsiveness that can assuage the deep polarization around race and sociocultural difference that prevails in US culture. Rather than accept apolitical understandings of somatic-informed dance training systems,Footnote ³ she unpacks the institutional “whitewashing” of somatic practice as a power move among field builders that, she insists, negates the power of somatic training to bridge cultural difference (see also George 2014).

A parallel effort to place political agency with dance practitioners, Ramsay Burt's “The Politics of Speaking About the Body” revisits his past discussions of Judson Dance Theatre choreographers Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, and Deborah Hay with special attention to the spoken commentary surrounding their work. Situating historical connections between the lifestyles led by these artists and an inoperable community (following Jean-Luc Nancy Reference Nancy1991), Burt argues for the performative force of their agentic utterances as antimainstream rhetorics that forged nothing short of a countercultural consciousness (252). In a volume coedited and overseen by one of dance's most committed materialists (Martin), Burt's avoidance of in-depth discussion of the material privileges that many of Judsonites subscribed to seems startling and retrograde.

Petra Kuppers’ contribution, “Dancing Disabled: Phenomenology and Embodied Politics,” locates disability dance performances as politically insurgent domains of cultural production. While dance's historic assumptions of able-ism and physical dexterity merit a far more multivocal account than Kuppers has space to fill, she sustains awareness of this problematic gap by considering how destabilizing choreographies by German disability dance group DINA 13 and US dance artist Bill Shannon upend “the everyday knowledge of disabled people's physicality and embodiment that audiences might hold” (278). Kuppers closes with the salient point that advancements in spatial and material access by disabled artists and spectators masks the slow and unsteady development of disability aesthetics in twenty-first-century dance research.

Rounding out the large number of essays in this volume that attend to structural exclusions that render dance production and research complicit with race-based dispossession, violence, and colonial conquest, Ananya Chatterjea's contribution, “Of Corporeal Rewritings, Translations and the Politics of Difference in Dancing,” promotes the merits of intersectional dance analysis as a nascent and long overdue contribution to critical dance discourse. Keeping nonnegotiable faith in dance as a method of political articulation, Chatterjea analyzes dance practices and performances from politically asymmetrical standpoints to show how artists of color negotiate neocolonial racisms and capitalisms using a politics of “constant translation” (295). She stages multivalent readings of concert dance works by dance artists of color that “re-write” colonialist narratives and produce political friction. She also turns important attention to the stultifying logics embedded in dance training systems by detailing how white repurposing of classical movement forms enacts sticky translations of movement traditions from the European West and Global South (ballet and yoga). The dexterity with which Chatterjea translates the micropractical details of technical achievement in dance and revisionist representational strategies of artists of color make hers an essential essay for academics seeking traction for practice as a decolonial mode of resistance.

If death is a problem for dance, as Peggy Phelan suggests in her smartly crafted essay, “Planning for Death's Surprise: Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham,” it is a problem inextricably linked to time. Phelan situates the unanticipated passing of Bausch and Cunningham in 2009 as an occasion to speculate about how each choreographer planned for ending both in their dances and their company legacy plans. A vital contribution of the piece is its effort to draw dance’s representational and organizational practices together and then show how they work at political odds. Phelan does this by construing Bausch's aesthetic aversions to endings as an anxiety that also informed her lack of legacy preparation after her swift cancer diagnosis. Interestingly and in contrast, Cunningham's deployment of aleatory time in his choreography stands diametrically opposed to the hypervigilant preservation practices that surround his work, implemented by the Cunningham Trust. Phelan's account of the temporal and countertemporal maneuvers of these canonized artists reveals how the prospect of death haunts dance; the legacies of Bausch and Cunningham suggest that posthumous embodiment in dance remains an always ideological prospect.

Section 4, “The Politics of Histories,” includes five chapters that deepen understanding of previously invisibilized or reductive aspects of global dance production. Unwilling to neatly equate dance with “freedom” in an aesthetic or political sense, Felicia McCarren's vital essay, “Dancing D-Day” connects histories of state dance funding in France and the United States to a 2014 interpretive performance of the 1944 landing of US allied forces at Normandy (a project funded, fascinatingly, by the French Ministry of Defense). McCarren takes up the unique occasion of this highly publicized dance and the government declarations that surrounded it to weigh contrasting national attitudes toward art as a market (or market-free) project in the US and French bureaucratic models of arts funding, respectively. She refuses to abide reductive characterizations of France's “centralized” infrastructure as more or less artist-enabling than the “market-driven” US model of public-private leveraged funds to argue, instead, that dance is never “free” in any economic sense. McCarren's piece makes a convincing case for more rigorous materialist analyses of artists’ complex enmeshment in state cultural policy regimes.

The shadowed status of dance scholarship on China informs Alexandra Kolb's chapter, “Dance and Politics in China: Interculturalism, Hybridity and the ArtsCross Project,” which contextualizes the Chinese government's shifting role in the slow and steady political project of dance institutionalization. Kolb's investment in revising reductive understandings of Maoist and post-Maoist state policies and attitudes toward dance forms the backdrop for her account of the hybrid choreographic practices at play in Chinese Western European and US dance in the twenty-first century. What results is an essay that exposes and expels Western postmodernist claims to hybridity and fragmentation as attitudes that, while still prevalent in dance research, do not neatly adhere in a Chinese production context.

Another account dedicated to decolonizing dance historical and ethnographic research is Victoria Fortuna's “Between the Cultural Center and the Villa: Dance, Neoliberalism and Silent Borders in Buenos Aires.” Fortuna's work introduces re-transitando, or “movement otherwise” as a conceptual framework through which politically engaged choreographers organize and enact counterhegemonic production curricula (373). In addition to offering a vivid account of Argentine urban history, social movement, and political art making in Buenos Aires, Fortuna's work multiplies the number of achieved standpoints that authorize dance while casting politically engaged choreographers as institutional critics capable of rerouting social connections between estranged local publics. Analyzing the performance flows of neoliberal economic development, embodied protest, dance performances, workshops, and political organizing, Fortuna's work shows how Argentinean collectives poner el cuerpo (“put bodies on the line”) and confront the ongoing economic decimation of low income neighborhoods in Argentina's governmental and cultural epicenter. In so doing, she makes a compelling case for how people who occupy deeply asymmetrical power relations manage to dance in a political economic crisis.

Joining McCarren and Kolb in provoking a more complex study of nationalist agendas in dance production is Susan Manning's piece, “Modern Dance in the Third Reich, Redux.” Manning's analysis shows how Weimar-era dance history “moves” toward and away from state power. She revisits her own and others’ historic accounts of German canonical dance figures during the Weimar years to conclude that any purported consensus among US and EU dance historians on the political significance of Weimar choreographers inscribes a false distance between artists and their political surroundings. Providing closer scrutiny of connections between past and present German art dance works, she hypothesizes: “If contemporary choreographers and scholars in Berlin are so interested in the complexities of memory and history, the archive and the body, the synchronicity of past and present, then why had(s) all discussion of modern dance in the Third Reich seemingly vanished?” (411). Reviewing extant literature while reflexively interrogating her own unstable archive, Manning makes a strong case for the complex contours of German dance history, asking how Nazi state bureaucrats promoted both Tanzkunst (dance as art) and Tanz-Gymnastik (dance as physical culture) to essentially remake “modernism” using newly available forms of state support.

Kate Elswit's piece, “The Micropolitics of Exchange: Exile and Otherness after the Nation” tracks the migratory experiences of exiled artists—their hybrid encounters, contingent social positions, and assimilationist tactics—to theorize dispossession in dance as a situational, multidirectional, and underrecognized aspect of dance history. Rather than accept the historical victimization and estrangement of exiled artists like Kurt Joss and Valeska Gert, Elswit revisits these artists’ itinerant career trajectories to flag the political losses and cross-cultural affordances that their travels engendered. She is careful to acknowledge the egregious circumstances that Jooss and Gert weathered under the Weimar regime while she strongly rejects the tendency among dance historians to stage political deficits and defeats in instances of exile. This historiographical reorientation toward migration and hypermobility as a fugitive and complicit form of political locomotion on the part of dance artists builds momentum around exile as a generative area of future dance study.

Section 5, “The Politics of Re-Signification,” invokes the important prefix re- to convey a return to danced representation that departs from new or alternative orientations. The four essays highlighted here undertake critical examinations of dance's productively illegible and minor meanings and situate power in dance's capacity to signify many ideas at once. Asking readers to consider how ballet de-ethnicizes, desexualizes, and assimilates Otherness and deviant sexual identities, Hannah Schwadron's “Black Swan, White Nose” offers a “queer Jewish reading” of Darren Aronofsky's major motion picture Black Swan (2010). To show how repressed identities enter into classical ballet representation via “ballet's monsters,” Schwadron's analysis depends on the intrusion of lead actor Natalie Portman's nose, a corporeal attribute that, she claims, betrays the closeted Jewish identities of the film's four female protagonists. This nasal protrusion into ballet's hegemonic “whiteness,” in Schwadron's view, perforates perceived boundaries between the performance of the hegemonic, white, feminine ideal of “swan femininity” that ballet historically upholds. Schwadron's creative form of critical cross-reading leverages the “deviled” representation of lesbian sexual experimentation in Black Swan to locate queer representation in dance as an exciting and yet still undertheorized area of research.Footnote ⁴

Writing about a challenging canonical figure in US modern dance history, James Moreno's “Brown in Black and White: José Limón Dances The Emperor Jones” looks at Limon's representational strategies in his 1956 danced interpretation of Eugene O'Neill's racist play The Emperor as a “fault-line narrative,” a staging of homosocial bonding, heterosexual desire, and failed whiteness that reinforces Limón's tenuous negotiation of modern dance's black/white binary and closeted homosexuality. Moreno follows Susan Manning's (Reference Manning2004) work on the artist to argue that Limón's stylized deployment of blackface and depictions of violence productively mismanage race and homoerotic anxiety to produce antiresolution in Limón's multivalent dances. Analyzing what it might have meant for Limón to negotiate his status as a brown dancer in the black/white world of modern dance, Moreno maintains that Limón's choreography perpetuated and resisted conventional tropes of femininity, homosociality, and modern dance pan-ethnicism, at the same time.

Thomas F. DeFrantz's essay, “SWITCH: Queer Social Dance, Political Leadership, and Black Popular Culture” maps the movement of queer African American social dance forms from margins to mainstream. De Frantz rehearses the embodied details at play in voguing, J-setting, and hand dancing as in-demand practices through the analytical trope of “the switch,” toggling reader attention between the large-scale magnetism of these movement forms and the agentic capacity of queer dance makers that mainstream absorption and appropriation violently endangers. The back and forth movement of De Frantz's discussion via this trope generates blurriness by design. In fact, it is this textual relay that powerfully sustains DeFrantz's conclusion that fugitive queer hauntings abound when queer black dance crosses from marginal to mainstream performance. Alongside Chatterjea's work in this volume, DeFrantz's deeply convincing model of seeing both the power and violence at play in black dance potently updates his ongoing arguments for corporeal orature (Reference DeFrantz and Lepecki2004, Reference DeFrantz2016) by showing how danced meanings may visually dissipate in black performance, but they never fully disappear.

A more parodic but also productively blurry authorial offering in this volume takes the form of an interview-essay by Slovenian performance artist Janez Janša (arguably Davide Grassi), a movement artist who coadopted the name of the Slovenian prime minister and joined the Democratic Socialist Party in 2007 in an act of political recognition and defiance.Footnote ⁵ Using an eponymous interview to unpack one of his own political choreographies (he interviews himself so it is hard to tell who is “doing the talking”), Janša reflects on how his 2007 piece Fake It throws issues of authority in dance representation into relief. Janša's dialogue unpacks the historic lag in institutionalization of contemporary dance in Eastern Europe as central to the political potential of works that enact “choreographic counterfeit,” a representational strategy that involves borrowing and reproducing movement by Western postmodernists in performance. The editorial inclusion of Janša's reflexive essay is a refreshing move that reinforces the function of politically engaged dance making as “speculative historiography” (like Lepecki) and provides a platform for artists (like Oliver) to articulate alternatives to hegemonic understandings of dance's national and institutional borders.

In the final section of the anthology, “The Politics of Re-Negotiation,” Nadine George-Graves's “Identity Politics and Political Will: Jeni LeGon Living in a Great Big Way,” argues for identity as a potent lens to revisit how historical contradictions and oppressive structures have been weathered by dance artists of color throughout US history. Her “between the lines” reading of African American tap dance artist Jeni LeGon's experiences of race-based discrimination (lost employment, subordinate casting, micro- and macro-aggressions) details the overt and creative ways that LeGon worked within the political institution of Hollywood to expose and deidentify with stultifying institutional norms. Her conceptualization of this artist's onstage and covert offstage maneuvers as instances of “black will” reclaims will as a container for revisionist histories of dance production. In doing so, George-Graves offers a crowning example of theory's power to enable researchers to imagine something different. Risking speculation, she locates knowing confidence in LeGon's aesthetic and extra-artistic efforts. This reorientation draws much-needed historical attention to field literacies and dexterities that shift the fate of artists at the historical margins (529).

Jacqueline Shea Murphy's essay, “Dancing in the Here and Now: Indigenous Presence and the Choreography of Emily Johnson/Catalyst and DANCING EARTH,” investigates how two contemporary indigenous dance groups negotiate settler colonial strategies of confinement, assimilation, and contingent recognition in their productions. Arguing against indigenous dance as a fixed identitarian attribute, Shea Murphy maintains that a level of marginal legibility abounds in dances by Elizabeth Johnson and DANCING EARTH and insists that such muddiness resuscitates and repairs narrow understandings of movement, land, and indigenous history. She cites Johnson's choreographic combination of Yup'ik cosmological images and Chicago Bulls iconography and DANCING EARTH's commitment to hiring inter-indigenous production teams, to present contemporary indigenous dance as a counterbalancing act that harbors both the vitality of indigenous life and resists the continuing violence of settler colonial policies on lands where artists live and work.

Pressuring dance artists and critics to reconsider narrow and ahistorical assumptions of cultural backwardness on the part of choreographers in Eastern Europe, Bojana Kunst's piece, “Dance and Eastern Europe Contemporary dance in the Time of Transition,” examines the postcommunist transition of Slavic states as an infantilizing process that has generated narrow and deleterious understandings of Eastern European contemporary dance performance. With Janša and Cvejič, Kunst highlights the anachronistic development of conceptual dance in formerly socialist states as a project of a distinct geopolitical history and uses this context to critique the scholarly tendency in dance research to forklift Western democratic ideals onto Eastern European aesthetic and organizational logics. Invoking the tropes of transition and perpetual “catching up” as gatekeeping devices that problematically relegate Eastern European artists to the proverbial wings of dance research, Kunst protests the reification of the Western European dance vanguard and argues for close geopolitical scrutiny of “transitional” countries after the fall of the Wall. She connects communist and socialist rule to artists’ engagement in solidarity movements and diverse articulations of experimentation and collaboration (567) and the resulting study spotlights transitional epistemologies in dance as an urgent frontier of future dance study.

In “Domesticating Dance: South Asian Filmic Bodies Negotiating New Moves in Neoliberalism,” Priya Srinivasan identifies neoliberal pressures on women's labor and subjectivity in filmic representation of female dance in South Asia. She follows the specific trope of female spirit (dis)possession across three “minor” dance media texts (a Tamil film, documentary film, and a Hindi TV serial) to expose the damaging and, she argues, haunting corporeal impacts of Indian neoliberal policies on women. Citing instances of bodily possession and haunting as representational strategies articulated through danced and nondanced forms of kinetic mobility, Srinivasan locates a resistant “body” in the figure of the absent woman present across these texts. This woman's absent presence, she insists, serves as a powerful spirit-source that circumvents the enduring effects of neoliberalism's enforced stillnesses on women in India and the Global South. While the text offers much more than a representational analysis, Srinivasan's purposefully Orientalist reading of devadasi female representation reinforces how nuanced textual analyses can serve as critical fictions to highlight the deleterious and toxic effects of institutional forces.

Closing this collection of insurgent essays is Jens Richard Giersdorf's essay “Is it OK to Dance on Graves?”—a text that reopens his past queries into representational and contextual frames of East German dance to theorize the coimbrication of modernist representational strategies across socialist realist dance theater and architecture. Departing from East German artist Boris Charmatz's 2014 efforts to stage a modernist dance work at the Soviet War Memorial, a gravesite of 5,178 Soviet soldiers, Giersdorf revisits works by Tom Schilling that challenge readers to think backward into the political condemnation of modernist aesthetic principles in East Germany as an ideological project that, he maintains, clouds understanding of the absorption of modernist ideologies across registers of East German art. Analyzing monumental architectures and dance choreographies together, Giersdorf's chapter exposes the polarizing fiction of modernism/social realism as a feigned political choreography that masks artists’ imbrication in state warfare and wartime remembering.

The voices assembled through the Oxford Handbook on Dance and Politics reveal a forceful effort within dance research to interrogate its own disciplinary boundaries with regard to topics, theories, and methods. Although body-focused analysis continues to stand the test of time as a dominant tool for dance study, the “minor,” “intersectional,” and “alternative” analytical strategies modeled here brilliantly reinforce the capacity of critical dance research to walk a reader through the body's action in words. This distinctive collection reorients past thinking, provokes future debates, and offers invaluable resources for those whose study and practice of dance hinge on the body's capacity to produce a politics.