Inter-Asia in Motion: Dance as Method brings together two disparate fields that heretofore have rarely intersected: inter-Asia cultural studies and dance studies. It models an inter-Asia dance studies that attends to ‘how Asia is set in constant motion, redefined and recreated through dance’ (p. 3). Eschewing Western-centric definitions of ‘Asian dance’ and comparative methodologies that often reify national or ethnic boundaries, inter-Asia dance studies focuses instead on interrelationality and inter-referencing, identifying dance and dancers as primary agents of inter-Asia relations and formations. As suggested by the subtitle, inter-Asia dance studies is a method ‘of both knowledge production and dance making’ (p. 1) that has the potential not only to shed light on new histories, migrations and choreographies, but also to propose new methodologies to its two constituent fields.

Published as part of the Routledge Special Issues as Books series, the bulk of Inter-Asia in Motion originally appeared as a December 2022 special issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. In the book, the ten research articles from the special issue are framed by a concise Introduction and two earlier essays in the same journal by each of the co-editors: Yoon’s 2018 ‘“Gangham Style” in Dhaka and Inter-Asian Refraction’ and Wilcox’s 2017 ‘Performing Bandung: China’s Dance Diplomacy with India, Indonesia, and Burma’. The remaining ten chapters cover periods including the 1940s, the Cold War and contemporary times, and dancers and/or dances from and practised in Bangladesh, Burma, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand.

Historical chapters emphasize the role of dance in decolonization and nation building (Basu) and Cold War diplomacy (Espena), as well as a method of performing inter-Asian ideologies such as Bandung (Wilcox, Zhang). In the process they demonstrate that inter-Asia dance is not a twenty-first-century construction. For example, Kim argues that Nam Hwayeon’s recent artistic research on Choi Seung-hee foregrounds the ways in which the pioneering Korean modern dancer’s work forwarded the idea of inter-Asia dance as early as the 1930s–1950s. Far from being a utopian endeavour, however, Choi’s work is an example of how inter-Asia dance as method is subject to – even as it takes advantage of – complex ‘geopolitical, cultural, and ideological’ (p. 89) investments and conflicts (see also Hoshino).

Just as some chapters examine aspects of inter-Asia history, others offer complications of contemporary inter-Asia collaborations and borrowings, such as staging the process of creation in (and beyond) inter-Asia cultural contexts (Boonstra and Rae), twenty-first-century negotiations of diasporic identity (Lin), or religio-cultural soft power (Nambiar). This work is not always welcomed without critique, however. For example, Chang discusses how the south–south experimental collaboration between Wu-Kang Chen and Pichet Klunchun, which offered alternatives to the East–West power dynamics and aesthetic hierarchies on display in much of intercultural performance, nonetheless confounded audiences. Finally, instances of inter-Asia pop-cultural inter-referencing expand ideas of who consumers are, even as they may be used to problematize or fix the local identities of the borrowers (Yoon) or the borrowed-from (Rudisill).

The book is influenced by three decades of inter-Asia cultural-studies scholarship, including theories such as minor transnationalism (Lionnet and Shih, 2005) and Asia as method (Chen, 2010). Moreover, the book builds on Wilcox’s previous work with Katherine Mezur (2017) to build a critical, transnational East Asian dance studies and Yoon’s work (2017, 2024) to decentre performance circuits away from East–West to consider Afro-Asian circulations. In turn, it makes significant contributions to both fields, highlighting theoretical and historical insights that attention to dance brings to the study of inter-Asia, even as it unsettles Euro-American frameworks foundational to dance studies.

While the collection issues direct calls to dance studies and inter-Asia cultural studies, it is an important text for theatre, dance and performance studies scholars and students from all regions and specializations to consider. It demonstrates how new concepts, methods and histories emerge in both scholarship and artmaking from attention to inter-Asia objects of study, frameworks and modes of analysis. Scholars and artists committed to activating and theorizing work across formations such as the global majority and the global South, interested in focusing on relationality and referentiality beyond national borders and East–West frameworks, and keen to decentre Euro-American critiques will find useful methods and vital insights here.