Queer Dance: Meanings & Makings makes and remakes the meanings of both “queer” and “dance” in each of its eighteen essays and in videos on its companion website, which features approximately nine hours of content. The inherent slipperiness of each term means that most of the contributors define how they deploy these terms, alerting readers to both the possibilities and limitations of language with constantly shifting referents. In her introduction, editor Clare Croft recognizes this problem as well, delineating “five specific stances on what queer dance might be” (3; emphasis added). Queer Dance is at its considerable best when contributors grapple with the space between what queer dance might be and its actual might. The collection challenges readers to question how, if queerness is always in process, never “arriving,” we can square that with the materiality of bodies who dance and how queer theory problematizes this space. thomas f. defrantz is one of few contributors willing to challenge now-orthodox queer theories. He explains, “as a queer be-er of color, I've never been convinced that rampant worldmaking does the many things we might hope for” (175). Yet other contributors remind us of how queer dance does bring worlds into being, however fleeting, and how this emergence through the body itself is an act of resistance. Croft reminds readers that “[q]ueer dance argues, instead, that queerness emerged in action, in protests, and on stages” (13).

Among Queer Dance’s many strengths is the inclusion of essays by artists and scholar-artists. Croft reminds us how “queer art and queer scholarship have long developed alongside one another” (23), and this proximity helps dispel the myth of the practice–theory opposition. Readers are thus able to trace Jennifer Monson and DD Dorvillier's RMW(a) & RMW from the perspective of both Monson and artist-scholar Doran George. George views these dances as the vehicle “to reconsider methodological differences in some theories of gender and its critique” (87), whereas Monson explores how RMW “restores me to a past and a historical way of moving and simultaneously lets me be in the present. And lets me imagine a future somehow” (220). Monson and Dorvillier's work has the largest footprint, as two filmed performances are available on the companion website in addition to a filmed conversation with Croft. These and other performance videos and interviews will be especially useful teaching tools. Being able to see what you have just read about (and vice versa, depending upon your preference) makes Queer Dance essential viewing as well as reading.

Several essays address the experience of performing queer dance. Nicholas Gareiss's autoethnographic account of performing traditional Irish dance asks what it means to be an American performing the dances of a culture other than your own. Angela K. Ahlgren explores how she fell in love with taiko, a form of drumming originating in 1950s Japan, and probes how a queer white woman can negotiate these differences. Ethnicity, gender, national identity, and race are thoughtfully examined throughout the project. Many forms of social and theatrical dance are included in the collection, although theatrical dance is privileged. Few essays address social dance in a social setting apart from Justin Torres's “In Praise of Latin Night at the Queer Club,” an elegy written after the 2016 massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, and Kareem Khubchandani's “Aunty Fever,” an exploration of how his origin stories taught him that he was always “dancing queerly” (203).

The contributors cover a wide swath of spaces where queer dance happens, from burlesque clubs to university stages to the Paris Opera Ballet to the East Village of the 1990s. Though the vast majority of the objects of study are US-centric, the essays that leave the United States behind most productively stretch understandings of queer dance, which only highlights the need for more global perspectives and research on queer dance. Emily E. Wilcox's essay on Gu Jiani's Right & Left points to the tension between intent and reception, noting up front that Gu “does not consider Right & Left a work of queer dance” (67). At the same time, she provides vivid movement description and interesting historical context about contemporary dance in Beijing in order to demonstrate artfully the stakes of moving queerly as a Chinese citizen dancer. Another highlight of the collection is Julian B. Carter's essay on reenactment and queer temporality theory as embodied in Jérôme Bel's Veronique Doisneau. Carter most convincingly moves between description of Bel's piece in performance and historicizing its connection to embodied queer temporalities; he writes, “Re-enactment complicates the present, making us feel how we are always folded in time, always in physical relationship to a past that can take new forms through and in our bodies” (120).

Queer Dance provides a model of intersectional scholarship, attendant to current debates in many of the academic fields engaged; apart from dance studies and queer studies, also productively engaged in conversation are anthropology, critical race studies, disability studies, performance studies, and popular culture studies. The essays present a range of methodologies, from queer readings of now-canonical dances to autoethnographic accounts to theoretical conceptualizations of queer dance. These methodologies themselves represent how dance and queerness move differently in discourse today; some essays undertake queer readings of dances whose queerness may not be immediately legible, whereas other dances are theorized using concepts from post-1990s queer theory.

Croft's excellent and thorough introduction exhorts readers to involve themselves in the multiple forms of content in Queer Dance: “If all you do is read the essays in the book, you will have missed several opportunities” (7). Queer Dance is the result of a monumental undertaking, growing out of a conference and performances at the University of Michigan and becoming this collection of filmed performances, interviews, and essays—all of which provide multiple entry points. This project privileges embodied, danced queerness above all and exemplifies how to structure equity and inclusivity into scholarship and practice. In the collection's final essay, Anna Martine Whitehead writes, “these dances exist for us to remind ourselves that we are alive in the first place” (288). Indeed.