I opened this text and witnessed joy — a full-spread photo documenting a moment in time. Pictured in the 14th Street Y gymnasium at the 1971 NYC Dance Marathon is Yvonne Rainer running alongside Trisha Brown with a hand over her heart — both are visibly laughing. Across the space and on the opposite page, Barbara Dilley and David Gordon appear to be spinning; joined at the shoulders with arms outstretched, their faces are blurred, but exuberant. The image encapsulates the free, unpredictable, and at times, chaotic improvisation performed by the Grand Union. Though only active as a collective for six years, this legendary group had a profound impact on experimental and postmodern dance in the United States. Author Wendy Perron’s guide to the Grand Union documents the group’s collective genius, their fearless risk-taking, humor, and rebellious nature — chronicling the “most ephemeral form of an ephemeral form” (1). Perron witnessed some of this history, and her extensive primary research includes several personal interviews as well as a section devoted to her meticulous description of performances documented on archival film. The text includes intimate portraits of founding members Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, Nancy Lewis, Yvonne Rainer, Lincoln Scott, and Becky Arnold. While much has been written about most of these artists and their illustrious careers, Perron focuses specifically on each of their significant contributions to the Grand Union. She provides historical context for the formation of the collective, including the influences of Anna Halprin, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage, as well as chapters exploring the 1971–1972 residencies at the Walker Art Center and Oberlin College that would cement the group as a performing ensemble. Perron’s highly detailed and deeply personal history of the Grand Union covers their processes, challenges, influences, and each of the artists who brought it to life.

Natalie Crohn Schmitt offers a comprehensive yet concise analysis of the foundational performance practices of commedia dell’arte, highlighting how these techniques have continued to inform contemporary theatre centuries later. Schmitt examines the nature of improvisation — how and why it was practiced — as an inroad to understanding the explorations of the early commedia dell’arte actors. Subsequent chapters include detailed descriptions of the use of dialect, voice, and gesture, as well as the utility of character masks. Altogether, this efficient text is approachable for students and actors while simultaneously engaging, perhaps demystifying, a detailed history and preceding scholarship on the topic. A final coda highlights the work of four contemporary groups invested in creative processes inspired by commedia dell’arte, demonstrating its longevity, though Schmitt disputes the idea that there is a “continuous unbroken tradition that allows for its ‘authentic’ performance” (1).

Sea ice, glaciers, icebergs, and the Arctic — these landscapes, once imagined as distant, less-habitable, and marginal places, have become urgently central to human experience in the Anthropocene. Performing Ice is a collection of essays authored by scholars across diverse disciplines ranging from literature to law, examining the complex ways humans have encountered and performed for, with, and alongside the icescapes that are increasingly entangled culturally and socially in the future of life on planet Earth. An introduction from the editors explains how the contributions are arranged in an eclectic manner — accounting for the ways performance, broadly understood, is engaged by authors in their own disciplinary contexts. The ensuing chapters examine artistic and cultural performances, as well as personal and autobiographical accounts from 12 contributors. “Figures in a Landscape” is a particularly compelling chapter by Douglas Quin, who examines the body-based work of four dance and performance artists who have worked in Antarctica: Christina Evans, Shakti Avattar León, and the collaborative partnership of VestAndPage (Andrea Pagnes and Verena Stenke). Quin notes, “Most of the aesthetic experiences we have of Antarctica have been mediated through the visual arts and the written word — those modes of expression most culturally privileged in the Western tradition” (84). The works undertaken by Evans, León, and VestAndPage range from visual and kinetic research for concert dance performance to detailed embodied rituals documented on film, but all engage kinesthetically and viscerally with the immediacy of the body in collaboration with the Antarctic landscape. Quin explains how these artists “bring us to a different ontological reckoning of self as subject versus object, space and place through corporeal experience and episteme” (84).

Vered Maimon introduces this text by recounting the violent words thrown by right-wing protestors in Tel Aviv at peaceful demonstrators opposing the ongoing aerial bombings of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli army. In Contemporary Art, Photography, and the Politics of Citizenship, Maimon asserts that contemporary artistic and activist practices are not only politically relevant and capable of intervention, but also facilitate a critical transformation. She argues that these practices are now less concerned with the “politics of representation” than with the performative formation of public spaces by communities — a “politics of rights” (2). Maimon examines the work of several artists and theorists on notions of critique, spectatorship, and “publicness” in support of this study, including a detailed profile of Activestills — a collective of Israeli, Palestinian, and international photographers founded in 2005. Rather than create journalistic images of demonstrations on the West Bank, Activestills’s artists document and visualize conditions of precarity wrought by political policies and life under globalization. The artists’ images capture “bodily acts of exposure to military violence towards specific subjects […]. They actively take part in the reconfiguration of political space by subjects who collectively insist on exercising their right to have rights” (46). This volume’s three distinct chapters are at times crowded with theory, but will be of interest to art historians and scholars of photography theory, visual culture, political theory, and cultural studies.

The 16 essays collected here reflect an expansion of East Asian dance studies into English-language scholarship. Despite the historical and cultural significance of dance in East Asia, as well as the work of prominent scholars in the region, the study of dance forms and the choreographic practices of East Asian artists were historically absent from Anglophone dance research and scholarship until the 1990s. All contributions to the anthology center the theme of “corporeal politics” as an organizing principle of the book’s aim to bridge fields of critical dance studies and critical area studies. The methodology of corporeal politics focuses on the body in motion, located in specific historical times and places, while emphasizing the impact that markers of identity such as gender, race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity have on the ways people navigate broad structures of power and culture. Each chapter examines the work of a prominent East Asian dance artist, performance culture, or specific choreography, including classical and folk aesthetics. In a concluding chapter, Mezur reflects upon the challenging process of decolonizing dance studies, and the power of movement to drive aesthetic, political, and social change. In its entirety, Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia aptly challenges problematic histories and hierarchies that privilege the “West” over “Asia” while simultaneously offering inquiries and illuminating paths toward future research — a significant contribution to the evolving and expanding field of critical dance studies.