Under the influence of regimens broadly known as "Somatics," late 20th century contemporary dancers revolutionized their training. They instituted biological and mechanical constructs of the body as the logic for dance classes, claiming to uncover a "natural" way of moving. By doing so these dancers saw themselves as rejecting preceding models such as Graham technique and ballet, which they felt treated the body as an instrument trained to meet the ideals of an aesthetic tradition. Convinced of the importance of their intervention, practitioners of Somatics initially worked with meager resources forging transnational alliances of pedagogies and aesthetics. Yet by the end of the 20th century, the training had found its way in the worlds most venerable dance education programs. A handful of choreographers, who initially experimented with Somatics in a small community, ultimately ascended within a transnational circuit of large concert houses. Educational institutions consequently saw value in Somatics, and implemented its pedagogy based on the conceit that focusing on the natural body provides dancers with the greatest facility for performance, while fueling broad creative possibility in choreographic processes.

In contrast with Somatic rhetoric, this dissertation traces how dancers used the idea the idea of nature to tackle changing social circumstances. A conceit of the natural body endured throughout the last 4 decades of the 20th century even while its ideological underpinnings underwent change, visible in shifts seen in studio procedures, the look and aptitudes of the dancing body, and the modalities of concerts. Dancers constructed what they saw as essential bodily truths by combining scientific metaphors, with non-Western practices that they represented as ancient and mystical. Through this combination they felt they retrieved lost corporeal capacities that they believed were still evident in children, animals and supposedly primitive societies. By the 1970s, a community of practitioners had synthesized what they felt was a comprehensively inclusive body that engendered an anti-hierarchical collective dance culture. Somatics therefore lined up with other subcultures of the era that turned to nature in search of personal authenticity as a source for liberation. Bodily "truth" purported to resist outdated gender ideals and authoritarian training, an idea that fueled the rapid transnational uptake of Somatics. As the approach established itself in Britain, Holland and Australia, it disseminated and naturalized key principles of American post-war liberalism; dancers across the network believed they were reclaiming an inherent right to individual creative freedom by displacing modern and classical aesthetics with dance based on the natural functioning of anatomical structure. In the 1980s, artists largely jettisoned the emphasis on collectivism; yet as they became entrepreneurs in line with the new economic culture of staunch individualism, the rhetoric about nature endured. Using signature choreography, and emphasizing the uniqueness of different Somatic-informed pedagogies, they pursued careerism, even as they often contested rampant conservative cultural agendas. Despite the political critique launched in the 1980s, by the close of the 20th century, Somatics had achieved institutional status, embodying new corporate ethics. The creative autonomy that dancers had won in previous decades now recalibrated itself through demands made upon artists in education and the professional field to prove capitalism is constituted by boundless innovation despite diminishing arts resources in an age of austerity. Throughout all these changes Somatics continued to cultivate a canonical body as an invisible category of nature, which purportedly accounted for ontology, yet marked difference and enacted exclusion from its supposedly universal purview.

This dissertation analyzes choreographic negotiations of Hong Kong’s (post)colonial political situation of “one country, two systems” since the end of British colonialism in 1997 to the present. Each chapter addresses a distinct institution and its particular navigation of this political proposal for semi-autonomy in relation to Chineseness, British colonialism, Western imperialism, and the international. Chapter one analyzes the development of the dance curriculum that trains each dancer major in Chinese dance(s), modern/contemporary dance, and ballet at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. I argue that this dance education expresses overlapping colonial, Chinese national, Cold War, and Western imperialist ideologies. The curriculum cultivates neoliberal bodies that can shift easily between cultural forms and can be hired across the globe, mirroring the city’s branding as “Asia’s World City.” Chapter two asserts that Hong Kong theater director Danny Yung levels the playing field for China and Hong Kong through collaborations with Nanjing kunqu artists. Yung’s work presents the flexible intercultural Chinese body on the Hong Kong stage by employing postmodern pedestrian movement and Western avant-garde methods of excerpting, subtracting, and reversing gender roles alongside traditional kunqu movement vocabulary. Via Yung’s curation of the Toki festival in Nanjing, kunqu performers participate in inter-Asian exchanges that allow both Hong Kong and China to participate in Chinese cultural heritage, thereby subverting nation-state heritage logic. Chapter three argues that the i-Dance improvisation festival deploys Somatic training of the “natural body” and its discourse of pre-culturality as a strategy for connecting Hong Kong to the international. Through collective workshops and improvised performances, dancers who cultivate this natural body experience a reorientation of their national identities whether from Hong Kong, China, or Taiwan. The festival neither emphasizes Chinese-Hong Kong collaboration nor neglects China completely, but rather, incorporates China into its vision of precultural harmony. It also permits pre-devised choreographic presentation that critiques Chinese cultural sources and expresses ambivalence about Chineseness, thereby undermining the strength of “one country” and Chinese masculinist agendas. The epilogue gestures to the future of dance in Hong Kong after the national security law of 2020 and the subsequent end of “one country, two systems.”

This dissertation investigates contemporary citizenship through an investigation of intermedia choreography and performance during the first decade of the twenty-first century. I theorize the present era as the age of the improvised explosive device (IED) to argue that citizenship has been fundamentally redefined within instable, unpredictable political and social conditions best encapsulated by the signification of the IED. The IED represents one of two twenty-first century phenomena affecting how citizenship is conceptualized, practiced and experienced in which I situate my investigation. The second is the rapid rise of the U.S. surveillance assemblage as part of the post-September 11 U.S. security state, which has similarly transformed the constitutional rights, liberties and protections of citizens around the world as well as the meaning of human presence and embodiment.

Though the dissertation is interdisciplinary in nature, pulling from scholarship across the humanities, it is directly in conversation with citizenship and critical dance studies. Recent theorizations in each highlight such characteristics as embodiment, agency, relationality and collectivity. Close choreographic analysis is the primary methodology; choreography is also a rubric for conceptualizing citizenship as a physically enacted, dynamic relationship between the individual citizen subject, the body politic and the nation-state.

Over the course of the dissertation I theorize seven different models of citizenship. I begin by delineating a new normal habitus of citizenship in the twenty-first century, then propose citizenship as dissonant through an analysis of dances by HIJACK and the William Forsythe Company. Central chapters address citizenship as it references the singular political actor and "the people" of American democracy. I first analyze dances by twentieth-century choreographers Isadora Duncan and Yvonne Rainer, which, I argue, choreograph citizenship, respectively, as incorporative and intersectional. These models provide a foundation for comparing the radical changes discussed in ensuing chapters on British South Asian live artist Rajni Shah, French Algerian choreographer Rachid Ouramdane and African American conceptual artist damali ayo [sic]. I argue that work by these artists proposes citizenship as contaminative, projective and improvisational. The final chapter asks what kind of political association and agency might be imagined by theorizing the political potential of conviviality in relation to participatory projects by Shah and Headlong Dance Theater.

Since the late 16th century, choreographers have documented their work using notated scores, many of which rely on standardized codification to facilitate accurate choreographic reproduction. This dissertation focuses on scores developed in the last fifty years, which, by contrast, indicate notation’s generative potential by deploying indeterminacy, engaged spectatorship, and nonreproductive documentation. Not only do such scores reconfigure roles for choreographers, performers, spectators and readers, but they also elucidate how schematization lends choreographic material increased mobility. That is, while the scores addressed in this analysis might record and represent choreographic material, they also render that material responsive to change by welcoming unpredictable forms of application and reception.

With respect to generative scoring, New York City's experimental arts community between 1960-61 represents an important touchstone, giving rise to a wealth of unconventional scores by choreographers, composers, writers, directors, and visual artists. This investigation examines scores from that period (Simone Forti's writings in An Anthology and Jackson Mac Low's The Pronouns), as well as later works that draw on key concepts and strategies of the time. Recent examples include: Deborah Hay's Solo Commissioning Project, William Forsythe's Synchronous Objects, Ralph Lemon’s Geography Trilogy, and dances by Yvonne Meier, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Julie Tolentino. Such examples illustrate the enduring influence of early 1960s innovation while suggesting the ways in which contemporary choreographers continue to push the score in new directions.

In each case, I emphasize the rootedness of a score within the parameters of a clearly defined choreographic practice. I also use concrete examples to reflect upon broader theoretical questions that come to the fore in light of the shift toward generativity: specifically, a constellation of issues concerning textuality, participation and the archive. By focusing on the score as a clear manifestation of choreographic thinking rather than its residue, I approach the representation of dance as a creative act that dovetails with physical practice in distinct, and sometimes surprising, ways. My goal is to supplant theoretical generalizations about the relationship between dance and textual representation by attending to the many ways in which contemporary choreographic practices revel in their intertwining.

This dissertation explores the embodiment of cross-cultural misunderstandings in a key transitional period in modern China—the late 1980s, during the country’s economic reformation and cultural opening to the West after the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). From 1987 to 1991, teachers from the American Dance Festival (ADF), at the invitation of the Guangdong (Canton) Dance School, trained the first group of professional modern dancers in China, known as the “Guangdong Modern Dance Experimental Program,” profoundly altering the history of Chinese modern dance in the New Era (1978–). Based on this program, China established its first modern dance company in 1992—the Guangdong Modern Dance Company. Under the guidance of ADF teachers, Chinese students created two new genres of Chinese modern dance that differed from the previous realism style. Some of the students later became internationally acclaimed artists—Shen Wei, Jin Xing, and Wang Mei.

Contesting existing accounts of the Guangdong program as a complete success in America’s and China’s dance histories, this dissertation instead argues that misunderstandings and miscommunications repeatedly occurred in both directions throughout this corporeal exchange. These misunderstandings and miscommunications revealed different conceptualizations of aesthetics, kinesthesia, pedagogy, individuality, freedom, tradition, and the modern. This research takes a microcosmic perspective to examine the program’s establishment, curriculum, and the reception of the dance it created as a case study to explore the macrocosmic transnational US–China relationship under globalization. Different political agendas nurtured the contradictory expectations of the ADF and the Guangdong Dance School. When the young Chinese traditional dancers changed their expertise and accepted a new dance system, differences in aesthetics, kinesthesia, pedagogy, and concepts of individuality and freedom created confusion among ADF teachers and Chinese students. Different understandings of Chineseness, the traditional, and the modern in the US and China shaped American and Chinese critics’ contrasting receptions of the pieces produced in the Guangdong program.

This dissertation is the first to take a cultural misinterpretation perspective to study dance in China, and the first to apply a critical dance studies lens to scrutinize cultural production in the context of US–China relations. By decoding these embodied misunderstandings, this dissertation aims to allow perspectives from the US and China to be heard in both countries and contribute to cross-cultural understandings on a global scale.

Choreographing Livability: Dance Epistemes in the Kibbutz and in the Israel Defense Forces traces the historical articulation of dance as a source of knowledge-formation in Israeli culture through two emblematic sites of performance, between the 1940s and the 2000s. It also proposes a theoretical intervention through the elaboration of the framework of livability, through which I explore the life-stakes and the political investment entailed in dancing within the specific context of Israel, in relation to its larger ideological tensions and political shifts.

My investigation across sites of performance and time-periods ultimately reassesses existing narratives that have framed “Israeli dance” primarily as a joyful, nation-building, recreational, entertaining, and energetic endeavor. In order to do so, I set out the mechanisms through which different dance experiences, even those apparently disengaged from political preoccupations, have contributed to the enhancement of governmental policies and ideological goals, in particular when such political maneuvers reiterated ethnonational divides or mechanisms of settler colonial hegemony. More specifically, through my scrutiny, supported by archival research, ethnography, and choreographic analysis, I unpack how dancers and choreographers in Israel have often articulated dance as a multicultural, universalistic, and humanizing practice. By doing so, I maintain, dance in Israel has generally worked as a strategy for the mitigation and concealment of larger governmental and ideological apparatuses of marginalization, commodification, or oppression.

The Introduction offers an interpretation of Zionism and Israel from a biopolitical perspective, an overview of my livability framework, and a reading of my project in terms of killjoy scholarship. Chapter 1 delineates how dance in kibbutz culture has been able to support shifts in the national strategy, evolving from engine for the international affirmation of Zionism, to agent for a rearticulation of the Socialist Labor Zionist agenda, to neoliberal enterprise. Chapter 2 charts the evolution of dance in the Israel Defense Forces from bureaucratic tool for the administration of military life, to spectacular device for the recalibration of the Israeli soldier’s masculinity, to globalized digital practice that reinforces military authority from the lower levels of the military hierarchy. The Epilogue, in addition, includes four choreographic analyses that, engaging with the kibbutz, the IDF, and the issue of choreographing in Israel, show how dance can invest in a critique of systems of oppression, and expand the possibility of living more livable lives.

In this dissertation, I analyze the pivotal role that ballet and modern dance played in the construction of modern México during the development of its post-revolutionary history and culture from 1919 to 1940. In this doctoral research, I approach dance as a means of knowledge production that contributes to shaping the cultural contexts in which individual and collective identities are produced while perpetuating systems of sociopolitical and economic domination and/or offering alternatives to restructure unequal power relations. As an organizing principle, this dissertation presupposes that dances always enact, explicitly and/or implicitly, sets of political assumptions that affect the bodies that participate by dancing or by watching dance. In other words, I examine how dance represents race, class, gender, and sexuality; how corporeal difference is arranged in space; what does the dance say about human relations; and how subjectivity is constructed through dance training and performing on stage. I also consider whose worldview, values and interests are enacted on stage and thereby normalized beyond the stage. In exploring these questions, I connect their answers to multiple forms that corporeal social interactions take in the formation of subjectivity at the world at large. Also, by examining specific dances and the discourses these engender, I offer various views of what it meant to be a modern Mexican across the different historical moments in which the country continually redefined and redirected its nationalist project of modernization. This discussion is framed by the various forms that México's revolutionary nationalism took as well as by cultural and political imperatives modeled by countries of the "first world".

This study of twentieth-century modern/postmodern dance in the San Francisco Bay Area investigates the relationship of concert dance to its political economic context through an examination of three dances: Carol Beals’ Waterfront - 1934 (1936-1937), Anna Halprin’s Parades and Changes (1965-1967), and the Wallflower Order’s Journeys: Undoing the Distances (1982-1983). Expanding beyond the current interpretive methods within dance history, I offer a Marxist interpretative framework that foregrounds the material relations that condition and enable works of concert dance. Inspired by what dance scholar and sociologist Randy Martin refers to as overreading dance, I argue that the contradictions and antagonisms of capitalism appear immanently within these three works. The dialectical forces of economic history are also operative within concert dance. Rethinking the purview of what counts as ‘context’ within dance history, I employ a four part analysis for a political economic interpretation of these dances, which considers a) the choreography, b) the process of making the piece, c) the material conditions that enabled the choreographer to create the work, and d) its political economic period. The case studies of the dissertation allow me to map concert dance onto shifts within capitalism over the course of the twentieth-century, from the Great Depression of the 1930s to the Fordist post-war boom to the aftermath of the 1973 economic crisis. In developing a mode of interpretation adequate to each period, the chapters focus on a single political economic category and the contradictions dwelling within it: capital during the 1930s, labor during the 1960s, and social reproduction during the 1980s. The dissertation contributes to the historiography of modern dance in California by rethinking a canonical figure (Anna Halprin) and offering accounts of choreographers who have not received significant dance historical attention (Carol Beals and the Wallflower Order). Together, the studies of Beals, Halprin, and the Wallflower Order chart the relationship of their dances to the economic contradictions of their period. Political economic methods can rethink the study of dance beyond discrete stage performances by entangling works of concert dance with their economic context.