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.

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.

This dissertation analyzes capoeira's choreographies of Afro-Brazilian modernity and tradition throughout the twentieth century: from the "national gymnastics" proposals of the 1920s to the Capoeira Angola/Capoeira Regional split in the 1930s and 40s; from capoeira's participation in Bahia's tourism industry in the 1950s to the adaptations of capoeira for the international stage in the 1960s and 1970s. By using movement analysis to revisit iterations of capoeira previously dismissed as cooptation, de-Africanization, and "loss of character," I identify previously overlooked processes through which capoeira's Afro-diasporic "traditions" were tactically re-articulated through the hegemonic discourses of modernity.

Conversely, by considering Capoeira Angola as more than a static "survival" of a capoeira practiced in an imagined past across the Atlantic, I acknowledge both the modernity and the creativity of those responsible for choreographing "traditional" capoeira. Rather than reproducing the binaries that accompanied the development of twentieth century capoeira--tradition/modernity, rescue/loss--I historicize these very binaries and propose a mutually constitutive relationship between them.

In this dissertation, I trace the alliances and antipathies between some of the most influential capoeira innovators of the twentieth century--Samuel Querido de Deus, Bimba, Pastinha, and Canjiquinha--and members of Bahia's artistic, intellectual and administrative elite, such as Édison Carneiro, Jorge Amado, Hildegardes Vianna, and Waldeloir Rego, in refashioning a marginalized and criminalized activity into one of the centerpieces of Bahia's cultural tourism industry. I extend my analysis to the emergence of folkloric shows for tourists which, in addition to capoeira, included maculelê, samba de roda, and dances from candomblé. Among the dozens of folkloric ensembles that sprung up in Salvador during the late 1950s and early 1960s, I focus on three of the most influential: Mestre Bimba's Folkloric Ensemble, Mestre Canjiquinha's shows sponsored by Salvador's Tourism Department, and Emília Biancardi's Viva Bahia, the folkloric ensemble that introduced capoeira to the world in the mid 1970s.

New York-based African American, Latino, and Caribbean immigrant youth of the 1960s and early 1970s gave life to one of the world's major contemporary cultural movements: Hip-hop. Initially misunderstood as a faddish form of Black male musical expression, Hip-hop's cultural resistance practices were quickly recognized as four core elements (emceeing, turntablism, graffiti art, and b-boying/b-girling). In the global context, Hip-hop has generated scholarly discourse that points to either the cultural globalization of American Blackness or a "global village." My project interrupts this conversation and focuses on the unique, multi-site cultural history of Filipino identity as constituted through practitioners of Hip-Hop dance. My work argues that a community of Filipinos, situated in different geo-political loci--Berkeley, California, Honolulu, Hawai`i, and Manila, Philippines--configure prevailing concepts of Hip-hop while remaking conditions of dispossession and displacement in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. My study advances its argument through a theorization of remaking comprised of three broad themes--Hip-hop dance is part of a repertoire for Filipino race relations; decolonization is tied to Hip-hop's institutionalization; and dance offers an alternative perspective of Hip-hop's globalization.

Using ethnography and choreographic analysis, I conduct close readings of select dances, dance events, and dancers in order to offer innovative views into the politics of race and culture. Specifically, I analyze the ways Filipinos in Berkeley remake the dominant racial paradigms of liberal multiculturalism and colorblindness with counter-hegemonic history and politics; Honolulu-based Filipinos creaate spaces for decolonization; and Filipinos in Manila rework the grammar of American neocolonialism to access otherwise proscribed spaces of gender and dance. Informed by fields of critical race studies, postcolonial studies, and performance studies, my dissertation uncovers the often neglected choreography of Filipinos to complement these fields and assert a practice-based approach to understanding global Hip-hop as a strategy for equality and social justice.