My research addresses how embodying the border informs contemporary dance around the Tijuana-San Diego region. I explore what we can learn about choreography, collaboration, nation-states, and citizenship by using the border as both a critical lens and a frame of reference. I have been interested in how (im)migration, racism, smuggling, narcotrafficking, and identity on both sides of the border inform and interfere with binational dance collaborations and choreographies to produce a genre of dance I call danzas fronterizas (border dances). An analysis of danzas fronterizas contributes to border studies from a choreographic perspective, foregrounding the body as a site of politics and economics along the U.S.-Mexican border.

This dissertation first studies the influential artistic work of José Limón and Anna Sokolow during the 1930s and 1950s as choreographers who laid the foundation for what later became danzas fronterizas. Chapters two and three analyze today's Tijuana-San Diego dance scene, looking first at the artists´ experiences of border crossing and collaboration, and presenting movement/choreographic analyses of selected danzas fronterizas. I have applied archival, auto-ethnographic, and ethnographic work (participant observation and interviews) as well as movement and choreographic analysis to this research. My project seeks to contemplate scholarly and artistic perspectives from both sides of the border. I interviewed choreographers, dancers, and directors of binational dance festivals; I analyze writings from both Mexican and U.S. sources; and my self-reflections connect my own work as a choreographer of danzas fronterizas to those dancers and choreographers who learn about the border by experiencing it.

In this dissertation, I look at the costumes of drag kings in contemporary drag king cabaret and at women's prison uniforms in the context of federal incarceration as material sites where dress, desire, and dance come together on formal and informal stages of U.S. statecrafting. I argue that as one of the many elements of "a dance" proper, dress colludes with the body to adorn the larger corpus at stake in a dance: namely, citizenship and the maintenance of the U.S. nation-state. I foreground the centrality of the sartorial in subject-formation and suggest that the U.S. State has a historical and on-going vested interest in how people dress, an investment that shapes and is evidenced in the uses and meanings of costume on formal and informal dance and performance stages. Drawing out a theory of the "dressed, dancing body" and the "sonic rub" of drag king costumes as they touch the performing body, this dissertation in its final repose offers a critical approach to drag kings attentive to embodiment, costume, and the sonic home-base of the drag kinging.

This doctoral dissertation explores the development of Greek contemporary dance practices as a site for engaging with national identity construction during the recent (2009-2015) sociopolitical and financial crisis. Following archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that the financial crisis has become an opportunity to reassess and challenge rooted beliefs concerning the composition of national, cultural, and social identity in Greece through artistic practices.

The structuring axes of this work are the discourses of ‘Hellenism’ and ‘Greekness’, which are understood as two contrasting theoretical approaches to nationalism that inform contemporary Greek identity construction. ‘Hellenism’ is perceived as an aspired ideal pertaining to ancient Greek philosophical values, whereas ‘Greekness’ connotes a more modern manifestation of national identity following the establishment of the Independent Greek State (1832).

The dissertation explores the slow shift that occurred in embodied practices, which in their early stages were mostly associated with Hellenism, but later gave way to a different understanding of national identity, more closely associated with Greekness. This move away from ancient Greek narratives towards an engagement with previously marginalized histories became particularly evident during the late stages of the crisis (2013-2015), when artistic production became a site for critical assessment of many aspects constituting contemporary Greek identity, such as people’s relationship to their past, gender hierarchies, or the issue of racial construction of Greekness. While chapter one traces the historical shift in embodied practices from the beginning of the twentieth century till the early 2000s, the coming chapters comprise choreographic analyses of performances created during the recession. These works provide glimpses into the experience of navigating precarity, or inhabiting a precarious state of existence, such as immigrants or political refugees, and paint an image of the fluctuating social landscape.

Utilizing contemporary dance as a lens into a society that has been severely affected by the global financial crisis, this study raises questions about how national identity is critically examined and re-evaluated during the recession era. It aspires to serve as a framework for the ways that crises directly affect people’s bodies not just on a material, corporeal level, but also on a phenomenological one.

Kutiyattam, practiced in Kerala, India, is the only living Sanskrit dance-theater tradition today. In 2001, UNESCO declared the art form as "Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity." This dissertation examines the impact of Kutiyattam's universalization as "intangible heritage" on the localized artistic practice. Drawing from dance studies and media studies literature to analyze interviews with Kutiyattam practitioners as well as Kutiyattam's performances during field work in Kerala, this study presents Kutiyattam as an arena of multi-sided contestations. Intellectual Property Rights operate within a racialized system of "universalization" where, in addition, gendered and casticized privileges are negotiated. Kutiyattam practitioners currently live these entanglements that affect their citizenship status within the Indian nation-state. Fieldwork at various locations in Kerala, including Irinjalakkuda, Chathakkudam, Moozhikkulam, Tripunithura, and Ambalapuzha, have enabled me to highlight local practitioners' and scholars' viewpoints regarding Kutiyattam's history and historiography. Observing live performances, both on stage and during practice sessions, I focus on corporeal renderings of different formats of Kutiyattam, including Nangiarkoothu (solo female theater), Cakyarkoothu (male solo verbal performances), and Kutiyattam (combined danced-acting of multiple performers). Via fieldwork and interviews, I found that universalization of this local practice differentially narrows, rather than broadens access to archived materials of Kutiyattam. In fact, international clients and caste-specific performers are favored, while limiting the local non-caste performers' access to Kutiyattam sources. I then examine how the media intervene in specific ways to shape the modern and "traditional" Indian ideal citizen via the female performer of Kutiyattam, affecting the value of women's cultural labor and their culturally specific performing rights through paradoxical intertwines of caste and gender. Finally, I examine how the (visual) "difference" of the material dancing body of Kutiyattam negotiates and is subjectified in the racialization process as Kutiyattam circulates globally as "universal" heritage. Ultimately, this dissertation shows how transnationalism intervenes in disarticulating Kutiyattam's cultural symbolism from its cultural danced labor, a process in which the nation- state plays a conciliatory role, allowing to gloss over the bodies that labor for Kutiyattam's upkeep, thus revealing processes of state-fundamentalism and neo-orientalism.

In this dissertation I look at the discourses and "carnival rhetoric" around female bodies, specifically the cumbia dancer, the carnival queens and the way in which they are portrayed in printed media (magazines, newspapers), advertisements (for the Carnival and for other companies in Carnival time) and the TV broadcasting of the main Carnival events. I Analyze their performances during carnival time and the rules and regulations regarding their participation in Carnival festivities. Through the analysis of these dancing bodies the processes of creation of national identity and regional identity can be traced, I look at the conflictive discourses (bodily and otherwise) that create raced and gendered nation building theories for the Caribbean Region of Colombia and for the consolidation of Colombian identity abroad.

"White Nose, (Post) Bawdy Bodies and the Un/Dancing Sexy Jewess" looks at asks how and why the 19th century figure of the exotic Jewess reappears in progressive US pious and porn subcultures, recent cabaret and burlesque acts, mainstream dance films, and magazine spoofs of the sexier Israeli sabra to articulate an updated Jewish femininity through various techniques of parody. I argue that today's Sexy Jewess embodies the most recent addition of a specifically American lineage of Jewish jokes predicated on an excessive and unattractive Jewish female body, and assess how the self-professed sexiness of contemporary Jewish female performers both challenges and reiterates long-standing cultural anxieties tied to race, gender, class, and sexuality. The phenomenon of the Sexy Jewess raises questions about the so-called `post-assimilatory' and `post-feminist' implications of Jewish female performance modalities that tweak and play with stereotypes even as they insist upon a double Jewish and gender difference. My research: 1) introduces how performers complicate self-critical jokes of the inferior Jewish female body through both marking and modifying a Jewish otherness, 2) documents the techniques Jewish female performers employ to mimic and master `sexiness' and, 3) theorizes how performances of Jewish female identity use the body to both participate in and parody `appropriate' femininity toward distinct ends. In order to question the viability of sexy ruse as a critical means of performing Jewishness, I draw on and intervene in three interrelated fields: Jewish Studies, Gender and Feminist studies, and Dance and Performance studies.

In order to contextualize the Sexy Jewess construct and its relationships to spectacles of US Jewish femininity, I take a dance studies approach that combines methods of choreographic analysis, participant performance ethnography, and archival work on genealogies of Jewish female performers to theorize how the body renders meaning in historical and contemporary contexts. I use print and online reviews, and performance ephemera like program notes, posters, photographs, giveaways, blogs and even tweets to discuss the textual and visual material surrounding live and online Jewess performances. My project also makes use of personal interviews with performers, choreographer-directors, and audiences as well as focus groups among viewers with ranging familiarity with dance and Jewishness to better understand how Jewish female shtick operates from a diverse set of perspectives. To frame my research, I borrow from scholarship on Jewishness and humor, gender and feminist studies dance and performance studies to analyze sexiness and funniness in relation to femininity, race, and social mobility.