This thesis explores a theoretical conceptualization of the term “mixed-race” in American postmodern dance, transforming the dominant understanding of “mixed-race” as an identity classification into an analytic framework. Relative to other artistic fields, there are few examples of dances by mixed-race-identified U.S.-based choreographers and limited scholarship on choreographic representations of mixed-race bodies, identities, or experiences. Given this apparent absence of mixed-race content, I propose an unmooring of “mixed-race dance” from mixed-race choreographers, dancers, or overt interests in mixed-race themes, to instead theorize mixed-race as an analytic for dance studies that can elucidate the construction, operation, and regulation of race within a dance overall. The mixed-race analytic highlights moments of what I call “racial disruption” — images of race that seem unexpected or even incompatible within the dominant logics of race in postmodern dance — to interrogate the hegemonic models of spectatorship implicit in perceiving and deciphering race in dance.

This dissertation develops and applies an original multiracial choreographic analytic for interpreting twenty-first century North American experimental dance. Offering the first full-length critical study that examines US notions of multiracialism within the field of dance studies, this dissertation argues that the terms “multiracial” or “mixed-race” do not exclusively reference self-identification with multiple broad racial categories, as they are typically defined in twenty-first century North American contexts. Rather, I theorize the “multiracial” as an interpretive angle for analyzing experimental dance, one that is not limited to examining the literal presence of self-identified multiracial choreographers, depictions of mixed-race dancers, or overt allegiance to representing multiracial experiences. This framework instead distills insights from mixed-race discourses into a series of propositions for analyzing a dance’s movement styles, props, and costumes, exploring how these elements of choreographic composition advance both reductive and reparative theorizations of race. Refusing straightforward analyses of a dance’s racial politics as either limiting or liberatory, the multiracial choreographic analytic insists that a singular dance can transmit hegemonic, counter-hegemonic, and more ambivalent racial perspectives simultaneously, emphasizing tensions between multiple interpretive possibilities.I theorize this framework according to a series of “problematics,” which extend existing scholarly discourses about multiracial constructs as both progressive and reactionary ideas within twenty-first century US racial imaginaries. In Chapter One, I identify three problematics (relevant to racial categories, racialized relationalities, and racialized imaginings of bodily traits), contextualizing them within the mainstream recognition of a “multiracial paradigm” following amendments to racial data collection on the 2000 US census. Subsequent chapters each engage one problematic to analyze a set of paired dances. In Chapter Two, I explore the construction of racialized order through the organization of human and non-human categories in Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s The input of this machine is the power an output contains (2020) and Glenn Potter-Takata’s Yonsei f*ck f*ck (2022). Chapter Three shows how Young Jean Lee’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (2003) and Ann Liv Young’s Michael (2005) blur boundaries between relationships typically recognized as “intimate” and those that appear “violent,” illuminating the intertwined dynamics of desire and coercion within some histories of interracial sexualities. Chapter 4 considers choreographies of the face in Ligia Lewis’s Sorrow Swag (2014) and Narcissister’s Burka Barbie (2014) in relation to the perception and symbolic function of racial ambiguity. I ultimately argue that, by examining the political ambiguities associated with multiracial discourses, my analytic produces deeper inquiry into how racial power transforms, reconfigures itself, and appears in ways that might “look different” to its normative iterations. If multiracial people are indeed considered one of the fastest growing demographics in the United States, then it is crucial to analyze the political complexities that such populations can represent, within choreographic realms and beyond.