My doctoral dissertation argues that Indigenous Women (Native American and First Nations) have used dance as a mode and act of defying the containment which colonization has imposed. I first trace this through a close look at Native American Fancy Shawl dancing and its history, at attempts to contain Fancy Shawl by university cultural clubs, and at how Fancy Shawl dancing exceeds those attempts at containment. My research then transitions to a different era, looking at Indigenous women, femmes, non-binary, and Two-Spirit Burlesque artists and Pole Dancers, arguing for the ongoing connections between contemporary Native women’s danced defiance, and that of early Fancy Dance creators. Throughout the dissertation I weave my experiences as both a Fancy Shawl dancer and a pole dancer, turning to my own body as part of my methodological approach alongside conducted interviews with Indigenous artists.

This project examines the teaching methodologies, exercises, and Principles of the exercise practice commonly known as Pilates from a Critical Dance Studies perspective. Muscle memory, or embodied knowledge, is significant to dance scholarship in that embodied knowledge houses important unwritten cultural, social, and political histories. This project examines the racial, gendered, and class-based issues embedded in the exercises and Principles of Pilates, revealing the ways that the embodied discourses Pilates perpetuates are "white" in nature, and work to conceal and absent other cultural histories.

This thesis addresses (inter-)cultural ruptures in perceiving Chinese modern dance. I examine how the history of representing Chinese-ness on American stages, U.S. mainstream rhetoric about the inception of modern dance, as well as U.S. Orientalist constructions about Chinese opera/ China's ethnicity and Asian American exploitations of such have affected the reception of Chinese modern dance today. I further illustrate by reading particular Chinese modern works as circulated in the U.S. culture, including those by companies that tour in the U.S., in particular, the Beijing Dance/ LDTX Modern Dance Company, and one piece by a Chinese choreographer based in the U.S.--Shen Wei. I focus on the structures of the gaze and the position of the audience by comparing my readings with those of several mainstream reviewers as the works circulated in the U.S..

The thesis formulates two central issues encompassing my research project --the Chinese modern dancing body as agent as well as the mobilization of its "immobile audience." I attempt to theorize how, on the one hand, an exclusively kinesthetic mode (or "muted" speech) helps negotiate political visibility in China for most Chinese dancing moderns, and how, on the other, rehabilitating the dancer's voice on stage can to some extent theorize the Chinese dancing body as complex agent. By means of the endeavors envisioned above, I hope to credit the agency of the Chinese modern dancing body and to open up a forum for discussing the possibility of alternative modernity or subversive authenticity for Chinese modern dances circulated in the U.S.

Seeing dance/ the body as a flexible, creative site for negotiating ethnic, cultural identity and political force, I employ kinesthetic analysis to parse the politics in some LDTX works--drawing on my dance and choreographic training in both countries--so as to fulfill part of the interpretative tasks. Further, traveling to Purchase NY in October 2008 to witness LDTX perform in front of a U.S. audience, as well as collecting interviews and critical reviews, I look at the circulation of Chinese modern dance from a transnational perspective. I pose questions about reception, that is, ethno-racial construction of Chinese bodies inside the Chinese border as viewed from outside.

This dissertation examines African and African Diaspora concert dance in Montreal in relation to Canadian multicultural policies and Québec nationalism. The multiple layers of colonization and various waves of immigration to Québec have made the province a unique nation with its own complex history of racial construction, quite unlike the racial histories of the U.S. or the rest of Canada (though still greatly informed by these racial paradigms). In the debates that arise in Québec over multiculturalism, language is often seen as the main cultural component in need of preservation. However, this focus on language often masks other elements at play in these cultural debates, in particular, how "race" informs notions of cultural belonging in Québec. A focus on African Diaspora dance in Montreal (Québec's largest and most demographically varied city) helps bring racial construction to the fore for two reasons. First, language differences do not distinguish Québec's Black community from the white French-Canadian majority as Québec's Black population is comprised mainly of French-speakers, and accordingly, studying Montreal's African Diaspora reduces the significance of linguistic difference. Second, concentrating on dance practices helps identify how the Montreal public interprets bodies and their cultural meanings. By analyzing the public support and critical reception of African Diaspora dance practices in Montreal, this dissertation examines how racial difference is constructed through multicultural rhetoric, policies, and debates about dance; it also suggests that dance practitioners have the ability to change and inform these constructed identities and the social landscape that frames them. To conduct this research, I use archival material along with personal interviews and participant-observer ethnography to examine: the early visits of Les Ballets Africains to North America (with a particular focus on Montreal); the Montreal-based company Les Ballets Jazz; the 1999 Montreal festival Afrique: Aller/Retour; and the work of Contemporary African dance choreographer Zab Maboungou. With these subjects, my projects contributes a partial history of African Diaspora dance in Montreal and analyzes the effectiveness and the shortcomings of Canadian Multiculturalism on this community.

My dissertation, Core Connections: A Contemporary Cairo Raqs Sharqi Ethnography investigates local, intra-MENA, and global circulations of raqs sharqi centered within Cairo, Egypt. I use dance ethnography to explore ways raqs sharqi contexts and bodies relate to tumultuous contemporary Middle Eastern politics. While most belly dance scholarship remains highly western-centric, addressing the practice in terms of its use by and value to western practitioners, and only tangentially treating the topic of how the dance circulates within Middle Eastern sites and through Middle Eastern bodies, I centralize the Cairene dancing body as a means of knowledge production and dissemination while fleshing out nuanced portraits of the lives, stories, and political insights of Middle Eastern dance and non-dance bodies.

This is particularly necessary, I argue, considering Cairo’s position as a key center within the Middle East today, with nations looking to Cairo for not only the latest trends in music and dance but also as a key negotiator since the aftermath of the series of Middle Eastern political uprisings, known as the ‘Arab Spring,’ particularly Egypt’s January 25th, 2011 revolution. I thus position my research in Cairo as a core site for analyzing the political, gender, and economic transformations the country has been experiencing. My project queries and argues for the unique insights, tactics, and corporeal knowledge a ground-level, multi-sited, and dance-centric analysis offers to such pressing politics.

My ethnographic research methodology consists primarily of participant-observation fieldwork at an array of class-stratified performance venues, with a focus on choreographic analysis within these field sites. Additionally, I conduct interviews with professional dancers and others involved with the dance industry at large. The project sites include Nile cruise ships, five-star hotels studding the Nile, and the cabarets with all male spectators clustered along historic Pyramid Street.

In addition to interweaving Dance and Middle Eastern Gender Studies, my dissertation charts invigorating new approaches on how to ‘do’ and write multi-sited dance ethnography. I propose and implement using the Cairo-based choreographic structure and aesthetics of raqs sharqi itself as research and writing model as a means of negotiating my own positionality to the project while remaining focused on mining intra-MENA dance circulations and contexts.

The Againness of Vietnam in Contemporary United States Antiwar Choreography examines eight twentieth- and twenty-first century postmodern antiwar choreographies in order to uncover the reverberations of Vietnam antiwar protests in these dances. The choreographies I examine in this study are Yvonne Rainer’s 1970 M-Walk and 1970 (and 1999) Trio A with Flags, Wendy Rogers’ 1970 Black Maypole, Ann Carlson’s 1990 Flag and 2006 Too Beautiful A Day, Miguel Gutierrez’s 2001, 2008, and 2009 Freedom of Information (FOI), Jeff McMahon’s 1991 Scatter and Victoria Mark’s 2006 Action Conversations: Veterans. I theorize a concept called “againness,” in order to think through the multiple ways that repetitions specific to these particular choreographies continue to exist and to enact effects through time. I argue that repeated choreographic embodiment offers immediacy, nuanced response over time, expression through the bodies of former soldiers, and sites of mediated resistance such as live-streamed dance protest, to the United States public’s commentary on and critique of war. I conclude that choreography’s irregular and inexact repetitions are one of the ways that dance is especially apt for commenting on the large, never-ending, and ongoing traumas of the world such as war. My research extends established discussions about choreographic repetition and ephemerality, exchanging in questions of exactitude for conversations about impact. In particular, I show how the changes inherent to bodily repetitions reflect societal change, raise energy, garner power, and/or respond to current events. I study how politicized dances do not disappear after the time/space event of the initial performance, but instead linger on and reappear in unexpected moments. I thus parse out the many unbounded ways that protest choreographies happen again and again.

Choreographers working in the United States have been practicing yoga since the early 1900s. They mention their yoga practice in autobiographies and interviews, include physical poses (asana) in their choreography and classroom exercises, and rely on breathing techniques (pranayama) to support their movement technique and personal practice. Meanwhile, yoga practice in the United States has increasingly become associated with thin white women in elaborate poses and tight pants smiling on the beach at sunset. So how did this association come about? I contend in this dissertation that this is at least partly due to white choreographers’ portrayal of yogis onstage and incorporation of yoga into their dance training. I focus on renowned (post)modern dance choreographers, such as Ruth St. Denis, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and Bill T. Jones, and recover the influence of yoga on their careers to help us better understand how yoga has shaped modern dance throughout its history. As their use of yoga became a tool in their creative and innovative interventions in dance, these (mostly white) choreographers encouraged or facilitated the forgetting of the labor of the yogis and yoga teachers who instructed them. This dissertation therefore also attends to the innovations of their teachers, such as Swami Vivekananda, Swami Paramananda, Yogi Vithaldas, and A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, who strategically and selectively emphasized aspects of their yoga teaching to suit contemporaneous cultural trends and confront Orientalist fantasies. I apply the tools of movement analysis and the theoretical frameworks of critical race studies and critical yoga studies to autobiographies, published scholarship, archival records of dance technique training and choreography, yoga training manuals, and dance and yoga videos.

My dissertation interweaves the frequently disparate fields of yoga studies and dance studies, reorients scholars to the historical affinities between these two modes of physical practice, and complicates contemporary models of cultural appropriation. This work disrupts the economy of affirmation and forgetting that places yogis as non-agentive culture bearers and concert dance choreographers as individual geniuses via the logic of colonialism. It also encourages us to recognize the stakes of naming and valuing genealogies of practice under the system of racialized capitalism.

This dissertation focuses on Taiwanese contemporary choreographies that incorporate traditional materials. I examine the works of two female-led dance companies in Taiwan: Pilgrimage, staged by Taipei Folk Dance Theater in 2004 and Jiao, performed by Legend Lin Dance Theater in 1995 and in 2006. My dissertation engages with interdisciplinary perspectives on the concept of nostalgia. Focusing especially on the dancing body, which is living and changing, I theorize a body-based understanding of engagements with nostalgia, and argue for the dancing body a site of nostalgic negotiation. This approach reevaluates the critical possibility of Asian dance practices and offers a critique to the binary ideology between the West and the East.

In chapter one, I demonstrate how, historically, Taiwanese female choreographers engaged nostalgically with "traditional" Chinese Min-Zu dance in ways that somehow empowered them in post-war Taiwan. In chapter two, I discuss the development of Taiwanese subjectivity after the 1980s and suggest that another kind of nostalgia, focusing on local culture, was generated widely during this period. My discussions of the search for Taiwanese cultural symbols and the desire to redefine Taiwanese bodies provide historical and political background that situates the two dance companies analyzed later.

In chapter three, I examine how Li-Hua Tsai, the choreographer of Pilgrimage, incorporates folk elements that highlight female spirituality in this dance. I suggest this dance piece negotiates different nationalism(s) in its attempt to fulfill the audiences' and governmental desires for the staging of cultural representations of Taiwan. Tsai's self-positioning in the local culture of Taiwan also achieves visibility in the international folk dance festivals. In chapter four, I explore how Lee-Chen Lin, the creator of Jiao, constructs a specific body aesthetic that demonstrates a body-based nostalgia, one that choreographs both her local resistance and her niche in the global market. By exploring how contemporary women choreographers in Taiwan continue to engage with their different longings, I bring Asian female choreographers back into dance discourses and recognize their complicated strategies of choreographing nostalgia(s) that bridge not only the past and the present, but also the local and the global.

This dissertation looks at critical interventions made by select San Francisco bay area choreographers and dance programmers interested in altering spectatorial norms for contemporary dance. Those selected have strategically employed food themes and materials in and as performance, simultaneously tapping into existing foodie ideology and redressing concerns about dwindling audiences for live dance performance in the twenty-first century. I argue that such efforts 1) bring to light subsumed race, class, and gender politics embedded in the trend towards "audience engagement," espoused by arts funders and dance makers alike as a necessary intervention for the survival of contemporary dance; and 2) open up discursive and experiential realms of possibility by favoring material, associative exchange, (re)awakening synesthetic sensory-perceptive capacities, inviting spectators to refigure themselves as co- creators in performance, and providing opportunities to reckon with exoticizing desires to enrich one's own culture by consuming another's.

In theoretically grouping these choreographies together I illustrate a spectrum of responses that clarify how food-oriented performance gatherings can operate not only as strategies for altering audience relations, but as sites for alternative knowledge production and fruitful commensal exchange. Such research draws from and intervenes in the overlapping fields of food studies, American studies, and performance and dance studies. This analysis is uniquely positioned amongst other work addressing the interstices between food and performance in its emphasis explicitly on Western concert dance. It also contributes significantly to the archives of an often overlooked San Francisco bay area dance community.

Methodologically I take a dance studies approach, generating choreographic analyses enabled through interviews with choreographers and dance programmers, my own work as witness/participant in the selected events, and archival research into feminist theories of performativity, anthropologies of the senses, contemporary theories of embodiment and select dance and theatre scholarship from the 1800s to the present. Throughout I prioritize the embodied experience of spectatorship, highlighting how contemporary corporeality is shaped by shifting inclusions and exclusions of various peoples and practices, capitalist economic models, the pervasive reach of readily-available digitized media, and both dominant and alternative systems of knowledge production.

The Western Christian tradition, particularly in the U.S. Protestantized religious landscape, has often denied dance as a legitimate form of worship, and many view Christianity and dance to be contradictory pursuits. White Soul/Forbidden Body: Dancing Christian From Ruth St. Denis to Pole Dancing for Jesus builds upon this tension in order to understand the strategies and tactics that Christian dancers in the U.S. employ to negotiate the power structures that function to forbid dancing bodies from occupying Christian spaces. This dissertation theorizes this tension as rooted in the politics of white Christian embodiment, which is created through the practice of constructing a particular relationship between the body and the soul. I argue that dance gives these dancers, who are primarily white women, the opportunity to creatively inhabit Christian power structures that privilege certain forms of embodiment over others. Through dance, this women are able to engender small pockets of religious leadership that allow them and others to experience religion through the body and explore dance's spiritual, meaning-making capacities. Methodologically, I rely on ethnography, archival research, and performance analysis in order to explore the multiple locations where Christian dance emerges in the U.S. - sanctuaries, dance fitness classes, dance studios, stages, etc. The chapters are organized around the dancers' use of embodied strategies such a "high art" framing, confrontations with the aging body, the rhetoric of health, the invocation of humor, and the development of community. By analyzing the contemporary and historical politics of Christian sacred dance, this dissertation research sheds new light on the neglected topic of dance as religious embodiment. While debates are ongoing about dance's appropriateness as a sacred art form, Christian dance continues not only to exist, but it also plays an integral role in understanding the relationship between bodily practice and religious identity formation. This research, therefore, models a critical, interdisciplinary approach essential to those who study dance history and theory as it intersects with American religion, critical race theory, and women's studies.