Project MUSE®: Dance Research Journal - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/380
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Dance Research Journal.daily12026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 40 (2008) through current issueLatest Articles: Dance Research JournalTWOProject MUSE®Dance Research Journal1940-509X0149-7677Latest articles in Dance Research Journal. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Intermedial Dance and Acéphalic Butoh: Damien Jalet's and Nawa Kōhei's Vessel (2016)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987223
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Nawa Kōhei's gallery shows mounted under the title Vessel (2016-19) used techniques of bodily distortion to explore what Nawa called "the idea of 'liquefying' and 'dissolving'" the human body as "represented by the distinctive 'headless' pose"—or what the Surrealist Georges Bataille christened in 1936 "the acéphale" (Nawa et al. Arario; Jalet et al. 2019; Woo-hyun 2019). Christine Chiu's review of the gallery exhibition described how:
twenty life-sized sculptures of human figures in seemingly impossible, contorted poses were arranged in a single row, their faces hidden or missing. The perfectly contoured black bodies are coated with shimmery silicon carbide powder, and were dimly lit by faint spotlights … These
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/380/image/coversmallIntermedial Dance and Acéphalic Butoh: Damien Jalet's and Nawa Kōhei's Vessel (2016)2026-04-07text/htmlen-USIntermedial Dance and Acéphalic Butoh: Damien Jalet's and Nawa Kōhei's Vessel (2016)2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®1593802026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Vulnerable Relations: Redefining Lead and Follow in Asian American Dancesport
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987224
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This essay seeks to limn the vulnerabilities of partnering in competitive ballroom dancing. It argues that for racialized and gendered subjects who fall beyond dance-sport's normative range of aesthetic legibility, lead and follow becomes an especially fraught—yet potentially reparative—mode of relation. It brings sustained ethnographic focus to the Asian American amateur dancesport community in New York City, which not only represents a growing presence in a predominantly white industry, but unsettles its racially charged conventions of skill, prestige, beauty, and belonging. From this position, it maps a field of vulnerable relations: between Asian American amateurs and the dancesport industry, in which they
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/380/image/coversmallVulnerable Relations: Redefining Lead and Follow in Asian American Dancesport2026-04-07text/htmlen-USVulnerable Relations: Redefining Lead and Follow in Asian American Dancesport2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®1204472026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07We Walk Until the Deaths Stop: Sentiment and Corporeality on the Migrant Trail
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987225
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Every year, beginning on Memorial Day, a group of 35 to 851 activists walk from Sásabe, Mexico to Tucson, Arizona, USA over eight days, through the arid, rugged terrain of the Sonoran Desert. They walk through soaring desert temperatures, along dirt roads and highways, enduring hot spots, blisters, and leg cramps, as shade gradually disappears with little to block the rising sun. At night, walkers sleep in tents or on tarps. Participants carry small white crosses emblazoned with the names and ages at death of migrants who perished while trying to complete a perilous journey undetected. Some are labeled "Deconocido/a" (Unknown) to memorialize someone whose remains have not yet been identified. Periodically, over the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/380/image/coversmallWe Walk Until the Deaths Stop: Sentiment and Corporeality on the Migrant Trail2026-04-07text/htmlen-USWe Walk Until the Deaths Stop: Sentiment and Corporeality on the Migrant Trail2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®1034922026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Danzantes del Alba: Dance, Textile, and the Communitarian Weave
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987226
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"By the nineteenth century, the very memory of the connection between the agricultural laborer and communal property had, of course, vanished."In this stark statement, Marx announces game over for the commons. After four hundred years of land enclosures and privatization, the European working class had lost not only physical access to common lands, but also the "very memory" of the commons as a basic right and co-existential truth. He thus draws a distinction between the commons as a physical site and the sensibility associated with its collective use—call it commons-sense. To lose the physical commons is to incite struggle—as occurred across centuries of peasant revolt in Europe. But to lose commons-sense, Marx
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/380/image/coversmallDanzantes del Alba: Dance, Textile, and the Communitarian Weave2026-04-07text/htmlen-USDanzantes del Alba: Dance, Textile, and the Communitarian Weave2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®1050632026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study ed. by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987227
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Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study, a collection of twelve self-contained booklets, features contributions by artists and scholars may-field brooks, thomas f. defrantz, maura nguyễn donohue, Keith Hennessy, Bebe Miller, Okwui Okpokwasili, Eiko Otake, Annie-B Parson, Javier Stell-Frésquez, Ogemdi Ude, Mariana Valencia, and Andros Zins-Browne. The booklets offer a view into the various locations in which these dancers make work: a farm in Japan, the shore of New York's Rockaway Beach, and football stadiums in the U.S. South. Even as they offer individual booklets, these artists often intersect with one another in the creative space of writing, citing parallel influences and trajectories or direct
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/380/image/coversmallDance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study ed. by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson (review)2026-04-07text/htmlen-USDance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study ed. by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson (review)2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®287982026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Inter-Asia in Motion: Dance as Method ed. by Emily Wilcox, and Soo Ryon Yoon (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987228
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The concept of Inter-Asia (Chen 2010a; Chen 2010b; Chua 2015; Niranjana 2006; Ong 2011) has developed as a corrective to the Western-centric and colonialist concept of "Asia," in particular in response to criticisms of area studies' role in US (neo)imperial expansion. The first US interdisciplinary area studies programs strategically sought to elevate understanding about other parts of the world in reaction to perceived geopolitical threats fueled by the world wars and the Cold War (Shih 2019). Inter-Asia moves past a nation-state model of relationship and aligns with decolonial perspectives. Inter-Asia in Motion: Dance as Method re-publishes twelve articles from the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journal, two by the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/380/image/coversmallInter-Asia in Motion: Dance as Method ed. by Emily Wilcox, and Soo Ryon Yoon (review)2026-04-07text/htmlen-USInter-Asia in Motion: Dance as Method ed. by Emily Wilcox, and Soo Ryon Yoon (review)2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®232082026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Imprints of Dance in Ancient Greece and Rome by Zoa Alonso Fernández, and Sarah Olsen (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987229
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In the winter of the year 182 CE, Epaphroditus, an eight-year-old slave, leaned out of a rooftop in a village in Egypt and fell to his death. The boy had been on that roof because he had wanted to watch dancing on the street during a festival. If one is lax about causal inference, one could say that dancing killed Epaphroditus. The papyrus scrap that reports this tragic incident (P. Oxy. 475, mentioned by Weiss on p. 141 of the book under review) is proof of the remarkable insight that some such documents provide into daily life in Roman Egypt. It is also evidence of the fact that dance was ubiquitous in the Greek and Roman Mediterranean, and that it mattered to many, even to children and slaves. Dance was so vital
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/380/image/coversmallImprints of Dance in Ancient Greece and Rome by Zoa Alonso Fernández, and Sarah Olsen (review)2026-04-07text/htmlen-USImprints of Dance in Ancient Greece and Rome by Zoa Alonso Fernández, and Sarah Olsen (review)2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®243502026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Editor's Note
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987230
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Each of the articles presented in this volume explore how dance frames, generates, and interrogates human relationships, emphasizing community, vulnerability, interdependence, and the embodied negotiation of social power. Across disparate cultural and political contexts—Mexican migrant communities, Asian American ballroom dancers in New York, activists commemorating migrant deaths on the U.S.–Mexico border, and contemporary intermedia collaborations drawing from butoh and Surrealism—the essays collectively highlight how dance becomes a site for rethinking belonging, grief, racial and gender hierarchies, and the boundaries of the human body itself. While stylistically diverse, the works converge on the idea that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/380/image/coversmallEditor's Note2026-04-07text/htmlen-USEditor's Note2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®118832026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Call for Submissions: Early Twentieth-Century Dance Photography Transnational and Transdisciplinary Approaches
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987232
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This special issue for Dance Research Journal will bring together 5-6 articles from scholars in Dance Studies, Visual Studies, and beyond, to explore the transnational and transdisciplinary aspects of dance photography, considering how innovations in photography helped document global life in the early twentieth century. Dance photography functions as a primary and portable archive of dance performances in the period. It also sheds light on the importance of corporeal movement and performance to experiments with technological developments in photography as well as photography's ongoing, often self-conscious, development into a form of art. At the same time, dance itself was developing under the impact of the new
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/380/image/coversmallCall for Submissions: Early Twentieth-Century Dance Photography Transnational and Transdisciplinary Approaches2026-04-07text/htmlen-USCall for Submissions: Early Twentieth-Century Dance Photography Transnational and Transdisciplinary Approaches2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®183572026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07