Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study interrogates the history of dance from the embodied and poetic perspectives of choreographers. Authored by twelve diverse American dance artists in the form of twelve small booklets, it approaches and celebrates dance history as a subjective, artistic inquiry. Written by working choreographers, it reimagines and radicalizes our understanding of dance throughout human history. Simultaneously, the project is dedicated to the power of an artist-centric view of history itself, thus placing the history of dance back into the body, where it began. Here, history occurs in vertical layers of time and space, moving dance history into the street, the football field, the yard, the screen, the memory, the womb, the sky, and the future. Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study enlarges and complicates the history of dance; it interprets history as unfixed, limitless, and prismatic. Edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson.
Published by Dancing Foxes Press and Wesleyan University Press.
Produced by Big Dance Theater with the generous support of The Howard Gilman Foundation, The Starry Night Fund, Big Dance Theater’s Board Designated Fund, Virginia and Timothy Millhiser, and King’s Fountain.
Dance History(s) was published through a partnership between Dancing Foxes Press, Big Dance Theater, and Wesleyan University Press.
“The beginning of dance history was bare feet in the dirt.” mayfield brooks
“Who are your peoples? How did they dance first?” Javier Stell-Fresquez
“I don’t believe in history and I don’t know what dance is. Which is to say I don’t know what dance isn’t.” Andros Zins-Brown
“Dance is a weed. So let’s start in the ground.” maura nguyễn donohue
“A history of dance is a history of people in search of freedom.” Keith Hennessy
“Dance history is a moving target without end.” thomas f. defrantz
“So today, they deserve this party. It’s a bridge to survival, a dance, a gathering, a physical transcendence: communion through exhaustion that helps them face the week ahead. ”
Mariana Valencia
“Black Southern majorette dancers have codified a particular power: Black femme sensuality organized into eight counts.” Ogemdi Ude
My history of dance must begin with my first collaboration, the dance with my mother, a duet attuned to our mutual heartbeats, a dance in the womb, a song in the key of water”. Okwui Okpokwasili
“Dance. An abundance of cries and breaths… lives and movements.” Eiko Otake
“We command, we are commanded, we contain multitudes, we twist and shout.” Bebe Miller
“As you read this, someone is making a dance right now, someone is teaching a dance right now, someone is just dancing somewhere right now. Dancing is living.” Annie-B Parson
Editors Bios
THOMAS F. DEFRANTZ is a professor at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, and director of SLIPPAGE: Performance, Culture, Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. DeFrantz received the Outstanding Research in Dance award from the Dance Studies Association in 2017. DeFrantz’s project soundz at the back of my head was nominated for a Bessie award in 2020.
ANNIE-B PARSON is a choreographer and the artistic director of Big Dance Theater. Parson has also made choreography for opera, rock shows, marching bands, symphonies, movies, museums, objects, augmented reality, and people: David Byrne, David Bowie, Lorde, St. Vincent, Kim Deal, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Wendy Whelan, Laurie Anderson, Salt ‘n Pepa, Jonathan Demme, and the Martha Graham Dance Co.
Authors’ Bios
mayfield brooks is a dancer, vocalist, urban farmer, and writer. They are inspired by interspecies relations, ocean cosmologies, and regenerative ecological events such as land based compost systems or the whale fall—where the carcass of a whale falls to the ocean floor creating new ecosystems in its wake. brooks teaches and performs practices from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance project, which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing.
maura nguyễn donohue is director of MFA Dance at Hunter College, City University of New York. She has been making dance-based performance works in New York for almost thirty years. Donohue has written for American Theater, Contemporary Directions in Asian American Dance, Culturebot, Dance Insider, Dance Magazine, Imaginings Journal, Movement Research Performance Journal, and Women & Performance Journal.
Keith Hennessy is a frolicker, imperfectionist, and witch working in the fields of dance, performance, affordable housing, and gay sexuality. Raised on Atikameksheng Anishnawbek lands in Canada and living since 1982 on Ramaytush Ohlone lands (San Francisco), Hennessy engages in practices of improvisation, ritual, collaboration, and play to respond to political crises. His work is interdisciplinary and experimental, motivated by antiracist, queer-feminist, and anarchist movements. His honors include a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2012 USA Fellowship, a 2009 Bessie Award, and multiple Izzie Awards.
Bebe Miller is a native New Yorker. Her choreography has been performed by A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Oregon Ballet Theater, Philadanco, and PACT Dance of Johannesburg, among others. Named a Master of African American Choreography by the Kennedy Center, Miller has received honorary doctorates and numerous awards and is one of the inaugural class of Doris Duke Artist Award recipients. A professor emerita at Ohio State University, she currently lives on Vashon Island in Washington State.
Okwui Okpokwasili is a Brooklyn, New York–based performer, choreographer, and writer who creates multidisciplinary performance pieces. In 2022, she was the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a 2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, a 2018 Herb Alpert Award in Dance, a 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship.
Born and raised in Japan and living in New York since 1976, Eiko Otake worked for more than 40 years as Eiko & Koma. Since 2014 she has performed as a soloist at more than seventy sites. In her Duet Project (2017-) , she has collaborated with artists of different disciplines, races, genders and generations. Eiko has also created videos, films installations and exhibitions. Her honors include 1996 MacArthur Fellowship, 2004 the Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award, 2012 the Doris Duke Artist Award.
Javier Stell-Frésquez (Piru and Tigua Pueblo ancestry, Mixed Chican@) grew up in El Paso, TX, and moved to the San Francisco (Yelamu) area in 2008. In the short time since, she has seen an awe-inspiring eruption of two-spirit visibility, artistry, and cultural reclamation, inspired in large part by the Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits (BAAITS) Powwow. She produces, co-curates, and tours Weaving Spirits Festival of Two-Spirit Performance. Her dance/performance experience includes Indigenous contemporary, vogue, flamenco, and performance art.
Ogemdi Ude is a Black femme dance and interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Brooklyn. Her performance work focuses on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. Her work has been presented at Gibney, Harlem Stage, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Recess Art, and BAX. She has taught at The New School, Princeton University, MIT, and Sarah Lawrence College. In January 2022 she appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine for their annual “25 to Watch” issue.
Mariana Valencia researches self-representation, collectivity, and abstraction through dance. Her work was included in the Whitney Biennial 2019. Valencia’s dance work reaches beyond the stage: she has published two books of performance texts, Mariana Valencia’sBouquet (3 Hole Press, 2019) and Album (Wendy’s Subway, 2019); is a founding member of the No Total reading group; and has been the co-editor of Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence. Valencia has toured in the United Kingdom, Norway, and the Balkans.
Andros Zins-Browne works at the intersection of performance and dance, extending choreographic notions into encounters with dancers, nondancers, singers, objects, and texts. In 2022, ZinsBrowne premiered color a body who flees, a collaborative sound installation and performance at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. ZinsBrowne is the recipient of awards from the Goethe Institut, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Ministry of Culture of the Flemish Community, and the New York State Council on the Arts.
About Dancing Foxes Press
Dancing Foxes Press is a Brooklyn-based independent publishing platform founded in 2012 by Karen Kelly and Barbara Schroeder. Projects are driven by content and collaboration. Our process—which values active and critical dialogues—focuses on the singularity of each project. Dancing Foxes Press is recognized for distinctive publications that are commissioned for their specificity and realized through editorial collaboration and hands-on production and craftsmanship. All aspects of the production process are considered part of the content, so that the form of the book ultimately carries the project’s message. A broad objective of our press is to recognize social responsibility in publishing and present and affirm a range of cultural experiences and artistic practices.
About Big Dance Theater
Founded by Molly Hickok, Paul Lazar, and Annie-B Parson in 1991, Big Dance Theater is known for its inspired synthesis of dance, music, text, and visual design. The company’s work ranges from pure dance pieces, to dance/theater works with sources from found text, literature, plays, or an alchemy of wildly incongruent source material, weaving and braiding disparate strands of text and theatrical elements into multidimensional performance. Big Dance has delved into the literary work of such authors as Twain, Tanizaki, Euripides, Flaubert, and Anne Carson, and dance is used as both frame and metaphor to theatricalize these writings. For 33 years, Big Dance Theater has worked to create over 25 large-scale dance/theater works, generating each piece over months and years of collaboration with its associate artists, a long-standing, ever-evolving family of actors, dancers, composers, and designers.
About Wesleyan University Press
Founded in 1957, Wesleyan University Press quickly established itself as one of the nation’s outstanding scholarly publishers of interdisciplinary work in the humanities and poetry. Over its lengthy history, it has published exceptional works of scholarship as well as books of wide interest to general readers. The Press has garnered national and international accolades for its work, including six Pulitzer Prizes, three National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, three Griffin Poetry Prizes, and an Anisfield-Wolf Award, among many others. Wesleyan publishes approximately twenty new books each year, primarily in the fields of music, dance, and the arts, including 6-8 titles each year in poetry. Since 1957, the Press has published over 1,500 books, nearly 1,000 of which are still in print, and has distributed over 3.5 million books—all bearing the WUP imprint—across the world.