This article examines the challenges and possibilities of teaching dance history in Western Europe through a pedagogical approach that both teaches and unteaches the canon. Drawing on my experiences as a dance history lecturer, I explore how such engagement with the canon enables students to develop essential skills in performance analysis. Through discussion of historiographical critiques, contemporary performances, and pedagogical strategies, I argue that wrestling with the canon is necessary not only for historical awareness but also for fostering a more inclusive, critical, and methodologically expansive approach to dance studies. Ultimately, (un)teaching the canon serves as a tool for reimagining the field and shaping future dance scholars and artists.

This article explores the significance of theatre dance material found in various collections of British 20th century personal and private papers. It details discoveries made in these collections and how this sheds new light on British theatre dance of the first half of the twentieth century. These comprised the UK Parliamentary Archives at Westminster; the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College Cambridge; the British Library and the Wellcome Collection in London; Kings College Cambridge Archive Centre; and the Harry Ransom Center in Austin Texas. It closes with a case study on the dancer Maud Allan to demonstrate how archival data from non-dance archives can reshape our understanding of dance history and provide valuable insights for advancing dance studies research.

This essay examines Margaret Morris’s development as an innovative choreographer from 1910 to her 1917 piece Angkorr. Using archival material, it traces her involvement with networks of modernist painters, writers, and musicians, particularly through the Margaret Morris Club in Chelsea during the 1914–18 war. It examines the lack of support for modern dance in Britain and for the more avant-garde art of the Chelsea network, which caused modern dance and progressive visual art in Britain to go into decline after 1918. It argues, however, that in 1917, Morris was the most innovative choreographer in Britain.

This is the second of a two-part article looking at the dance holdings in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). While the first part was a general survey, this part focuses upon the important holdings on various companies described under the loose category of ‘Ballets Russes’ or ‘Ballet Russe’. Material on Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes1911–1929 is particularly strong but there are also rich collections on the Colonel de Basil and René Blum/Denham companies and on Anna Pavlova and her company. In addition, there are many less-highly-profiled companies, some of which survived for only short periods of time. With the opening of the V&A East Storehouse which makes the material more accessible, this article introduces researchers to what exists and reminds them of the varied locations in which they will be found. Catalogue numbers are included in the text to assist researchers. For more general readers, images of many of the objects may be found by typing the catalogue numbers into Explore the Collections V&A.

In December 2023, the art collective NUL hosted in Milan a queer Electronic Dance Music event which included the sema ritual performance of a Mevlevi dervish ensemble from Turkey. Approaching this specific event through autoethnography and performance analysis, this essay demonstrates how over the last decades Sufi practices traversed geographical and social boundaries. By describing how the sema penetrated pop music, contemporary opera, and queer nightlife subcultures in Italy, this study expands current scholarly understandings of the contemporary circulation of Sufism and its neo-orientalist entanglements in global performance and the nightlife industries.