I write. I edit. I teach. I curate conferences. I am a full professor at Arizona State University (ASU), a large research-one public university, specializing in dance history, theory, and ethics. Here I reflect on these different processes, recognizing that these labels represent different avenues by which I manifest larger existential concerns. Driving this self-analysis is the cancer diagnosis I received in January 2023 and subsequent grueling treatments that interrupted my planned research agenda. Instead, what became urgent was making meaning of the strategies that have allowed me to navigate my academic career to date. In the process, I realized that I wanted to cultivate a poetic ‘voice’ to more accurately convey the underlying creative life force that drives all areas of my life and is helping me to survive. I hope through this process to inspire others in higher education to take stock of their efforts, especially in the face of major changes in their lives and the dance field more generally.

Abstract This article argues that “crossover”– a recording artist's movement across the racialized boundaries of commercial music genres and the attainment of a broader consumer base– is central to the history and production logic of the U.S. commercial dance industry. By framing the televised variety show The Jacksons (1976–1977) as a formative production experience for Michael and Janet Jackson and situating it within a genealogy of popular dance on commercial television, I examine how racial and class signifiers were used to appeal to different demographics, highlighting the historical lineages and capitalist foundations of the U.S. commercial dance industry.

Abstract Ananya Dance Theatre generates a framework for “contemporary dance” as choreography which enacts its solidarity with the land of Native peoples. Artistic director Ananya Chatterjea mobilizes her contemporary aesthetic, “Yorchhā,” through the company's alliance with Indigenous peoples’ worldviews on land and water protection, especially through their relations with Dakota and Anishinaabe persons. Dance analysis of the pieces “Moreechika: Season of Mirage” (2012), “Shaatranga: Women Weaving Worlds” (2018), and “Shyamali: Sprouting Words” (2017) shapes contemporary dance through its engagement with Native persons’ caretaking labor for the environment and the position of these relations in the choreography. A practice of humility emerges as the cornerstone of solidarity in contemporary dance due to the necessity for longstanding Native invitation and engagement, Indigenous narratives and embodiment in the dance pieces, and lessons learned from the pitfalls in intersecting techniques such as Ananya Dance Theatre's with Native people's lifeways and knowledges.

Abstract This article is an anthropological exploration of the role of dance in tourism-led entrepreneurship and tourism-led mobilities in Cuba. Based on ethnographic research and employing an autoethnographic lens, the article examines the imaginaries and gendered performances of Cubanness that play out in touristic settings as part of dance trips organized on the island for international tourists. Women are the main target audience for these dance programs, which oftentimes reveal the reproduction of racial stereotypes that contributed to the growing popularity of Cuba as a tourist destination. Dance teachers come to establish a broad spectrum of relations that are influenced by inequalities of resources and unequal access to mobility, since it is the (usually) white European and North American dancing tourists who take up space as central dancing figures, co-creating the cultural script that fetishizes Cuban Black bodies, especially in settings such as salsa schools or popular dance venues.

Deportations and the threat of removal are choreographic strategies of the nation-state's ever-growing monopoly of movement through border securitization and immigration enforcement, which persists into the twenty-first century. While literature and the visual arts have received critical and popular attention by considering forced family separations, dance remains overlooked. Analyzing dance performances that relate directly to deportation teaches us not only about the painful impact of forced removal: it instructs us to decode, move and maintain relationships as aliens and citizens amid the increasing control of motion in the United States and the cruel joke offered by a nation of immigrants.