Singapore’s global aspirations have, since the turn of the 21st century, led to the consolidation of a range of new institutions—arts research centers, degree granting programs in universities, museums, festivals— with affiliated experts, to prepare the ground for an emergent arts scene that is aligned with the norms of contemporary western art practice. As neoliberal instrumentation competes with the communitarian logic of the traditional arts, dance forms such as Indian classical, Javanese court and Malay folk dances, which once sought to link the ancient past and perpetuity for ethnic communities of spectatorship, are constricted within narrowly defined categories of the regional performing arts market. To avoid becoming mere touristic spectacles, a new generation of traditionally trained artists reinvent their respective forms to accommodate the near future of contemporary culture in Singapore. Such adaptations unsettle the once cohesive universe of traditional dance, resulting in unfinished and unsettling works that betray, to quote Nicholas Bourriard, “countless forms of melancholy”, This paper looks at two recent works of contemporary dance staged in Singapore—January Low’s Reclaim (2019), Raka Maitra’s Pallavi Series (2015-2018). I consider dance emerging from this latter discourse as articulating an aesthetic of acclimatization, sustained by political, communal and institutional attachments that emerge in a climate of overwhelming crises and adjustment. As the traditional dance world in Singapore enters a state of slow death, I identify projects that embark on experiments of partial recuperation, which “stay with the trouble,” as Donna Harraway suggests, making-with and getting-on with what remains of traditional dance and its embodied practices. I suggest that these projects extend the life of traditional dance as a minor, mutated species in an early evolutionary stage that nevertheless transforms the ecology they acclimate to. In remaining selectively porous to neoliberal and biopolitical operations, and receptive to novel artistic regimes, can the aesthetic of acclimatization allow traditional dance to escape its totalization within neoliberal calculations?