Naween A. Mangi spent twenty years working in rural Sindh and assumed farming communities had no use for dance. A choreographer's tour through small towns proved her wrong, and changed how she thinks about what "community development" means.
Maria Pickart can trace the shame historically, culturally, pedagogically. She has written papers on it. And then she walks into the studio, and the imagined audience assembles before she has taken a single step.
Mary Kate Sheehan is a freelance dancer trained to be versatile, to embody any aesthetic, to deliver whatever the room required. In this essay, she traces what happens when that is no longer enough, and the long search for a dancing self that belongs to no one but her.
A dance theatre work leaves the stage and enters the landscape. In mountains, beside waterfalls, on uneven ground, the body has to negotiate the world around it. Having seen both versions, Rainy J. reviews Ning Qiang's The Wind.
"Dance chose me long before I chose dance." Choreographer Mohsin Babar on reclaiming Pakistani performance culture after decades of systemic neglect.
Dila Yumurtaci reviews Alice Ripoll's Adorno, finding that beneath a striking mass of balloons lies a brilliant, vulnerable study on how our ordinary choices reconstruct who we are.
Rennie McDougall’s Nonstop Bodies strips the history of dance in New York away from the canon and hands it back to the streets. Next on our reading list.
In the Jardim da Estrela in Lisbon, transdisciplinary artist Myrna Renaud films her shadow as she moves through rehabilitation exercises on a park bench; second position reduced to what a broken wrist allows. The video and this text are the same work.
What seven years in New York looks like, and what it asks of you
Leila Lois speaks to the artists of Melbourne's RISING Dance Biennale and reveals a programme that feels urgent, uncomfortably alive, and may have saved an important contemporary dance festival.
What headlines reveal about institutional decolonization
By Loïc Magliano — A Pole Dancer on Cabaret, Theft, and the French-American Gaze
Features
By Madison Vomastek — Madison traces her discovery of flow through two unlikely parallel, the hip-hop cipher and Forsythe's Improvisational Technologies, and finds the same thing at the heart of both: community, witnessing, and the freedom to be seen.
Reviews
By Will McGregor — The 19th-century village is gone. In its place: a concrete wall, factory light, and bodies that already know their place. Ten years on, Akram Khan's Giselle has grown into its own weight.
Essays
By Carol Pierre — A relationship with a choreographer reveals oral history as embodied practice. Like dance, research arranges testimonies, holds space, moves through memory with narrators, and performs stories that transform audiences into witnesses of alternative realities.
Interviews
On dance floors lost and found, queer Palestine, languages that carry whole worlds, the slow burn of academia, and Mei, a blind Shih Tzu who knows more about love than most of us ever will.
Interviews
The Swiss-Italian dance scholar on Baroque notation, digital bodies, and finding wabi-sabi in a hectic life.
Reviews
By Leila Lois — NYCB's opening night offered everything: the pure joy of Serenade, the frank sensuality of a rarely staged Prodigal Son, and the athletic brilliance of Paquita. Leila Lois travels from the Southern Hemisphere to see performances that honor ballet's full emotional spectrum.
Reviews
By Will McGregor — David Chartoriski and Yelena Odintsova navigate tango's essential paradox: a dance born in intimate embrace that becomes magnetic when performed. At Sofar Sounds' RSA House, they made the case for both.
Short Reads
Michael O'Connor discovers that paper folding reveals that human bodies work as archives of evolutionary folds where dancing, writing, and speech cross over each other. Through experiments with nine artists, he shows that the body isn't metaphorically like origami. It is origami.
Interviews
From West Siberia to Munich, Alina Belyagina has turned periphery into method. Her new work fuses vogue and Slavic folk dance to explore how bodies migrate between traditions and carry memories that discourse hasn't yet mapped.
Profiles
"‘I approached a Dance Mag's visual direction as a foundation, not a constraint,’ designer Lilia Di Bella said. In our conversation, she explains how she drew from her dance background to let shapes and colors flow through the pages, creating a space where "meaning is made together with the reader."
Features
Photographer Jennifer Lee Delić and dancer-fighter Rasmus Branders push against the limits of the camera. Using flowing fabrics and contrasts of light, their collaboration seeks to give form to the internal dance of masculine and feminine energy we all embody.
Short Reads
Tejaswini Loundo moves through flow, ego-death, and the cosmic rhythm of Naṭarāja to ask what it truly means to dance beyond the self.