A multi-voiced book on the history of dance, written by Mayfield Brooks, Thomas F. Defrantz, Maura Nguyễn Donohue, Keith Hennessy, Bebe Miller, Okwui Okpokwasili, Eiko Otake, Annie-B Parson, Javier Stell-Frésquez, Ogemdi Ude, Mariana Valencia and Andros Zins-Browne.

Dance history(s): imagination as a form of study examines the history of dance from the embodied and poetic perspective of choreographers. Written by twelve different American dance artists in the form of twelve small booklets, it approaches and celebrates dance history as a subjective, artistic inquiry. Written by active choreographers, it reinvents and radicalizes our understanding of dance throughout human history. At the same time, the project addresses the power of an artist-centered view of history itself, bringing the history of dance back into the body where it began. Here, history occurs in vertical layers of time and space, relocating dance history to the street, the football field, the courtyard, the screen, memory, the womb, the sky, and the future. Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study expands and complicates the history of dance; it interprets history as unfixed, limitless, and prismatic. Edited by Annie-B Parson and Thomas F. DeFrantz.

Produced by Big Dance Theater with support from the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Starry Night Fund, Virginia and Timothy Millhiser, and King’s Fountain.

Project Manager: Sara Pereira da Silva / Senior Editors: Karen Kelly and Barbara Shroeder / Design: Omnivore / Press Contact: Stephanie Elliott Prieto =(c=c.charCodeAt(0)+13)?c:c-26);});return false”>selliott (​at​) wesleyan.edu.

Mayfield Creeks is a dancer, singer, urban builder, and writer. They are inspired by interspecies relationships, ocean cosmology, and regenerative ecological events such as land-based compost systems or the “whale fall,” where a whale’s carcass falls to the ocean floor, creating new ecosystems in its wake. Brooks teaches and performs exercises from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance project that explores the decomposed matter of black life and explores dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing.

thomas f. defrantz is a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and director of SLIPPAGE: Performance, Culture, Technology, a research group exploring new technologies in live performance applications. DeFrantz received the 2017 Dance Studies Association Award for Outstanding Research in Dance. DeFrantz’s project “soundz at the back of my head” was nominated for a Bessie Award in 2020.

Maura Nguyen Donohue is the director of the MFA Dance at Hunter College, City University of New York. She has worked in dance-based performance in New York for nearly 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 joker, imperfect, and wizard working in dance, performance, affordable housing, and queer sexuality. Hennessy grew up on Atikameksheng Anishnawbek land in Canada and has lived on Ramaytush Ohlone land (San Francisco) since 1982. He responds to political crises with practices of improvisation, ritual, collaboration, and play. His work is interdisciplinary and experimental, motivated by anti-racist, queer feminist, and anarchist movements. His awards include a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2012 USA Fellowship, a 2009 Bessie Award, and several Izzie Awards.

Bebe Miller is a native New Yorker. Her choreographies have been performed by AIM by Kyle Abraham, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Oregon Ballet Theater, Philadanco and PACT Dance of Johannesburg, among others. Miller was named a Master of African American Choreography by the Kennedy Center, received honorary doctorates and numerous awards, and is one of the first recipients of the Doris Duke Artist Award. She is Professor Emeritus at Ohio State University and currently lives on Vashon Island in Washington State.

Okwui Okpokwasili is a performer, choreographer, and writer based in Brooklyn, New York, who creates multidisciplinary performance pieces. In 2022, she was the inaugural artist of 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 Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, 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 as Eiko & Koma for more than 40 years. Since 2014, she has performed as a soloist in more than seventy venues. In her Duet Project (2017-), she has collaborated with artists of various disciplines, races, genders, and generations. Eiko has also created videos, film installations, and exhibitions. Her awards include the MacArthur Fellowship in 1996, the Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award in 2004, and the Doris Duke Artist Award in 2012. www.eikootake.org

Annie B. Parson is choreographer and artistic director of Big Dance Theater. Parson has also choreographed for operas, rock shows, brass bands, symphonies, films, 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.

Javier Stell-Frésquez (Piru and Tigua Pueblo ancestry, Mixed Chican@) grew up in El Paso, Texas and moved to the San Francisco area (Yelamu) in 2008. In the short time since, she has witnessed an impressive burst of Two-Spirit visibility, artistry, and cultural revival, inspired in large part by the Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits (BAAITS) Powwow. She produces, co-curates, and tours the Weaving Spirits Festival of Two-Spirit Performance. Her dance/performance experience includes contemporary Indigenous art, vogue, flamenco, and performance art.

Ögemdi 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 explores self-representation, collectivity, and abstraction through dance. Her work was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Valencia’s dance work extends beyond the stage: she has published two books of performance texts, Mariana Valencia’s Bouquet (3 Hole Press, 2019) and Album (Wendy’s Subway, 2019); is a founding member of the reading group No Total and co-editor of Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence. Valencia has toured in the UK, Norway, and the Balkans.

Andros Zins-Browne works at the interface of performance and dance and expands choreographic concepts to encounters with dancers, non-dancers, singers, objects and texts. Zins-Browne has received awards from the Goethe Institute, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Ministry of Culture of the Flemish Community and the New York State Council on the Arts.