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In this article, I examine the work created by Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite for her company Kidd Pivot, placing it within a larger tradition of dance-theater that combines text and movement, and traffics openly in big emotions and even bigger narrative structures. I argue that Pite's use of text does not just offer a way into, or a representational gloss on, her otherwise abstract movement vocabulary, but also a means of affectively and even kinesthetically re-experiencing that movement post-performance. I focus on Pite's three most recent evening-length programs for Kidd Pivot, and on the different modes of textual address employed therein (voice-over narration, projection, live speech). My goal in analyzing the choreographer's narrative scripts alongside her physical ones is to highlight, on the one hand, the materiality of words within the total sensory environments created by Pite through her dance-theater performances and, on the other, to emphasize their consequentiality in helping to make somatic sense of one's memories of those performances.

This article examines contemporary choreographer Crystal Pite’s celebrated work Flight Pattern (2017), created for the Royal Ballet, which depicts an unspecified group of refugees as allegory for the “human” condition. In striving to choreograph exile outside of place and time, Pite rewrites the refugee as a purely bodied condition of transience, and thus corporealizes what Alexander Weheliye calls a “travelling theory.” The work thus strategically obfuscates the political in the image of the refugee, serving a State-run stage; moreover, it downplays the significance of race to the refugee crisis in complement to a predominantly white company. Reading this dance against key texts of biopolitical discourse, I show how the refugee figures as a symbol of the magnitude of biopower and as such is ontologically tied to the notion of the population—yet the refugee is never engaged at the level of embodiment. Flight Pattern thus offers a critical intervention: how does the West envision the refugee as an individual body? On the dancerly body, this entails citations of Western concert dance’s conventions of aestheticized alterity, raising the specter of the “relatable abject”: a figure that is Other to its audience and yet invites their empathic projection. Flight Pattern thus raises important questions for researchers about the implications of aesthetic inquiry into biopolitical crises: what dance can capture—and what it erases—of the experience of refugitude and the struggle for recognition and legibility on the stage of international politics.

Vision/Revision is the title of a ballet I created during my graduate studies, and in many ways, it is the culmination of my two years at the University of Utah School of Dance. It exists in many forms: the stage version that was first shown during the spring semester of 2018 and a final version performed during the fall semester of 2018. It also exists as a screendance as well as through this written thesis that examines the three questions driving my research: First, what does it mean to be “authentic” as a choreographer? Second, how does this approach resonate with the methods of Crystal Pite, a choreographer I admire? And finally, how could these methods and approaches challenge the often-repeated idea of Jennifer Homans, author of Apollo’s Angels, that ballet is dying? As I discovered during my creative process, in order for ballet to remain relevant, it is essential that we empower dancers and honor their distinct voices and contributions. It is also crucial that we investigate the transfer of stage work to screen versions and notice what can be enhanced by the circulations of screendance. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I realized that I am an interdisciplinary artist who is inspired by the ability to compose music, to create movement, to encourage dancers, to design costumes, to build a set, and to direct and edit a film version of my ballet. Ultimately, I found that ballet is an art form characterized by vitality and resilience, and it has a profound ability to inspire and motivate me.

This essay engages with Alan Brissenden's claim that Shakespeare uses dance as a metaphor in his last plays to indicate a complex interplay between concord and discord, virtue and vengeance. While Brissenden deliberately does not address the ways in which this interplay might have been embodied through movement on the early modern stage, this essay analyzes two recent ballet versions of The Tempest (American Ballet Theatre, 2013) and The Winter's Tale (Royal Ballet, 2014) to demonstrate how choreographers can realize this dramatic conjunction through dance. Choreographers Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon emphasize the destructive anger of Prospero and Leontes, and both ballets end on notes of sadness, longing, and loss. Yet each also incorporates harmony and hope, primarily through the redemptive relationships between the young lovers.