Dancing Transnational Feminisms: Ananya Dance Theatre and the Art of Social Justice (University of Washington Press 2021), edited by Ananya Chatterjea, Hui Niu Wilcox, and Alessandra Lebea Williams. “Drawing from more than fifteen years of collaborative dance-making and sustained dialogues based on deep alliances across communities of color, Dancing Transnational Feminisms offers a multigenre exploration of how dance can be intersectionally reimagined as practice, methodology, and metaphor for feminist solidarity. Blending essays with stories, interviews, and poems, this collection explores timely questions surrounding race and performance, gender and sexuality, art and politics, global and local inequities, and the responsibilities of artists toward their communities.”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.“A Radical Practice of Inclusion: Choreographing Race and Gender with Ananya Dance Theatre” (TDR 66, no. 1, March 2022). Ananya Dance Theatre directs our present‐day concern for racial and gender diversity toward a radical practice. Choreographer Ananya Chatterjea includes white and mixed-race women as well as black male‐presenting artists in her dances that place the global, social justice stories of black and brown women and femmes at their center.Alessandra’s essay on choreographer David Roussève/REALITY dance company was included in this edition of the “Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies” publication, co-edited by Thomas DeFrantz and Takiyah Nur Amin.
