Kate Elswit
Biographic Data
| ID | 926271 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kate Elswit |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kate |
| FAMILY NAME | Elswit |
| SIGNATURE | ELSWIT K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9541-107X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Radical accounting as method: Interconnections across time, space, and bodies in Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s archives
This essay contributes to digital history by proposing ‘radical accounting’ as a method for gathering data from archives to support analysis of bodily practices at a scale that encompasses the transnational, intergenerational, and collective. Taking as our case study the Black-centered, multi-racial concert dance company Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater established in 1958, we manually curated data from over 30,000 print materials held by the A…
Digital Scholarship Roundtable: The State of the Field
Dancing with Coronaspheres: Expanded Breath Bodies and the Politics of Public Movement in the Age of Covid-19
This essay develops the concept of the ‘coronasphere’ to grapple with how breath shifts the perceptible extent of the body during a pandemic, and the implications of such a radically altered sense of proximity for the choreography of public movement. Coming into being through an act of perception that is entangled with responsibility to others, the coronasphere is offered as a sensory alternative to fixed-distance models of social distancing appr…
Visceral Data for Dance Histories: Katherine Dunham’s People, Places, and Pieces
Between 1947 and 1960, choreographer Katherine Dunham spent over 5,000 days in hundreds of cities on six continents. During that time, almost 200 dancers, drummers, and singers traveled with her, performing 166 repertory pieces. Dunham’s expansive work lends itself to digital approaches that illuminate the complex ways history is iterated across bodies, and how the specific questions raised by dance history underpin a visceral approach to the dig…
Reflections on bodies in lockdown: The coronasphere
Dance History and Digital Humanities Meet at the Archives: An Interim Project Report on Dunham's Data
This interim project report addresses the ongoing work of Dunham's Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry. The project centres choreographer Katherine Dunham's transnational circulation, and takes a critical mixed methods approach informed by feminist and anti-racist discussions in the digital humanities in order to explore the questions and problems that make data analysis and visualization meaningful for dance h…
Katherine Dunham's Global Method and the Embodied Politics of Dance's Everyday
In a 1950 letter, choreographer Katherine Dunham mentions trouble keeping dancers with her troupe “[i]n spite of the fact that we are the only non-subsidized professional group that has remained self-supporting over these years, and in spite of the fact that we are loved and respected all over the world and work more weeks out of the year than any other dance group in existence.” Although some of these claims would be challenging to validate empi…
A living cabinet of breath curiosities: Somatics, bio-media, and the archive
Breath builds intimate and physical connections beyond the individual, at the same time as it also poses challenges to sharing experience with others. However, performance has the capacity to archive multidimensional sensory experience and recompose it in a manner that is palpable to an audience. This essay addresses the problem of collecting, re-accessing, and sharing breath, from the indexing of breath as biodata to the use of ‘breath media’ in…
Mapping Movement on the Move: Dance Touring and Digital Methods
A better understanding of the transnational networks of dance touring is critical to placing dance within larger theatrical and cultural systems. This essay demonstrates how digital research methods can work in tandem with more traditional scholarly methods to manage the scale and complexity of data truly necessary to account for what we call “movement on the move.” Drawing on the authors’ research on dance touring-namely, South American tours by…
Inheriting Dance's Alternative Histories
In 1975, German choreographer Kurt Jooss created his last dance, Dixit Dominus , for Swedish-based Indian dancer Lilavati Häger. After Rani Nair reconstructed what is often seen as a “minor” work, she then created Future Memory (2012) to engage more directly with her inheritance, from caring for the personal things and stories that surrounded the piece to re-working its promise of dancing between European and Indian forms. Working outward from my…
Ten Evenings with Pina: Bausch's "Late" Style and the Cultural Politics of Coproduction
This essay reconsiders the legacy of German dance theatre choreographer Pina Bausch through a series of thoughts collected and tested while sitting in the dark during the World Cities retrospective that was presented as part of the Cultural Olympiad of the London 2012 Olympics. While Bausch's aesthetic is almost entirely articulated on the basis of her vintage period, World Cities called attention to the coproduction process under which Tanztheat…
So You Think You Can Dance Does Dance Studies
The extended choreography of the reality television dance competition So You Think You Can Dance teaches its viewers how to engage in a different kind of spectatorship
“Berlin … Your Dance Partner Is Death”
Dance and death combined in post-WWI Germany to complicate the material authority they were seen to share. Using nascent modern dance techniques to exploit the expressive capacities of the dancing body, choreographers turned to dances of death to portray the increasingly difficult conditions of humanity. The logistics of performing these spectacles of the real are investigated through three choreographer/performers of the Weimar Republic: Kurt Jo…
Mapping Movement on the Move: Dance Touring and Digital Methods
A better understanding of the transnational networks of dance touring is critical to placing dance within larger theatrical and cultural systems. This essay demonstrates how digital research methods can work in tandem with more traditional scholarly methods to manage the scale and complexity of data truly necessary to account for what we call “movement on the move.” Drawing on the authors’ research on dance touring-namely, South American tours by…
Inheriting Dance's Alternative Histories
In 1975, German choreographer Kurt Jooss created his last dance, Dixit Dominus , for Swedish-based Indian dancer Lilavati Häger. After Rani Nair reconstructed what is often seen as a “minor” work, she then created Future Memory (2012) to engage more directly with her inheritance, from caring for the personal things and stories that surrounded the piece to re-working its promise of dancing between European and Indian forms. Working outward from my…
Ten Evenings with Pina: Bausch's "Late" Style and the Cultural Politics of Coproduction
This essay reconsiders the legacy of German dance theatre choreographer Pina Bausch through a series of thoughts collected and tested while sitting in the dark during the World Cities retrospective that was presented as part of the Cultural Olympiad of the London 2012 Olympics. While Bausch's aesthetic is almost entirely articulated on the basis of her vintage period, World Cities called attention to the coproduction process under which Tanztheat…
“Berlin … Your Dance Partner Is Death”
Dance and death combined in post-WWI Germany to complicate the material authority they were seen to share. Using nascent modern dance techniques to exploit the expressive capacities of the dancing body, choreographers turned to dances of death to portray the increasingly difficult conditions of humanity. The logistics of performing these spectacles of the real are investigated through three choreographer/performers of the Weimar Republic: Kurt Jo…
So You Think You Can Dance Does Dance Studies
The extended choreography of the reality television dance competition So You Think You Can Dance teaches its viewers how to engage in a different kind of spectatorship
Ten Evenings with Pina: Bausch's "Late" Style and the Cultural Politics of Coproduction
This essay reconsiders the legacy of German dance theatre choreographer Pina Bausch through a series of thoughts collected and tested while sitting in the dark during the World Cities retrospective that was presented as part of the Cultural Olympiad of the London 2012 Olympics. While Bausch's aesthetic is almost entirely articulated on the basis of her vintage period, World Cities called attention to the coproduction process under which Tanztheat…
Inheriting Dance's Alternative Histories
In 1975, German choreographer Kurt Jooss created his last dance, Dixit Dominus , for Swedish-based Indian dancer Lilavati Häger. After Rani Nair reconstructed what is often seen as a “minor” work, she then created Future Memory (2012) to engage more directly with her inheritance, from caring for the personal things and stories that surrounded the piece to re-working its promise of dancing between European and Indian forms. Working outward from my…
Mapping Movement on the Move: Dance Touring and Digital Methods
A better understanding of the transnational networks of dance touring is critical to placing dance within larger theatrical and cultural systems. This essay demonstrates how digital research methods can work in tandem with more traditional scholarly methods to manage the scale and complexity of data truly necessary to account for what we call “movement on the move.” Drawing on the authors’ research on dance touring-namely, South American tours by…
A living cabinet of breath curiosities: Somatics, bio-media, and the archive
Breath builds intimate and physical connections beyond the individual, at the same time as it also poses challenges to sharing experience with others. However, performance has the capacity to archive multidimensional sensory experience and recompose it in a manner that is palpable to an audience. This essay addresses the problem of collecting, re-accessing, and sharing breath, from the indexing of breath as biodata to the use of ‘breath media’ in…
Dance History and Digital Humanities Meet at the Archives: An Interim Project Report on Dunham's Data
This interim project report addresses the ongoing work of Dunham's Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry. The project centres choreographer Katherine Dunham's transnational circulation, and takes a critical mixed methods approach informed by feminist and anti-racist discussions in the digital humanities in order to explore the questions and problems that make data analysis and visualization meaningful for dance h…
Katherine Dunham's Global Method and the Embodied Politics of Dance's Everyday
In a 1950 letter, choreographer Katherine Dunham mentions trouble keeping dancers with her troupe “[i]n spite of the fact that we are the only non-subsidized professional group that has remained self-supporting over these years, and in spite of the fact that we are loved and respected all over the world and work more weeks out of the year than any other dance group in existence.” Although some of these claims would be challenging to validate empi…
Reflections on bodies in lockdown: The coronasphere
Dancing with Coronaspheres: Expanded Breath Bodies and the Politics of Public Movement in the Age of Covid-19
This essay develops the concept of the ‘coronasphere’ to grapple with how breath shifts the perceptible extent of the body during a pandemic, and the implications of such a radically altered sense of proximity for the choreography of public movement. Coming into being through an act of perception that is entangled with responsibility to others, the coronasphere is offered as a sensory alternative to fixed-distance models of social distancing appr…
Visceral Data for Dance Histories: Katherine Dunham’s People, Places, and Pieces
Between 1947 and 1960, choreographer Katherine Dunham spent over 5,000 days in hundreds of cities on six continents. During that time, almost 200 dancers, drummers, and singers traveled with her, performing 166 repertory pieces. Dunham’s expansive work lends itself to digital approaches that illuminate the complex ways history is iterated across bodies, and how the specific questions raised by dance history underpin a visceral approach to the dig…
Digital Scholarship Roundtable: The State of the Field
Radical accounting as method: Interconnections across time, space, and bodies in Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s archives
This essay contributes to digital history by proposing ‘radical accounting’ as a method for gathering data from archives to support analysis of bodily practices at a scale that encompasses the transnational, intergenerational, and collective. Taking as our case study the Black-centered, multi-racial concert dance company Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater established in 1958, we manually curated data from over 30,000 print materials held by the A…
Art (11 works) · Dance (10 works) · Visual arts (10 works) · Diversity and Impact of Dance (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · History (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Art history (5 works) · Sociology (5 works)