Introduction

Chapter 1 introduces the field of Contemporary Dance and works through the different ways this category is understood. Establishing a focus on contemporary concert dance, characterized by global desire to belong to it, this chapter articulates some of the primary concepts that determine the analytical framework for this book: how innovation is determined, how artistic chronologies are entangled with aspirations for “newness,” and how time-worn strategies of “inclusion” result in failures to reckon with difference at the heart of global contemporary choreography. It articulates in detail the construction of the South-South axis, along which the choreographic readings are located, and its generation of the central trope of this book, Heat.