Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder. By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself. A symptom that precisely turns 'we' into a problem, perhaps makes it impossible, the foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities.-Julia Kristeva 1 When we put together the call for papers for this journal issue, inspired by prompts from Marisa Zanotti, we were thinking simply of what goes on beyond the frame. As Charles Atlas remarked in an interview, "I wanted to explore things that related to my life; less about the studio, more about what's outside the studio."2 We were thinking of such questions as: What are the networks and support structures that enable each of us to do our work? What communities do we draw from creatively and intellectually? Who are audiences and interlocutors for our work? We were not explicitly thinking of global politics, and yet, a theme such as community invites us to reflect more broadly on the boundaries of the communities to which we belong or with which we identify, the stakes inherent in those identifications, and the mutual responsibility that attends investments in a community and its identity.In the past weeks and months leading up to this journal issue, the 'international community' has expressed concern over Greece's financial well-being, Russia's operations in the Ukraine, Ebola outbreaks in West Africa, #blacklivesmatter protests throughout the United States, the drowning deaths of 900 souls trying to reach Europe from Libya, and thousands dead in Nepal after a devastating earthquake. Each of these scenes of chaos, vulnerability, catastrophe, and pain asks us to consider: what is community, and how far does it extend? What is the 'we' implicit in community as both its promise (premise) and its impossibility? How far can intention toward community reach before fellow-feeling transforms into xenophobia, or before the support we lendThe International Journal of Screendance 5 (2015).

Her research sits at the intersections of dance, media, and performance studies, with a recent turn toward leveraging digital tools for scholarly inquiry. Her writing has appeared in numerous edited collections, as well as in The International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Participations, Performance Matters, among others. Upcoming projects include a forthcoming book tentatively titled Dance as Common: Movement as Belonging in Digital Cultures, as well as Mapping Touring, a digital humanities and database project focused on the performance engagements of early twentieth-century dance companies.

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 digital humanities.

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 empirically, Dunham is not exaggerating when she describes the amount of work it took for her and her dancers to keep going without the benefit of public funding or an enduring private patron. This essay is part of a larger critical mixed methods project on historical dance touring and transmission: Dunham's Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry. We turn here to the scale of the “everyday,” beginning by building a daily itinerary of Dunham's travels so as to understand better the global method necessary for her company's survival, and how the ongoing pursuit of solvency propelled her, her performers, and her work into the world.

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