In this article, I examine the role that Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova played in Mexico's attempts to produce an embodied mestizo modernity that resonated with efforts to construct a post-revolutionary modern nation. After the revolution of 1910, cultural modernization consisted in the integration of Mexico's histories of indigenous civilizations and European influences in the production of expressive cultures intended to be local in character but universal in their appeal. I argue that Pavlova's performances from her Europeanized ballet repertoire as well as her balleticized rendition of Mexican folk dances helped to create a social space in which Mexican elites could reaffirm their affinity with international cosmopolitan classes while also attempting to retain a sense of Mexican distinctiveness. I contextualize my analysis by attending to racial and class formations implicated in the production of Mexico as a modern nation within the context of colonialist legacies informing notions of Western cultural modernity.

This article analyzes ways in which dance as labor and artist as a specific subjectivity relate to the material conditions of their production within contexts shaped by neoliberal notions of freedom, ideologies of liberal democracy, and the logic of global capitalism. The discussion focuses on contemporary dance practices that embody some of these values by striving to be more egalitarian, thus giving performers more agency in how they participate in creative processes that lead to a collectively created performance work. This analysis emphasizes the tension between these collaborative practices and modes of producing and distributing financial and symbolic, as well as cultural forms of capital in ways that resist and/or reproduce exploitative aspects of capitalism. Examining some works by Yvonne Rainer, Xavier Le Roy, and Tino Sehgal enables the theorization of the entrepreneurial artistic archive as well as practices of crediting creative labor in relation to notions of capital, ownership, collaboration, and consequently who dance-art makers and performers become as politically progressive artists.

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