This article interrogates the multivalent understandings of the term “contemporary dance” in concert, commercial, and world dance contexts. I argue that placing multiple uses of the term “contemporary” alongside one another can provide insight into the ways that “high art” dance, popular dance, and non-Western dance are increasingly wrapped up with each other and, at the same time, the ways that their separations reveal our artistic, cultural, and political prejudices, as well as the forces of the market.

Chapter 2 examines two duets in which cultural miscomprehension occurs alongside personal expressions of loss. It begins with a discussion of Flash, a duet between Rennie Harris, a popper, and Michael Sakamoto, a butoh artist. Flash is compared to Simulacrum, a duet between an Argentinian contemporary dancer who also studies kabuki and a Japanese dancer famous for flamenco. Analyzing both works’ multimodal incorporation of dancing and talking, this chapter demonstrates how the grief the artists disclose to each other and the conjunctions and disjunctions they find in the different forms of danced mourning they practice result in a moving expression of cross-cultural empathy, an impetus toward understanding in the face of the incommensurability of tragedy.

In 2004, Singaporean presenter Tang Fu Kuen commissioned French avant-garde choreographer Jérôme Bel to create a work in collaboration with classical Thai dancer-choreographer Pichet Klunchun. The resulting piece is unlike most intercultural collaborations. In the world of concert dance, East–West interculturalism takes place in a variety of ways: in costuming or set design, in theme or subject matter, in choreographic structure, in stylings of the body, in energetic impetus, in spatial composition, in philosophical attitude toward art making. Bel's work, titled Pichet Klunchun and Myself, does not combine aesthetics in any of these ways. In fact, the piece may more accurately be described not as a dance but as two verbal interviews (first by Bel of Klunchun and then vice versa) performed for an audience and separated by an intermission. There is no actual intermingling of forms—Thai classical dance with European contemporary choreography—in this performance. The intercultural “choreography” here comprises a staged conversation between the artists and some isolated physical demonstrations by each.

The Chop Suey Circuit describes Asian American cabaret performers who toured the US from the 1930s through the '50s. Performing the era's popular songs and dances, these “Orientals” were novel yet familiar, exotic yet accessible. At a time of war, internment, and segregation they simultaneously solidified and challenged racial cartographies that would emplace race.

This first chapter of Love Dances explores the ethics and politics of intercultural dance via a piece that draws on the modality of speech over that of movement. The chapter sets the stage for the other works examined in the book, all of which combine talking and dancing. It also places Pichet Klunchun and Myself within a longer history of intercultural dance and theater, reminding readers of the continuing context of Orientalism. As a duet between a white, European, heterosexual, cis-male, avant-garde choreographer and a Thai, heterosexual, cis-male, khon dancer, the work reproduces some of the more hackneyed patterns of Orientalist encounter, in contrast to the more complex not-exactly-East-not-exactly-West collaborations studied later in the book. As such, the piece provides a backdrop against which the other pieces may be understood. Finally, this chapter notes the ways that the cross-cultural and the aesthetic dynamics of this particular partnership tell us something about the pitfalls of intercultural collaboration, as well as the pedagogical potentials.