“Choreo-roboticists (that is, roboticists who work choreographically) believe that incorporating dancerly gestures into machinic behaviors will make robots seem less like industrial contrivances, and instead more alive, more empathetic, and more attentive. Such an interdisciplinary intervention could make robots easier to be around and work with—no small feat given their proliferation in consumer, medical, and military contexts.”

“Shawn could be a paternalistic egoist, but he was a paternalistic egoist responsible for the launching of hundreds of dancerly careers, and catalyzed a near-century of institutional sustenance for work of men and women across color and cultural lines. This ambivalence can be read simultaneously with generosity and criticality, and arguably serves as an inflection point in a history of cultural gatekeeping and toxic masculinity as old as the western dance tradition.”

“It sounded like choreography to me. Whether it’s people existing under surveillance capitalism, within a national security apparatus or performing in a dance show, we’re ultimately talking about the observation, interpretation and meaning-making of bodies in motion. It’s just that these four components (observation, interpretation, meaning-making, bodies in motion) used to be done exclusively by humans. Now, they are all increasingly accomplished by machines.”

“Louis Horst, longtime collaborator of Ted Shawn and author of the classic book on dance composition, Preclassic Dance Forms, wrote that “Its contemporaneousness with the tempo of our time is the gauge by which we measure the dance.” For Horst, a vital metric of any performance’s success was the extent to which it resonated with the energies of its lived moment. The more “contemporary” a dance, the more thoroughly of its time it appeared, and the more engaging it might be for its audience. In the context of the long arc of dance history, however, Horst’s tenet brings us to something of a paradox: the more timely a piece of art, the more obviously dated it becomes. With dances, as with vocal cadences and haircuts, contemporaneousness comes at the cost of having to explain oneself to future generations.”