My research specialism lies in theoretical and interdisciplinary explorations of choreographic politics. I am particularly interested in thinking at the intersection of materialist thought, critical race theory and indigenous studies for theorising the ways bodies move: from modernist and contemporary theatre choreographies, to disco dancefloors and forms of industrial protest.

My first book, Dancing on Violent Ground: Utopia as Dispossession in Euro-American Theatre Dance (Northwestern University Press, 2021), was awarded the 2022 David Bradby Monograph Prize (Theatre and Performance Research Association) and was shortlisted for the Dance Studies Association's de la Torre Bueno First Book Award.

In this book I argued that embodied forms of hope promised in ballet and progressive dance modernisms conceal and depend on spatial operations of imperial, colonial, and racial subjection. I unearth dance’s violent ground in the spatial and racial dispossession underpinning idealisms of canonical Euro-American theatre dances, including works by Marius Petipa, Martha Graham, George Balanchine, Rudolf von Laban, Oskar Schlemmer, Merce Cunningham and Boris Charmatz. Bringing these choreographies into dialogue with architecture, geometry, land legislation, urban regeneration, agriculture, domestic routine, racial segregation, and museology, the book ultimately advocates for a position of “critical negativity” in dance research, an analytical attitude attuned to how dance’s exuberant modeling of certain forms of life might provide cover for life-negating practices.

I am the receipient of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2026-2027) for my next book project Reparative Movements: Dancing Health in Twentieth-Century Britain:

This project explores dance as a health practice across contested spaces in the British isles and empire between 1914 and 1972, spaces including progressive schools, military hospitals, internment camps, agricultural plants, factory floors and picket lines. The project includes chapters on Joseph Pilates' WW1 internment on the Isle of Man; garden dances at Dartington Hall in the 1930s; and Rudolf Laban's movement efficiency training for mid-century British factory workers. Investigating dance in relation to therapeutic exercise, labour efficiency, military discipline and colonial population management, I show how movements for “good health” both animated and troubled reactionary, imperialist and fascist forces in British modern culture.

I am interested in collaborative research, as represented in DISCO! Music, Image, Dance, a volume I co-edited with Mimi Haddon and Michael Lawrence and published in 2025 by Oxford University Press; and my work with Royona Mitra (Brunel) and Simon Ellis (Coventry) on 'Contemporary Dance and Whiteness' (2019) a research project exploring racism and anti-racist action in British contemporary dance.

I have also published catalogue essays on the work of dance artists Michael Clark and Christopher Matthews, and collaborate as a researcher, writer and sometimes performer with dance artists J. Neve Harrington and Christopher Matthews.

Selected publications


Books:

Dancing on Violent Ground: Utopia as Dispossession in Euro-American Theatre Dance, (Performance Works series, Northwestern University Press, 2021).

DISCO! Music, Image, Dance, co-edited with Mimi Haddon and Michael Lawrence, (Oxford University Press, 2025).


Articles and chapters:

(Forthcoming) 'Somatics as Social Injury: Bodily Optimisation and Imperial Extraction in Rudolf Laban’s "Industrial Organism"', in The Routledge Companion to Bodies in Performance, ed. by Roberta Mock, Victor Ramirez Ladron de Guevara and Hershini Young, (London: Routledge). 

(2025) ‘Moving in Horror: in Dialogue with Seke Chimutengwende, Adrienne Ming, and Isaac Ouro-Gnao’, TDR: The Drama Review, Special Issue: ‘Performance, Possession and Automation’, ed. Rebecca Schneider, Dhanveer Singh Brar and Nicholas Ridout, Vol. 69, Issue 3 (September 2025).

(2025) 'Disco Pessimism' “a dance floor for everyone” at Tate Modern', in DISCO! Music, Image, Dance, ed. by Mimi Haddon, Michael Lawrence and Arabella Stanger, (New York: Oxford University Press,).

(2021) ‘Ballet Gone Wrong: Michael Clark’s Classical Deviations’ in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet, ed. by Jill Nunes Jensen and Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel, (New York: Oxford University Press).

(2020) ‘Dancing on Violent Ground: George Balanchine and Urban Depopulation’, in Decolonizing Dance Discourses, ed. Anurima Banerji and Royona Mitra, special issue of Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, Vol. XL. Dance Studies Association. https://dancestudiesassociation.org/publications/conversations-across-the-field-of-dance-studies/decolonizing-dance-discourses

(2020) ‘Soloist Love’ in Michael Clark, ed. Florence Ostende (London: Barbican and Prestel).

(2019) ‘Bodily Wreckage, Economic Salvage and the Middle Passage in Sondra Perry's Typhoon Coming On (2018)’, Performance Research, Vol. 24, No. 5, Staging the Wreckage, (July/August 2019).

(2018) ‘Choreographing Epic: Ocean as Epic Timespace in Homer, Joyce, and Cunningham’, in Epic Performances: From the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century, ed. Fiona Macintosh and Justine McConnell, (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

(2017) ‘Dramaturgy and Sabotage’, in The Practice of Dramaturgy: Working on Actions in Performance, ed. Konstantina Georgelou, Efrosini Protopapa, and Danae Therodoridou, (Amsterdam: Valiz).

(2016) ‘Heterotopia as Choreography: Foucault’s Sailing Vessel’, Performance Research, Vol. 21, No. 3, On Dialectics, (June).

(2014) ‘The Choreography of Space: Towards a Socio-Aesthetics of Dance’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 30, Issue 1, (February).

(2012) ‘Merce Cunningham's Ensemble Space and the Black Mountain Principle of Community’, The Journal of Black Mountain College Studies, Vol. 3, www.blackmountainstudiesjournal.org/wp/?page_id=899.

(2010) ‘Striking a Balance: The Apolline and Dionysiac in Contemporary Classical Choreography’, in The Ancient Dancer in The Modern World: Responses to Greek and Roman Dance, ed. Fiona Macintosh, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp.347–367.