BODIES BORROWED, INDIGENOUS CULTURES CONSUMED: THE EXTRACTIVE AESTHETIC OF AMERICAN MODERN DANCE

Abstract

This thesis argues that American modern dance is fundamentally built on extractive aesthetics, a settler colonial logic through which choreographers appropriated, reassembled, and claimed Indigenous cultural materials as the basis of a new “American” dance form. Through archival analysis and theoretical frameworks such as Frankenindianism, the project demonstrates how pioneering dance figures, like Ted Shawn, constructed choreographic identities by dismembering Indigenous movement, ceremony, and epistemologies, then stitching these fragments into stylized representations that circulated as what was perceived as authentic, original, and artistically innovative. These practices were not incidental but structural, forming the aesthetic and pedagogical foundations that continue to shape modern dance training, repertory, and institutional authority today. By tracing how these extractive methods became codified as tradition within modern dance, this thesis reveals how the field continues to reproduce colonial narratives under the guise of homage, influence, or artistic inheritance. Ultimately, this project contends that modern dance cannot be separated from the colonial frameworks that produced it, and that confronting these foundations is essential for dismantling the ongoing harms embedded in the field’s practices and pedagogies.