By studying the transhistorical, transmedial, and transcultural relations of contemporary dance and dance in Greek and Greco-Roman antiquity, Michel Briand establishes a queer approach to classical culture and reception, discerning queer classics both in thematic and epistemological terms.

Just as Isadora Duncan and other revolutionary and nostalgic artists invented modern dance by re-contextualizing, re-creating, and queering ancient Greek dances, Briand argues that contemporary choreographers often invite their performers and spectators to imagine and re-enact both untimely and productive, or sensitive and critical, extensions and projections of what we envisage and conceptualize as classical thought, culture, and art.

Classical Antiquity and Contemporary Dance applies the notion of queerness to the dynamic and paradoxical relations of significant post-classical and contemporary choreographic creations with the classical aesthetics and anthropology of dance in antiquity they intend to create dialogue with. Investigating several facets of dance, from archaic and classical dancing in Greek antiquity, to the problematization of dance in called Medieval Renaissance-era Europe and the emergence and complex evolution of modern and contemporary dance, this book seeks to disrupt the rigid binaries imposed in contemporary dance studies and reveal how parts of our contemporaneous culture are classical--not in an academic sense, but in an emancipatory, oblique, and queer way,