Rulan Tangen: Entangling Memory, Relationality, and Repetition to Heat up Contemporary Indigenous Dance

Chapter 7 considers the multi-modal work of choreographer Rulan Tangen to Indigenize contemporary dance. It refers to her work with memory, cultural narratives, and structured improvisation to call in an inter-tribal community of dancers to participate in her contemporary choreography powered by dream-visions, history, Indigenous ways of being and knowing, and a politics of relationality. This chapter proposes that the steady, patient building of heat in Tangen’s work also decolonizes the broader field of contemporary dance as she centralizes strategies of re-storying, Land Dances, pluriversal technique, platiality, practices of repetition, and imaginations of whole futures in dance. Ultimately, the argument positions Tangen as a central figure in the processes of reimagining contemporary dance through the lens of global Indigeneities, connecting to the heated core of the earth through her dance.