Clarity vs. flourish. Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s account of an Africanist aesthetic names high-affect juxtaposition, polycentrism, and ephebism (youthful, playful attack) as organizing principles in their own right — not deviations from clean line but a different definition of precision. “Eliminating unnecessary flourish” is a defensible technical goal; it’s also a value judgment about which embellishments count as necessary. Worth naming to students explicitly, rather than absorbing silently.

Non-narrative as a raced position. The claim that movement “is expressive of and by itself,” with no story attached, has often been read by scholars of Black performance as itself a stance — abstraction and the “unmarked” body are historically available to some dancers more easily than others. Thomas DeFrantz asks what happens when the dancing body is never allowed to simply “be itself” because it is always already read as meaning something.

Risk, reframed. Danielle Goldman’s history of improvisation puts Cunningham/Cage-lineage chance procedures beside Black social-dance improvisation and shows the stakes are not the same: one tradition experiments with unpredictability from a position of relative safety; the other developed readiness as a practice of survival under real constraint. Both are real forms of risk — but naming the difference matters when you teach “risk-taking” as a universal category.