This panel examines the contributions of Asian American labor to “contemporary” dance and dance studies, problematizing the dominantly narrow theorization of the “contemporary” within these fields. The “contemporary” in dance is temporally and aesthetically significant: it indicates historical current-ness and aesthetic experimentation, concepts fraught with the racialized, colonial logics underpinning artistic innovation and modernity. Asian American dance scholars have argued that mainstream understandings of “contemporary dance” often reference white, Euro-American choreographers exclusively, positioned in opposition to racialized, global artists whose dances represent “tradition” (Chatterjea 2013; Kwan 2017). Our panel elaborates on this scholarship by exploring how discussions of “contemporary dance” also require attention to their contemporary contexts — that is, we insist that our studies must be responsive to social-political urgencies of our contemporary moment in the 2020s. In this panel, we locate these urgencies in the connection between Asian American dance, critical refugee studies, casteism, anti-Blackness, and Indigeneity, aiming to not only complicate dominant (white) theorizations of Asian American dancers as un-contemporary but to argue that analyses of interrelated oppressions are crucial to this scholarship. We also emphasize dance practices and perspectives that are marginalized in normative imaginings of contemporary dance, exploring Asian American hip hop dancers; Hmong dance; and analyses of South Asian dance from anti-racist, anti-caste, and regionalist approaches. In doing so, we assert the significance of dance disciplinary methods to Asian American studies broadly: the movement of the body expresses crucial knowledge, perhaps producing alternative paradigms for Asian American scholarship and prompting the “arrival” of contemporary solidarities.