Anthony Shay’s interview offers a rare insight into the lineage of Western theatre dance, the process of cross-cultural transmission of dance genres and the geographical displacement of embodied memories. Currently a Professor of Theatre and Dance at Pomona College, Shay is a former choreographer who has created more than 200 works with material coming from traditional dance genres, predominantly from the Balkan region, Middle East and Turkey. As he recounts to dance scholar Susanne Franco, he was first introduced to folk dances as a recreational activity during his college studies which took place at a period of intense cultural fascination with what constitutes folk dance and ethnic identity. During the cold war, the encounter as a spectator with the work of Russian choreographer and “dance diplomat” Igor Moiseyev changed the trajectory of his professional life and inspired him to create the AMAN International Music and Dance Company, a non-professional dance company that gained great visibility across the diasporic ethnic communities in the USA thanks to the voluntary commitment of the dancers and the choreographer. In this frame, he theoretically introduced the etho-identity dances, dance works with ethnic references that are created by a choreographer to be (re-)presented on stage. Ways of dance transmission and issues of authenticity and appropriation in the restaging process include the additional topics of this discussion that recounts the trajectory of an artist-scholar across a professional career of nearly 60 years.