Body Impossible theorizes virtuosity in contemporary dance through a study of the career of Desmond Richardson, who performed with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, Ballett Frankfurt, Michael Jackson, and Prince, and co-founded Complexions Contemporary Ballet with choreographer Dwight Rhoden, inaugurating a virtuosic queer black dance aesthetic. Osterweis suggests that discourses of virtuosity are linked to connotations of excess, and analyzes formal and sociocultural aspects of virtuosity to reveal underground and popular culture's effects on concert dance. Focusing on the decades approaching the millennium (shaped by Reaganism, the Culture Wars, the AIDS epidemic, the New Jim Crow, and MTV), Body Impossible accounts for the constitutive relationship between disciplined perceptions of virtuosity's excess and the disciplining of racialized bodies in national and transnational contexts.