In much of the Western world, professional dance is categorized as an art practice and therefore its value for society has been described as primarily aesthetic. In light of this, how do we explain the exponential rise of artistic research laboratories and experiments, initiated by dancers over the past decade? To make sense of this phenomenon, this dissertation proposes to take dancers serious as researchers, understanding how dancers practice research and how modalities of contemporary dance function as research communities. To conceptualize dance as research practice, the dissertation makes four moves. First, I trace the historical emergence of dance as a research practice in the interdisciplinary reform milieux of the early 20th century. Drawing on primary and secondary sources, I show how dance was understood as a science proper which aimed to alleviate ills of modernity. At the time, artists and scientists worked in close collaboration on the question of intentional movement as a life-shaping and life-changing practice. Second, I provide two case studies based on participant observation, apprenticeship and interviews conducted with professional dancers who dance to research and experiment. The first case study follows the dance researchers of the Institute for the Study of Somatic Communication as they study attention as a tactile phenomenon. The second case study provides insight into the research practice of dancers of the Axis Syllabus, who explore dynamic anatomy. I discuss the dance researcher’s practice and findings in comparison to social and natural scientific theories of attention and anatomy, showing how their insights complement and enrich previous research. What differentiates the dance researcher’s inquiry from ‘conventional’ science and scholarship is, that dance researchers' main epistemic outputs are changed and innovated perceptual and kinetic techniques rather than conceptual propositions, taking shape in articles or books. Thus, if a cosmology consists as much of a perceptual-kinetic as of a conceptual scheme, this dissertation analyzes how dancers research, experiment and intervene on dynamic perceptual and kinetic schema. Intentionally researching and changing one’s own and other’s perception and movement techniques illustrates a process-oriented approach to how social structures are enacted and transformed through bodily processes of adaptation, habituation, and inscription. Third, and emerging from the historical and ethnographic research, I propose an extended redefinition of Marcel Mauss’ foundational concept of body techniques. I call them bodymind techniques, signaling the integrative functioning of mind and body. Complementing and enriching previous theories of bodymind entrainment, which describe the latter as predominantly automatic, habitual or unconscious, I suggest that bodymind techniques can be conscious, intentional, relational, and creative. I conceptualize bodymind techniques as tools for critical thought and agency—as locations for attending to, questioning, and altering conventional or ideological entrainment of mind and body. As an analytical category, bodymind technique offers anthropological grip on how language, culture and sociality grow out of skillful bodymind dispositions. Finally, I discuss the political potential of bodymind reform and adaptation. Because patterns of perceiving and moving are learned, they provide a field for intervention. Dancers who dance to research want nothing less than to reimagine how we perceive and move and, consequently, who we are and how we can act in the world. When subjectivity emerges in bodymind techniques of perception and movement, it is in technique that who one is and what one does may not only be adapted but may be manipulated. So, what is involved in a social theory of adaptive bodyminds?