In this paper I intend to show how Israeli early dance was influenced by German Freitanz or Ausdruckstanz and how the intellectual and spiritual background of the period, both in Germany and in Palestine or Eretz-Israel, led to the wondrous establishment of Israeli dance, whether theatrical, social, or folk dance.

This paper concerns the migration of American modern dance to Britain throughout the 1960s and 1970s when Martha Graham's technique and repertory were introduced to British dancers and audiences. The author addresses these issues from a historical and phenomenological point of view using her memories and reflections, the data from the research she has conducted into this milestone in British dance history, and the theories of Pierre Bourdieu.

This essay navigates the dance history and aesthetics of New York–based Filipina-American dance artist Kristin Jackson, who bravely produced herself as an independent dance-maker. It highlights the independent and alternative dance practice of Jackson in the context of her multicultural identity and Filipino diaspora in America. As Jackson straddles both the Philippines and America, we witness in this narrative several issues mobilized around her dance and dance-making.

Together, “authenticity” and “tradition” are embedded in cultural expressions at particular historical moments, and both are inherently fluid as they shift and bend over time. This paper examines these intersections, shifts, and bends by exploring a number of current theoretical approaches to the topics of authenticity and tradition. The author places them first in context with her own fieldwork and then moves on to an underpinning of the three subsequent papers that comprise this panel.

This paper examines the performance of religion in British Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu communities using ethnographic research to investigate the use of classical dance and trance, or embodied dance, as performative practice. Contemporary U.K. evidence of Tamil Saivite worship shows an affiliation of dance and ritual being articulated and reinvented through the classical dance form of Bharatanatyam and through its transmission in the temple environment in an increasing display of embodied diasporic Hinduism.

The changing economic and artistic milieu of Western professional entertainment from 1890 to 1930 provided a liminal space for performances of “Eastern dance” by women of both Middle Eastern and non–Middle Eastern descent. In denning their performance personas and in articulating their hybrid dance techniques and presentations, these artists engaged in a fluid process that reflects the ever-changing reinscription of the relationship between the consumers of the West and the East they envision. This paper explores the nuances of this complex interaction through the careers and performance experiences of both Eastern and Western dancers.

The May 1936 National Dance Congress and Festival, held at the 92nd Street Y, was organized by more than twenty representatives from various parts of the dance community and attracted fourteen hundred people, with two hundred performing in evening concerts. I explore the political concerns that underpinned the congress and investigate the programming as it reveals a sense of the period's modernism and within an understanding of contemporary immigration and ideas about diversity.

In the paper the choreographer Rudolf Laban plays a decisive role. More precisely, the paper's focus is on the journey he undertook through the United States in 1926. The title, “America is the Future,” is a citation from Labans dance travelogues. Exploring the questions this sentiment raises lies at the heart of the study.

Rina Nikova, a Jewish dancer, ballet master, and choreographer, was born in Russia around 1898 and died in Israel in 1974. Nikova established her Yemenite Singing Ballet in 1932. She trained her dancers—young Jewish emigrates from Yemen—with classical ballet technique augmented with various local and migrating influences. She gathered firsthand information on folk dances, music, and costumes by visiting Arab towns and villages and communities of Oriental Jews. Nikova combined those influences into an original creation that was to become a cornerstone of nation-building in Israel.

This paper will look at how early Norwegian fri dans (“free dance”) was constructed and discuss how Norwegian theater dance, and especially the fri dans was developed through what we can call cross-cultural “dance migrations” between 1910 and 1950. The paper also looks at how elements from Norwegian traditional folkdance blended into the contemporary dance styles and created a special form of fri dans especially evident in the works of the Norwegian choreographer Gerd Kjølaas.

Peter Meilaender reminds us that a CEO relocating to a foreign country to head up an international branch is as much an immigrant as is an impoverished refuge. This paper situates Hanya Holm within structural and personal paradigms of migration theory to examine her first year in the United States, when she faced the prospect of financial ruin in the host country and a threat to loyalties and interdependencies in the sending country.

This paper explores body pedagogy, particularly related to how we teach dance technique in the United States. It addresses the paradigmatic positions underlying dance education and how somatics plays a role in how educators teach dance. Although somatics is viewed as a positive addition to a pedagogical repertoire, the author questions viewing it as a universal panacea for all the world's ills and points to larger sociopolitical factors concerning power dynamics and institutional power (that is, higher education dance).

This paper explores memory and surrogation in the geographic and historical revisions/reinventions created within the practice of capoeira angola in Brazil. Employing Joseph Roach's discussion of circum-Atlantic memory, the author analyzes how angoleiros/as, the practitioners of capoeira angola, look back to Africa for an origin, while at the same time carving out an empowered space in Brazil through movement and song, ritual and play. Using Diana Taylor's concepts of archive and repertoire, the paper examines how angoleiros/as reject the Brazilian archive and claim agency by becoming the protagonists of history through the music and movement of capoeira. The author examine the word “vagrancy” (vadiagem) in the context of capoeira angola and relate it to Saidiya Hartman's discussion of postemancipation vagrancy laws and “indebted servitude,” proposing that vadiagem, re-appropriated by angoleiros/as to refer to the practice of capoeira, becomes symbolic of capoeira's subversion: it both remembers a past of persecution and challenges the capitalist hegemony by underscoring capoeira's nonproductivity.

William Forsythe has remarked that the forms of ballet exist as a body of ideas. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus that the body without organs is not an enemy organism but rather is another organization of the organs. The paper goes on to discuss isometry, transfer of energy, and anatomical migration and the concept of migration as a metaphor in the context of various historical discourses about the body.

Gertrud Kraus, Jewish expressionist modern dancer, directed a company and school both in interwar Vienna and in Tel Aviv after she fled the Nazis in 1935. This paper examines her work as both a Diaspora and Israeli dance artist and her influence on the identities of different dancers who in turn affected American audiences, students, and dancers. Some of the Kraus dancers who emigrated to America from Vienna before and during World War II included Jan Veen, Fred Berk, Katya Delakova, and Claudia Vall; from Israel they included Ze'eva Cohen and Zvi Gotheiner, whose latest work, Gertrud premiered in 2007 in New York.

This paper explores the field of choreographic transfers between Europe and America at the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on the tremendous dynamism of social dance practice in Interwar France (1919–1939), it examines the context of this new type of migration, from North and South America to Europe. It also studies how the assimilation of social dances from the “New World” in the French dancing repertoire profoundly transformed body practices of the French society.

This paper presents a description of the work of José Limón with American Indian students at Flandreau Indian School in 1970. This historic event grew out of the collaboration of Juilliard's Martha Hill with Mrs. Stewart (Lee) Udall and her organization the Center for Arts of Indian America, which was dedicated to enabling native youth to enter the fields of dance and theater.

Doris Humphrey applied her principle of Fall and Recovery not only to the movements she choreographed but also to the architecture of her dances. José Limón, who learned about choreography from her teaching and example, adapted her ideas to his own compositions.

The most recent generational shift in the culture of Yorùbá Bàtá performance has provoked frustration in older artists who are worried that their tradition is dying. The generation of artists in its twenties fuses traditional bàtá, with popular musical genres, creating a fusion style I call “pop tradition.” “Pop” signifies the young artists' desires to identify with a pan-Yorùbá and global culture, fueling a particular worldly performance style rooted in both tradition and modernity.