The music and dance of African Diasporan artists has impacted current dance practice in Britain, and their legacies are testament to the global circulation of artistic ideas. This paper discusses the British Dance and the African Diaspora research project which seeks to write Black British dance artists and their legacies back into history. It aims to understand the nexus of aesthetic, institutional, and conceptual problems that have rendered these dancers invisible.

Since the 1970s, a number of black British-based dancers has been teaching and producing performance work in a variety of dance styles. It was influenced by the context of anti-colonialism and the struggle for independence, which has been the motivation for the post-war generation of Caribbean and Asian artists who migrated to Britain. These historical and cultural contexts form the basis for our argument for new approaches to frameworks for analysis of the work of black British dance artists.

This paper suggests that social dance, specifically cotillion, teaches students to internalize and reflect ideas relevant to constructions of class. An examination of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cotillion dance (also referred to as private balls, public balls, assemblies, and dance halls) shows a physical manifestation of class that can still be seen in the modern day dance world. This paper examines social dance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I use historical references, specifically Elizabeth Aldrich's From the Ballroom to Hell: Grace and Folly in Nineteenth-Century Dance, Linda Tomko's Dancing Class, Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, and the Library of Congress Web site to foreground this idea before turning to some modern day case studies. Employing historical as well as interview-based methodologies, the paper combines interviews from present day cotillion directors with my own experiences in the cotillion and professional ballet communities. The paper concludes that social dance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sets up a tradition still carried forth today—one that is more about classed aspirations and courtship and less about dance technique or physical ability.

This paper discusses a graduate thesis project aimed to serve underprivileged teenage girls residing in a foster care facility through engagement in a collaborative dance-making process with students from a university dance department. While the project focused upon the choreography of trained and untrained bodies as a vehicle for service, it also considers the choreography of the foster care system (involving a continual negotiation of personal, relational, and environmental tensions) and the choreography of community engagement (including communication, planning, relationship-building, inclusion, reflection, and termination).

Additionally, the presentation examines links between embodiment and empowerment, analyzing how the trained and untrained dancers experienced a process of realization of self and others through the development of a corporeal work. The trained and untrained dancers in this project identified sources of personal disempowerment and objectification while also recognizing commonalities. Within the context of this project, participants formed connections between their unique histories and their bodies, asserting subjective agency and ownership as they revisited and shaped memories through embodied expression. The challenging transition from the choreographic to performative phase of this project is also discussed, in conjunction with a consideration of ways to ensure that the choreography of performance leads to empowerment rather than exploitation.

Over the past decade, so-called African dance has become increasingly popular in Italy, growing in tandem with local West African diasporic communities and the national concern over immigration. Although the circulation of African dance provides West African migrants with an important form of self-identification and subsistence, it often revolves around problematic discourses rooted on the myth and romance with the primitive. Constructing and capitalizing on the fetishization of black bodies, African dance mobilizes complex economies of desire that rest on an orientalist fascination with the Other. While these economies reify racist stereotypes, they also enable significant communities of knowledge and interracial encounters.

How does the representation of bodies change in times of war? How can dance be political activism? This paper considers the dances of Hijikata Tatsumi and Mary Wigman in relation to their experiences of war, and explores their use/representation of the body as a political statement. In both cases, these artists sought to use dance to rescue the body from its subjugated social standing.

Mary Wigman's dance technique is influenced by German korperkultur, and had its birth in her work with Rudolph Laban and at the natural paradise of Hellerau. Wigman admired Nietzsche's desire to rescue the body from “despisers of the body,” who saw the physical body as an obstacle that must be denied in order for the soul to reach salvation. For Wigman, the “sensuous dancing body” that Nietzsche referred to in Zarathustra “became the vehicle to an authentic life.”

Hijikata's idea of dancers as “lethal weapons that dream” offered a view of bodies that were aware of personal agency and chose to step outside of usefulness for the elusive “advancement” of society. He explains, “in this sense my dance, based on human self-activation … can naturally be a protest against the ‘alienation of labor’ in capitalist society.” Douglass Slaymaker's writing on post-war Japanese literature frames Hijikata's sentiment in the time: images of body as nikutai [flesh] were considered counterhegemonic because they defied the notion that the individual body belonged to the national body. Hijikata redirected the body's sacrifice away from productivity and toward the creation of art.

Traversing through disparate cultural and geographic frontiers, my paper maps the journey of a Bengali dancer, Manjusri Chaki-Sircar, who travels from India to America via Africa before putting her “roots” finally down in India, exploring the migration of body movements across the world. Spelling a new body politics, her dance inscribes the signature of her-self in moving space(s); weaving varied patterns of life experiences; telling tales of displacements, exodus, and resettlements; and fashioning a glocal perspective of movement in a “global political moment.”

Situating Manjusri within a counter-centric discourse, my paper underscores the counter-hegemonic agency of her feminist choreographies that opened up “an other” genre of bodily idiom, turning the flattering feminine performance into a site for cultural politics. From the dynamic landscape of post-partitioned Bengal, I will trace how the idiom evolved, migrated, and altered, changing, by the end of the century, the face of Indian contemporary dance.

The globalization of tap dance carries the possibility of hybridization as well as homogenization of the dance form. The transmission of tap dance to England during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries enabled individuals to learn repertoire for syllabus examinations and theatrical productions. In 2006, the implementation of the tap jam, an informal event featuring improvised tap dance and live music, introduced the concept of spontaneous musical and movement composition. The tap jams represent shifting cultural processes in global performances of tap dance. This paper will examine the application of global perspectives in how tap dance is performed and practiced in other countries. My discussion will draw from an ethnographic investigation of two tap dance communities located in Manchester and London, England. Utilizing examples from my fieldwork, I demonstrate how the tap jams in England act as a site for constructing individual performance identity, highlighting a move away from homogenized tap performance.

This roundtable reflects on the processes of de-centering from multiple lenses and temporal placements inside the research and creative process. It is based on a collaborative, intermedia, and multitemporal contemporary performance/art installation informed by long-term ethnographic research of dance and ritual in Ghana and Cuba. Roundtable participants will excavate the process of conducting the research and creating the installation that continues to exhibit internationally at venues ranging from art galleries and libraries to rural research field sites. The installation offers a matrix of layered artistic exploration grounded in ethnographic inquiry that does not sit squarely inside a singular discipline. Inherently transdisciplinary, with multiple entanglements and porous boundaries, it offers “interpretive frictions” at the borders of ethnography, performance, material culture, research-based choreography, and embodiment of lived experience.

In this paper, the current practices and discourses surrounding the Alevi semah are analysed in a peculiar reflexive and embodied manner. The semah is comprehended here as a “dynamic structured body system,” which is differently recognized as ibadet (devotional practice), dans (dance), or meditasyon (meditation), and whose practice is alleged to support ideals of inter-religious peace and gender equity. Its analysis resorts to data collected during an intensive fieldwork that was carried out between 2008 and 2011 by following the experimental theater piece with the title Samah—Kardeşlik Töreni (Samah—the Ritual of Brotherhood) of the Ankara Deneme Sahnesi amateur group based in Ankara (Turkey). This play is the result of a re-elaboration of ethnographic data that were collected throughout the Anatolian peninsula since the early 1980s by a team of students and researchers affiliated with the Theatre Department of Ankara University. In this process of re-adaptation for the stage, the semah was singled out of its religious source (the Ayin-i Cem ritual) for which it started to display a mirror image offering a condensed exposition of the Alevi rituals to an audience. This paper contextualizes these formal adaptations on the stage into the frame of the abrupt history of migration and urbanization in late twentieth century Turkey. Such historical processes played a major role in the current circulation of the semah in Turkey as well as abroad, resulting also in its perspective inscription as world intangible heritage.

This is a presentation of the principles of somatic-performative research with application to the audience's research. The proposal has been developed over ten years of artistic-scientific research at the Graduate Program of Performing Arts of Federal University of Bahia, Salvador BA, Brazil. The approach associates Somatic Education and Performance in dance research, especially regarding inner impulse in relation to the environment and collective awareness in a micro-macro political attitude.

While quantitative and qualitative research deals with practice as an object of study, in performative research, practice is in itself a research method (Haseman 2006). Somatic-performative research is defined and organized by the somatic practice (“experienced body”), transforming the ephemeral nature of dance into the research's modus operandi. From the starting point of inter-artistic moving principles with/in the environment, the object of study becomes a creative, live, and relational subject. Therefore, studies and methods become contaminated by the subject's dynamic nature, melting any prejudice or a priori settings. In an unpredictable, autonomous, yet integrated, pulsing that destabilizes borders, discourses, and manners, dance becomes a spread-out medium of studies (rather than something to be studied).

As an integrated “soma,” dance research constantly dis-re-organizes “the way we form things,” subverting power relationships and discourses over art and the body. Somatic-performative exploration dilutes the separation and conflict between practice and theory, body and mind, art and science, dynamic multidimensional movement and fixed linear record, human and environment, place and non-place, matter and energy. In a connecting quantum spacetime, “being” is permanently perceived and reinvented as trans-cellular intelligence in movement or creative somatic wisdom in a “culture of becoming” with/in a “deep ecology.”

Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, outlines a historical shift from punishment as public spectacle to punishment as “the most hidden part of the penal process.” Examining the resultant changes, he recognizes the quieter, psychological control and bodily supervision that have replaced public torture in our system.

I observe this control of incarcerated individuals and then correlate it with terms that Danielle Goldman uses to describe dance improvisation: continued confrontation with constraint(s). She advocates that the practice of freedom, through improvisation, is a “mode of making oneself ready for a range of ... situations,” and so is politically and socially powerful.

Citing multiple prison arts programs, I conclude that embodied improvisation both theoretically and practically addresses forces of oppression and confinement within the prison system by offering moments of creative self-direction and non-hierarchal interaction. I render this unique application an ideal artistic and actionable response to the framework of captivity.

Old Spanish Days Fiesta, an annual five-day event held in Santa Barbara, California, since 1924, “… provides an education to residents and visitors about the history, customs, and traditions of the American Indian, Spanish, Mexican, and early American settlers that comprise the rich cultural heritage of Santa Barbara” (http://www.sbfiesta.org). Dance plays a central role, with flamenco in the spotlight as the prime corporeal practice, constructing Spanishness through romanticized and revisionist historiography, and validating European colonization, migration, and diaspora. Although Mexican ballet folklórico is also featured, given the socio-political context in relation to people of Mexican heritage (recent and long-term) in Santa Barbara, I argue that deliberately privileging flamenco as the principal dance perpetuates problematic divisions, validating Europe and simultaneously undermining a Mexican presence.

The paper examines the Swedish polska as a special case of movementscape in Finnish folk dance. The research is based on ethnographic fieldwork among Finnish folk dancers in 2013. Since the 1970s, the polska has been popular in Swedish folk dance, and this versatile dance form can be seen as emblematic to Swedish folk dance culture. During the last 30 years, Finnish folk dance groups have also eagerly adopted it: not only the dance itself, but a whole new style and embodiment of dancing with improvisation as an important element. Although there have been vernacular polska forms in Finland, as well, and folk dancers have danced them for decades, they have not been able to reach any higher status. Although Finnish folk dancers have adopted dances from other Nordic countries since the early twentieth century, the popularity of Swedish polska exceeds that of any earlier Nordic innovations in Finland.

Recent performances of meke, a “traditional” Fijian song-dance genre, in Canada indicate a renegotiation of identity among Fijians in diasporic communities. However, due to religious and political anxieties involving Fiji's colonial history, not all Fijians in Canada will participate in meke. To explore this, I draw from archival research and fieldwork conducted in Western Canada and Viti Levu, Fiji (2011–2012). Additionally, I take inspiration from the anthropological theory of affect, whereby the body has the ability to be affected (to feel/sense) and to affect others (causing others to feel/sense). I argue that experiences and expressions of powerful feeling states in and surrounding meke performance are important in terms of renegotiating Fiji's past colonial and present post-independence realities while negotiating new connections and relations in multicultural Canada.

occupation is a screendance that explores a state of “uprootedness” in the context of the events of the Iraq War and the World Financial Crisis. The film utilizes the metaphor of a historic building and its astonishing relationship to its foundation to illustrate the second wave of erosion of American democracy after 9/11. The film features three movers: two dancers and one building. In 2009, this five million-pound building underwent an engineering feat when it was raised eleven feet off its foundation and moved in one fell swoop. Interleaved footage of the dancers and the building in motion illustrates their correlation—a mounting tension that speaks to democracy in the U.S. being shaken, uprooted, and redefined underneath people's feet. Dizzying changes silence oppositional voices occupying public spaces. Pursuing everyday occupations equals prevailing war in the name of democratic values. But do we still live in a democracy?

Cultural policies, understood as acts of intervention, not only from the State, but also from social groups and institutions, trigger devices that highlight the complexity of the cultural system and power relationships. These acts, developed in a participatory manner, can contribute to the global re-politicization of collective life.

Regarding Brazil, we can assert the search for common spaces has grown in importance under president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's administration (2003–2010), when cultural policies suffered a significant change with the implementation of an inclusive and participatory model. This led to sectorial policies and the creation of public spaces for the representation of civil society. The field of dance took an active role in this process through its associations and regional forums, leading to the creation of a Dance Sectorial Collegiate and a Dance Federal Plan.

Despite some progress that has been made, cultural policies in Brazil are still under the strong influence of a neoliberal approach, which centers its efforts in economic development with a focus on public funding to culture and the creation of funding laws. A participative construction of public policy for dance would be based on agreements between civil society and government, going beyond the financing of arts through grants. The area of dance in Brazil needs structuring programs and actions that would collaborate with the organizational and productive modes of people and groups that are working to develop the area. Thus, this paper discusses cultural policies of dance by pointing out the consequences of “fast-cult” dance production and identifies spaces of resistance and micro-politics, generated by Brazilian artists who are seeking sustainable development and collaborative modes of production in dance.

Drawing on theories from performance studies, dance studies, and critical race studies, this paper explores the ways in which Korean pop (K-pop)'s appropriation of hip-hop reveals a complex moment of global cultural flow. Western audience reception of K-pop is likely limited to framing K-pop either as a form of contemporary minstrelsy or a postcolonial mimicry, e.g., making fun of African American culture or a bad copy of American pop. This perspective, however, understands K-pop through the lens of American culture and only considers external signs of the performances. It fails to capture the local context in Korea, such as how and why the performers appropriate hip-hop, such as the process of embodiment and training process to learn hip-hop movement, rhythm, and styles, etc. By analyzing K-pop singer G-Dragon's (GD) music videos, this paper argues that Koreans' appropriation of American culture is neither minstrelsy nor postcolonial mimicry. K-pop's chameleonic racial and gender hybridity reveals incommensurability of contemporary Asian-ness, which I have called post-racial Asian-ness as non-racialization.

The repurposed metaphor “floating worlds,” from Japanese woodblock prints, highlights political junctions when transcultural American and Japanese dance collide and reconfigure. The first “floating world” is an “Ethiopian Concert” presented by Commodore Matthew Perry's Japanese Olio Minstrels in celebration of The Treaty of Peace and Amity (1854). The second challenges nostalgic Western notions of an “Old Japan” through the aggressively westernized Tokyo School of Music, where modern dancer Michio Ito trained for an opera career. Third, a post–World War I Peace Festival in Washington, DC, which included Ito's “eccentric dances,” documents an early Japanese diaspora within mainstream America. The final “floating world” conversely locates transcultural America outside of the United States through Ito's “Spirit of ’76” spectacle, staged for Occupied Forces following his unjust deportation to Japan. I apply analytical concepts of transcultural historians to imagine a global past that is less recognized, but no less nuanced, than the global present.