The image and interpretation of the ballerina has shifted over time since she first took her place in the pantheon of romantic female performers in the early nineteenth century. For many, she is still romanticized, respected, and revered; in other circles, she has become suspect as a creature who may be obsessed, exploited, and retrogressive in light of the egalitarian strides women have made or are still trying to make. The female ballet dancer's basic contradiction—her ethereal exterior and her iron-willed interior—has not been sufficiently accounted for in either scheme, nor has it been woven into the kind of complex, contextualized analysis that includes practitioners who embody the form, audience members of various kinds, and the multiple, shifting locales and attitudes that surround them. As an elite art form, ballet has until recently relied on the more univocal discourse of bouquets and brickbats from critics and other specialists. In 1993, when dance anthropologist Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull called for a consideration of ballet's relationship of dance to life in ways that other cultural forms are investigated, few took up the call.

Between 1998 and 2000, the Gap clothing company produced three advertising campaigns whose visual images consisted of choreographed movement sequences based on vernacular dance forms, theatrical jazz dance, and the codes and conventions of the Hollywood musical: “khakis,” “that's holiday,” and “West Side Story.” Each campaign produced a series of commercials that employed dance and musical theater in an attempt to bridge the gap between entertainment and advertising, and between popular culture and art. By manipulating standard advertising conventions, the Gap framed these televisual texts as performances or artworks, rather than as advertisements, creating choreographic, performance-oriented commercials that became the sign of Gap clothing. As a result, the commercials have been identifiable, just as the clothes have been, by style alone.

The identification of images of dance from antiquity is very difficult given the limitations of ancient forms of representation, the remoteness of the action itself, and the obscurity of its cultural contexts. These problems are magnified when one considers images of dance from preliterate cultures or those in which written language offers little insight. The following is an investigation into the representation of dance dating to the latter half of the Aegean Bronze Age, during the second millennium BC, as part of the visual culture of the Minoans and Mycenaeans from the island of Crete and the mainland of Greece respectively.

At my first performance of Eidos:Telos, in Frankfurt in 1998, I discover a work of penetrating power that is both ordered and disordered. It is febrile at one moment and cool at the next. It is abstract but threaded through with symbolism, and its three acts exude darkness and mystery.

There are no obvious divisions into time or place, and the weave of obscure and fragmented allusions means that dramas build and drop away. The dancing bodies create a mass of curves, lines, and angles with astonishing fluency but in few centrally organized patterns. I try to make sense of the diversity of abstract dance that seems rooted in evasive purpose, and symbolism that lends itself to poetics rather more often than to literal meaning. I search for metaphors that will bind images together, but the imagery is delivered faster than the speed of thought. The movement is rooted in ballet, and fleetingly I sense Apollo lingering; warm to a fragment of Giselle and feel a frisson of excitement when a man sinks to the ground and folds over his body, because it reminds me of Nijinsky's L'Aprés midi d'un faune. But though these connections continue to burn in my mind, they are incidentals and personal to what I see, and quickly succeeded by others.

But I leave Eidos:Telos feeling somehow different, for my body is pumping with energy and ideas, and colorful dynamics are colliding in my head. It has taken me on a journey of the philosophical, kinaesthetic, and sensual, and I need to experience more.

In this article, based on my dissertation, “A Dream Journey to the Unknown: Searching for Dialogue in Dance Education” (2003), I will describe several qualities, or themes, related to dialogue. These ideas may facilitate dialogue in dance education and bear significance for reflecting the nature of dialogical education more generally. In addition, my intent is to uncover the personal nature of my search for dialogue. Before describing the themes, I briefly outline the research process.

The process began in 1997 when I was invited to take part in an art education project that was situated in an elementary school in Helsinki, Finland. I was aware that I was about to turn back to something that I thought I had already left behind. I had recently completed another study concerning my own dance teaching practice (1996). I had joined the so-called teacher research movement with a desire to understand the dynamics of the teaching and learning situation in the context of dance from an experiential point of view.

The film From a Classical Position (1997) is a fully collaborative work between a notable dancer and performer and a notable choreographer, being danced, directed, and edited by Dana Caspersen and William Forsythe of the late Ballett Frankfurt. By looking closely at the film, its origins, and its process of creation, we gain an understanding of Caspersen and Forsythe's way of collaborating and their interest in working with other media and formats. Uncompromising if not difficult for a general dance audience, it is also somewhat didactic and offers insights into some of the Ballett Frankfurt's methods of generating movement, choreographic structures, and the importance of classical technique to a distinctive movement vocabulary:

[The film] was also a little message to the British, who I'm sure were curious about us. It was a little missile to them, saying yes we are the Frankfurt Ballet, yes we perform before so many seats in the Opera House. We are the same people and this is what we do … There is the obvious classical training and this is how we are dealing with it. (Forsythe 1999)

Since contact improvisation was “invented” in North America in the 1970s, it has gained widespread acceptance; teachers have been travelling extensively to conduct seminars and workshops. The dance form has been documented and researched from several viewpoints, but, as I see it, there is general agreement among practitioners and scholars—including United Kingdom-based Helen Thomas (2003), Norway-based Hilde Rustad (2006) and Eli Torvik (2005), and Cynthia Novack (1990), who worked in the United States—that contact improvisation is a form of nonhierarchical relations that entails an appeal to accept mutual responsibility for each other and that also implies a specific lifestyle. In her book Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture, Novack, as an anthropologist, perceives contact improvisation as embodied culture where the movements are central constitutional parts. Her position is that through the study of contact improvisation, “the history of the dancing serves as a vehicle for investigating powerful interrelationships of body, movement, dance and society” (8).

On the morning of May 4, 1961, a brave and motley group of travelers—seven black males, three white males, and three white females, varying in age and professional standing but all trained in nonviolence—embarked on what they called the “Freedom Ride.” Designed by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the bus ride was meant to commemorate and further the organization's 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, a non-violent test of desegregation on interstate buses that quickly disintegrated in the face of staunch resistance. This time, riders would test the 1960 Supreme Court decision Boynton v. Virginia, which prohibited segregation in the waiting rooms and restaurants of bus terminals (Branch 1989, 390). Departing from Washington, D.C., the Freedom Ride aimed to arrive in New Orleans on May 17, the seventh anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. Explaining that they were merely exercising rights granted by the Supreme Court but that they knew the dangers, CORE director James Farmer said, “We were prepared for the possibility of death” (Cozzens 1997). Riding the momentum of the student sit-ins, the civil rights movement had become for many a matter of “putting your body on the line” (Branch 1989, 392).

This statement may resonate with many who practice, teach, or write about dance and movement training and performance, but it is particularly apt in relation to the work of Gertrud Falke-Heller (1891–1984). Her extraordinary career spanned almost sixty years, and she worked with some of the most influential figures in European modern dance and performance, including Rudolph Laban, Mary Wigman, and Kurt Jooss. The training she developed, based mainly on the work of German body awareness pioneer Elsa Gindler (1885–1961), did not have a name, and little documentation about it exists. After an early career as a performer in Hamburg, Falke-Heller taught this form of training for Ballet Jooss at Dartington Hall in the 1930s. She developed her work after World War II with psychiatric patients in a variety of hospitals in England and Scotland and died at her home in London in 1984. In an interview given four years before her death, Falke-Heller lists the following questions and concerns that underpinned her work in the many different contexts to which it has been applied:

The body awareness in the sitting, standing, walking, lying down in all human functioning. What is expressive movement? Where does it start to be really interesting? And where is it empty? Then also the space—the dynamic in the room. That's what I was always interested in from the beginning. (Falke-Heller 1980)