Twentieth century technology has given rise to new and exciting methods for the analysis of human motion. With the aid of the motion picture camera a dancer's kick can be frozen and details invisible in normal viewing can be isolated and analyzed. Electrical detecting devices can uncover secrets about the inner workings of the body, its nerves and muscles. Platforms sensitive to the changing dynamics of a movement can tell us how the body generates force, how it locomotes itself and creates artistic effects and qualities which were previously thought of as “mystical” and “denying natural laws”. Numerous ballet technique manuals offer explanations as to the correct execution of dance movements. Although these descriptions are largely in agreement with one another, they are often in conflict with kinesiological information about the general functioning of the human body. Little research exists in the specific area of kinesiology and dance.

It is therefore the goal of the present research to clinically examine one selected dance movement, the grand battement devant, in order to form a kinesiological model of its skeletal and muscular components. This information may help provide a means of assessing the great heritage of traditional ballet theory based largely on personal experience and trial and error, and form a foundation for new theory based on objective analysis. The problem was to discover skeletal and muscular patterns when the grand battement is performed with both legs parallel (patellae facing anteriorly), and with both legs “turned out” (femurs laterally rotated as much as possible at the hip joints).

Turns are an important part of dance vocabulary. Turns in place on one foot — pirouettes, attitude turns, and turns in arabesque, for instance — form a category of ballet movements that are difficult to learn well, and require considerable skill in control of the body.

Three characteristics of turns are important in the proper execution of the movement: body form, rate of turn, and balance. The aesthetic body form can be learned only by example and by careful criticism from a dance teacher. Turnout of the supporting foot or a straight horizontal leg in anarabesque turn are important aspects of a good turn in a purely artistic sense. But other properties of a turn, the most important of which are rate of turn and balance, are open to physical analysis, an understanding of which may give the dancer and dance teacher a better sense of the turning process.

Three considerations addressed here are the importance of the distribution of body mass around the rotation axis, the way the torque for the turn is exerted and angular momentum generated, and the way a dancer maintains balance over a supporting point. In order to investigate more carefully the way a dancer initiates a turn by exerting a torque on the floor, experiments were carried out in which this torque, and the resulting angular momentum of the dancer, could be measured.

Choreographers have always found difficulty in fitting stories to existing musical scores and there have been few occasions when such music has fitted the dramatic structure entirely satisfactorily at every instance. There are two solutions to the problem: either to commission new music or to manipulate an existing score so that it suits the choreographer's purpose, by editing, changing the order of events or the orchestration, even by finding a composer to write a few bars here and there ‘in the style of’ the main body of the music. Such manipulation is by no means the property of story dances; Balanchine altered the order of events in Serenade for instance.

Frederick Ashton has more often than not chosen the ‘welding’ approach, as he calls it, and this is the method he and John Lanchbery used in A Month in the Country. The two men spent a week in September, 1975, working out action to music before any of the dance was choreographed. Before A Month in the Country, Ashton had already collaborated with John Lanchbery in a similar fashion, on La Fille mal gardée (1960), The Two Pigeons (1961) and The Dream (1964), and, much earlier in his career, he had worked with Constant Lambert who introduced the approach to him and was on hand to arrange and orchestrate pieces, even to suggest which music Ashton should use.

Ever since I was fourteen and read Tamara Karsavina's Theatre Street, I had wanted to visit the school that she described so endearingly in her autobiography. Finally, in 1973,1 was in Leningrad and had a chance to see what is now known as the Vaganova Choreographic Institute. After several engrossing hours of watching classes, I was called into the office where I was invited to ask questions but was first asked to listen to an explanation. “We know,” said the young man appointed as spokesman, “that you have visited the very modern new school that is now used by the Bolshoi Ballet. We want you to know that we, too, were offered a new building by the Soviet government, but we did not accept it. We told the government that, unlike Moscow, we have a great tradition that was created and nurtured within these walls. We are proud of this tradition and we want to remain here.”

If I had not already loved the Leningrad school because of Karsavina, I would have loved it then.

The film The Children of Theatre Street tries to capture some of this feeling of inheritance, and at times it succeeds. We see the rapt faces of the young students as they stand beneath portrait's of past masters who walked these same halls, beneath views of dancers who preceded them, perhaps at that same space at the barre. The face of tradition, like that of a parent, is both loving and demanding. The children are intensely aware of their responsibility; we respond to their consuming dedication as the film concentrates on the daily lives of two young students, Angelina Armeiskaya and Alec Timoushin. But watching moments of their classes, we long to see more of their dancing. Of course, it is interesting to see the school cafeteria and a dormitory bedroom, but a glimpse would have sufficed.

The Kiowa-Apache are a small group of Apachean speakers living in the area in and near Anadarko, Oklahoma. Many anthropologists believe they separated from the other Apachean speakers, who now live in the Southwest, about 400 years ago, when they moved out onto the plains and began to function as a band of the linguistically unrelated Kiowa. Some of the early literature (Mooney 1895,1907), dismisses the Kiowa-Apache as simply being a band of the Kiowa, and in no way different than their Kiowa neighbors. This view has been refuted in some detail by McAllister (1937), Bittle (1954,1960,1962), Opler and Bittle (1962), Brant (1949, 1950,1953,1969) and Beatty (1974). There still seems to remain, nonetheless, some confusion among many people as to whether the Kiowa-Apache should be classified as Kiowa or Apache. Although the Kiowa-Apache themselves are quite clear on the fact that they are Apaches and not Kiowas, the surrounding population frequently holds that they are Kiowa. Bittle (1962) suspected that the continued confusion over the identity was in part responsible for the revitalization of the Manatidie society and the accompanying ceremonial dance.

The Manatidie is one of the Kiowa-Apache societies as well as the name of the dance performed by that society. McAllister (1937) discusses it in some detail although he had never seen the ceremony. Bittle (1962), who was present during the revitalization also describes it, as does Beatty (1974) who saw it after revitalization. Beatty's study of Kiowa-Apache music implies that although the music is generally in a “typical” Plains Indian style, it deviates occasionally into the musical style associated with their linguistic relatives (the south-western Apache and Navajo). The deviation is especially interesting in the Manatidie songs which tend to have more characteristics of the southwestern music style than might be expected. The Kiowa-Apache seem to borrow easily musical forms such as peyote songs, which stem from the Southwest and tend to have typical Southwest music patterns (Roberts 1936; Nettl 1954; McAllester 1949). The Manatidie society, on the other hand, seems not to be a southwestern institution as is peyote, and hence the appearance of southwestern music patterns in the Manatidie is somewhat surprising. The patterns can also be found in some of the more recently composed songs as well.

The field work for this study was conducted in Pingtung County, Taiwan over a five-month period in 1976 from February to July. The Paiwan tribe is one of the nine existing tribes in Taiwan; most of these people live in Pingtung County in the south (Fig. 1). Of the 300,000 Taiwan aborigines on the island today, approximately 45,000 are Paiwan. The methods employed in the collection of the data were: 1) observing and recording dances roughly in Labanotation, 2) participating in dancing, 3) filming dances, and 4) interviewing informants. Dances were observed in two ways – in their actual context, or especially elicited. Those elicited included some which are still performed today but were demonstrated for me by request apart from their natural context, and some which are no longer performed but were recalled by my informants. After my return from the field, Labanotation was refined and checked against films, and the raw data was then categorized and analysed. The purpose of the categorization was to identify the characteristics of Paiwan dances based on the data collected.

A total of 62 dances were witnessed in 12 villages of the 8 townships visited. Not all dance types were observed in each village (Figure 2). Some informants remember and can reconstruct more than others, so that data collected in each village may not necessarily represent the entire village repertoire of the present or the recent past. In many cases, the same movements were executed in dances of the same or different dance types. It is the associated song and song text rather than the movements that differentiates the dances.