A string band strikes up a rhythmic tune and a circle of dancers, one hundred or more, falls into the beat together. “All join hands and circle to the left,” directs the caller, beginning an old time square dance each Friday and Saturday night in several communities across Southwest Virginia. Old time square dancing is one of the two oldest regional forms of dance which continue to change through community participation. The other form is a dance of “rhythm-making with the feet” (Hall 1984–85,201), a solo dance known variously as clogging, flatfooting, or buck dancing. Old time square dancing typically begins with one large circle and with patterns for the whole group; proceeds to a middle section of one or more patterns for two couples, who form the “square;” and ends with one large circle or patterns for the whole group. Dancers use the term “old time square dance” to differentiate this community-based form from western club square dancing, which was popularized mid-century and is taught, with classes of increasing levels of difficulty, through a national organization. Both forms of old time dancing have evolved since the eighteenth century through the interaction of European-Americans, African-Americans, and Native Americans, and are performed to music of the old-time, bluegrass, country, or country-rock variety, depending upon the community.

In 1951, at the dawning of a decade that would be known by some for its suffocating conformity and political intolerance, Katherine Dunham created Southland, a dramatic ballet Americana about what was by then the century-long practice of lynching. In the program notes to the ballet that premiered at the Opera House in Santiago de Chile, Dunham wrote, “This is the story of no actual lynching in the southern states of America, and still it is the story of every one of them”. She spoke the Prologue onstage, in Spanish:

Recent scientific research provides evidence to suggest that it is more than coincidental that principles of training are held in common by Tai Chi, Sweigard's Ideokinesis, and Bartenieff's Fundamentals. The reason that principles of training for the neuromuscular facilitation of human movement can be found to cross diverse methods and forms of training is, quite simply, that they work. This statement comes as no surprise to individuals who have utilized these principles of training. However, only recently has objective scientific evidence been published that suggests the potential efficacy of this kind of training. Beyond comparing principles of training and current scientific research, the purpose of this paper is to build a testable hypothesis that can provide a focus in dance science for the beginnings of experimentation in neuromuscular facilitation training.

The integration of Oriental and Occidental elements, as Michio Ito perceived them, was central to his vision of art and life. “In my dancing,” he said, “it is my desire to bring together the East and the West. My dancing is not Japanese. It is not anything—only myself”.

Ito thus described his dancing in a newspaper interview in August, 1917, less than a year after his arrival in America. Those who view the individual as inevitably embedded in his specific cultural and historical environment may find Ito's description idealistic but naive. He was, after all, only twenty-three. Certainly, Ito was inescapably an Oriental from the standpoint of the Western formulated Orientalism described by Edward Said. Moreover, Ito's prior experience in Europe had already acquainted him with the Orientalist tendency to lump together all Eastern cultures, assuming, for example, that values and behavior of Japanese, Indians, and Egyptians must be similar if not identical. As the only Asian among well over three hundred students at the Dalcroze Institute, Ito noted that, despite his protests, other students regarded what he said and did as typical of all Eastern people as well as all Japanese. Ito, then, was not naively oblivious to contemporary stereotypes of Orientals.

Ito's concept and practice of his art reflects some aspects of Said's Orientalism while evading others. This is partially because Said's study admittedly emphasizes British and French scholarship and imperialist politics, particularly in relation to the Arab world. In this Orientalist tradition, the European saw the Oriental as essentially different and inferior, the passive “other” incapable of self-government despite past glories of Eastern philosophy and art. Consequently, Orientalism logically predicted and justified the colonization of the colonized. Moreover, since the East was thought to have unchanging characteristics, this dominant-subservient relationship was assumed static until the dissolution of the imperialist empires in the twentieth century.

In a world where symbolic discourse may be the hallmark of a dominant species, certain human beings stand out for their social isolation. Six nonverbal children, ages six to nine, with dual impairments of vision and hearing, formed one such cluster of humanity within a residential educational setting. This article reports on some features of a study that analyzes the influence of an intensive dance program (Dance) on social and task engagement in these children (Bond 1991). A multi-faceted inquiry was undertaken that combined a two-group experimental design with participant observation and cumulative theorizing. In this “art-science duet” (Bond 1987), qualitative procedures were adopted to interpret patterns of engagement uncovered through quantitative analysis. Results clearly show that Dance was an effective mode of expression, communication and learning for the six children.

In America, around 1900, Edith Wharton wrote in her autobiography, “[O]nly two kinds of dancing were familiar…: waltzing in the ballroom and pirouetting on the stage”. Wharton missed her earliest opportunity to see Duncan, in 1899, when a Boston philanthropist and Newport hostess featured the young dancer at a garden party:

No doubt, the young Duncan's earliest performances must have looked peculiar. She neither waltzed nor pirouetted. She did not kick up her legs; she manipulated no skirts; she rarely portrayed any specific character. Legend even has it (though not quite accurately) that she was maverick enough at a very tender age to disavow her toe dancing lessons. In her more semantically polemical moments, Duncan rejected the label “dancer” altogether, in order to disassociate herself from the questionable antics of her colleagues. Instead, she set herself apart as an “artiste.” That is what she listed as her occupation on the birth certificate for her second child, Patrick Augustus Duncan, in 1910.