The recent shift of scholarly focus towards the body and performance has helped to raise the profile of dance as a significant academic site for cultural investigation and to open up channels for dialogue with other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Chapters on dance may now be found in collections on gender, the body and ethnography, for example and there is abundant evidence of the impact of poststructuralist and postmodernist thinking in mainstream dance literature itself. This interest may engage with ethnographic approaches to dance to formulate questions around “whose body in performance?” so that issues of gender, social status, kinship, ethnicity and power can be addressed, as well as more reflexive concerns related to bodily experience. From an ethnological perspective, such contemporary aspects of study in relation to the moving body may be examined diachronically, particularly in dance practices where the past is perceived as being of key significance.

Many early western dance historians, influenced by romanticism, never really thought about “folk” dance changing as a historical entity. Since they imagined it connected to the original and pure national spirit of a people, they often assumed that such a dance appeared right from the birth of that people itself, and that it is (or should be) changeless. Dance traditions generally continue on among the peasants as archaic remnants of the olden days (or in some cases, perhaps, they simply become extinct). One could represent this history on a two-dimensional timeline (Figure 1), drawing an arrow to symbolize the dance tradition as it progresses from left to right across time. A ball or node in the line could indicate a specific moment in the dance tradition's history, a documented performance for example.

Discovery of historical knowledge or disclosure of historical truth are no longer tenable research objectives, while speculation as to the conditions which enable forms of knowledge and truth to be constituted is conceivably a legitimate practice. Nor can there be the unveiling of a definitive version of past events, but rather, the mapping of a multiplicity of authorial voices through the deployment of interpretive strategies which acknowledge that all writing is situated (Adshead-Lansdale 1996; Buckland 1996 on Franko).

Norwegian television is broadcasting a “Good Old Days” type of program and an engaged audience of elderly people all over the country is tuning in. An informal competition is announced: What kind of dance is this couple dancing? Let's imagine we can take in answers from people all over the country: “Oh, it's the hoppvals, just as I did it in my youth!”–“Isn't it the hamburger, it's not done anymore here.”—“That's trippar, for sure.” There are different names for this dance all over the country. Then the TV host presents the correct answer: “I'm sure you all recognised this dance, it was: the polka!” (Figure 1) Hardly any elderly traditional dancer in Norway would use the present official name polka for this dance, (Bakka 1978: 102) and the point of departure for my paper is the question Why?—Why are there many popular names for this dance in Norway, different from the “official” one?

The use of the term “style” in relation to dance is a term we all use, but seldom explore its myriad meanings and implications. In this paper I will attempt to clarify my own usage of the term and how it relates to other terms, such as dance, form, and structure. These slippery terms are used by all of us, as if we agree on what they mean. Here, I want to explore what they might, or could, mean.

Dance creation and processes of artistic aspirations by individual folk dancers and folk dance ensembles in Malaysia mirror the rich cultural heritage of the people. The past and the present are represented in living traditions of Malaysian dance culture. Motions and sounds are celebrated within specific spaces and times expressing influences of past and present civilisations. Young choreographers and dancers, while keen to pursue newer dance pieces, are always aware of the omnipresence of the past in the present. The evolution of Malaysia's folk dances is an ongoing process that is experiencing cross-border sharing of new dance motifs and musical arrangements between the Malays of Peninsular Malaysia, Singapore and the Indonesian Island of Sumatra. Conventions of movements and musical structures of Malay folk dance traditions are shared between these communities. Events that shaped the formation of new styles of Malay folk dances were also effective in spreading and affirming old and new dance styles. When Malay folk dances spread to movies and amusement parks in the 1950s, new interpretations of dances became fashionable. The 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s witnessed the enhancements of older dances and evolved them into contemporary forms. This essay traces the changes within the Zapin dance genre and delineates the three styles in which Zapin is now performed in contemporary Malaysia.

For most people carrying out research in ritual and traditional dance forms, ‘modernisation’, usually understood as ‘Westernisation’, is seen as something destructive. Often rituals are studied as fairly static phenomena. Even though in our fieldwork we never see a ritual repeated in precisely the same manner, because our informants often insist on standardisation and on the possibility of exact ritual replication, we tend to look for a “proper”, archetypal form from which all other forms have deviated. As Gerd Baumann has argued (1992), from Durkheim onward much of the anthropological discourse about ritual has been based on a number of closely related assumptions:

1. 1. Rituals are seen to be symbolic performances at the core of the social identity of communities;

2. 2. They create and maintain (or transform) a society's cultural identity and social relations;

3. 3. The existence of a ritual community or congregation is assumed, whose members share a relationship to the performance, its symbols and their meanings;

4. 4. Thus, rituals are seen to be best understood as acts internal to the category or group that celebrates them or celebrates itself through them, the group being essentially concerned with itself rather than with the outside world.

In Lower Franconia an annual event has existed for more than 300 years in which dance is the most important element. This paper focuses on three villages where this event is still important to the community—Gochsheim, Sennfeld and Schwebheim. These villages are situated in the south and southeast of the city of Schweinfurt and within three kilometers of the city boundary. Gochsheim (60007000 inhabitants) was first mentioned in a deed of donation for the monastery of Fulda in 796, and the population lived until the Second World War on vegetable gardening. During the last fifty years the sources of income changed almost completely, the farmers decreased while public servants, employees and workers increased (Zeilein 1982: 22). A similar situation is found in the smaller village Sennfeld (4000-5000 inhabitants), also one of the oldest villages of Franconia and documented since 1094. Here too the sources of income traditionally came from vegetable gardening but only a few self-supporting farms still exist. Even today, however, both villages supply trading-centres and canneries of the region with their produce. Slightly different is the situation in the third village Schwebheim (3000-4000 inhabitants), which was part of the property of the Barons von Bibra. In earlier times this village was the only German village in which the principal products came from the cultivation of medicinal herbs. Today, only a few farmers still produce these herbs. Common to all three villages is that they have a small Catholic population and church and a larger Protestant population and church. The histories of the villages indicate that until the end of the nineteenth century the population was almost exclusively Protestant, even though they are situated in the middle of the archdiocese of Wuerzburg.

This paper discusses an interrelationship of linđo dancing that occurs in both social and ritual contexts within Croatian Dubrovnik-area villages. In February 1977 during poklada (carnival), I video-recorded maškare (masqueraders), with their house-to-house visitations, a noisy procession, boisterous and outrageous antics, heavy wine drinking and the clowning of linđo dancing. During the 1976-1977 winter season I also recorded a series of social dance events in the same villages during holidays and Sunday evening dance events when only linđo was actively danced for hours. Now that several years have passed, and a theme of this symposium (held in Skierniewice, Poland, July 1994) is ritual and ritual dancing in contemporary society, I am led to analyse the process of continuities and changes related to this winter carnival (poklada) event. This paper suggests that the continuities and changes of dancing in a “ritual” event are in correlation to the changes in the music and dancing at “social” dance events, which were in turn influenced by major socio-economic changes during the 1970s and 1980s.

Elaborating upon the social aspects of dance (or dancing), makes reference to its most general and comprehensive features, because dance is in essence a particular form of social interaction. Even if dance can be artificially separated from its social context and considered solely in its physical features as an independent artistic means of expression, the social component is implicit to the dancing person as an individual and as a member of a socio-cultural community. From this perspective dance structure may be considered as a culturally determined “program” where social, historical and environmental factors interlock with the physical, psychological and mental features of the individual (Giurchescu 1984: 35). Considered as a psychosomatic entity, the dancer is the “soul and body” of dance. He or she is the dance.

In order to understand what “folklore” stood for in the period after the socialist revolution in Bulgaria in 1944, we should consider five important factors:

1. • First, proceeding from the National Revival traditions of Bulgarian ethnology, Bulgarian scholars continued studying folklore as knowledge of the people about itself. In the 1970s the aspiration towards a more systemic comprehension of this knowledge produced the theoretical concept of the study of folklore as a type of aesthetic culture, with a dominant sociological approach. The next decade saw a focus on people as the agents of folk culture and began the anthropological approach to culture.

2. • Second, the first state ensemble for folk song and dance was set up in accordance with the Soviet model in 1952. The concept of its founders was that the “rather simple” art of the people ought to be developed, embellished and enriched in line with contemporary aesthetic needs. The socialist ideology of culture needed an art for the people. Thus in the 1980s small Bulgaria had no fewer than 17 state professional folk song and dance ensembles financially supported by the state.

3. • Third, a centre for amateur art activities was set up. This centre's institutional network and organisational structure covered the entire country via special directives and culture management methods, and “folk amateur art” was one of its priorities. This included groups for arranged folklore and groups for so called “original” (authentic) folklore from the villages. Groups for arranged folklore generally repeated the choreography of professional ensembles on a smaller scale. Groups for original folklore tried to enact on the stage customs, dances, and songs that were only recently part of their life.

4. • Fourth, the forums of folk amateur art activities were municipal, district and national festivals for arranged and for original folklore. There were juries, ratings and prizes in both cases. But while the jury at arranged folklore festivals was made up of choreographers who rated performers depending on whether their own works figured in the repertoire so that they would get their production fees, there was place for scholars on juries at shows of original folklore-scholars who were trying to preserve and keep the Bulgarian folk phenomena alive.

5. • Fifth, along with staged folk festivals, wedding traditions survived in their traditional cultural context and created spontaneous performances of folk works in a natural folk environment. Thus the full annual cycle of feasts and rituals with music and dance that had governed the cultural life of Bulgarian villages and had been preserved until the 1940s, splintered into a rich kaleidoscope of separate elements and fragments.

In Greece, text, melody and movement have had a long creative history and a close relationship with the people. This trilogy has often been used as an important element in the struggle for freedom, or resistance, whether in the songs of the Klepfts, or in the various step combinations of the refugees from Asia Minor. The Metaxas dictatorship, for instance, in the late 1930s, banned many singers and texts of songs of the so-called rebétika, yet also reinforced the idea of folk tradition. From April 1967 until November 1974, the colonels' junta also banned performances of certain ancient and other plays because of their political content. The songs of Theodorakis, of Loizos landed the composers in exile, which was also the fate of other artists who opposed the regime, such as the famous actresses Melina Merkouri and Irene Pappas. Tradition flourished after a period of silence that began in the movement for a popular music of protest against the junta. Under the dictatorship, this trilogy of text, melody, and movement became a medium of resistance.

In the winter of 1991, ballerinas of the State Ballet Ensemble of Turkey found a traditional davul (drum) player in their rehearsals. It was the idea of the Minister of Cultural Affairs that the state-sponsored ballet dancers should learn “our national rhythms”! The following day's newspapers gave a broad coverage to the event, displaying on their front page ballerinas crying in shock, despair and humiliation. This was a war of territory between tradition and modernity, a confrontation between different approaches to dance. It was about nationalism, and the definition of what was national, taking the art of dance at its centre.

“Dance in its sociopolitical aspects,” one theme of the ICTM Ethnochoreology Sub-Group Symposium at which this paper was presented, was a timely one immediately following, as it did, the Los Angeles riots of spring 1992. At that time, one could open the arts section of a newspaper or magazine to find debate raging over such concepts as multiculturalism and diversity. Such controversy within the arts community might have seemed merely a sideshow to the profound interracial, -ethnic, and -class conflicts that erupted then in Los Angles into some of the largest American civil unrest of the century, but the social and political struggle over diversity in our country is a dispute with serious implications for those engaged in arts research as well as for activists and advocates in the public sector.

The connection between folk dance and folk music is a subject of investigation for researchers of both dance and music. Significant results have been achieved in both disciplines, but a comprehensive summary has not yet been made. This may be due to the lack of a unified point of view or to the isolation of the research fields.