The present work in the form of a case study aims to identify the contribution of the dance performance “Spontaneous 40” through the personal perception of two ordinary male and five ordinary female citizens, part of a total group of 40, all over 40 years old, who, voluntarily and without any previous experience, participated in the laboratory of Madrid choreographer “La Ribot” at the “Teatro Camões” in Lisbon within the cycle of performance art called “Like You and Me.” This cycle was programmed by the art director of the theater, Mark Deputter, contradicting the idea that art has little to do with people's daily lives, and advocating the replacement of trained and disciplined bodies of classical ballet dancers on stage with the differentiated bodies of ordinary people: some small, big, fat, thin, young, or old. The Spontaneous 40 is a creative and interdisciplinary work in an artistic, cultural, and educational forum that explores the body, laughter, sounds, objects as background music, and poetic visual richness. Following a qualitative methodology, an open questionnaire was used for data collection. The data were subjected to content analysis to phenomenological grounds. The data were then subjected to a content analysis. The results of this study revealed that the unanimated adult becomes alive through dance, reconciling him- or herself with his body, with him- or herself and with others, and exploring his or her creative background and allowing him or her to build self-images of life with more energy, elegance, and creativity, away from the stereotype of aging in our present Portuguese society.

In the tradition of Arab music, artists aspire to generate tarab, an experiential quality described by ethnomusicologist A. J. Racy as a merger between music and emotional transformation. Although there is no exact equivalent in Western language, the most common English words used to capture the meaning of tarab are “ecstasy,” “transcendence,” and “enchantment.” Music frequently identified as being tarab music includes that of Egyptian singer Umm Kulthūm, a towering figure in twentieth century Arab music. Oriental dance (the name used in Egypt, but commonly referred to as belly dance) is customarily performed to this genre of music, which dancers acknowledge as an inseparable part of the dance. This study unravels how the Oriental dancer, in tandem with the music of Umm Kulthūm, engages with the audience to create the experience of tarab—a deeply emotional state generated by the invocation of personal, cultural, and public memories that is often collectively experienced by dancer, musicians, and audience. This study is based on interviews with four Egyptian dancers and four North American dancers who performed extensively in the Middle East. This research, while both building on and theorizing from the current ethnomusicological research on tarab music, foregrounds the dancer's voice and her experiences while embodying and performing to this music, offering a new analysis that brings the dancer into the discourse and expands our understanding of Oriental dance as a performance and aesthetic experience apart from the traditional notions of Orientalism.

In the world of modern dance, people are constantly looking for new and different ways to explore the choreographic process and how dance can be related to other academic disciplines. Recently there have been great strides made to connect modern dance and the world of mathematics. “Synchronous objects” is a study that was done at Ohio State University where a choreographed dance was converted into easily manipulated data, thus bringing significant advances to the math–dance connection. However, this study was a one-way transaction, from dance to data. It leaves mathematicians everywhere wondering how to transform their knowledge of formulas into an expression of the body. To satisfy the urges of these dance-minded mathematicians, we have developed two methods of creating choreography from a simple fractal formula. The first method uses fractal landscapes as a coordinate map of the stage and Labanotation as the translation key (the reverse of the synchronous objects project), and the second uses the basic Labanotation figures as the “objects” with which fractals are generated. These methods, stemming completely from a computer algorithm, will allow people not well versed in dance to create new and exciting pieces of choreography by making simple decisions about the fractal equation.

Dancers in the Brazilian folk celebration Bumba-meu-boi once performed in simple, repetitive, and predominantly circular movements. This structure promotes multigenerational participation, increases community interaction, and maintains a semi-intact historical legacy. Nevertheless, many groups are currently adopting choreographic steps and patterns familiar from popular entertainment culture and urban Carnival celebrations. This evolution is uneven, with many of the nearly 300 groups that perform in the federal state of Maranhão maintaining the older practices. Nevertheless, for groups embracing modern entertainment values, greater appeal to tourists and general audiences comes at the cost of the traditional form and content of the celebration described by field researchers only two or three decades ago. Gender presentations have been particularly affected, with the increased use of elaborate and skimpy costumes, younger and more athletic performers (mostly young women), and professionalized musical support. These changes are part of the modernization and urbanization of the festival, and they create an ambivalent dialectic in which women appear increasingly as leaders and major performing figures, but also as chorus line bodies with minimal narrative function. Our research includes visual documentation from several years of field research in Sao Luis (Maranhão), Brazil, available online at http://simoneferro.com. Albums of still photography are available at http://meredithwwatts.com.

In the Cuban towns of Perico and Agramonte, the Afro-Cuban religious practices inherently involve dance and music practices that exist in a mutual dialogue of sounding the body and moving the music. But the dialogue between the music and dance are but a part of the embodied sensorium. Stories, narratives, memories, religious objects, and ritual process are as resonant. The embodied-body is contextualized by these conversational sensual forms. Together, they form and mobilize the sensational heritage of these towns. This presentation will narrate the evocative stories and historical narratives of Perico and Agramonte, Cuba—in particular, their African-derived Arará religious practices. Revealed as a fluid and shifting social memory, the narratives tell the stories of the “African” elders and their religious objects and deities that arrived with them “directly” from Africa in Perico and Agramonte. These narratives resonate with imperfect but evocative history and imagination. They inform and imbue religious ritual and community identity. They also wrap around and imbue the dance and musical expressions that ground, move, sound, and evoke social memory, which is at one and the same time—a collective weaving of history and myth, construction, change, reimagining and reweaving. Is this social memory fact or fiction, or both? How does embodied sensational heritage relate to these stories, whether tangibly felt, touched, heard, or danced? And how is this social memory understood as its own creative process?

This paper explores the relationship between musical tastes and dance practices in popular dance practices. It is based on ideas that emerged from a multisited ethnography involving the participation in and observation of the practices of breaking, as well as interviews with individual b-boys and b-girls, who often traveled between cities as part of their practices. Although there were many interesting and contradictory observations and participant responses provided by this multigenerational, multicultural scene, one theme emerged as central.

Geography is a feature that typically belongs to the realm of folk dance. Folk dances are often defined as belonging to a certain region, and it is seldom they are considered a result of artistic creativity. In the Nordic countries, folk dancers have co-operated intensively since the early twentieth century, sharing dances with each other. In this presentation, I am arguing that this co-operation has created imaginative geographies of the Nordic region, filled not with landscapes, terrains, or water systems, but with movements, holds, and music. As an example, I will present two Nordic folk dance books from the 1960s. In these books, dances are attached to certain geographical areas, which is not merely contextual information but also entails stylistic features of a specific dance. Most dances are connected to a certain parish, and in some cases the province is mentioned, as well. In practice, for most folk dancers, the names of the areas do not have much significance as material domain, but they are elements of a map of a danced region, and as such the dances are a part of imaginative geographies, performed spaces. Following the British geographer Derek Gregory, I see folk dances as a continuation of performances that necessarily creates novelty, which allows one to experience spaces differently. The books are danced atlases presenting the Nordic region as a series of performed spaces. They address how the Nordic region has been represented in a danced form, emphasizing affiliation and unity, as well as distinction and disjointedness.

This article will narrate the process of working in artistic collaboration utilizing traditional Ghanaian dance forms and Western dance-making methods while incorporating a common artistic thread between the two cultures. Invited to create a new work of choreography for the Ghana Dance Ensemble (GDE), the author as guest artist choreographer explored ways of creating a hybrid dance work that honored the artistic footprint of GDE. The choreographer engaged company members, consisting of both dancers and musicians, in daily rehearsals and dialogue about the artistic process and the aesthetic roots from which each artist was grounded. Compositional structures were explored cross-culturally. Traveling out to several field sites, the choreographer was able to view and participate in sacred ceremony for more grounding and artistic information. From this process, a dialogic space was created in which new meanings were shared between cultures and traditional artistic values re-imagined. Dialogue through conversation was not the only exchange of importance. An additional dialogue was that of dancing bodies viewing each other, adapting and integrating change firmly grounded in each other's originating aesthetic footprint. Equally important was the exchange in a culture where it is inherent that the music sounds the dance and the dance moves the music. Thus the dialogue extended itself where the choreographer tried on new ways of thinking about the sounding body just as GDE integrated the choreographer's approaches and made it their own through their own processes of creative invention.

To the musician, the polyphony inherent within Bach's music offers multiple interpretations for a persuasive performance. “Which measures are climactic? Which phrases deserve rubato?” These notations of a violin score translate into movements of the bow arm and fingering for the left hand, which then convey intentions and emotions. The score does not merely imply the music to be played, but instead describes how a body moves in order to play the music and, thus, in the case of Bach, express emotion. How might the relation of polyphony and space be conceptualized through the embodiment of music to the dance artist? My research examines the musical score as a text where these intersections exist. As I integrate my training as a classical musician and dancer, I have discovered an intrinsic duality of music and movement that has led me to explore the embodiment of sound. Psychologist and music theorist, Eric Clarke, in his writings on the ecology of listening, further emphasizes this relationship by stating that the significance of music lives within its ability to convey motion and, inversely, that sound gives evidence to motion. I believe the score embraces the greater context of the performance of the music and the dance. To explore this argument, I have chosen J.S. Bach's first violin partita, where the melodic and harmonic relationships within Baroque music are well defined. This paper will demonstrate several ways in which I employ Bach's text as the point of origin and basis to inform my choreography.

Dancer-choreographer Nova Bhattacharya uses the ecological term “edge-effect” to describe her experience within the choreographic process where her bharatanatyam training and her contemporary dance creativity overlap to create a lingua franca. Hari Krishnan, dancer-choreographer and scholar, describes his work as “constantly ruptured” within his “post-post-modern experience.” This paper argues that the creative processes underlying the respective contemporary dance-making practices of Nova Bhattacharya and Hari Krishnan are cultural ecosystems demonstrating the rich dynamic of the edge-effect at the intersection of bharatanatyam and contemporary dance aesthetics and themes. Within the edge-effect, both reception and rupture occur as artistic identities evolve. Furthermore, reception and rupture occur within the performance venue as the performers' and audiences' worlds overlap—another negotiated edge-effect. While the ecological metaphor of the edge-effect helps to conceptualize these interactive spaces, the sociological metaphor of a “dynamic nucleus” (Lloyd Wong) helps us to theorize the nature and energy of the critically reflective exchanges occurring, between contemporary and bharatanatyam sensibilities, in both the studio and concert theater. The edge-effect and dynamic nucleus metaphors build on Homi Bhaha's concept of the “cultural interstices” within which individual and communal identities are initiated and culture is located. Additionally, these metaphors expand on Guillermo Gômez-Peña's theory of “multihybrid identities, in a constant process of metamorphosis” as today's “border-culture” becomes tomorrow's institutional art. This paper provides dance scholars with a way of conceptualizing the energy of dance as a cultural force influencing experiences of hybridity and identity for performers and audiences within intercultural contexts.

The paper provides an account of an innovative collaborative work between composer/violinist Elo Masing, choreographer/dancer Jean Lee, and the Kreutzer String Quartet. The project challenges the conventions of music and dance collaboration by proposing a fundamentally new way of working across disciplines, establishing a profound interrelation between movement and sound production.

The work so far has mostly involved developing a new notation system for string instruments and dancer suitable for recording the sounds and movements the work in progress will primarily be based on. The paper will, at this stage, demonstrate only a fraction of the various possibilities of this new way of musician–dancer collaboration that is estimated to span over the next couple of years. The idea for the piece dates back to June 2010, when a structured improvisation was created in collaboration between Elo Masing and Jean Lee, commissioned for a conference at Roehampton University.

The innovative aspect of the project is manifested in the development of choreography and music together from the very beginning, using new sound and movement languages discovered in interdisciplinary improvisation sessions. In the center of the collaboration lies the definition of the roles of the musician and the dancer as equal, with equally complex compositional material and interchanging ideas. That means composing music and dance simultaneously and letting them influence each other.

The new notation system for string instruments focuses on the movements of string players, thus creating a possibility for relating music to dance in a more tangible and visual rather than conceptual and abstract way.

This essay illustrates the working of the process of music and dance collaboration that has been developed since 2010 by composer Elo Masing and choreographer Jean Lee. It includes exemplification of their empirical work from a first person viewpoint, presented in chronological order. This paper questions how performer(s) to performer(s) interrelationship will affect the performer(s) to spectator(s) interrelationship in live performance, encompassing improvisation and examining spectatorship.

Visual artists, designers, composers, photographers, poets, and choreographers were vital participants in the Bennington School of the Dance, which ran on the Bennington College campus in Bennington, Vermont, from 1934–1942 with one year, 1939, spent at Mills College in California. Collaborations were an integral component of the school, occurring between faculty and staff members as well as between students and faculty/staff. Of particular importance were the collaborations between musicians (including Louis Horst, Gregory Tucker, Norman Lloyd, and Alex North) and choreographers (including Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman). These collaborations influenced the direction of American modern dance, which was establishing itself with new breath as a form that could express American life and traditions without necessarily drawing upon European composers to do so.

Contemporary sexual norms in Canada continue to dictate how sexuality should be presented on the stage in many styles of theatrical dance. Jazz dance is not excluded from this practice; in fact, since the early days of social dancing, jazz dance has often been considered synonymous with gratuitously deviant sex and sexuality. In contemporary artistic circles, concert jazz dance often finds itself subject to an additional classification as low-art because of this perceived relationship between sex and the dancing. This artistically marginalized position of concert jazz implies a conservative heteronormativity in Canada that is contrary to our apparent inclusion of subjugated sexual minorities as “normal.” “It's All in the Hips” explores sexuality in contemporary Canadian concert jazz dance to illustrate the potential for representations of marginalized sexualities on stage, and the perceived threat to artistic hegemony. While there is growing research into sexuality on the American stage in ballet and modern dance through scholars such as Jane C. Desmond, Jennifer Fisher, Susan Leigh Foster, and others, and also into jazz's roots in social dancing by Susan Manning, Anthea Kraut, Julie Malnig, and a growing host of scholars, very little work has been done on the Canadian concert jazz scene, save for the work of Iro Tembeck, Mark Miller, Meilan Lam, and a handful of dancers. This paper examines the intersection between sexual and artistic minority in Canadian concert jazz dance and problems that arise for positioning the form to dance audiences as high art.

In Bésame el Cactus (2004), Sol Picó, modern dancer and choreographer, simultaneously performs flamenco music and dance. Using her body, her shoes, castanets, and hands, she is integrating flamenco—as a cultural symbol of Spain—into a contemporary performance. In a Spain impacted by Franco's dictatorship (1939–1975), the peculiar ambiguous choice of using flamenco in a modern performance raises questions about the construction of national and gender identity, both during the dictatorship and now. Franco's regime promoted a centralized nationalism, and imposed it on the other cultures that were part of the Spanish state. These were cultural regionalisms linked to the historic communities of Catalonia, Galicia, and the Basque Country. During Francoism, popular and folk music and dances were employed as an effort to construct a unified Spanish culture. This paper will address the problems of gender and national construction in contemporary Spain through a close reading of this choreographic piece. A methodological analysis of Bésame el Cactus will be presented using applied performing arts theories. I will also draw upon interview material with the choreographer/performer, Sol Picó. In conclusion, this paper will illustrate the ways in which the heritage of Francoism still informs choreographers' choices, and thereby creates an artificial national music and dance in Spain.

The epoch-making dance reforms of the early twentieth century did not only lead to new dance techniques, styles, and movement concepts, but also to an intensive search for new dialogues between music/sound and dance/movement. These new interactions were notable for their reliance on pre-existing music that was usually not intended for dance. Analogous to the choreographers' search for new movements in new (sound) spaces, composers looked for a new physicality of sounds (musical gestures), as well as for new spaces inside and outside of these sounds. Following these mid-twentieth-century developments, choreographers have increasingly chosen “new music” for their creations—compositions beyond the classical repertoire. In my paper, I will explore the choreographic possibilities of “new (non-dance) music” by comparing two examples: Bill T. Jones' solo danced to Edgar Varèses' Ionisation and a solo created by Martin Schläpfer using György Ligeti's Ramification. These examples will serve as case studies to argue for my concept of “kinesthetic listening,” which can be applied to a more general approach to discussions of the embodiment of music. This concept includes not only the perspective of the choreographer and interpreter/dancer, but also the perception of the spectator/listener. As a precondition, music/sound is understood as movement: an audible but not visible, rather an imaginable/imaginary movement that can (but need not) interact with body movements. Body movements/dance, in turn, can interact with music according to different choreographic strategies. To analyze these choreomusical dialogues, a special combination of (and training in) listening to and watching movement is required—informed by models of analysis from musicology and dance studies as well as from phenomenology and cognitive sciences.

A. K. Coomaraswamy writes in The Dance of Shiva that Nataraja, the Hindu dancing figure, is the “clearest image of the activity of God which any art or religion can boast of.” Nataraja's dance activates dormant vital energy (kundalini) and resonates with the primordial sacred seed sounds (bijas) of the cosmos. Sanskrit seed sounds such as Aum are described in the Katha Upanishads as “consciousness or God (Brahman) itself.” In his book, Healing Mantras, Ashley-Farrand writes that the practice of mantra brings about positive changes in matter and consciousness by the agency of a subtle vibration. Cyndi Dale in The Subtle Body correlates each note of the ancient Solfeggio scale used in Gregorian chants to the energy centers (chakras) in the body. Sacred sounds are recited in Buddhist chants, Jewish hymns (Zemirot), and the dances of Sufi whirling dervishes, among other traditions. The dancer, through mastery of breath, form, and heightened awareness of sound, possesses the potential to “ride” on the crests of musical waves of sacred sound and harmoniously vibrate with wavelike patterns of energy or “cosmic strings,” identified in quantum physics as the essence of matter, and thereby facilitate healing and self-integration. However, in mainstream dance practice and research, sound/movement spiritual practices are largely relegated to the separate category of “new age,” dance therapy, or yoga. This performative paper discusses how the integration of the mindful use of sacred sound in contemporary dance training has profound implications for expanding consciousness, heightening creativity, and enhancing physical capabilities.