My first idea was to compare Ausdruckstanz literature to work in other fields on the theorization of fascist aesthetics. This would establish a critical framework for the vexed question of the fascistization of German modern dance. As the research of Susan Manning, Marion Kant, and Laure Guilbert has made patently evident, Ausdruckstanz begs the question of dance and politics because of the easy and massive accommodation of German modern dance to the cultural policies of the Third Reich. The history of Ausdruckstanz has long been veiled, but the original research of these scholars persuades us to reconsider dance modernism from the political perspective. An early twentieth-century avant-garde art movement and an authoritarian state apparatus encounter each other at a moment crucial in the development of each; something new is being created, both artistically and politically, that reveals contradictory forces and tendencies at work. Only when these dance scholars lifted the veil and rewrote history could we begin to perceive dance in the full light of the political. They have inaugurated an area of inquiry that requires further work. But any serious critical development of dance study methodology must also be tested against their re-evaluation Ausdruckstanz.

Head tossed back wearing a mile-wide grin, ecstatic arms stretched to the sky, jutting knees counterbalancing a substantial backside—the Jazz Age had no symbol more potent than the moving black body (Figure 1). Nearly always an illustration, and in many cases a caricature, these images depicted anonymous black movers rather than recognizable individuals. Yet, looking beyond this superficial representation, it was actually visibly white dance professionals who primarily marketed jazz steps to the American public as teachers and choreographers. A quick glance through the pages of the nascent Dance Magazine of the 1920s reveals numerous jass dance routines with names such as “High Yaller,” “Pickin’ Cotton,” “The Savannah Stomp,” and the “Hula-Charleston,” each represented by a specific white Broadway performer (Fig. 2). Standing just behind each dancer, however, is a dark dancing figure that remains nameless and faceless.

Much has been said of the tradition of quadrille dancing that exists in the Caribbean. This dance and music repertory was first introduced there in the late eighteenth century by European colonists who wanted to recreate some of the aristocratic lifestyle they would have enjoyed in their country of origin. But soon after its introduction, people of African descent whom the Europeans had forcibly introduced in the Caribbean appropriated the dance and transformed it to fit the new environment.

In his overview of Caribbean music, Kenneth Bilby noted that the most ubiquitous music traditions of the Caribbean seem to be the ones that grew out of the European social dances and music genres of an earlier era (1985, 195). Establishing a parallel with the Creole music of the Seychelles, which bears strong resemblance to Caribbean forms, John Szwed and Morton Marks (1988) suggested that the French contredanse and quadrille were instrumental to the emergence of the Creole repertories, primarily because, just like many of the Caribbean islands, the Seychelles were French colonies in the eighteenth century.

In the San Francisco Weekly in 2002, reviewer Bernice Yeung referred to butoh as a “bizarre and mysterious art.” Although it has become a leading postmodern and international art form in the last thirty years and is familiar to contemporary arts festival viewers around the globe, butoh is still referred to as bizarre, tortured, disturbing. As a butoh practitioner who has seen many butoh performances in Tokyo, the United States, Canada, and Sweden from 1981 to 2006, I have come to believe that its grotesque elements, though important, do not constitute the core of butoh. Rather, it is the basic Buddhist value of compassion that inspires butoh's content and powerful expression. In the above remarks by Ohno and Hijikata, the founders of this esoteric art form, stretching out a hand or stepping a crippled step forward in crisis are acts of compassion, and it may be this compassionate aspect of butoh that engenders its appeal.

When CORD asked me to put together a panel honoring Marcia B. Siegel for the 2005 conference in Montreal, I did not hesitate to accept. She had done the same for me in 2001. But this was no quid pro quo. Decades ago, when Siegel edited the long-defunct publication Dance Scope, she invited me to contribute a review of Edwin Denby's Dancers, Buildings and People in the Street to the Spring 1966 issue. She was taking a big chance. That was my first published writing. She had only heard me talk about dance on “The Critical People,” a radio show about the arts on WBAI-FM (a bunch of us got together weekly and more or less winged it).

Over the years, she and I have thrashed out ideas about criticism, historical writing, and specific performances sitting side by side in theater seats, collapsing in hotel rooms after arduous days at conferences, conducting workshops together, and while weeding my vegetable garden. Our opinions may differ, but we have similar ideas about what we are trying to accomplish in our writing and what kind of writing we like to read.

In putting together the panel, I consulted Marcia for ideas. Gay Morris, Selma Odom, and Peggy Phelan are her distinguished colleagues in dance history, theory, and criticism; she also counts them among her friends. Elizabeth Streb, whom she has reviewed over the years, created and delivered a stunning Powerpoint presentation. I regret that it couldn’t be included here. Juxtaposing Marcia's writings about her work to glimpses of the pieces reviewed and her own impressions of them, Streb offered a uniquely insightful and generous view of the critic-artist relationship.

Around the time Marcia Siegel's dance writing career began, an important predecessor's ended with the death in 1962 of Beryl de Zoete, critic and ethnologist. Of Dutch descent, de Zoete was born in London in 1879 into a family of brokers whose name still figures prominently on the British stock exchange. Traveling independently, using her gifts for meeting people and learning languages, she wrote three unprecedented ethnographies, beginning with the book she produced with Walter Spies, Dance and Drama in Bali (1938), and followed by The Other Mind: A Study of Dance in South India (1953) and Dance and Magic Drama in Ceylon (1957). From the late 1920s through the mid-1950s, de Zoete also published many articles on her encounters with European dance and music, and her reviews of performances and books appeared regularly in newspapers, most notably in the influential weekly New Statesman and Nation. After she died, her friend Arthur Waley completed her planned collection of short pieces, The Thunder and the Freshness (1963), titled after poet John Keats's description of a waterfall. This image evoked, for her, the sound of dance drumming before dawn.

In this talk, I sketch de Zoete's life and begin to think about how she worked as a writer. As part of my doctoral research, I investigated her connections with Dalcroze Eurhythmies, which teaches music through movement and improvisation. I also draw on previous work by Margaret Dale, who remembers de Zoete's visits to Sadler's Wells Ballet rehearsals in the 1940s and later consulted her about presenting Sinhalese dance on BBC television.

I am sorry not to be able to join you in person today, but I am glad for the chance to participate in this opportunity to honor Marcia Siegel. Marcia and I taught together in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University from 1985, when I joined the faculty, until her retirement in 1999. And I was honored when she came to do a workshop and speak in my class at Stanford when I began teaching there in 2003. Many of you in attendance today know the beauty and rigor of Marcia's writing about dance, so perhaps it might be better if I spend my time sharing some aspects of Marcia's work that might be less well known to you.

First I would like to thank Deborah Jowitt and CORD for inviting me to participate in this panel. I have known Marcia for many years and I am delighted to be here today to honor her. This also gives me a chance to speak about the Institutes for Dance Criticism (sometimes unofficially called the critics' conferences) started by Selma Jeanne Cohen in 1971 at Connecticut College and then expanded to the West Coast for several years in the mid-1970s. I met Marcia at the 1974 West Coast institute, which she was directing at Mills College. The next year I attended the East Coast branch at Connecticut College, which Deborah [Jowitt] directed and where Marcia served on the faculty.

In their early years the institutes were of tremendous importance to dance criticism. Nothing like them had ever been attempted. They came at the beginning of the dance boom, when publications were suddenly expected to cover what, for many editors and writers, was a little-known art form. The institutes were sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts specifically to train dance critics. A number of people passed through the institutes who went on to important careers in criticism and academe, including Sally Banes, Janice Ross, and Mindy Aloff.

Europeans have imagined India as a land of fabulous riches and exotic legends since the time of ancient Greece. In Greek mythology Dionysus, the god of passion and wine, was said to have come from India, and Alexander the Great's proudest achievement was arriving at the banks of the Indus. When, after 1498, explorers from Portugal, Holland, England, Denmark, and France began to establish trade links with the subcontinent, it seemed the legends were true; rare spices, silks, gold, and precious stones were transported to Europe and added fuel to already inflamed imaginations. The very name of the city of Golconda became a synonym for unimaginable wealth. There was confusion between all things exotic or “oriental.” Turks, Africans, Persians, American “Indians,” and Caribbeans were all from the same imaginary region, “the Indies,” which existed more in the poetic fantasies of Europeans than on a geographical map.

As early as 1626 at the court of Louis XIII, king of France, the mysterious figure of Asia appeared in the Grand Bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut, a ballet danced by the king and his noble companions. In 1635 The Temple of Love, a court masque (as le ballet du cour was known in England), was presented at Whitehall Palace in London. In this spectacle, Persian youths voyaged to India to encounter Indamora, Queen of Narasinga, danced by Queen Henrietta Maria herself in a costume designed by Inigo Jones. Back in France, a Sanjac Indien represented the continent of Asia in another court ballet, Les Entretiens de la Fontaine de Vaucluse (1649).

Modernity, once a prerogative of the West, is now ubiquitous, experienced diversely by people all over the world. The changing notions of modernity are historically linked to the development of the public sphere. This article broadly attempts to map the discourse of modernity to the evolution of Kathak, a premier classical dance from India. The article has two threads running through it. One is the development of the public sphere in India as it relates to anti-colonial nationalism, the formation of the modern nation-state, and globalization. The other focuses on transformations in Kathak as they relate to changing patronage, ideology, and postcolonial history. I emphasize the latter to mark the transitions in Kathak as emblematic of Indian national identity and national ideology to a new era of cultural contestation. This emergent public domain of culture is coined as “public modernity” by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai in contemporary India. It is linked to economic reforms, or “liberalization,” leading to globalization and a resurgence of communal politics. Both of these make culture, tradition, and identity central to the contestation of power among the diverse social formations in India.

Within this quotation the reader may find a rich description of historical and even contemporary Middle Eastern attitudes toward dance and male dancers in particular, penned from a native point of view. In this article I address those attitudes, but more importantly challenge several cherished, long-held assumptions and theoretical stances expressed by native elites and Westerners interested in Middle Eastern dance and dancers. First, I challenge the romantic views that many gay men hold that the presence of male dancers and the sexual interest expressed toward them by Middle Eastern men somehow constitutes evidence for an environment accepting of homosexuality and a Utopian gay paradise, where the possibility of unbridled sexual congress with handsome, passionately out-of-control Arabs, Persians, and Turks exists. Thus, they crucially confuse gay or homosexual identity with homosexual activity or behavior. Because of this confusion, I use an important aspect of queer theory that counters “the monolithic alternative of liberationist gay politics” (Bleys 1995, 7) to look at the phenomenon of professional male dancers in a somewhat grittier, more realistic light. In particular, I refer to Stephen O. Murray's groundbreaking article, “The Will Not to Know” (1997, 14–54) which establishes a valuable lens through which to view how the vast majority of Middle Eastern individuals regard homosexual acts.

Some readers may find the style and organization of Ms. Ameri's article different from those that they are used to finding in Dance Research Journal. One must keep in mind that in Iran the performance of dance, with the exception of male folk dancing in front of all-male audiences, has been banned for over twenty-five years. Even the performance of solo improvised dance in private parties, such as weddings, can result in severe punishment. Prior to the 1978/79 revolution only one serious, but deeply flawed, article (Zoka' 1979) in Persian had appeared in print. Ms. Ameri's article is a pioneering effort, the first serious scholarly article to appear in print in Iran by an Iranian in a quarter of a century, and one that the reader can more readily appreciate when he or she realizes that the research materials available to dance researchers in the West, Japan, and other parts of the world do not exist in Iran. Thus, the work Ms. Ameri undertook was burdened by a lack of knowledge of trends in contemporary dance research that many of us take as commonplace; the article took great personal courage to write.