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.

Mary Wigman wanted to develop a new dance form, one that could express her personal perception of the spirit of her era and communicate her innermost feelings. What she created in her early choreographies, despite variations in specific works, was a dance in which one of the most prevalent constituents was mysticism, found in the purpose, process, and content of her choreography. It is by virtue of the element of mysticism that Wigman's artwork can be linked to a major aspect of the German Expressionist movement, which had come to full flower in art and drama during Wigman's artistically formative years.

German Expressionism was the attempt, by several German artists circa 1907-1925, to express the inner reality of a character, situation, or event rather than the external, scientifically verifiable facts, by portraying the essence, by giving form to experience to convey its universal significance. This expression of the artist's vision, which was intensely individual in style and inspiration yet universal in content, was often marked by distortion or non-realistic symbols used to attain a direct communication from soul to soul, that is, to express the essence of their vision so that it could be apprehended on a sensed level rather than on an intellectual level. The German Expressionist artists, as well as Wigman, developed their own, individual styles according to their particular art medium and individual personalities.

Nearly twenty years ago, I took a graduate seminar on postcolonial theory with Edward Said in the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University. It was a heady experience: competitive grad students and young faculty members vied for his imperious (I realize the irony of the word in reference to Said!) attentions. We read novels—potent, searing, difficult novels—alongside some of the theorists of political struggle who would indelibly alter my understanding of what cultural resistance could mean. Said's recent death, which of course coincided with a period of distressing shifts in political tides, has placed pressure on those of us engaged with cultural analysis to probe even more deeply the significance of anticolonial struggle in cultural forms. As a dance scholar, I have found myself reflecting on the ways in which postcolonial theory might inform my understanding of the power of choreography to affect political change—but also on the ways in which dance can inform our readings of postcolonial theory.

What kind of “symbol making behavior” is “dance”? At this point in history, are most scholars inclined to believe that “dance” is actually many symbol-making behaviors within time? “Dancing,” a human activity, occurs in myriad forms, both now and in the past. This warm-up accents the ramifications of adopting an historical perspective to describe “dance.” As might the Annalist Fernand Braudel, let me propose that dance media “should fit into time which carries life ceaselessly along” (Braudel 1980, 69). By “dance media,” I recognize every “dance” form which is tacitly legitimated within a social group. Every dance medium is a socially particular manner of constructing movement within a social group. There may be a scholar who argues that there is a dance medium which is not socially legitimated, but in turn, what data shows that such a medium exists? “Dance” should give way to dance media, a plural term.

This article examines the work of Annie Payson Call (1853–1940) who was during her lifetime a highly regarded teacher of her method of bodily education and a prolific author. I place Call's work against the background of American Delsartism, the flourishing of health movements, and innovations in dance forms of the period. I suggest that Call, a now forgotten figure, can be seen as a contributor to a lineage in American approaches to movement that place bodily awareness and sensory knowledge at the heart of movement experience and training. The first half of the article introduces the reader to key concepts in Call's movement philosophy and outlines her method of training bodily awareness and releasing muscular tension. The second part looks at characteristics of Call's writing to shed light on the hereto neglected aspect of somatics and somatic education: the role of language and imagination in writings about movement.

The employment of the scientific process to gain additional insight into a particular problem beyond the ordinary inquiry of the problem is commonly referred to as research. In fact, the term research can be substituted for scientific process. In general, research differs from other scholarly activities in regard to the methods and procedures under which the problem is studied and analyzed. Research further aims to enlarge the fields of knowlege already in existence. The researcher identifies a problem or an issue within his/her field of interest and then systematically undertakes to answer specific questions or hypotheses concerning the problem.

The scientific problem under consideration by the researcher must be a significant, well-defined problem as well as one that the researcher is totally involved in answering. This is a most important aspect of the research process because the identification and the statement of the problem directs all of the later activities of the inquiry. The statement of the problem is a roadmap of the territory under consideration.

Once the statement of the problem has been identified in clear, percise terms the researcher moves into the second phase of the research process, namely the proposal of the hypothesis or hypotheses. An hypothesis is a guess that the researcher makes about the problem and it provides a basis for the research, therefore it is a vital aspect of the entire study regardless of the type of research being undertaken. A hypothesis is generally a statement of expected relationships among the variables. Whether the hypothesis is accepted or rejected should not be the prime objective of the researcher. Statistically significant results are not necessary to add knowledge to our existing knowledge; statistically insignificant results also add to our knowledge. The hypothesis may be viewed as an “if … then …” type of relationship. If certain conditions prevail, then certain other things will result.

This article examines Eleo Pomare's concept of vitality in his piece Blues for the Jungle (1966) as a black aesthetic approach to choreography. Vitality seeks to connect with black audiences in Harlem by referencing and affirming shared cultural knowledge, conveying an embodied epistemology of the US political economy defined by the lived experiences of Harlem: “Harlem knows.” Using a lens of diaspora citation, I argue that Pomare's choreographic citations of “vital” ways of moving and knowing in Harlem critique the terms for “proper” national belonging, while articulating diasporic belonging in motion.

The Nāṭyaśāstra is a Sanskrit work on drama, dance, and music of uncertain date, which has acquired the status of Ur-text of Indian classical dance. It was in the twentieth century, through the modernization process of bharatanatyam, that the Nāṭyaśāstra and its related texts came to be regarded as setting out the grammar of Indian dance classicism (Coorlawala 1994; Meduri 1996; O'Shea 2001).

Chapter 4 of the Nāṭyaśāstra deals specifically with dance, here distinct from acting, and describes the 108 dance units—Karaṇas—of the tāṇḍava dance of Śiva and their combinations, dance phrases named aṇgahāras (NS 1988–89, 4, w. 1–245). This particular chapter of the Nāṭyaśāstra has attracted attention ever since Naidu, Naidu, and Pantulu published its translation into English, Tānḍavalakṇaṣam, in 1936. Since then there have been other translations of the Nāṭyaśāstra, among which the two volumes by Manmohan Ghosh, in 1951 and 1956 respectively, and different interpretations of the Karaṇas of chapter 4. Readings have drawn on the iconography of the Karaṇas as found at the temples at Thanjavur, Kumbakonam, and Chidambaram in southern India. The karana reliefs on the walls of Kumbakonam and Chidambaram have been identified by inscriptions found on each karaṇa slab, that give the Sanskrit name of the karaṇa as recorded in the Nāṭyaśāstra.

Bronislava Nijinska arrived in Warsaw during June of 1937 to accept the post of ballet mistress and choreographer for the Polish Ballet. She created a company, premiered five choreographies, and within four months brought the Polish Ballet to acclaim by capturing the Grande Prix award at the 1937 Paris International Exposition of Art and Technology Applied to Modern Life. Although her work for the Polish Ballet was prolific and significant, it had an early and unanticipated finale; Nijinska's three-year contract was prematurely terminated by the company's administration following her first year as artistic director. Little evidence remains to document this year of intense creativity and commitment. Unaware that she would not return to Poland after her first year, she left many of her personal records in Warsaw during the summer of 1938. The 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany resulted in the subsequent destruction of numerous precious source materials, including the choreographic notes, musical scores, and costumes of Nijinska's ballets.

In 1914, as Europe went to war, Serge Diaghilev launched an artistic revolution that profoundly altered the identity of the Ballets Russes. By and large, historians have dated this artistic shift to Parade. Unveiled in Paris in 1917, three years after Diaghilev's last full-scale season in the French capital, the work served public notice of the switch in his allegiance to the avant-garde. Parade came with impeccable modernist credentials: designs by Pablo Picasso, music by Erik Satie, a libretto by Jean Cocteau, program notes by Guillaume Apollinaire. Only Léonide Massine, the ballet's choreographer, was an unknown quantity, although by the early 1920s, his name, too, would be synonymous with modernism. It is not difficult to understand why historians have identified this work as the cradle of Ballets Russes modernism.

This article examines a pivoting moment in Chinese modern dance history—a four-year US-China dance exchange project known as the Guangdong Modern Dance Experimental Program that occurred as part of China's Reform Era cultural policies. Based on my intertwined positions of outside insider and artist-scholar, this article examines the interaction between competing kinesthetic values, pedagogical approaches, and conceptions of the modern crystallized in the Guangdong program, an inquiry that defies conventional narratives of Chinese modern dance. I propose the concept of “mis-step” as an aperture to rethink corporeal encounter and dance circulation in global spaces. “Mis-” indicates contingency beyond expectations; “-step” suggests productivity of that contingency. “Mis-step” thus highlights the rich potential of indeterminacy and proposes to theorize transnational dance history beyond “right” or “wrong.” Through mis-step, this article submits a sensual experience of global encounter that centers on perplexity. This awkward yet meaningful experience constructs a crucial component of globalization reality.

Popular dances encapsulate the aliveness of Africa's young. Radiating an Africanist aesthetic of the cool, these moves enflesh popular music, saturating mass media platforms and everyday spaces with imageries of joyful transcendence. This essay understands scriptive dance fads as textual and choreographic calls for public embodiment. I explore how three Nigerian musicians, and their dances, have wielded scriptive prompts to elicit specific moved responses from dispersed, heterogenous, and transnational publics. Dance fads of this kind productively complicate musicological approaches that insist on divorcing contemporary African music cultures from the dancing bodies that they often conjure. Taken together, these movements enlist popular culture as a domain marked by telling contestations over musical ownership and embodied citizenship.