The purpose of this study was to examine basic psychophysiological response levels in professional ballet dancers and the effects of different performances on these responses. Electrical activity of the trapezius muscle, blood pressure, heart rate, and skin-conductance level were measured during a resting state and before, during, and after rehearsals, first-night performances, and shows performed from 10 to 50 times. Subjective mental tension during performance was evaluated, as was performance success. The influence of sex, age, experience, artistic level, role, and the type of performance were studied.

Principals had less tension in the trapezius muscle in the resting state than corps de ballet dancers and soloists. Principals' psychophysiological activation during performances was increased more than that of soloists and corps de ballet dancers as compared with baseline values. The type of performance influenced subjective mental tension and physiological responses. During the last general rehearsals (with an audience) physiological activation was higher than during first-night and other performances. Age and experience did not affect physiological activation. Sex differences in subjectively estimated success and mental tension, as well as in physiological measurements, were small.

1947 was the year Jack Cole created Sing, Sing, Sing to the recording made famous by “King of Swing” Benny Goodman and his Big Band. “[We] kicked, spun, slammed and slid on our knees for seven minutes in true Jack Cole style,” said Rod Alexander about the dance performed by the Jack Cole Dancers when it premiered in New York at the Latin Quarter (Loney 1984, 85). “Everyone came off the floor, gasped, and threw up. It was a ball-breaker, a number that asked the impossible,” remembered Buzz Miller (Miller 1992). Described by critics as “a dance in the style of Harlem” (Martin 1947) and “a primitive dance of primitive ecstasy” (Terry 1947b), Sing, Sing, Sing was a stylized Lindy Hop, or jitterbug, that popular swing-era social dance that flung and flipped partners into “breakaway” solos and daring “air” steps. More than a step, the jitterbug was a style, a state of mind: a violent, even frenzied athleticism made it hazardous, exciting, sexual, cathartic; the jitterbugger became synonymous with the “hepcat,” a swing addict. Sing, Sing, Sing, however, was not a pat reproduction of the jitterbug. Cole had captured and distilled its energetic spirit. He codified its movement, disciplined its form, tamed and readied it for the stage.

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.

English sociologist of art Janet Wolff says that all art is situated both historically and in relation to the status groups that produce it and share a taste for it. Tracing the relationships between the situation and the art is the difficult task of the sociology of art.

The theoretical model used by art historians results in their focusing heavily on the body of art itself, showing how styles influence and develop out of each other. Alternatively, the “interpretive” theory of anthropologist Clifford Geertz—described in his essay, “Art as a Cultural System” —emphasizes the idea that the meaning system of the art participates in the larger meaning system of the culture: the larger system provides the key to the art.

This article questions how the historically revisionist history of “the West,” as initiated by Thomas Hanna, informs systems of inclusion, exclusion, and power within the field of “somatics.” Hanna, who coined the term somatics, sought in so doing to root the burgeoning field in a “Western” tradition of philosophy and science that he fundamentally misconstrued. Meanwhile, Hanna's work to formulate a historically and philosophically Western basis of a somatic field continues to provide cover for white somatic practitioners whose institutionally minted somatic forms extract philosophical and practical knowledge from non-white body-mind practices internationally. Subsequent accounts of somatics consequently articulate both the Western history of somatics and its “non-Western influences” on false grounds. This article theorizes the colonial and Western supremacist holdovers within a somatic field that nonetheless gives lip service to postcolonial discourse. Finally, by rebuilding an approach to the “deep time” history relating sōma and somatics, this article proposes how the field of somatics could reground its understanding of the “first-person experience of the body,” informed by Afropessimism, Black Accelerationism, and Afrofuturist thought.

In this article, I examine the work created by Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite for her company Kidd Pivot, placing it within a larger tradition of dance-theater that combines text and movement, and traffics openly in big emotions and even bigger narrative structures. I argue that Pite's use of text does not just offer a way into, or a representational gloss on, her otherwise abstract movement vocabulary, but also a means of affectively and even kinesthetically re-experiencing that movement post-performance. I focus on Pite's three most recent evening-length programs for Kidd Pivot, and on the different modes of textual address employed therein (voice-over narration, projection, live speech). My goal in analyzing the choreographer's narrative scripts alongside her physical ones is to highlight, on the one hand, the materiality of words within the total sensory environments created by Pite through her dance-theater performances and, on the other, to emphasize their consequentiality in helping to make somatic sense of one's memories of those performances.

This article examines Antonia Mercé La Argentina's stay in Manila in 1929 and the creation of her solo La Cariñosa as a case study to analyze the place of Spanish dance as both colonizing and colonized on the basis of the cultural legacies since Romanticism, when Spanish dance was an exoticized and racialized “Other dance” in relation to the canon and hierarchies of Western dance. La Argentina's supposed homage to the Filipino people in the creation of a solo that stylized their national dance performed for Western audiences continued the exercise of colonial power. The result of those processes of appropriation would be the creation of a repertoire of “Hispanic essences” of that constructed postcolonial “community”; a catalogue equivalent to the rock-hard monumentality of a Hispanidad—the commemoration through Columbus statues and colonial architecture—now celebrated from the body, its performativity, its symbolism, and its gesture.

One of the most widespread and dramatic styles of folk dance performance throughout much of Europe over the past six centuries has been sword dancing, specifically the linked styles—often called “hilt and point” or “chain” sword dances—which were first reported in the late Middle Ages and are still practiced in a number of countries. In these dance styles, a group of dancers, normally ranging from four or five up to twenty-odd, moves through various figures, minimally lines and circles but often using very complex and demanding movements. The dancers are connected to one another by swords, or sword-like implements of metal or wood, which they usually hold with the hilt in their right hands and the point of the next dancer's sword in their left. The dancers have traditionally been men or boys, often members of a guild or profession, or in rural areas, the men of a parish or district.

The dances are usually presented in the winter, most often during Carnival time or Shrovetide in much of northern and central Europe, or on Boxing Day or Plough Monday in England. But they might also take place on a local patron saint's feast day or other popular holiday. In Spain and Portugal the dances have been performed at Corpus Christi, in the summer. In many countries they have been presented to entertain royalty, wealthy tourists, folklore collectors, or other distinguished audiences. Particular speeches, songs, or short dramas have sometimes been associated with these dances. It has not been uncommon for a piece of mock combat to take place, perhaps with a fencing scene. A dramatic moment in some dances comes when the swords are locked or laid together. They then can be displayed in a star shape to the audience; used as a platform for a performer to stand on; or placed around a performer's neck, for an “execution”, sometimes followed by a “resurrection.” Nonetheless, the emphasis and originality of this style of dancing lies in the linked movements of the dancers, connected by their swords.

Listening to the work presented at the 2001 meeting of the Congress on Research in Dance, “Transmigratory Moves,” one could not help noticing that both established and emerging dance scholars were in the process of attempting to find a fuller and more accurate way of understanding the relationship between global political and economic forces and movement praxis. The following articles (all extended versions of work presented at the conference) exemplify different aspects of these new initiatives in our field. As Shanti Pillai points out in her piece, the term “globalization” has tended to provoke two kinds of responses: either panic over the global imposition of American corporate culture, or else celebration of cultural hybridity and the resilience of indigenous forms. Both of these responses can often present a reductive view of what are, in fact, highly complex phenomena. All three of the articles presented here attempt a more nuanced narrative of the effects of traveling choreographic and movement practices.

What lever of power do Ubakala women have when their society traditionally requires them to leave their birthplace to live among strangers in a situation which excludes them from formal political and religious decision-making? The answer is dance! And when the messages of the dance go unheeded, the women have been known to resort to less peaceful persuasion. The Nigerian Women's War of 1929, which I describe later, is the most notable case.

The Ubakala people of eastern Nigeria (now Imo State) trace family descent on the father's side. Women leave their natal home upon marriage to live among their husband's kin, many of whom may be strangers. Another indicator of apparent male domination is the exclusion of women from the formal, traditional political and ritual decision-making bodies. Most women's activities center on the domestic scene, agricultural fields, and the market network. However, Ubakala women are not merely subordinate domestic creatures of exchange and family alliances. They also provide men with mates, privileges in a new group (husbands gain special support from a wife's family), and labor. Ubakala recognize that female fertility and energies complement male virility and strength in human and economic production. Furthermore, women have prestige and power apart from that of their husbands: achieving wealth, developing persuasive verbal eloquence, and bearing many offspring are indicators of a woman's success. With these assets women past menopause may even attend men's political meetings if they choose. Women have their own groups and leaders which are considered powerful amongst both themselves and the men. Moreover, women may assert themselves and become especially visible in dance-play performance.