Ever since I was fourteen and read Tamara Karsavina's Theatre Street, I had wanted to visit the school that she described so endearingly in her autobiography. Finally, in 1973,1 was in Leningrad and had a chance to see what is now known as the Vaganova Choreographic Institute. After several engrossing hours of watching classes, I was called into the office where I was invited to ask questions but was first asked to listen to an explanation. “We know,” said the young man appointed as spokesman, “that you have visited the very modern new school that is now used by the Bolshoi Ballet. We want you to know that we, too, were offered a new building by the Soviet government, but we did not accept it. We told the government that, unlike Moscow, we have a great tradition that was created and nurtured within these walls. We are proud of this tradition and we want to remain here.”

If I had not already loved the Leningrad school because of Karsavina, I would have loved it then.

The film The Children of Theatre Street tries to capture some of this feeling of inheritance, and at times it succeeds. We see the rapt faces of the young students as they stand beneath portrait's of past masters who walked these same halls, beneath views of dancers who preceded them, perhaps at that same space at the barre. The face of tradition, like that of a parent, is both loving and demanding. The children are intensely aware of their responsibility; we respond to their consuming dedication as the film concentrates on the daily lives of two young students, Angelina Armeiskaya and Alec Timoushin. But watching moments of their classes, we long to see more of their dancing. Of course, it is interesting to see the school cafeteria and a dormitory bedroom, but a glimpse would have sufficed.

This essay is a descriptive analysis of a 2000 encounter with Mayan “mambo” dancing in a mountain community, an encounter that challenges assumptions about prevalent notions of exoticism, identity, and cultural authenticity. Traveling in Guatemala with a group of international scholars, I witnessed a public performance of the transnational mambo by costumed Guatemalans that was not mambo, not Mayan, and not social. Male performers, in celebration of Corpus Christi, dressed as Disney-style costume characters and executed routines to merengue music while nondancing participants watched the spectacle. This contradictory display of dancing encouraged me to reflect on the impact of popular social dance and to examine the complicated meanings communicated by performers who incorporate body-based art into indigenous social and economic paradigms. The performers' unique interpretation of mambo dance within the context of a public Corpus Christi festival underscored discrepancies between institutional perceptions of the mambo and the popular reuse of dance motifs. At the same time, the performance, which used clowning as a mechanism to engage the audience, inverted the solemnity of the religious feast day.

One of Antony Tudor's choreographic concerns is the emotional life and societal role of women. His best known early works, Lilac Garden (1936), Dark Elegies (1937), and Pillar of Fire (1942) explore the feminine realm and the differences in power between men and women that relegate women to their particular place in society. In both Lilac Garden and Pillar of Fire the central issue is the difficulty women face in finding romantic love in polite society. In both pieces women face uncertainty and confusion until the right man steps in to fulfill their destiny. In Dark Elegies, gender is not the central issue, but the scenario is the same: underneath the explorations of personal and communal grief, the struggle to cope with the loss of young children, is a clear and critical thread of gender differentiation.

Tudor connects gender with the ways people handle grief—women get lost in grief, men cope with it—and with the leadership roles in the Dark Elegies community. Men are the driving forces in the community. They are the comforters and have the capacity to lead the group through the stages of the grieving process into resignation. Women are the passive members of the community. They can neither help themselves nor each other, but must depend on their men for solace and salvation.

More than fifty years have passed since the American premiere of Stravinsky's Les Noces, which opened on April 25, 1929 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. Generally overshadowed by the Bronislava Nijinska version (Paris, 1923) and by the later Jerome Robbins version (New York, 1965), the 1929 production presented a significantly different interpretation of the Stravinsky piece. The choreographer was Elizaveta Anderson-Ivantzova (1890–1973), former prima ballerina at the Bolshoi, whose life span parallels almost exactly that of Nijinska (1891–1972) and whose career intersects with that of Nijinska by virtue of her choreographing the second version. Of concommitant interest is that the first two versions of Les Noces were choreographed by women in an age when women were less than likely to be engaged as choreographers, a fact not unnoticed in 1929. Yet, little is known of this and other aspects of the production today. An examination, therefore, of the background, the production itself, and the choreography in particular is needed to describe, as clearly as the evidence will allow, what the 1929 production was like and how it differed from the better known version of 1923.

The little attention given to the New York premiere seems to have had less to do with its original performance than with a subsequent indifference to it.

While considerable scholarly attention has begun to turn to Baroque dance, researchers have most frequently investigated French or English sources. The Netherlands, strongly influenced by both of these nations, has perhaps been overlooked because of its small size, its seemingly minor role relative to larger powers in world affairs in this period, and the difficulty of non-Dutch scholars with the language. Nevertheless, the flourishing Dutch court, the nation's extensive commercial activity, and the cultural wealth of the Netherlands make research into the theatre and dance of this period rewarding and enlightening. Further, the excellent research facilities available in the Netherlands make research in that country a scholar's delight. The intention of this study is to document the dancing activities of the Dutch court, to contrast these with dancing in a distant province of the land, and to explore the effects of religious attitudes on both of these situations.

A recent, inconspicuous story in the newspaper, one of our most revered keepers and transmitters of traditions, added to our cosmology. It reported “galaxies formed at high rates when the universe was half to one-fourth its current age—earlier than thought. If one assumes the universe is 15 billion years old … this discovery would put the galactic baby boom at about 8 billion—11 billion years ago…. Astronomers are able to witness galactic births because light takes so long to reach Earth, but they've not seen them on the scale reported in the new findings—namely, 40 cosmic infants” (Anonymous 1995).

This carrier of tales, the newspaper, also reports “America Online has been offering Road Trips since June, with customized interactive trips through its own areas and sites on the World Wide Web. The service allows users to designate favorite places while being able to chat in real-time with friends about the experience…. The Internet is a kind of strange, scary place and [Road Trips] can make it more friendly” (Haring 1995 ).

Theoretical physicist Stephen W. Hawking writes that “life, at least as we know it, can exist only in regions of space-time in which [there are] one time and three space dimensions” (1988:165) (1). Space-time is ever fascinating to us humans because it is where we live, and its dimensions continue to expand.

Dance critic Walter Terry was in the audience the evening of Rosalind Pierson's last, glorious performance with Virginia Tanner's Children's Dance Theatre (CDT). In his review for the New York Herald Tribune of that July 1953 Jacob's Pillow performance, Terry discussed the girls' connections to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, described the outdoor performance setting, the program, and the children as “wonderfully disciplined yet gloriously free in movement.” He concluded his performance description with this paragraph:

In a now classic study Mitchell demonstrated that dances quite beside their aesthetic interest offer important insight into social structural processes. Dances characteristic of the transitional period in Africa frequently offer valuable insights into patterns of changing social organization and into the cultural perspectives of the participants. I am going to scrutinize here some features of dances now being exchanged in Western Equatorial Africa—in particular among the Pahouin peoples or Yaounde-Fang speakers of northern Gabon, Southern Cameroons and Equatorial Guinea. These peoples traditionally had simple non-market economies. In recent years they have been brought rapidly into a modern economy through the introduction of cash crops and migrant labor. The question arises: what is being exchanged in the distribution of these dances and what is the consequence of this exchange? In a transitional economy there are almost surely other values in transaction than those measurable in modern currency.