This article is part of a larger work in progress in which I am exploring meanings of community, tradition, and performance practice among contra dancers, callers, and musicians, and looking at this material from a local, regional, and national perspective (1). In this article I analyze the contra dance world as a community built around expressive culture and discuss some of the ways in which community is formed on the dance floor and maintained through the regular repetition of dancing and music making at specific dance events. I will look at context as well as at aesthetic, behavioral, and social factors, in order to see how the processes of performance create multiple dimensions of meaning for those involved—processes that lead to the formation of community. Because participants are engaged with actions associated with creativity, identity, and learning, each will have his/her own experience of what this “community” means. The continuous interplay between individual experience and group interaction during performance, seen as a subtext to a relationship between marginal group and dominant culture, represents a complex cultural microcosm empowered by many voices.

Turns are an important part of dance vocabulary. Turns in place on one foot — pirouettes, attitude turns, and turns in arabesque, for instance — form a category of ballet movements that are difficult to learn well, and require considerable skill in control of the body.

Three characteristics of turns are important in the proper execution of the movement: body form, rate of turn, and balance. The aesthetic body form can be learned only by example and by careful criticism from a dance teacher. Turnout of the supporting foot or a straight horizontal leg in anarabesque turn are important aspects of a good turn in a purely artistic sense. But other properties of a turn, the most important of which are rate of turn and balance, are open to physical analysis, an understanding of which may give the dancer and dance teacher a better sense of the turning process.

Three considerations addressed here are the importance of the distribution of body mass around the rotation axis, the way the torque for the turn is exerted and angular momentum generated, and the way a dancer maintains balance over a supporting point. In order to investigate more carefully the way a dancer initiates a turn by exerting a torque on the floor, experiments were carried out in which this torque, and the resulting angular momentum of the dancer, could be measured.

To reenact nine solos Mary Wigman performed during her first U.S. tour (1930–31), Fabian Barba establishes a contract with the audience based on representational codes of modernist dance in the early twentieth century. As one enters the theater, a little program is found on one's seat with the intended course of the evening. The program mentions the place and date of the reenactment—in German, with an English translation, as it might have been during the American tours—but not the year. Reading it, we learn that six solos, Aus dem Tanzcyklus “Schwingende Landschaft” (From the Dance Cycle “Shifting Landscape“), dated 1929, will be performed. There will be an eight-minute intermission after which three other solos are to follow: two from Visions and one from Celebration. The program is printed in the typography of those days and the contractual agreement of the dance concert—written in small letters as is usually the case with contracts—is indicated at the bottom: “The audience is kindly asked not to leave the room during the intermission. At the end of the recital and upon demand from the public, two dances can be shown again as ‘encores.’”

This article compares Rudolf von Laban's and Mary Wigman's practices and theories of gestural flow with Walter Benjamin's theory of gesture as interruption. For Laban and Wigman, gesture mirrors a vitalist understanding of life that is based on the rediscovery of transhistorical continuities between human and cosmic energy. Benjamin's Brechtian gestures address inscriptions and manipulations of bodies, which provide comment on the conditions of society by subjecting to critique the essentializing aspects of historical and vitalist flow. Addressing in particular forms of vibration as both enriching and destabilizing the gestural from its margins, my article explores how vibratory energy indicates a self-reflexive theory of media, but also a revolutionary charge, in Benjamin; how it engenders a politically ambivalent process of transmission between dancers and audience in Laban; and how it becomes an actual mode of movement in Wigman. The historical inquiry contributes to a genealogy of vibration in contemporary dance.

Among all the arts in western culture, dance may have the most to gain from feminist analysis. Certainly the two are highly compatible. Dance is an art form of the body, and the body is where gender distinctions are generally understood to originate. The inquiries that feminist analysis makes into the ways that the body is shaped and comes to have meaning are directly and immediately applicable to the study of dance, which is, after all, a kind of living laboratory for the study of the body—its training, its stories, its way of being and being seen in the world. As a traditionally female-populated (but not necessarily female-dominated) field that perpetuates some of our culture's most potent symbols of femininity, western theatrical dance provides feminist analysis with its potentially richest material.

Personal Performance Practice (PPP) refers to a regular activity—differentiated from training and production—popular among contemporary dance artists. Against the backdrop of contemporary neoliberal working conditions, this article analyzes PPP by applying the ambivalent notion of “support” in order to show how PPP makes the daily work of dance visible, encouraging a discussion on the sustaining systems of dance. Framing this argument is the notion that in the long run, practice brings about shifts in style and in the aesthetics of dancing. The article thus calls for an acknowledgment of dance artists’ everyday work.

No critic of phenomenology, arguably, has been more influential in prefiguring recent discourses on power, gender, and sexuality that have emerged in dance studies in recent decades than the philosopher-historian-critic Michel Foucault. The number of dance scholars directly citing Foucault, and the number influenced indirectly by his ideas through intermediary theorists such as Judith Butler—perhaps the single most popular one—is so large as to require an essay of its own just to survey. Virtually every analysis of choreographic practice that has addressed these topics since the 1980s has drawn directly or indirectly on Foucault's theories. Indeed, the very mention of the term “discipline” in current dance scholarship (and many related fields as well) more or less automatically makes reference to Foucault's genealogical study of incarceration, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison, translated into English as Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison, and, in particular to the chapter, “Les corps dociles” or “Docile Bodies” (Foucault 1975, 137–171; 1975/1995, 135–170).

Reconstructing and citing historical dance pieces as well as making the dance stage a site for archiving dance performatively have become major trends in contemporary dance (as this issue of DRJ demonstrates). Contemporary choreographers have left behind the incessant striving to create new movements and instead are engaging in dialogue with the past. While the “avant-garde” in Western stage dance was once perceived as embodying the “new” and was believed to be different from dance forms considered marked by tradition, these demarcations are now being challenged by both dance historians and artists (Franko and Richards 2000; Burt 2003). What's more, reenactments increasingly destabilize distinctions between the artistic and academic fields as they highlight the performative nature of “doing history” and present modes of research that involve lectures, texts, and documentation in a stage setting. As such, the past is a playground for the present—a notion of history that is also encouraged academically by a critical historiography that reflects on the narrative structures implicit in doing dance history (White 1990; Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer 1999). History as well as the act of memory are now considered a process that “constitutes, stages, re-stages, and constantly modifies its object while simultaneously creating new models and media of commemorating” (Fischer-Lichte and Lehnert 2000, 14; my translation).

Twentieth century technology has given rise to new and exciting methods for the analysis of human motion. With the aid of the motion picture camera a dancer's kick can be frozen and details invisible in normal viewing can be isolated and analyzed. Electrical detecting devices can uncover secrets about the inner workings of the body, its nerves and muscles. Platforms sensitive to the changing dynamics of a movement can tell us how the body generates force, how it locomotes itself and creates artistic effects and qualities which were previously thought of as “mystical” and “denying natural laws”. Numerous ballet technique manuals offer explanations as to the correct execution of dance movements. Although these descriptions are largely in agreement with one another, they are often in conflict with kinesiological information about the general functioning of the human body. Little research exists in the specific area of kinesiology and dance.

It is therefore the goal of the present research to clinically examine one selected dance movement, the grand battement devant, in order to form a kinesiological model of its skeletal and muscular components. This information may help provide a means of assessing the great heritage of traditional ballet theory based largely on personal experience and trial and error, and form a foundation for new theory based on objective analysis. The problem was to discover skeletal and muscular patterns when the grand battement is performed with both legs parallel (patellae facing anteriorly), and with both legs “turned out” (femurs laterally rotated as much as possible at the hip joints).

This article deals with the representation of Kenyan national identity through dance. It analyses the reenactment of a series of ethnic dances at Bomas of Kenya, a cultural center located just outside Nairobi and part of the network of National Museums of Kenya. As an institution resulting from a strategic political investment in both Kenya's immaterial heritage and the tourist industry, since its inception in the early 1970s Bomas of Kenya has played an important role in conveying the idea of ethnic harmony and national unity. The comparison with Cut Off My Tongue (2009), the show by Kenyan writer and performer Sitawa Namwalie in which dance is interwoven with political satire to frame reflections on negative ethnicity, serves to highlight the implications that different approaches to dancing bodies, through such concepts as identity, embodiment, archive, and memory, could have for a meaningful political future.

This article interrogates “contact,” understood by Global North contemporary dance discourse as choreography that is mobilized by shifting points of physical touch between two or more bodies, by attending to inherent, and often ignored, power asymmetries that are foundational to such choreographic practices. This “unmaking of contact” is undertaken by deploying the lenses of race, caste, and gender in order to argue for an intersectional, intercultural and inter-epistemic understanding of “choreographic touch” that may or may not involve tactility. It starts by examining contact improvisation (CI), and its now ubiquitous choreographic manifestation of partnering, as an aesthetic that can work in colonizing ways on South Asian dancers who train in primarily solo classical dance forms. The article then moves on to place South Asian bodies, philosophies, and discourses at the heart of its interrogation of choreographic touch, and foregrounds the culturally specific politics and powers that govern them.

Despite Yvonne Rainer's subversive refusal to stage Trio A as a spectacle, to have it represent or narrate social structures, or to engage with the audience in a traditional manner, the landmarks of canonization have all been put upon it. The Banes-produced 1978 film of Rainer dancing Trio A was recently exhibited while the dance was performed live simultaneously by Pat Catterson, Jimmy Robert, and Ian White at the Museum of Modern Art, the institution that determines what constitutes important modernist and contemporary art in the United States and, indeed, the Western world. In conjunction with Rainer's famous NO Manifesto, Trio A appears in nearly every publication on so-called postmodern dance and art. Moreover, the key documentary on postmodern dance Beyond the Mainstream—containing Trio A—is screened in most dance history courses when postmodern dance is discussed. As a result, the choreography became not only a staple on syllabi in dance departments but also in disciplines such as gender studies, film and art history, or communications. Even Susan Au's Ballet and Modern Dance, a conservative historical text utilized in many dance history classes, defines Trio A as “one of the most influential works in the modern dance repertoire” (Au 2002, 155).

In this article, based on my dissertation, “A Dream Journey to the Unknown: Searching for Dialogue in Dance Education” (2003), I will describe several qualities, or themes, related to dialogue. These ideas may facilitate dialogue in dance education and bear significance for reflecting the nature of dialogical education more generally. In addition, my intent is to uncover the personal nature of my search for dialogue. Before describing the themes, I briefly outline the research process.

The process began in 1997 when I was invited to take part in an art education project that was situated in an elementary school in Helsinki, Finland. I was aware that I was about to turn back to something that I thought I had already left behind. I had recently completed another study concerning my own dance teaching practice (1996). I had joined the so-called teacher research movement with a desire to understand the dynamics of the teaching and learning situation in the context of dance from an experiential point of view.

In contemporary Cuba, a previously marginal cultural expression now publicizes new paradigms in a complex process of social change. Within institutional strategies of cultural preservation and re-education, rumba, a dance of predominantly lower class black-skinned Cubans in the nineteenth century, has emerged as a national symbol of twentieth-century Cuban society. The national status of rumba has been enhanced and institutionalized through a series of monthly public activities organized by the Castro government through the Ministry of Culture. Cuba has chosen to promote a new national and international image and it has done so through rumba more than through any other folkloric dance. Before the Revolution of 1959, Cuban ballet and modern dance received national acclaim while folkloric dances were not particularly encouraged to flourish. Since the Revolution, a shift of support and interest has occurred in Cuban cultural policies. Rumba, a dance and a dance complex, as I will discuss later, is now promoted to express identification with African-derived elements that permeate Cuban culture. It is supported to represent the interests of the working masses and to solidify participation of the artistic community in the social advancement of a new political system. Despite the appropriation of this important cultural expression of the masses by the socialist revolution, rumba is not common within all segments of the Cuban population. It remains a dance primarily performed by dark-skinned Cubans with relatively little direct participation from other segments of Cuban society.

Since 1979, rumba in Cuba has been promoted in ways that other dances have not. Other dances, such as conga and son, are easier to perform and involve the participation of a larger cross section of the total population. As rumba has been appropriated and formalized in its presentation to a national and international public, it has shifted from a spontaneous, improvisational dance to a prepared, manipulated dance. Yet, rumba continues to forcefully embody a significant aspect of national culture for the Cuban people. The goal of this paper is to deconstruct the meaning of rumba and its role in the forging of a new Cuban national identity.

In the mid-1990s several articles appeared in the dance literature calling for a greater alliance between dance scholarship and cultural studies. More recently, dance scholarship has come to be labeled “dance studies,” suggesting that such a link has occurred. Since interdisciplinarity is a key element of cultural studies, it is appropriate to investigate interdisciplinarity in dance studies by examining dance's relationship to cultural studies. This genealogical task, though, is not as straightforward as it might seem. Cultural studies' relationship to the disciplines has not been stable over its half-century of existence. Interdisciplinarity, tied so closely to cultural studies' idea of its own freedom and political mission, has proved difficult to hang onto—so difficult, in fact, that today some consider the field to be in crisis. To complicate matters further, dance and cultural studies developed along different paths; consequently, interdisciplinarity within dance studies is not always conceptualized in the way it is in cultural studies. Cultural studies was initially meant as a political and social intervention that purposefully avoided creating theories of its own, while dance research, long tied to the disciplines of history and anthropology, not only adopted many of the theories and methods of these fields but also developed theories and methods of its own as an aid in analyzing the human body in motion. Where and how, then, do dance and cultural studies meet on the grounds of interdisciplinarity? This is not an idle question; cultural studies has had a major impact on arts and humanities scholarship, and as cultural studies reaches a critical moment of reexamination, new questions arise as to the role of interdisciplinarity, both in cultural studies and in the fields it has so profoundly influenced.

Theater dance is an interdisciplinary form, and some of the most interesting advances in progressive and experimental dance work in recent years have been interdisciplinary in nature. Where Anglo-American dance scholarship is concerned, however, a “theoretical turn” that has led some dance scholars to develop interdisciplinary methodologies has proved highly controversial. Interdisciplinarity is in danger of becoming a specter haunting dance scholarship.

Dance has not been alone in finding this transition difficult. As art historian and cultural theorist Mieke Bal has recently noted, one challenge facing the academy today is to find “a theoretical link between linguistic, visual and aural domains that blend so consistently in contemporary culture but remain so insistently separated as fields of study in the academy” (Bal 1999a, 10). Where dance is concerned, corporeality needs to be added to Bal's list of domains. This essay explores some of the reasons underlying resistance among Anglo-American dance scholars to the use of interdisciplinary methodologies. By doing so it aims to give an account of the public space in which recent examples of theater dance from Europe and the United States map out complex webs of relationships between corporeal, linguistic, visual, and aural levels of signification.

In the following study, methods developed within feminist film theory of deconstructing the gaze are applied to “read” abhinaya (the narrational component in Indian classical dancing)(1) and the performer-audience relationship. The study has yielded an alternative model to Kaplan's model of an inevitable male gaze and a performance mechanism for generating transcendence. It also shows that decontextualised readings of dance can yield very different meanings from the readings that consider the religio-aesthetic environment of Indian dance. European-American perceptions informed by Freud and Lacan recognize the power of seeing and its relationship to knowing, so also do yogic theories of perception and the cosmological view of existence that informs the Indian dance. Examining one way of looking through another way of looking may yield fascinating connections and insights, but it also has limitations. The two perspectives cannot be equated. Each view has value-laden socio-cultural orientations which must be considered.

According to Indian theories of aesthetics and perception, looking (drishti) as evident in Indian Classical Dance, is integrally linked with cognizing form (rupa) and naming (nāma). Mastery of abhinaya necessarily involves the ability to direct the audience's sensibilities towards a particular perception through the use of eye movements. The eyes are used not just for “looking” at, or responding to another imaginary character. The focused gaze directs attention to an action, a place or a part of the body. This cues observers to “see” what they are supposed to see. Thus the spaces between the sounds of tatkar (rhythmic footwork) of the Kathak performer are emphasized and translated into a visual dimension, by swift directional changes of the performer's head and gaze. Occasionally the hands too will “draw” the pattern of the rhythms (2).