Sylphides and wilis, white gauze and moonlit glades: these are the stereotypical images of the Romantic ballet. A cursory look at the lithographs of the period leaves the viewer with visions of an airy-fairyland far removed from industry, labor, colonialism, or any of the bigger and beastlier concerns of the early nineteenth century. But despite its bias towards otherworldliness, the Romantic ballet was not entirely divorced from the concerns of its time. It shared many interests with the drama, literature, and fine arts of the period and like them drew many of its themes from the material world, although it tended to select and exploit these themes for their color and spectacle rather than utilize them to convey sociological truths or instigate reform. An example of such a “realistic” ballet is Jules Perro's Catarina, whose protagonist is a more robust creature than the sylphs and fays that dominated the period: a female bandit.

In 1700 the London theatrical world was in crisis. The quality of English plays had deteriorated during the 40 years of restored Stuart rule. Playwrights, believing themselves to be working in the tradition of the finest Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic poets, were churning out ranting tragedies, stripped of the subtle heroes and comic relief of Shakespeare, and amoral comedies, rarely showing the sparkling wit of Jonson. The two London theatre companies were locked in bitter competition for the small, mostly aristocratic audience, and managers compromised the poets and actors by introducing into their plays music-hall entertainments, from ventriloquists to tumblers. At the center of the crisis, however, was not the lack of playwrights of genius nor a fickle, world-weary audience; rather British drama was seriously weakened by a tradition that had since 1660 allowed the play to become the vehicle not only for spoken drama, but for large quantities of music and dance as well.

This paper announces a forthcoming bibliography for dance scholars and details some of the major sources it will list. The publication originated as a bibliography for a course on French music and dance taught at the University of California, Riverside, by Dr. Judith Schwartz, Wendy Hilton (guest artist), and the author. It has since taken on larger dimensions, including the cooperation of another scholar, Dr. Meredith Little of Stanford University. The collaborators sought to develop a definitive bibliography on French dance of the period 1643-1793.

The bibliography will be published by Joseph Boonin, Inc., in the series Music Indexes and Bibliographies, George R. Hill, General Editor. The full title is French Court Dance and Dance Music during the Reigns of Louis XIV-Louis XVI: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources. Part I contains printed and manuscript collections of notated chorégraphies, and an index of musical incipits for notated chorégraphies. Part II contains writings about dance and dance notation. Part III contains writings about dance music, with a selective list of composers of dance music in the French manner.

What, if anything, relates the dances of the Muslim peoples to the other arts produced by the culture to which they belong? Is there a community of belief and an aesthetic identity strong enough among the Muslim peoples, despite their wide geographic dispersion, that would result in a homo-geneous community of artistic production and appreciation? Is dance among the Muslims an art which, like the visual and aural arts, shares characteristics which reveal a consistency and unity despite regional differences? Or, on the contrary, is “Islamic” only a convenient label for an amorphous body of dance phenomena existing among peoples who share religious beliefs, but among whom little penetrating cultural affinity is revealed in their dance?

Before attempting to answer the above questions, we must call attention to the fact that dance did not play the important aesthetic role in Islamic civilization that it played in some other civilizations (e.g., in Hindu culture, among the Amerindians, and in Western Europe-America during the last few centuries). The Muslims were never able to quite resolve the uncertainty which they, as a people, felt over the legitimacy of dance. There are various explanations for this problem regarding dance. Perhaps all of them can claim some validity.

The medium of dance can refine its own instrument; the dancer gains fuller possession and utility of the body, of sensibilities, the uniqueness of total self. The rational and intuitive begin to flow freely into each other; the equipment becomes more subtle. Dance can thus be one more way, and a potent one, of enabling a human being to command more fully his powers.

Philosophical statements such as this exemplify the emphasis the dancer must put upon the ideal as well as upon the practical application of the real. Dance technique, how-ever, exhibits the gap between fact and theory. Today, the dance instructor has available literature related to kinesiology and research methods that could be of help to improve the theory underlying dance technique; but it appears that full advantage has not been taken of these resources to correct existing errors in technique.

This essay set out to explore the paradox of the Middle Eastern woman. The dichotomy of concealment vs. display is a stereotype in western culture and a function of sexual division in modern Arabian society. From the Saudi point of view, seclusion is necessary in the public domain whereas in the private domain display is appropriate. Private space is usually female space. It logically follows that belly dancing, a display mechanism, is done in female space by females for other females when the audience includes nonkin.

In the college community, “proper” belly dancing (as defined by the Saudi subgroup of the community Dhahran) can take place only under certain cultural conditions. When constraints break down, both the style and the message change. There are two alternative explanations for the aberrant performance. It may be considered (1) a simple example of deviance, i.e., a violation of the rules, or (2) an example of culture change in mental notions and hence “airport art.” No attempt has been made to assign priority to either explanation or to say that one is more correct. Deviance compounded and perpetuated is culture change. Also, it is necessary to remember that in a multicultural community the same behavior may be categorized differently by different subgroups. Little is to be gained, except, perhaps, a false simplification of the data, by assigning priority to either of the analytical or folk interpretations.

The fourteenth-century Italian lived during turbulent and catastrophic times. Internecine warfare between Guelphs and Ghibellines, reprisals against foraging neighbors, conflict between church and state, and, as though political and religious dissension were not enough, the dreaded black plague, which descended over Europe periodically with devastating results, added to human misery.

Yet, in the face of such calamities Italy covered herself with glory, for in that century the arts blossomed as never before. In musical productivity no other country could boast of over 700 compositions during the period known as the Ars Nova (1330–1420). Francesco Landini, the most famous composer and organist, and a contemporary of Boccaccio, alone has left us over 150 compositions. The composition of music was encouraged by advances in musical notation, such as those described by Marchettus da Padua in his treatise Pomerium (1314), which made possible the precise recording of a much wider range of rhythmic figures.

Dance in a particular cultural tradition may be analyzed from any of several different perspectives, which may be classified in two categories. In the first, analysis may be structural or stylistic. By structure I mean the set of relationships among discrete movements characteristic of a dance tradition; it is similar to grammar in language (cf. Woodard 1976). Style refers to the general qualities of a dance tradition or classes of the tradition: tempo, energy level, parts of the body used, characteristic number of dancers, smoothness or abruptness of movements, body decorations and objects manipulated in the dance (cf. Lomax 1968:222-273). Although this category is concerned with analysis of dance qua dance, it may justifiably be argued that a kind of meaning inheres in pure structure and style, and therefore that their analysis is an explication of meaning.

Other ways of analyzing dance in a cultural tradition approach meaning in a different way. Meaning is sought in the relationship between structure and style on one hand and other aspects of the culture on the other.

W. Thomas Marrocco has shown the types of music and dance that are discussed in Boccaccio's Decameron; I should like to present some examples of these art forms, re-created as accurately as we are able to do so, in the form of an entertainment which might have amused the ladies and gentlemen in that secluded villa on the outskirts of Florence in 1348.

In re-creating dances of the past from written documents, two principles must be borne in mind: first, that the records reflect the dance of an earlier period, for the steps and movements must have been tried, learned, and proven successful before a dancing master (or academician) would have deemed them worthy of recording; second, the materials preserved were obviously quite popular in the courts and hence were likely the most “danceable” compositions available. Therefore, it is the task of the reconstructor of these movements to discover the elements that were exciting and appealing to the dancers (and spectators) of the period and to make these elements come to life for contemporary audiences. Besides the obvious necessity of translating verbal instructions for steps and movement patterns and setting these to music, many factors enter into this elusive performance task: the size of the dance area usually employed; the shape, length and weight of clothing worn while dancing; the style and maneuverability of shoes, hats, swords, capes and other accoutrements; body positions generally in vogue as well as attitudes towards the human body, i.e., what was and what was not generally acceptable in terms of the good manners of the day.

The Grand Union was a collective of choreographer/performers which during the years 1970–76 made group improvisations embracing dance, theater, and theatrics in an ongoing investigation into the nature of dance and performance. Grand Union's identity as a group had several sources: some of the nine who have been its members had known each other for as long as ten years when the group formed; they had seen and performed in each other's works since the Judson Church days. Most had studied with Merce Cunningham, and three had danced in his company.

One important and rich source for the group's genesis was Yvonne Rainer's work Continuous Project-Altered Daily (CP-AD). To understand the course of Grand Union's activities, it is useful to look first at the changing nature of CP-AD. Rainer began the piece in 1969, and in March 1970 presented a definitive version at the Whitney Museum. The performers were Becky Arnold, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, Barbara Lloyd (now Dilley), Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer and various readers.