The authors describe a model for teaching research and writing to graduate students in dance that they have been implementing and refining for the past five years. The model entwines scholarship, teaching, and artistry. Dils and Stinson reflect on two issues that arise from their teaching: embodiment as it relates to dance research and to online learning and maintaining high expectations for critical and reflective thinking in light of the developmental levels of students. Risner's survey on graduate dance programs in the United States is referred to within the presentation, including a brief excerpt from qualitative responses.

The May 1936 National Dance Congress and Festival, held at the 92nd Street Y, was organized by more than twenty representatives from various parts of the dance community and attracted fourteen hundred people, with two hundred performing in evening concerts. I explore the political concerns that underpinned the congress and investigate the programming as it reveals a sense of the period's modernism and within an understanding of contemporary immigration and ideas about diversity.

In writing this paper, we—Jill Crosby and Ann Dils—render into text six years of sporadic dialogues. Through our explanation and examination of the 1994 movement analysis and description project that began our exchanges and discussion of subsequent readings, we hope to explore important aspects of dance studies research. Our use and understanding of Laban-based movement analysis as a tool for understanding movement as it is felt and observed, awareness of concepts of dialogue and the dialogical process as potential frameworks, critical lenses, and theoretical bases for dance studies research, and adaptation of the interpretive paradigm to suit dance research are especially important to this exploration. Little of our text is written in dialogue form (Crosby:, Dils:); rather, we hope, by drawing examples from our project, Crosby's dissertation, and the works of other researchers, to capture the bubbling-up of understanding that stems from the cooperative and confrontational exchanges of dance studies research.

Over a three-month period in 1994, we conducted a movement analysis and description project as part of Crosby's work for her doctoral dissertation, “Will the Real Jazz Dance Please Stand Up? A Critical Examination of the Roots and Essence of Jazz Dance with Implications for Education.” Crosby investigated the aesthetic shapings of jazz expression inclusive of its West African roots from a cross-disciplinary perspective, using ethnographic methods as tools for understanding artistic form (Crosby 1995). An arts educator and dancer, Crosby wanted to establish a pool of descriptive and potentially inherent characteristics for music-based jazz dance. These characteristics would comprise a personal definition for the form and provide Crosby with a point of departure for a discussion of jazz as a movement tradition.

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:

The discussion that followed the original presentation of these papers at the 1989 conference speculated on the possibilities of radically reconstructing Tudor's work, somehow re-arranging the gender roles he assigns in order to comment on his covert construction of gender. Reactions varied: some conference participants asserted it was an interesting idea, but felt they wouldn't want to violate Tudor's intentions; others thought this was perfectly acceptable, that the definition of the work needed to be open-ended and include many possibilities. One audience member felt our panel might be considered an instance of the work, especially because Giffin and Maletic performed motifs from the dance.

These diverse opinions reflect alternate understandings of what our panel accomplished. On the one hand, our search for constitutive properties is a way of documenting and preserving Dark Elegies. The search for constitutive properties details what has happened in various performances and the content of the score, and also tries to recapture Tudor's thinking. Through his analysis of the score, Giffin discusses Tudor's choreographic constructions and distinctive ways of using the body.