As the classical Indian dance form Bharatanatyam globalizes, it suffers under the gravitas of “unbroken tradition.” To numerically characterize tradition in contemporary India, surveys were administered to 212 practitioners on execution, values, knowledge, and pedagogy. Statistical analysis revealed extensive diversity, lack of a consistent core, and fundamental drivers of variation.

In “Dance Narratives and Fantasies” Angela Mc Robbie writes that for generations of women dance has represented “an arena for self expression … away from the difficulties of everyday life. … a symbolic escape route from the more normative expectations of young women.” “I dance because it … makes me feel free,” writes Ms Mae, one of twenty seniors who participated in Work It On Out, a community dance project that brought elders together with dance majors at Northwest Vista College. Sharing dances and stories about dance, we would form a unique intergenerational community to celebrate a woman's ongoing love affair with dance. Though dance is not something that old and young typically share, the exuberance in the simple acts of moving together created instant rapport. With Aretha crooning “freedom …” in the background, looking good and shaking our shoulders and hips was a “fem-positive” message of grace, dignity, and strength over circumstance, signified by the freedom of the body.

The Chinese tradition of female foot binding dates back thousands of years and has had a profound impact on the status and expectations of Chinese women well into the twentieth century. This paper explores the cross-cultural collaboration between a male Chinese choreographer and a female American dancer and the intersection of metaphoric movement with female identity in Er-Dong Hu's choreographic work, 3” Golden Lotus (2007). Addressing a personal and cultural history, Hu offers a gallery of kinesthetic images that portray the imposed practice of foot binding. What is revealed is one dancer's psychological journey as she follows in the tiny and excruciating footsteps of her female ancestors, 3” Golden Lotus serves as a choreographic springboard for investigating not only the Chinese tradition of bound feet but also its counterparts in other times and cultures, all of which represent a global subjugation of the woman's body.

The Dutch dancer Mata Hari (alias Margaretha Geertruida Zelle) has achieved an iconic status within twentieth-century dance history, partly due to her execution as a German spy in 1917. Although she lacked significant dance training, she successfully performed her works, primarily in eclectic oriental styles, before European audiences. My discussion considers Mata Hari's contributions against the backdrop of the pre–World War I European dance scene. It specifically explores the ideological and aesthetic framework within which she was embedded as a female artist in the context of related concurrent dance trends. Drawing on feminist theories, orientalism and postcolonialism (Edward Said), the paper examines how Mata Hari's on- and off-stage personae conformed to certain stereotyped images of women whilst also subverting social conventions.

This presentation deals with the current status of dance studies in Germany, focusing particularly on the situation in Baden-Württemberg, the home state of the internationally renowned Stuttgart Ballet. Whereas German dance companies enjoy some of the highest subsidies in the world, and freelance dancers in Germany benefit from privileges in the German social system, dance is not an independent subject of study at any level of the German educational system. The strong discrepancies in educational, cultural, and social policy on dance are indicative of the limits to and disagreements within symbolic meaning ascribed to dance. The relevant areas of policy will be presented, as well as the historical factors in the development of these discrepancies. A discussion of the role of gendering in the ascription of symbolic meanings to dance follows, especially considering current developments regarding community building and social justice.

Bellydancing is largely misunderstood and stereotyped. Few realize that it is an expressive, ancient, and woman-centered genre of movement, rooted in Middle/Near Eastern folk tradition and culture. Not surprisingly, it has received scant scholarship despite its increasing popularity throughout the world. This paper offers a feminist critique of hegemonic understandings of bellydance, based upon ethnographic research on American women's experiences. Findings are organized along five themes: discovery (of the dance and of self); healing (repair and respite from illness, injury, and victimization); spirituality (connectivity to each other, a higher power, and divine femininity); sisterhood (community, specifically woman-space); and empowerment (omnipresent sense of pride and self-confidence). I argue that bellydance is too easily dismissed as a means through which women are objectified via patriarchal views of beauty, sexuality, and performativity. These may be understood as byproducts of Western Orientalist renderings of the Middle/Near East and contextualized within our contemporary antifeminist society.

Traditionally, dance learning has involved two modes of delivery: visual and verbal instruction. A teacher explains and corrects, demonstrates, and gives tactile feedback to teach students about ideas through movement. She may find it difficult to contextualize concepts through verbal explanation alone and could spend hours searching for appropriate supplements. Even then, students unfamiliar with dance vocabulary and uncomfortable with abstract movement could run into frustration through this limited approach. Education requires a variety of stimuli, and dance education in particular can benefit greatly from the advantages of online learning tools. This presentation will show you how dance educators can easily incorporate twentyfirst-century technologies into their classrooms, thereby enhancing students' comprehension of theories such as feminism.

On July 17, 2007, Byron Garcia, Cebu provincial security consultant, uploaded the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center inmates' performance of Michael Jackson's iconic, record-breaking music video “Thriller,” which has gained enough popularity to be ranked You-Tube's fourth all-time favorite video. I ask how 1,500 Cebuano prisoners performing “Thriller” hold the global gaze so captive? Also, how do issues of sexual, racial, and cultural desire and anxiety inform “Thriller” in both content and reception? I analyze the filmed “Thriller” dance in Cebu in order to open up its ambivalent success as explicated through issues of mimicry, choreography, and reception. I argue that “Thriller” takes part in a century-long conversation on Philippine representation, discipline, and imperial meanings. What subjects are formed through this experiment designed to literally choreograph discipline onto “deviant” bodies? Finally, when situating this user-generated spectacle in the contexts of Filipino diaspora, postcolonialism, and bakla performance, what epistemological shifts do we make from the gaze-spectacle binary?

Jazz dance has come to be recognized as a serious and significant art form. Eventually, a path was forged by a few jazz dance pioneers who developed and codified their movement methodology and inscribed their styles on other dancers through training programs and choreography. Presently, Gus Giordano is one of four twentieth-century dance artists who are considered pioneer figures in systemizing jazz dance. This kinesthetic and detailed “reading” of elements of his technique will reveal how Giordano's fashioning of diverse cultural components has had an empowering effect upon the female dancer and enables us to make certain assumptions about how Giordano's technique affects her perception of herself and of her place in the world.

This paper presents updates from my ongoing ethnographic study into the lived experience and worldviews of eight- to eleven-year-old girls in the United Kindom and responds to my 1999 Selma Jeanne Cohen award-winning paper, “Respect, Antipathy, and Tenderness: Why Do Girls ‘Go to Ballet’?” History has moved very fast: technologies have transformed the daily lived experience of children, now supersaturated with images and with access to communities far beyond their physical and cultural environment. The paper reports on the girls' assessment of their experience and considers whether the girls' bodies are being re-choreographed by an unprecedented excess of images of bodies and ways of moving, very different from and potentially more powerful than those they encounter in their own cultural setting.

This paper critically analyzes audience responses to Ananya Dance Theatre's work Pipaashaa: Extreme Thirst. Ananya Dance Theater intervenes in colorblind racial politics through casting only women and girls of color. Different responses by audiences of different social locations constitute critical discourses about race and social justice—catalysts for personal and social transformation. An examination of the discourse around Pipaashaa demonstrates that materiality of both performing and viewing bodies are important factors in creating meaningful art that envisions and inspires change.

Cognitive neuroscience is an area that helps us to enlarge our knowledge of how movement is perceived and how we can understand the process of kinesthetic empathy. In this article I will analyze the connections between the visual input while watching a dance performance, the motor memory, the awareness of movement sensation, and emotional experiences. Experiments done on monkeys by Rizzolatti et al. gave insight in the working of the brain while watching dance. He discovered activity of neurons, which he called mirror neurons. Many experiments followed by neuroscientists and psychologists like Keysers, Bekkering, and Calvo–Merino. In this article I will use research results from neuroscience, as well as results from my own empirical studies. Those results give us more insight in the mechanisms active in the process of kinesthetic empathy, which can be helpful for choreographers interested in involvement strategies on a movement level.

In the field of dance studies much discourse surrounds notions of gender identity and women's rights within Western dance traditions. One group of scholars asserts that early modern dance practice successfully resisted patriarchal notions. Another contends that early modern dance perpetuated traditional assumptions. A third perspective proposes that early modern dance realized a simultaneous reiteration and subversion of traditional gender roles. In similar fashion, this paper delineates the parameters of a growing subset in contemporary dance and religious practice, the field of contemporary professional Christian dance, and explores the ways in which these groups reify traditional gender roles through choreographed depictions of rigid gender binaries while simultaneously subverting them through the introduction of the female body and the female voice into the traditionally male-dominated Protestant worship space. In terms of its relevance to global feminisms, contemporary professional Christian dancers reify and subvert traditional gender roles on a global scale through international touring and arts-based missionary outreach programs.

A study and comparison of works by two creators of ritual performance—Anna Halprin and Lin Lee-Chen—provide insight into Richard Schechner's efficacy-entertainment continuum as well as how ritual manifests in contemporary performance. Through a close reading of the structure and performance quality of Lin's Miroirs de Vie (Jiao) and Halprin's Circle the Earth “Dancing with Life on the Line,” I look at both artist's efforts and results in creating ritual performance and illustrate what I believe to be their distinctive features. Contextualization of the work and the artists' intentions shed light on the possibility or scope of change effected by their creations. While Lin's highly stylized large-scale dance-dramas in many senses cannot be compared to Halprin's nature-oriented participatory community rituals, commonalities in these two works show a strong emphasis on bodily experience, indicating embodiment as fundamental in creating transformative performance.

This essay uses ballet as an example of how dance can be rooted in a discourse of difference that women must learn to overcome. Contributing to the growing research on ballet produced by Jennifer Fisher (and others), this article explores the practice of ballet from the perspective of three female students enrolled in a university-level intermediate ballet class. Based on ethnographic material that was brought together by observing the body practices in the ballet classroom and interviewing the students about their experience with ballet, I explore the intersection between ballet and the lives of the female participants. In describing how the students understand their bodies in relation to the rigid structures of ballet, I show that it is precisely those structures that imbue the students with a sense of agency and self-expression. I also reveal that by conforming to the structures of ballet, the students are achieving higher levels of thinking that allow them to negotiate their everyday lived experiences.