A dynamic, reflexive relationship exists between bodies and space as humans both respond to and mold the world around them, and vice versa. Demonstrating this body–space relationship as one of embodiment, site dance holds great potential for engaging community, activating public space, and affecting change. By placing dance within the lived experience, site dance empowers audiences to recognize their roles as active agents shaping the non-static entity of space, and thereby it can be used to engender new relationships to places within a community.

In the following paper, I argue that The Greek Depression is the inevitable outcome of synthetic politics that understand difference through identical opposition. It is my contention that dancing, as an embodied praxis embedded within present sociopolitical territories and stratified actualities, envelops potentiality for what Deleuze and Guattari call de-stratification and de-territorialization. Drawing from their work, I call for a neo-realist understanding of the virtual capacities of the dancing body, so we can move history beyond ordinarily conceived politics and introduce not yet imagined body politics that still remain uncaptured.

The educational system introduced in Greece during the liberation, a period known as the Bavarian Regency (1833–1862), had been, more or less, a copy of the corresponding German system of this period. Koula Pratsika (1899–1984), who established modern dance and professional dance studies in the country, participated in the Delphic festival in 1927 and was influenced by Eva Palmer. She also had been influenced by the 1930s Hellenistic ideology writers and artists. Pratsika was trying to find and develop a dance reflecting Greek tradition, revitalized and encouraged by the ancient spirit. She was inspired by Duncan regarding ancient dance as well as by many aesthetic movements, including German modern dance and the Dalcroze School where she studied. Pratsika invited German dancers to give seminars and performances in Athens. This paper will examine the birth of Greek modern dance since the beginning of the twentieth century and the influence of German culture and dance.

Simona Bertozzi is an Italian dancer, choreographer, and performer based in Bologna, Italy. From 2008 to 2012, she worked on the project Homo Ludens. I propose this project, composed of four performances, as a case study that will investigate the multifaceted term “presence” within the context of dance. As a result of my research, I make an argument that a definition of presence, defined as a tension between motion and stillness, can be founded on Domenico da Piacenza's treatise Dela Arte di Ballare et Danzare (c. 1455).

In Athenian classical theater (especially in Dionysian choruses; the tragic in Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides; the satyric in Euripides’ Cyclops; or the carnivalesque in Aristophanes), aesthetics, ethics, and politics intermingle in kinesthetic, musical, and textual pragmatics. This paper questions the reference to classical performativity (especially the gendered bodies it stages) in contemporary performances, from Olivier Dubois’ Tragédie (2012) (and the committed nudity it enacts) to Femen's sextremist protests and Trajal Harrell's Antigone Sr. / Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (L) (2012). These issues are central to the philosophy of performance, from F. Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872) to J. Butler's and A. Athanassiou's Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (2013).

Brazil, a country of miscegenation, saw its culture being built considerably rich from the shock of the differences that were presented here throughout the history: indigenous people (first inhabitants), Europeans (coming from our colonizers), and Africans (through slave labor arising from Africa). The Brazilian method dancer–researcher–performer (BPI, or Bailarino–Pesquisador–Intérprete, in Portuguese) proposes the development of the dancer framed in popular manifestations in Brazil, where the subject first contacts its own origin and then performs field research in some popular manifestation. The experience is unfolded in directed practical labs, where the emotional records of this encounter, between the interpreter and the individuals in the field, are elaborated and developed reaching a very unique and expressive movement quality, coming from the subject in process.

In the artistic product created in the BPI, the dancer does not interpret a character: the character is embodied; it lives what emerged from the body; it is a real interlacing and elaboration of the relationship of its country culture with artistic creation.

The BPI leads the interpreter in an integrative way, going against the current trend in dance, in which the dancer must leave his or her body at the disposal of idealizations. We will describe a process of a BPI whose fieldwork took place with the Terecô agrarian religious manifestation, rural women who work as breakers of the babaçu coconut. The product of this process, which occurred with the author, was presented in the communities within the Amazon forest in Brazil.

The purpose of this article is to investigate dancer-researcher-performer (BPI), the Brazilian method of dance composition that was created by professor Graziela Rodrigues in the 1980s. The article aims at showing how such practices are developed from the experience of a performer in relation to some popular manifestation such as a festivity or another cultural event. It also enables one to work directly with popular knowledge that is passed from “generation to generation.” The investigation offers a brief view of my doctoral studies in which I aim at analyzing the aesthetic specificities of this method.

Dance critic Judith Mackrell wrote recently that dramaturgy might “go a long way to help realise [dance's] potential” (2014). What kinds of change can dance dramaturgs help foster? This alternative-format workshop combines spoken presentation, small-group conversation, and physical movement. We create a collaborative space for exploring what dramaturgy can contribute to dance under contemporary conditions of uneven access to material and cultural resources. We invite artists, scholars, curators—anyone curious about developing dramaturgical practices of questioning, relational process, and well-timed intervention—to join us in talking, writing, watching, and participating in movement structures that lead toward creative change.

The objective is to initiate a investigation between dance, authorship, intellectual property, and choreography. For this, a look at what is meant by authoring in dance with the publication of Chorégraphie, ou l'art de décrire la danse par caracteres (1700) by Raoul-Auger Feuillet and the dispute with Pierre Beauchamp for the authorship of dance notation and recent discussions about copyright and choreography will be made; I will also discuss some cases of revival/reconstruction. It's not only understanding such procedures as “embodied textual practices” (Thomas 2004), from the perspective of dance notation, but also as embodied political and aesthetic options.

This study explores aspects of cultural identity of two Bulgarian immigrants, as these are reflected in their dance preferences in contemporary Athens. Using methodological tools of anthropological critique and the “new” reflexive anthropology, the study highlights the internal-personal and external (social, political, economic) factors that mold cultural identity over time, whereby the past becomes a key factor influencing the actions of people in the “present” context. The study draws on Timothy Rice's (1994) work—the comparison with the “protagonists” of his ethnography (Kostandin Varimezov and his wife Todora Varimezova) is inevitable—and discusses the meaning of music and dance for a couple of Bulgarian immigrants living in Athens while struggling—once more—with an economic crisis.

The founding of anthropological studies to China in the 1920s introduced the cultures of the countryside and its villages to the urban elite and helped to create a more complex definition of Chinese culture. The ability to study, collect, and reproduce dance specifically, as opposed to religious ceremonies or music, truly began only with the arrival of a dedicated pioneer who had an unusual range of skills and training to bring to the task. This was the remarkable Dai Ailian (1916–2006). She was born of Chinese ancestry in Trinidad and received dance training in England from 1931–1937 when both ballet and modern were just being explored in that country. Both chance and purpose brought about her first important work in folk dance when she arrived in China in 1940, during the anti-Japanese War. The unoccupied parts of southwest China were rich with the dance of minority peoples, and she set to work learning and propagating with great energy. This paper examines Dai's work in folk dance at this time and sets it against the trajectory of folk as it developed in the next seventy years.

Martha Graham cultivated a dual awareness of self and environment through the use of Earth-based imagery in her technique and repertory. Her Greek dramas are situated in landscapes created by Isamu Noguchi that suggest both geological and topographical landscapes as well as landscapes of the mind and body. In bridging the connection between body and Earth, the characters from these ballets have a dynamic relationship to these terrains that contain, embolden, and empower them. So what happens to the meanings and understandings of these works when they are stripped of their Noguchi habitats? This research investigates Martha Graham's Errand into the Maze (1947) in relationship to a stripped down version of the dance called Errand that premiered in the Graham Company's 2013 season after Hurricane Sandy destroyed the sets.

This work presents a previous analysis of the specificities of the relationship between director and performer that exists when using the dancer–researcher–performer method (BPI in Portuguese). BPI is a Brazilian dance creation method in which the performer lives an otherness experience through fieldwork in Brazilian cultural manifestations. In this method, the director acts as a midwife, facilitating the “birth” of a dance that already exists in the performer's body, generated from its encounter with the field.

In Trinidad, the act of playing mas in Carnival is about transformation and the intersection of traditional characters with contemporary social issues. When the mas moves from the streets of Port of Spain to a university campus, dance and theatrical performance become a means for students to engage with social issues in public spaces. In February 2014, the performing arts students of the University of the West Indies St. Augustine campus played mas to raise awareness for several issues in the department. The students claimed a lack of adequate class space and proper consultation in developing these resources. The students carried handmade placards with slogans, danced, chanted, and sang as they lined the road to campus. Some students even performed ballet and modern dance sequences learned in class on the sidewalk to demonstrate the need for more rehearsal space. Later in that same month, students also produced The Old Yard, part of the annual Trinidad Carnival celebration. The event featured “dramatic displays and exhibitions linked to cultural research within and outside of the University of the West Indies” (UWI St Augustine Campus 2014). Both performances utilized dance to communicate how socio-economic issues impacted daily life on campus and within a national performance community. By applying historical and ethnographic frameworks, I explore how the students use the act of playing mas as a means to negotiate their identity as performers and students in a university setting.

We explore embodiment in the digital age—a time where dance is now often passed down from body—to computer—to body. While some believe digitally mediated transmission of bodily knowledge to be “disembodied,” we propose that digital technology can extend our conceptions of embodiment by creating more space for knowledge and growth within the field of dance. We seek to understand the expanding notion of embodiment through a case study that examines the transmission of bodily knowledge in the performance Longing and Forgetting. We compare differences in transmitting bodily knowledge through multiple modes: phenomenological accounts, text, and video.

Does music “embody” the dancing movement? Or does (and if yes, how does) popular dance embody musical patterns and costume designs? On the one hand, dance and music curricula in universities and schools of dance in Greece consider music and dance mostly as coexisting and—in a superficial way—collaborating arts. They rarely refer to the “corporalization” of music, nor do they examine the relation between dance and other involving arts of a performance, such as painting and costume design. It should also be noticed that interdisciplinary creative collaboration between music and dance (and also other arts) was achieved in 1950s. This paper will try to explain how popular dance can reflect costume design and the patterns of music, and lead to a creative collaboration among these arts. For the performances of the Greek Chorodrama (Manou's Dancetheater Company), the composer, the painter, the writer, and the choreographer worked at the same time, interactively; Rallou Manou “translated” the traditional and modern elements of each art into movement, while Manos Hadjidakis (Oscar awarded composer) and Yiannis Moralis (well-known Greek painter) gave to the music, sets, and costumes a “corporal dimension,” correspondingly. As a result, the final “product” was a united, inseparable cultural event, which exceeded the dance performance and became a cultural product, with further aesthetic, artistic, pedagogical, and social value.

Within the context of dance education, the quality of students’ learning experiences during instruction affects their ability to coordinate body and mind effectively. The more these experiences are invested with emotionally motivated expectation, the more pervasive will students’ occupation with dance be. On this premise, the learning of dance is realized as a continuous process of aesthetic understanding, appreciation, and evaluation of the form of dance, as a learning object per se. Such a perspective upgrades instructional design to the level of art making, where every dancer can experience the aesthetically acceptable and “beautiful” while participating in dance lesson activities. The review of relevant literature shows that the application of solely reproductive practices in dance teaching cannot support the establishment of a learning environment that is rich in aesthetic experiences.

The aim of this paper is to analyze those principles that should govern dance lesson design so that dance teaching can have the impact of an aesthetically elevated experience on every student dancer. With Greek traditional dance at the background and under the prism of modern socio-cognitive and aesthetic theories, the attributes of aesthetic teaching practices are reviewed. The design and implementation of a newly established method, the Laban Notation method for Teaching Dance, is used as an example. The author's objective is to add a new perspective to the design of dance teaching-a perspective that will balance student dancers' potential between passion for performance, conceptual appraising and personal identity.

This round table presents an overview of activities developed at higher education institutions with graduate and postgraduate studies in dance in Brazil, especially southern Brazil. Oddly enough, amid the global crisis in early 2008, the Brazilian government launched an educational program that allowed the expansion of courses at the graduate level, including dance, in several public and free universities. As an example of this scenario, we present our experiences in two public universities, UFRGS and UDESC. These dance courses have seen increasing interest and confrontation the presence of artists and researchers seeking to investigate their own work or the work of others. How can we contemplate structuring contents and methods to teach dance in the university context? How does a dance artist associate the experience of dancing to academic research? How does teaching dance force universities to think about embodied knowledge? The situation of teaching dance in Brazilian universities shows that there is still a lot to be done, considering that the creation of these courses is rather new and that dance, in this context, is an area of ongoing consolidation. The struggle to create a greater number of dance courses in universities is part of the discussion of this session. The practice of teaching dance in universities seeks to articulate repertoires of knowledges that belong to different traditions and artistic experiences transversed by reflections about contemporary dance, and to qualify the teacher, the dancer, and the researcher.