Given our panel's focus, I will introduce myself by way of my undergraduate dance pedagogy course and highlight what I will be addressing in my remarks this morning. The young women in my dance pedagogy course bring considerable experience in modern, ballet, and jazz technique and are equally skilled as young performers. These students likely represent a good cross section of students in their third year of undergraduate dance programs in the United States. We begin this pedagogy course by looking at the students'experience of teaching in their own training and dance education.

One of the most critical issues in education is teacher quality. In dance there is long-standing debate concerning which teaching skills tend to be weakest and thus comprise the most exigent threats to dance teacher quality. The requisite skills of teaching expertise have been broadly categorized as content knowledge (that is, expertise in the subject being taught) and pedagogical knowledge (that is, expertise in teaching techniques). Which of these sets of capacities (or lack thereof) more frequently cause dance teachers' work to be ineffective? Data from a series of original research studies, employing a range of methods, are considered.

This paper explores body pedagogy, particularly related to how we teach dance technique in the United States. It addresses the paradigmatic positions underlying dance education and how somatics plays a role in how educators teach dance. Although somatics is viewed as a positive addition to a pedagogical repertoire, the author questions viewing it as a universal panacea for all the world's ills and points to larger sociopolitical factors concerning power dynamics and institutional power (that is, higher education dance).

occupation is a screendance that explores a state of “uprootedness” in the context of the events of the Iraq War and the World Financial Crisis. The film utilizes the metaphor of a historic building and its astonishing relationship to its foundation to illustrate the second wave of erosion of American democracy after 9/11. The film features three movers: two dancers and one building. In 2009, this five million-pound building underwent an engineering feat when it was raised eleven feet off its foundation and moved in one fell swoop. Interleaved footage of the dancers and the building in motion illustrates their correlation—a mounting tension that speaks to democracy in the U.S. being shaken, uprooted, and redefined underneath people's feet. Dizzying changes silence oppositional voices occupying public spaces. Pursuing everyday occupations equals prevailing war in the name of democratic values. But do we still live in a democracy?

This paper critically assesses the expectations of competitive jazz dance adjudicators and the effects of these expectations on the presentation of gendered and sexualized dance choreographies by private dance studios. Expectations for competitive dance students with regard to technical ability, execution of choreography, and age/gender (in)appropriateness are unclearly articulated by competitions and adjudicators throughout Canada and the United States. Nevertheless, parents and students enter into private dance studios with pre-conceived notions of what it takes to “win” at competition and demand that their training and choreography reflect this. The onus is on dance teachers and choreographers, then, to adhere to this rapidly evolving culture of dance competition, or otherwise risk losing customers and funds.

This paper critically examines current trends in competitive jazz and hip-hop dance through interviews and conversations with three professional competition dance adjudicators. As a competitive dance studio choreographer and researcher, I question the role that competitive dance culture plays in the gendering and sexualization of amateur dancing bodies. Ultimately, what are the implications of the perpetuation of heteronormativity, hegemonic masculinity, and femininity through the dances created for competition on adolescent dancing bodies? What other options are available for private competitive dance studios wishing to simultaneously participate in and disrupt this culture without losing their businesses?

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).

Theory suggests that prescription should be detrimental to creativity. The Cloud Gate Dance School has highly structured and detailed curricula and pedagogical practices where the meeting of specific course and individual lesson objectives are regarded as essential. Yet, personal creativity in activities is stressed by the school's leaders and teachers, both for teachers and students. This paper considers the construction of creativity in the specific context and how it is underpinned by the school's ethos. It is based on observations of studio practice, discussions with teachers and other staff, and analysis of printed curricula documentation.

Crossing between texts, bodies, and the senses, dance literacies bring fresh perspectives on how new literacies can function, especially non-alphabetic or non-text-based literacies. Reading and writing in an expanded understanding of literacy are interpretive means of interacting with texts, of embedding and discerning meaning, of making sense of movement or choreographic information, of composing and performing, and of creating documentation and archive. Makers and viewers of dances act as readers, and writers, and authors. These roles are permeable in dance literacy, shifting with the context of the dance phenomenon or artistic practice. This paper engages with the dance practices of two dance companies to explore issues of shared-authorship, documentation, multimodality, body-text relationships, and reader-writer permeability: the Bebe Miller Company during their creation of A History and RikudNetto, who composes through Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation. What literacy events and practices are present in the studio? What range of written literacies are used and how? Where and how were these literacies learned? In what ways might they cross the so-called literacy-orality divide? Drawing from questions and frameworks of the New Literacy Studies, this paper invites a critical look at dance literacy in context.

In recent years, the theorization of dance as a critical and political practice has focused on its “resisting” qualities. “Withholding” or “arresting” are terms used to qualify dance as a means for questioning economic and artistic practices. This paper seeks to problematize such a view both by pondering the question of how to conceptualize acting bodies in forming political spaces and by grounding this discussion in a historical comparison. I will re-visit and question my previous research on movement choirs, and propose that the notion of supporting, transmitting, and sharing are strategies commensurately significant with choreographies of protest.

Attempting to uncover and document the history, or rather histories and pre-histories, of queer tango is difficult. Superficially, the history ought to be easy. The term “queer tango” barely existed before 2001 when it was first used by LGBT dancers in Hamburg, Germany. It was perceived of by them as a riposte to “hetero-normative” leader-follower relationships in mainstream Argentinian tango, proposing instead women as leaders, men as followers, same sex couples and “active” rather than passive followers. Queer tango has subsequently been characterized by the emergence around the world of queer tango organizations, of international festivals, and an international community of dancers, thriving by contact through social media. Yet as the author, who is collaborating with writers and dancers Birthe Havmøller and Olaya Aramo in editing The Queer Tango Book, an online anthology of writings about queer tango, has found out, there is still no settled agreement as to what, precisely, the term means; there is disagreement about the premise that “hetero-normative” tango was quite as oppressive to women in the ways it was originally made out to be, and there is no agreement—indeed so far, precious little discussion—as to which dance practices in Buenos Aires and beyond from the late nineteenth century onward might legitimately be enlisted as forming the pre-history. Were the men-only prácticas, which ran for decades, a part of it? Or women teaching each other at home? When so little was written down, how is one to find out?

Acknowledging the value of dance within education and as an art, this study examines teaching and learning experiences and their effect in the status and ethos of dance. The main focus of this study was to examine dance education and training in tertiary education (further and higher) in England and in Greece. The aim was to find similarities and differences in teachers' approaches in order to improve understanding of what affects students' learning experiences and future choices. Methodology is based on a comparative study, predominately qualitative, that focuses on individuals' experiences. The methods used were documentations, interviews, observations, and questionnaires from people who experience and teach dance within further education dance institutions. This study is part of a Ph.D. thesis.

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.

This paper reports on three years of research conducted through the Centre for Excellence in Performance Arts at De Montfort University. The intention of the paper is to align the assessment of dance practice with pedagogic concerns. The development of an innovative approach to assessment and feedback is discussed with respect of the nature of dance practice, constructive alignment, and validity and reliability. Whilst this research derives from practice-based research, it is also informed by published material on pedagogy and hermeneutics.

In this paper, the current practices and discourses surrounding the Alevi semah are analysed in a peculiar reflexive and embodied manner. The semah is comprehended here as a “dynamic structured body system,” which is differently recognized as ibadet (devotional practice), dans (dance), or meditasyon (meditation), and whose practice is alleged to support ideals of inter-religious peace and gender equity. Its analysis resorts to data collected during an intensive fieldwork that was carried out between 2008 and 2011 by following the experimental theater piece with the title Samah—Kardeşlik Töreni (Samah—the Ritual of Brotherhood) of the Ankara Deneme Sahnesi amateur group based in Ankara (Turkey). This play is the result of a re-elaboration of ethnographic data that were collected throughout the Anatolian peninsula since the early 1980s by a team of students and researchers affiliated with the Theatre Department of Ankara University. In this process of re-adaptation for the stage, the semah was singled out of its religious source (the Ayin-i Cem ritual) for which it started to display a mirror image offering a condensed exposition of the Alevi rituals to an audience. This paper contextualizes these formal adaptations on the stage into the frame of the abrupt history of migration and urbanization in late twentieth century Turkey. Such historical processes played a major role in the current circulation of the semah in Turkey as well as abroad, resulting also in its perspective inscription as world intangible heritage.

Shakespeare and his contemporaries regularly staged plays that exhibited feats of physical prowess, such as dancing, acrobatics, and combat. Spectacles of this sort existed in a kind of double space: even as they operated within a play's fictional narrative, they also served as legitimate entertainments in their own right. Jean Alter refers to these complementary aspects of theatre as its “referential” and “performant” functions: theatre as semiotic system, employing both mimetic and nonmimetic forms of representation, and theatre as spectacular show, akin to sports or the circus. My paper analyzes the interplay between these two performance modes in displays of bodily skill in the early modern English theatres. Drawing on a variety of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents concerning foreign travel, sensory perception, physical talent, and popular festivity, I explore the cultural valences of what contemporaries referred to as “feats of activity” that refreshed, or “recreated,” the eye. I pay particular attention to onstage dances. These episodes, I contend, suggest an alternative to post-Benjamin, post-Brecht notions of spectacle as that which dazzles passive viewers. Juxtaposing extratheatrical primary sources with brief snapshots from Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, I reconstruct the historically specific affective experiences generated by early modern displays of physical spectacle. Nonverbal practices, such as dance, were not merely depicted in drama but integrated into the performance medium itself. I argue that the resulting dynamics between representation and presentation situated spectators as active participants in the performance event. In this way, onstage dances reinforced communal identity and contributed to the construction and dissemination of broader cultural discourses.

How can we make the history of dance meaningful for the practitioners of the future that we teach? In this presentation, I argue that we need a genealogical and metahistorical perspective to teaching history. Our students need to understand history not as something to be known but as something written and created and therefore constantly changing. It is possible to teach a canon critically, to make past dances and our need of these past dances relevant for today's practice.

Contemporary sexual norms in Canada continue to dictate how sexuality should be presented on the stage in many styles of theatrical dance. Jazz dance is not excluded from this practice; in fact, since the early days of social dancing, jazz dance has often been considered synonymous with gratuitously deviant sex and sexuality. In contemporary artistic circles, concert jazz dance often finds itself subject to an additional classification as low-art because of this perceived relationship between sex and the dancing. This artistically marginalized position of concert jazz implies a conservative heteronormativity in Canada that is contrary to our apparent inclusion of subjugated sexual minorities as “normal.” “It's All in the Hips” explores sexuality in contemporary Canadian concert jazz dance to illustrate the potential for representations of marginalized sexualities on stage, and the perceived threat to artistic hegemony. While there is growing research into sexuality on the American stage in ballet and modern dance through scholars such as Jane C. Desmond, Jennifer Fisher, Susan Leigh Foster, and others, and also into jazz's roots in social dancing by Susan Manning, Anthea Kraut, Julie Malnig, and a growing host of scholars, very little work has been done on the Canadian concert jazz scene, save for the work of Iro Tembeck, Mark Miller, Meilan Lam, and a handful of dancers. This paper examines the intersection between sexual and artistic minority in Canadian concert jazz dance and problems that arise for positioning the form to dance audiences as high art.

I once read that the music we listen to during our high school and college years is the music that most resonates with us throughout our lifespan. I would suggest as well that the theory we encounter during a doctoral program will continue to resonate throughout our professional lives. This certainly has been true for me, and, in my case, there is congruence between the music and the theory, making for an even deeper attachment. In this presentation I will explore that attachment and also question it, giving voice to conflicting arguments and trying to resolve them. The internal dialogue made audible here was generated by the current intense focus on outcomes-based assessment in education.

Over the past decade, so-called African dance has become increasingly popular in Italy, growing in tandem with local West African diasporic communities and the national concern over immigration. Although the circulation of African dance provides West African migrants with an important form of self-identification and subsistence, it often revolves around problematic discourses rooted on the myth and romance with the primitive. Constructing and capitalizing on the fetishization of black bodies, African dance mobilizes complex economies of desire that rest on an orientalist fascination with the Other. While these economies reify racist stereotypes, they also enable significant communities of knowledge and interracial encounters.