In 2003, UNESCO adopted the “Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage” and introduced within a global perspective, new socio-political and economical international parameters for the protection and promotion of cultural heritage. In this context, dance, as an immaterial cultural aspect, lies at the heart of international developments. In my essay, I will present cases of dance phenomena figuring in UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists and discuss the ways in which ubiquitous dance practices are changing due to the processes of (re)negotiating their existence values in the novel international socio-cultural context.

It is a commonly held assumption that new technologies have changed human society, culture, and communication dramatically. New phenomena appear, and the new reality is a challenge on many levels. The mass expansion of the Internet, since the early 1990s, has brought new circumstances at the economic, social, and cultural levels, as well as new forms of behavior and expression. In recent years, the basic practice of instructors, dancers, and dance enthusiasts is searching and downloading videos on traditional Greek dancing. In many cases, the videos are considered “research” products capable of supporting the teaching of dance in traditional dance groups. What inevitably emerges is a mode of YouTube as a new digital dance archive. In this peculiar condition, the production, distribution, and “assessment” of the content are in the hands of the user community, who, as Derrida notes, are possessed by one “irrepressible desire to return to the origin”. In Foucault's terms, the archive is a space of enunciation. Repositioned as something that defies exhaustive description, for Foucault, the archive becomes engaged in the production and authorization of discourse itself. This perspective raises questions about the issues of standards, evaluation, and quality of the “material”. But, the most important question is, what is the concept and the content of the terms “research” and “teaching?”

In the world of modern dance, people are constantly looking for new and different ways to explore the choreographic process and how dance can be related to other academic disciplines. Recently there have been great strides made to connect modern dance and the world of mathematics. “Synchronous objects” is a study that was done at Ohio State University where a choreographed dance was converted into easily manipulated data, thus bringing significant advances to the math–dance connection. However, this study was a one-way transaction, from dance to data. It leaves mathematicians everywhere wondering how to transform their knowledge of formulas into an expression of the body. To satisfy the urges of these dance-minded mathematicians, we have developed two methods of creating choreography from a simple fractal formula. The first method uses fractal landscapes as a coordinate map of the stage and Labanotation as the translation key (the reverse of the synchronous objects project), and the second uses the basic Labanotation figures as the “objects” with which fractals are generated. These methods, stemming completely from a computer algorithm, will allow people not well versed in dance to create new and exciting pieces of choreography by making simple decisions about the fractal equation.

In working with children with special educational needs both in South Africa and in Denmark, I continue to reflect upon who should dance and how to train dancers who are differently abled. The label of “other” dancer profoundly challenges the notion of “ideal dancing bodies” as “cultures collide.” This paper sets out to engage with the notions of “disability arts” by suggesting some working definitions for this loaded term and provides an examination within the South African context of the multiculturalism of the disabled community, which could be seen as a cultural grouping in and of itself.

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).

There is a movement form very close to Greece, across the waters of the Mediterranean in the land of modern day Turkey, which is a noble part of antiquity and which has faced sweeping changes in last century. Pressures from nationalistic, touristic, and other special interests particular to modernity have shaped and re-shaped this ancient form dramatically. This is the sema ritual of the whirling dervish.

Theater and dance practitioners have been inspired by the whirling dervish since the nineteenth century, when many Europeans traveled to Turkey and witnessed the whirling dervishes there. As part of the wave of spiritual and occult interest that blossomed at the end of the nineteenth century and through the twentieth century, ideas from Sufism began to penetrate the discourses of both esoteric and performance schools in Europe. Practitioners such as Jerzy Grotowski in the United States, and Rudolf Laban and Mary Wigman in Europe included forms of whirling and ideas from Sufism in their training methods.

This researcher, like practitioners from the early twentieth century, has sought to open avenues of embodied awareness in her dancers via whirling practice. Whirling itself, as a powerful performance form, has become prominent in her own work. A growing network of semazen-performers have been producing and touring ritual whirling as public performance extensively in the last two decades. This presentation presents perspectives of the modern Sufi initiate, who negotiates issues of ownership, authenticity, function, and form through and with the act of performance. At once political, socially responsive, and aesthetic, the whirling sema is also uniquely spiritual and devotional, opening up questions of religious importance through the East–West interchanges of its practitioners, initiates, and performers.

Hopak dance is one of the most visually recognizable symbols of Ukraine—either as a Soviet republic or an independent country. Men in bright colored sharovary pants performing virtuosic jumps in squatting position or effortless high leaps to stylized folk tunes is one of the most popular moving images that represent Ukrainian culture. During from the 1950s until recently, the hopak in Ukraine was performed almost exclusively as a stage dance art (unlike in diasporas where it has over time has taken on traits of social dance and event), connected with state celebrations.

Starting in 1985, a new kind of hopak has been formed and implemented in Ukraine—military hopak. Its tradition is claimed to descend from the martial art of Zaporizhian Kossaks, which was lost during Soviet times and later rediscovered and renewed as specifically a Ukrainian martial art. It gained lots of publicity, fans, and practitioners in the 2000s, and it seemed that military hopak strived to replace the old, representational stage dance version of its practice, which emphasized playfulness and light-hearted character of Ukrainian folk. Hopak as a martial art refers to the heroic past of Ukraine, its identity, and uniqueness.

This paper explores the field of choreographic transfers between Europe and America at the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on the tremendous dynamism of social dance practice in Interwar France (1919–1939), it examines the context of this new type of migration, from North and South America to Europe. It also studies how the assimilation of social dances from the “New World” in the French dancing repertoire profoundly transformed body practices of the French society.

This paper argues for the possibility of queer spectatorship in renowned taiko player Tiffany Tamaribuchi's performances. Taiko is an athletic and spectacular form of ensemble drumming with roots in Japanese culture. An award-winning taiko player who has trained and performed in the United States and Japan, Tiffany Tamaribuchi also founded the Sacramento Taiko Dan and Jodaiko, an all-women's taiko group comprised of members from throughout North America. Despite working within a conservative performance framework and within a form that is often framed as “multicultural” performance, Tamaribuchi's performances with the all-women's group Jodaiko can be seen as queer. Using performance analysis and a close reading of Tamaribuchi's performance of a solo called “Odaiko” in a 2006 concert, I argue that Tamaribuchi's taiko performances invite queer spectatorship both through Tamaribuchi's queer gender performance and the affective, kinesthetic relationship taiko drumming can produce between the audience and spectator.

This paper will explore the migration of local and global markers of authority as members of the Ghana Dance Ensemble (GDE) negotiate the ideologies of nationalism, attempting to re/create cultural forms that will be judged “authentic” by both indigenous and international communities. This will include examining how Western and local practices have merged to re/establish power relationships between choreographers and performers as they work to devise strategies that give an aura of authenticity to various dance forms.

Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, outlines a historical shift from punishment as public spectacle to punishment as “the most hidden part of the penal process.” Examining the resultant changes, he recognizes the quieter, psychological control and bodily supervision that have replaced public torture in our system.

I observe this control of incarcerated individuals and then correlate it with terms that Danielle Goldman uses to describe dance improvisation: continued confrontation with constraint(s). She advocates that the practice of freedom, through improvisation, is a “mode of making oneself ready for a range of ... situations,” and so is politically and socially powerful.

Citing multiple prison arts programs, I conclude that embodied improvisation both theoretically and practically addresses forces of oppression and confinement within the prison system by offering moments of creative self-direction and non-hierarchal interaction. I render this unique application an ideal artistic and actionable response to the framework of captivity.

Dance in most African countries, especially in West Africa, is the responsibility of a particular class of the society. The main issue for performers or choreographers trained in modern standards is the transfer of information to dance professionals who are illiterate, approximately 75 percent of noneducated people on the continent. The majority are women. It is an oral tradition too, so diversity, globalization, and feminism mean nothing to them. The sociopolitical situation of the entire continent is a good example of the consequences of colonization that, besides being a historical big mistake, was also a disaster because it did not respect the structure of societies. Today's globalization of the world draws the continent down because it cannot consider Africa's specific needs. To me, dance cannot be globalized because of the creativity, identity, and social-specific values that would die.

This paper seeks to theorize embodied knowledge. If knowledge is power, then questions of “embodied knowledge” should be central to this conference. How and when is knowledge embodied? Under what conditions can embodied practice constitute knowledge? And what kind of practice-based “research” expands this kind of knowledge? Today, as references to embodied knowledge continue to multiply, it is essential that scholars arrive at a useful and rigorously theorized understanding of this concept that can satisfy both the demands of practice and the requirements of scholarship. This presentation intervenes in the ongoing debate on practice as research, with reference to the conversations of the ASTR working group on Performance as Research (of which I am part) and to two recent books published by Palgrave-Macmillan.

How does Le Stelle, an ethnic dance group in the multicultural city of Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, represent Italian culture? Our article broaches this question by analyzing Le Stelle's 2012 “Carnivale of Venezia” dance. While the number is meant to evoke the Italian Renaissance, it creatively uses kinetic movements from ballet, Irish step dancing, and the Italian tarantella. It is staged to a 1950s Mantovani song mixed with music from Assassin's Creed II; and it utilizes Italian peasant costuming and Venetian masks. Our paper examines Le Stelle's use of these hybridities in staging Italian culture.

The international Athens Festival was prominent in shaping a cosmopolitan identity and openness within Greek society. During its first decade (1955–1966), the Festival also functioned as a significant form of cultural diplomacy. Audiences were exposed to elite dance companies from nations such as the U.S., which functioned ideologically and diplomatically. Our presentation interrogates the construction of a dance field in Greece and the shaping of aesthetic values, contextualized within socio-cultural tensions. Research exposes imperatives of a rising superpower consolidating its position, revealing multiple types of influence on Greece and other nations in a battle of political wills with the USSR.