In 1907, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío published the collection El canto errante [The Wandering Song], containing a poem entitled “La bailarina de los pies desnudos” [“The Barefoot Dancer”]. The title leads the reader to anticipate an aesthetic of lightness and simplicity, yet the poem is weighted down by its many cultural references: at least one per line, and barely harmonizing amongst themselves. Its space is heavily perfumed, thickly ornamented, animated by the movements of a dancer who invokes different cultural references and plastic forms with each extended limb, each trembling body part. At first sight sinuously seductive, this central figure unravels into a welter of fragments and contradictions: both animal and divine, eroticized and chaste, a lunar deity (Selene) and a literary character (Anactoria), a “constellation of examples and of objects” (constelada de casos y de cosas) whose body, as the line suggests, barely contains its referential chaos.

Ballipadu is a small village in the West Godavari district in Andhra Pradesh, South India. One of the most prominent markers in the village landscape is the Madanagopālasvāmi temple (Fig. 1). Pemmaraju Konayamatya constructed the temple sometime in the late eighteenth century (exact dates unknown). The central image in the temple is that of Kṛṣṇa as Madanagopālasvāmi, The Cowherd Beautiful as the God of Desire (Fig. 2). From the time of its consecration, the Ballipadu Madanagopālasvāmi temple had supported over fifteen devadāsīs (women artists who served in temples and/or courts) by providing them with tax-free land, money, and a platform to present their art. In return, some of the women performed ritual tasks such as the waving of the fiveflames (pañca-hārati) and the pot lamp (kumbha-hārati), as ritual duties in the temple. In 1948, at the end of a long struggle with the discursive contours of social reform, five women—Manikyam, Anusuya, Varahalu, Seshachalam and Maithili—were expelled from the temple. These five women from Ballipadu subsequently moved to the small town of Duwa, where they maintain a small matrifocal home, adhering to their traditional patterns of kinship as devadāsīs. They do not ostensibly retain any markers of devadāsī identity: they no longer sing or dance in public, have any ritual duties in temples, receive tax-free land (mãnyãlu) from temples or feudal kingdoms (zamīndāri samasthānas), and bless homes during auspicious occasions. Yet, they insist on referring to themselves as devadāsīs, despite the extreme social stigma attached to this identity.

Dance teacher behaviors have been studied for many years in an attempt to describe what these teachers do in the classroom. One method of describing dance teacher behaviors is to place the behaviors in categories or classes (Gray 1983; Gray 1984a; Skrinar 1986; Skrinar and Moses 1988; Minton 1992; Davenport 1993). Researchers have also attempted to describe dance teacher behaviors by drawing relationships between one behavior category and another. This has been accomplished through the use of proportions, patterns or domain analysis (Lunt 1974; Lord 1981/82; Gray 1984b). More recently, dance teacher behaviors were analyzed by dividing the task presentations into distinct moments: the set-up, presentation, and transition to execution (Lord, Chayer and Girard 1995). In addition, some investigators preferred to classify dance teacher behaviors by describing the type of imagery used during the instruction process (Overby 1990; Overby 1991/92; Minton 1996). Finally, the case study has been used to describe and classify the behaviors of a single dance teacher.

In a 1915 editorial of The Ladies Home Journal, social commentator Dorothy Mills pondered the issue of the “woman question,” and in a few vivid sentences summed up much of the public's reaction to women's readjusted place in society during the Progressive era. What was one to make of the fact that women were declaring the right to vote, divorcing their husbands at a greater pace than ever and demanding fulfilling work outside of marriage? Said Mills:

Dancers and choreographers have always been navigating disability within an ableist representational form. This article questions the ableist histories of modern dance in the United States and seeks to redefine how disability is conceived of within the field of dance. The article explores five themes found within archival research, including overcoming narratives, symbiotic and inseparability of dance and disability, denial of disability, changing choreographic practices, and disability aesthetics. Examples of these themes are found in primary source documents about and by Martha Graham, Ted Shawn, and Doris Humphrey and contextualized throughout the article with dance and disability studies theorization.

In the 1960s, the initial decade of the Cuban Revolution, policies of proletarianization of culture intersected an economic model built upon the heroic labor of the New Man—the ideal revolutionary and communist worker. Adapting the practice of ballet to this Marxist context, ballet dancers took their art to the working classes through popular performances and outreach events in farms and factories. Given the centrality of manual work to the revolution's ideology, dancers drew upon their own physical labor both in ballet and agriculture to establish an even stronger association with the working classes and embody the New Man's morality. Known for their strict work ethic, Alicia Alonso and other ballet dancers became public examples of hard work for the nation—one way of fulfilling the politico-pedagogical role that the state expected from artists. At the same time, media representations of female dancers’ labor enabled formulations of the New Man's gendered counterpart: the New Woman.

As we move we change. How could it be otherwise? The direction and consequence of change is far from assured. Dance inscribes movement in the world as a practical accomplishment. It legibly affirms, even if ephemerally, fleetingly, that some immediate difference has been made when the outcome of movement in life might still be in doubt. As a means for registering what movement can be, dance shows us how we pass from one state to another. It does this literally, as bodies configure their realms of space and time, and allegorically, as a touchstone to what it means to be passing through this world. Dance reports on the art of passing, telling us how to dwell amongst so many departures and arrivals. It also instructs us in passing as self-representation, convincing us in performance that it is dancers we see. Such a lovely tale, this. Yet in a nation of immigrants, all are compelled to move, but not all get to pass. Those who lived by the land were evicted in the name of property. Those who were designated property were affixed to the land in bondage. Others worked off their debts of passage. Still more were promised mobility from migration.

Nicholas Roerich, the scenarist and designer of Le Sacre du printemps for the original production, by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, in 1913, built the ballet around the sacrifice of a young maiden. As the climax to a series of ritual tasks by members of an archaic tribe, the Chosen Maiden dances herself to death to assure the return of Spring. In the logic of the rite her sacrifice is seen as a marriage with Yarilo, the sun deity of pre-Christian Slavic mythology. The composer of the ballet, Igor Stravinsky, claimed from the outset that he had conceived the idea for Sacre as he was finishing Firebird in 1910. But an interview with Roerich in the St. Petersburg press and other documentation show that he had already written a scenario when Stravinsky approached him with the notion of a ballet about archaic Russia. Roerich's scenario was entitled “The Great Sacrifice,” and it survives as the second act of what we know as Le Sacre du printemps. Contrasted with the somber tasks and grave tone of the second act are the vigorous games and ceremonies which Roerich and Stravinsky together planned for the first act. Stravinsky marked the score for Act I “Day” and Act II “Night,” a polarity that is carried out in all aspects of the music, decor and choreography.

Almost since the inception of moving pictures, those pictures have often featured dance. The obvious reason for this is that the natural subject of moving pictures is movement. And dances—along with hurtling locomotives, car chases, cattle stampedes, tennis matches, intergalactic dog-fights, and the like—move. Thus, a significant portion of the history of moving pictures involves dance movement. Many moving-picture makers have devoted admirable amounts of effort and imagination to portraying dance in or through media as diverse as film, video, and computer animation. The purpose of this essay is to attempt to offer a philosophical characterization of this field of activity; that is, I will try to define moving-picture dance.

Many readers, learning of my intention, are apt to groan “labeling again, how boring.” To a certain extent I can sympathize with that sentiment. It is far more interesting to talk about work than it is to set about classifying it. The concrete achievements of the field are more important than abstractions about it. Nevertheless, despite my ready acknowledgment of this, I will persist for several reasons.

First, whenever festivals of this sort of work are held, it is very likely that at one time or another almost everyone present will be tempted to say of some work that it doesn't really belong on the program. Everyone complains about labeling, but sooner or later most people feel compelled to invoke some favorite definition of their own. For human beings, categorizations are unavoidable, even if we like to pretend indifference to them. And most of us can feign indifference only for so long; most of us have a breaking point. Thus, it seems to me a good idea to get this issue out in the open and to discuss it abstractly—to compare and contrast the various categorizations in play and to develop dialectically from them a comprehensive framework that makes sense of our practices and that resonates with our intuitions about its compass.

Frevo is an energetic dance from Recife, the capital of Brazil's northeastern state of Pernambuco. Frevo is a dance of resistance because it narrates complex notions of identity that contribute to social empowerment through strategic processes of liberation for marginalized groups. The dance originates from the Brazilian martial art of capoeira and it is carnivalesque because it is performed in crowded, often violent streets during carnival, when power hierarchies are disrupted. Through this ethnographic research, I consider how frevo practitioners engage in cultural resistance using a practice that I call “carnivalesque improvisation.”

This piece is adapted from a lecture delivered in the “Performing Institutions” series curated by Artists Space with the 2012 Whitney Biennial. The event also included David Velasco of Artforum as well as Sarah Michelson, who had just become the first choreographer to win the Bucksbaum Award for the best work presented at the Whitney Biennial. Artists Space represented the Performing Institutions series in the following terms: “Taking as its starting point the 2012 Whitney Biennial's allocation of the fourth floor Emily Fischer Landau Galleries as a performance space for music, dance, theater, and participatory programming, this series of talks consider the status of performance and ‘virtuosity’ within the parameters of an institutional public sphere. Does this turn toward ‘activity without end product’ potentially shift entrenched relations between institution and artist, artwork and viewer, or reinforce a contemporary experience of totalizing social production?”

In the first few moments of Parallel Passions, the program devised for Mavin Khoo Dance and toured extensively around Britain in the fall of 2003, the halflight atmosphere creates difficulties in distinguishing among dancers (Fig. 1). Bodies, genders, technical backgrounds, and ethnicity become subsumed for a few short moments to a greater purpose that is unconcerned with the trappings of identity, and the viewer begins to wonder optimistically how this will evolve. The effect is not sustained, however, and another evening of worthy crosscultural experiments in dance forms unfolds. Being momentarily surprised in this way helped to develop some interesting ideas. What remains in memory are those extraordinary moments where the project of Modern Britain seemed suddenly to have shape and be given expression. The eclectic mix of the dancers and their heritages, cultural and professional, was abandoned as a preoccupation. This allowed, albeit momentarily, a protean practice to peep through the layers of cultural ritual. The embrace of ballet and bharatanatyam cited in the promotional literature became momentarily irrelevant. But then, as if recalling the essence of the project and its obligation to teach lessons about sympathy and tolerance through the arts, a touring show financed by six different funding sources remembered itself and resorted to comparing and contrasting, later abandoning seriousness altogether for a light-hearted jazzbased club number. During a ponderous second half the dancers looked to be willing a connection that would not come, and then it was over.

At the end of the eighteenth century, ballet was split between those supporting tours de force and those who believed that “difficulties,” as they were called, should be avoided in favor of a more expressive, refined, graceful, and artless style of execution. Though the controversy neared its most intense period in 1800, as early as 1760 Jean-Georges Noverre (1727-1810) was pleading, in his extremely influential Lettres sur la danse, that his fellow artists renounce entrechats and cabrioles, abandon tours de force, which he considere to be meaningless. Ironically, 1769 was the year of birth of the man whose brilliance would make tours de force de rigueur for audiences and performers. Auguste Vestris (1760–1842) would overwhelm the dance world with his spectacularly athletic technique; his approach to dancing would be emulated by his fellow dancers as they tried to perform increasingly elaborate beats, greater numbers of pirouettes and tours en l'air, and higher leg elevations. The opposition of those seeking abstract dancerly qualities and those demanding feats of athletic virtuosity was the major controversy of the first three decades of the nineteenth century.

Alvin Toffler made an eloquent plea in 1967 for the construction of cultural statistics that would give artists, policy-makers and social scientists a reliable map of where the arts enterprises had been and where they seemed to be going. Only slow progress has been made since then.

To take the example that will concern us in this research note, how much solid information do we have concerning the “dance boom” that reportedly took place during the Sixties and Seventies? A “dance boom” can refer to many things. It can mean rapid growth in the size of the dance audience; in the number of dance companies; in the amount of amateur participation in the art; in the number of dance performances; and so on. These aspects of the art might not all show the same trends. For instance, the number of dance performances might have increased faster during the “boom” than the number of companies—or vice versa—suggesting two very different developments. Actually, the only firm documentation we possess concerning the boom in the amount of dance activity has to do with the size of the audience, and we have that only for the Seventies, not the Sixties. Surveys done by the Louis Harris polling organization put the percentage of Americans aged 18 years and older who attended at least one live dance performance in the years 1973, 1975 and 1980 at 9%, 16% and 25%.