The late T. Balasaraswati (1918–1984) is considered one of the foremost exponents of the south Indian dance form known today as Bharata Nātyam. Her mother (Jayammal) was a well-known singer and her grandmother (Vina Dhanammal) was a great vina artist who was a descendant of a dancer and musician (Papammal) in the Tanjore Court in the eighteenth century. Balasaraswati was trained by Kandappa Pillai, the brilliant dance master of the highly codified Tanjore Court style of Bharata Nāṭyam. A supreme artist who dominated the field for a generation and enriched the tradition, Balasaraswati was particularly noted for her interpretations of themes dealing with human striving for union with the Divine.

In the Bharata Nāṭyam concert repertoire the padam has been considered by connoisseurs to be the litmus test for a dancer's artistic range, especially in the Tanjore Court style. This performance item is a rhapsodic song with a poetic text that is used as a medium for the creation of mood through drama, with the dancer using primarily hand gestures, facial expressions, and stylized walking. Critical to this “drama” is the use of hand gestures, known as hastas. Dance gestures are most often referred to as hastas, but are occasionally called mudrās, which is the Sanskrit word used for temple ritual gestures. To eliminate confusion regarding these two words, the hand gestures described here are called hastas. In padams each text line is repeated any number of times with different vocal and dramatic interpretations. The expectation is for the dancer to transcend the given poetic text (sāhitya) and sophisticated music conception of the padam in order to bring life to the hidden meanings and moods.

Water Study, choreographed by Doris Humphrey in 1928, is described by dance writer Marcia B. Siegel as “still one of the most extraordinary works in American dance.” One of Humphrey's earliest works, it was created during the period in which American modern dancers Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Martha Graham broke away from the ersatz ethnicity of Denishawn to begin choreographing their own works. “As small and strange as it is,” Siegel continues, “Water Study is a masterpiece of the choreographic art”.

The piece begins with ten to twelve dancers crouched low on the floor, scattered throughout the stage area, and all facing stage right. They slowly rise and sink in canon, as though a wave passed over them and back again. The movement grows until it brings them onto their feet: they separate and rush toward one another, leaping and falling like waves splashing together and subsiding. Then, grouped together, they surge back and forth from one side of the stage to the other like shifting tides. One cluster of dancers breaks away while another leaps, turns, and falls, forming a progressive, whirl-pool-like spiral to the floor. A side-to-side rocking motion gradually brings the dancers into unison as they spread throughout the stage area again. They return to the crouching position and ripple upward again in one last splash before finishing with a slow crawling action that leaves them prone like the last remnant of a wave creeping up the shore.

Water Study focuses attention on movement by minimizing other theatrical elements. The dance does not tell a story; it is performed in silence with no scenery; lighting changes are minimal; and dancers are costumed in plain, flesh-colored leotards. Although these kinds of choices tell their own story, as will be examined later, they serve to “turn the volume up” on the movement “channel” of communication.

How does legendary status evolve in the world of ballet? Are the most brilliant dance figures simply bound to be recognized by the public and discerning critics alike? Or does historical importance depend on specific strategies? Or on the serendipity of circumstance? Joan Acocella notes that genius owes much to “ego strength” as well as luck (2007, xii). Perhaps the element of fame is always interlocked with market forces, even in the dance world, where artists are affected by what is written about them, whether it appears in influential places, and how much can be gained by selling an image. But how does history arrive at the consideration of a dance legend's substance and contributions? Being respected in the long run might inevitably depend on a combination of circumstances, including whether the popular imagination or the attention of academics can be captured. In the case of Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, a legend has grown around a particular set of glorifying associations. My question here is whether or not these associations, while celebrating Pavlova as a dance “star,” have also limited consideration of her as a significant figure in dance history. Often categorized as “old-fashioned” and “conservative,” Pavlova was in fact an innovator, I suggest, in terms of the way she combined ballet and dance influences from around the world, as well as her role in revivals of neglected dance forms, and, lastly, in her rhetorical framing of ballet as a serious endeavor and an empowering pursuit for women.

When Vertigo, an Israeli dance company, performed in collaboration with the English Ricochet dancers, there was one dance on the stage—one choreography—but the audience saw two different modes of movement. The English dancers were learned, elegant, arms and feet drawing long lines in space, the feet articulate. The Israelis danced with a powerful thrust, extremities loose, with total commitment and daring, their movements leaving in space traces of explosions too fast to recollect rather than spirals of continuity. How did this mode of movement develop? What is “Israeli” about Israeli dance?

In this essay I offer a brief history of concert dance in Israel, then a largely descriptive account of choreographic and motional themes that distinguish contemporary Israeli dance. My descriptions of works by contemporary Israeli choreographers Jasmine Goder, Ronit Ziv, Anat Danielli, Shlomi Bitton, and Noa Dar are drawn mostly from observation of performances held during yearly Curtain Up festivals at the Suzanne Dellal Center for Dance and Theater in Tel Aviv. I also discuss works by Inbal Pinto, Rami Be'er, Nir Ben-Gal and Liât Dror, and finally, Ohad Naharin, artistic director and choreographer of the Batsheva Dance Company.

Training in dance is a long and arduous process, and classical ballet is one of the most exacting and demanding of all the arts. The student must master the movement vocabulary, develop a high degree of technical skill, execute movements with utmost clarity and an appropriate sense of style. In the university, it is usually the teacher who evaluates the student's progress in these areas and determines how the individual should proceed in his/her development. Evaluation takes place in the form of daily feedback and as a final grading exercise.

One would like to think that dancers hold positive attitudes toward many forms of dance, not just their own. Maybe this is a reason why researchers have not been interested in studying the attitudes of dancers toward dance. However, there have always been conflicts (e.g., which teachers, dancers, dance schools, dance genres should be supported by grants and awards) among dancers in Finland, thus Finnish dance-policy groups have held discussions about improving cooperation both among dancers representing different dance forms and between dancers and artists in other fields. As a result the Dance Council of Finland was founded in 1980 as an organization with board members from various art dance organizations, folk dance organizations and the Finnish Dance Sport Association. The aims of the Dance Council were, among others, to increase cohesion among dancers and to improve the public perception, appreciation and funding of dance. The Dance Council initiated a dance magazine, Tanssi (Dance). However, according to Laine (1991), who was chair of the Dance Council and director of the Finnish National Ballet, the process was problematic and slow.

Space was always central to Merce's choreographic intention for the dance; there were twenty-one different spatial paths, which carried the dancers through the space, not just into it. He says the “summer” part of the title came later. Chance processes were used to determine entrances and exits, number of dancers onstage, who did what phrase when, and so forth. Merce had completed most of the time-consuming chance operations in New York, before rehearsals began in Connecticut. At Connecticut College we worked in a wonderful space— the enormous parlor/ballroom on the ground floor of a large, handsome stone dormitory. Tall windows opened onto an expanse of green lawn and vistas of lush and stately shade trees. It was a hot and humid summer, as summers in New London tended to be. A summer space.

The movement vocabulary is comprised of a variety of turns—slow turns, fast turns, jumping turns, turns ending in falls, and complex combinations of turns, as well as leaps, jumps, leg extensions, arabesques—a vocabulary far more balletic than had appeared in previous Cunningham group dances and yet, although the actual shapes and combinations of steps look deceptively like classical ballet, the abrupt changes in direction and speed, the rhythmic permutations unrelated to Morton Feldman's music, the devouring of space using walks, runs, skips, and leaps, and the surprising use of falls to the floor were not at all familiar to ballet dancers when they came to perform Summerspace. Nor were these ballet dancers attuned to the concept of “stillness.”

This dialogue between artist and dramaturg documents the creation of Dee(a)r Spine, Sam Mitchell's adaptation of the Yaqui Deer Dance, performed on Kumeyaay territory at the University of California, San Diego. Weaving reflections on dance, dramaturgy, and methodology, this article posits that dancing offers a pathway to the repatriation of Indigenous memory and kinship, a way to honor the trajectories of those whose connections with their communities have been interrupted by settler-colonialism. Dancing as a repatriation methodology, we argue, carves a healing space of sensate self-representation that centers on Indigenous forms of knowing and leaves no one behind.

In classical Khmer dance dramas, the fluidity of gestural and choreographic movement is complemented by the seamlessness with which mythical figures move between the realms of sky, earth, and sea. Such mythical migrations have been the subject of Khmer dance dramas for centuries. In this essay I explore the recent development and performance of one specific danced story of migration and the performers' social realities that complicate their relationship to their art and to this story in particular. I discuss transnational migration's impact on current and future possibilities for Khmer classical dance, and the lessons Cambodia's female dancers take from the fluidity, adaptability, and flexibility required of Khmer choreography as they negotiate their immediate social, cultural, and political upheavals.

The study of audiences is rarely at the forefront of dance scholarship. When the social composition of an audience is studied, it is usually market research—material to be used by the development staff of a dance company for audience-building.

Such studies are indeed indispensable for audience-building, but quantitative and qualitative studies of audiences are also indispensable for dance scholars. It is not necessary to argue here that the dance and the audience shape each other.

A superb example of a qualitative audience study, though not of dance audiences, is Joseph Horowitz's Wagner Nights: An American History. In his postlude he writes:

Comparison is the basis of theory. To know a thing is to know what it is not, and to theorize is therefore to compare a thing with many other things, including the thing itself at earlier stages, if the theorizing is about how the thing develops. The more “abstract” the theory, the greater is the range of things that can be compared—the more phenomena, in other words, the theory embraces.

The above paragraph is our way of warning the reader that, while we offer a theoretical perspective on the development of ballet, we spend most of our pages introducing an abstract way of making comparisons–comparisons pertinent not only to the differences between contemporary and earlier ballet but also to the differences between ballet and other artistic endeavors. The publication of this essay in a dance journal is justified by our concluding pages, therefore, but it is our hope that not just dance theorists will profit from (and add to) our analysis, but so also will persons of a theoretical bent interested in any of the arts.

One more word of preliminary explanation. A decade ago we published an essay in the Journal of Social History that offered a radically sociological interpretation of the development of ballet. Our article challenged conventional accounts of ballet history that charted the course of ballet as chiefly a product of its dominant performances and personalities.

As a doctoral candidate in anthropology preparing for field research among the Navajo, I surveyed the literature of cognitive anthropology (a subdiscipline of cultural anthropology) searching for analytical tools and methods that might suit my research needs. This inquiry led to the development of an experimental project, which is the subject of this article. I will begin with a brief account of my research problems and follow with a description of the experimental project, including a discussion of problems encountered and lessons learned.

The subject of my field research is: “The Role of ‘dance’ (alzhish) in Navajo Curing Ceremonials.” Portions of Navajo ceremonials were labeled “dance” by early researchers, presumably because they fit the Western concept—movement accompanied by music (drumming and singing) and performed before an audience. The Navajo call this component alzhish. The meaning of this term has not been investigated. We do not know how the other parts of a ceremony are labeled, and we do not know why this group of actions receives this label and not a different one. I devised three questions for exploring this domain: 1) What is alzhish? 2) What is the ceremonial function of alzhish? 3) How is that function achieved?

W. Thomas Marrocco has shown the types of music and dance that are discussed in Boccaccio's Decameron; I should like to present some examples of these art forms, re-created as accurately as we are able to do so, in the form of an entertainment which might have amused the ladies and gentlemen in that secluded villa on the outskirts of Florence in 1348.

In re-creating dances of the past from written documents, two principles must be borne in mind: first, that the records reflect the dance of an earlier period, for the steps and movements must have been tried, learned, and proven successful before a dancing master (or academician) would have deemed them worthy of recording; second, the materials preserved were obviously quite popular in the courts and hence were likely the most “danceable” compositions available. Therefore, it is the task of the reconstructor of these movements to discover the elements that were exciting and appealing to the dancers (and spectators) of the period and to make these elements come to life for contemporary audiences. Besides the obvious necessity of translating verbal instructions for steps and movement patterns and setting these to music, many factors enter into this elusive performance task: the size of the dance area usually employed; the shape, length and weight of clothing worn while dancing; the style and maneuverability of shoes, hats, swords, capes and other accoutrements; body positions generally in vogue as well as attitudes towards the human body, i.e., what was and what was not generally acceptable in terms of the good manners of the day.

The fourteenth-century Italian lived during turbulent and catastrophic times. Internecine warfare between Guelphs and Ghibellines, reprisals against foraging neighbors, conflict between church and state, and, as though political and religious dissension were not enough, the dreaded black plague, which descended over Europe periodically with devastating results, added to human misery.

Yet, in the face of such calamities Italy covered herself with glory, for in that century the arts blossomed as never before. In musical productivity no other country could boast of over 700 compositions during the period known as the Ars Nova (1330–1420). Francesco Landini, the most famous composer and organist, and a contemporary of Boccaccio, alone has left us over 150 compositions. The composition of music was encouraged by advances in musical notation, such as those described by Marchettus da Padua in his treatise Pomerium (1314), which made possible the precise recording of a much wider range of rhythmic figures.

As the literature of dance proliferates, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of what is available. The need for current bibliographies of dance materials has been addressed during the past few years at meetings of both CORD and the Dance History Scholars; this first installment of a western dance history bibliography is the direct result of such discussions. At the historians' meeting held during the August 1978 ADG-CORD Dance Conference in Hawaii, plans were formulated and a number of people offered to contribute to the project in one way or another. A report was made at the February 1979 history conference in New York City, and again the response was positive. A few months later, CORD offered to help support the project.

This is the first installment of materials published in 1978. It includes books and articles in twelve categories. An index in seven sections guides the reader to time, place, and area of subject matter; people, dance works, and institutions named in titles; and to authors. Part I of the bibliography is far from complete and only minimally international in coverage since most of the collecting has been done by one person located in the United States. Some periodicals have not yet been searched at all, and some categories of materials that may be included in the future – book and performance reviews, for example – have generally been omitted here.

Isadora Duncan inspired many such passages of fervid prose among her admiring contemporaries. From the beginning of her career, around the turn of the twentieth century, to her death in a bizarre automobile accident in 1927, those who saw her dance were less interested in writing about what she actually did than in presenting their bedizened responses to her.

Yet even as she evoked a fragrant never-never land, this American was creating a contemporary image for the stage dancer. Not a steely-legged virtuoso whipping off pirouettes, not a coquettish quasi-virgin, not a disembodied nymph, but a noble-spirited woman, bold, yet pliant — tree to use her imagination and her body as she wished.

On a table placed in the center of the stage squats a woman dressed in a rust-colored dress. The focus of the lighting on her, which keeps the rest of the performance space darkened, underscores her presence in isolation. Her arms are stretched out in front, parallel to each other, reaching to no one. The palms are rigid, the separated fingers are taut with tension. Her voice reaches out in a deep undertone, the mouth opens wide to enunciate each word by itself, reinforcing the strange disconnectedness between the relaxation of her lower back and pelvis, and the tension of her upper body, the emphasized separation between her fingers. Her eyebrows are raised, furrowing multiple lines of puzzled anguish across her forehead. Almost motionless, her eyes wide open and unflickering in the trembling light of the candle that is placed in front of her on the table, she speaks in near-choked baritones:

Why choreography and architecture? Both are visual art forms based on three-dimensional design. Both create vocabularies in space in order to express or communicate. Both are highly collaborative: in architecture there is the marriage of site and structure, in choreography, of music and movement. Perhaps these intertwined relations are seen most clearly in Fallingwater's majestic cantilever over Bear Run Creek, and in Martha Graham's powerful response to Aaron Copland's score, Appalachian Spring. Both Fallingwater and Appalachian Spring are bound to their settings, yet each enriches the site or score immeasurably.

The similarities between choreography and architecture oscillate between the obvious and the contrived. Unlike architecture, dance is ephemeral and subject to human variables which are, by nature, unpredictable. Choreography is dependent on the human dancer and therefore subject to multitudinous interpretations and manifestations. The architect's product is as solid as the building, but the architect's design is no less spontaneous than the choreographer's. Both art forms are subject to gravity, to expression and to structure—for the choreographer, structure involves both the dancer's individual body and the group's compositional organization. Both are collaborative forms: music and dance, costume and movement partner one another as structural engineering must support the design, the site, the building.

By focusing on a 2003 dance residency program sponsored by the U.S. State Department, this article locates twenty-first century American cultural diplomacy in a post-9/11 political context. The article focuses specifically on collaboration between San Francisco–based Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and Kolkata, India–based Tansuree Shankar Dance, which grew from the 2003 residency, to consider how artists find ways to facilitate cultural diplomacy that might be a blueprint for future American cultural diplomacy efforts. The article also addresses, however, the limits of that collaboration—limits that highlight the central tension of American cultural diplomacy: a desire to build relationships of so-called “mutual understanding” while also forwarding American national interests.