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:

This statement may resonate with many who practice, teach, or write about dance and movement training and performance, but it is particularly apt in relation to the work of Gertrud Falke-Heller (1891–1984). Her extraordinary career spanned almost sixty years, and she worked with some of the most influential figures in European modern dance and performance, including Rudolph Laban, Mary Wigman, and Kurt Jooss. The training she developed, based mainly on the work of German body awareness pioneer Elsa Gindler (1885–1961), did not have a name, and little documentation about it exists. After an early career as a performer in Hamburg, Falke-Heller taught this form of training for Ballet Jooss at Dartington Hall in the 1930s. She developed her work after World War II with psychiatric patients in a variety of hospitals in England and Scotland and died at her home in London in 1984. In an interview given four years before her death, Falke-Heller lists the following questions and concerns that underpinned her work in the many different contexts to which it has been applied:

The body awareness in the sitting, standing, walking, lying down in all human functioning. What is expressive movement? Where does it start to be really interesting? And where is it empty? Then also the space—the dynamic in the room. That's what I was always interested in from the beginning. (Falke-Heller 1980)

John Cranko's only ballet for the Batsheva Dance Company in Israel, Ami-Yam, Ami-Ya'ar (Song of My People—Forest People—Sea, 1971) is described in a program note as “A Nation and Man Move in Parallel Cycles from Death to Regeneration.” It has remained unique in Cranko's choreographic corpus and in the Batsheva repertoire. Based on recently discovered film evidence, I reread Cranko's largely forgotten project and discuss its problematic and controversial reception in Israel and abroad, in light of Adorno's statement that “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism.” I situate it as a landmark in tackling the Holocaust in dance in Israel as of 1971. I problematize the ethics and aesthetics of representation in Cranko's ballet on the grounds of Giorgio Agamben's discussion of testimony and in reference to Jacques Derrida's reading of Paul Celan.

This article examines dance pieces premiered in the Nordic countries at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015. Framed by the heated debates on current immigration policies, as well as prevailing tropes of a theater of migration and the figure of “the migrant,” the analysis centers on the potential for creating spaces of resistance in the encounter between choreographic performance and spectators. Drawing on analytical concepts such as migratory aesthetics and choreographic agency, the focus is on the interrelationship between the choreographic articulations of experience of migration and their materialization before an audience.

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.

This article examines the practice of the Danish K-pop (Korean pop) cover dance crew CODE9 as an example of the rapid cultural exchange on the Internet that reshapes the diffusion of dance styles and ideas. CODE9 demonstrates K-pop as a “migratory dance practice,” forming a transnational dancing community with modern technology at its center. By adapting and embodying K-pop, CODE9 creates a “Thirdspace” in between reality and fantasy, between being oneself and being a Korean idol. With CODE9, K-pop moves in and out of Denmark, through the practice of watching, learning, performing, and then circulating dance online.

Throughout the United States and Canada people go to Native American intertribal powwows. At powwows women, men, and children execute rhythmic movement, drumming, and song as they experience and express sensory stimuli. The aroma of sage incense pervades as Indians and non-Indians socialize, share fry bread, and sell, buy, or “window shop” at concession stands. Vendors display T-shirts, fur, turquoise, silver, and beaded jewelry as well as artwork, CDs, and Ecuadorian and Peruvian items. All participants enjoy storytelling, comedy skits, Indian rap and country music performances, and Mexican “Aztec” dance presentations alongside rituals such as giveaways, the Eagle ceremony, or the Veterans dance. These social and spiritual celebrations occur in increasing numbers across North America. In the tristate region of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut alone, from 1995 to 2001, the number of powwow events has tripled.

Sylphides and wilis, white gauze and moonlit glades: these are the stereotypical images of the Romantic ballet. A cursory look at the lithographs of the period leaves the viewer with visions of an airy-fairyland far removed from industry, labor, colonialism, or any of the bigger and beastlier concerns of the early nineteenth century. But despite its bias towards otherworldliness, the Romantic ballet was not entirely divorced from the concerns of its time. It shared many interests with the drama, literature, and fine arts of the period and like them drew many of its themes from the material world, although it tended to select and exploit these themes for their color and spectacle rather than utilize them to convey sociological truths or instigate reform. An example of such a “realistic” ballet is Jules Perro's Catarina, whose protagonist is a more robust creature than the sylphs and fays that dominated the period: a female bandit.

Since the early years of the twentieth century it has gradually come to pass that virtually anything, anything at all, can be considered a work of art. A sliced up cow can be art, and so can a pile of bricks or a hole in the ground. In the domain of dance, a choreographer having difficulty creating a dance work may, for example, simply walk onstage and describe for the audience how her work might have looked had she completed it. Or she can list the work in the concert program with an explanation that it will not be performed because it does not actually exist. The most advanced theories of art in circulation today would, without hesitation, confer the status of art upon either of these options as easily as upon an actual dance.

How did it come to be that such things as these could be art? The quick answer is that it is one of the legacies of aesthetic modernism to have made it possible for virtually anything to be art. As Thomas McEvilley explains:

The lights coming up from downstage left pick up a group of six women edging their way onto the stage from the diagonally opposite corner, their spines collapsed forward from their pelvises, backs jutting out to emphasize the broken line of the spine, knees flexed low, feet weighted to the ground, arms lying stiff and lifeless at their sides, but their heads still reaching searchingly forward. With their broken backs, they move painstakingly, slowly: the heel of one foot rises almost imperceptibly and drags the foot forward, the sole ever unable to dissociate itself fully from the ground. The weight shifts forward with this arduous endeavor as the body resigns itself onto the forward foot. Now the heel of the other foot rises in a barely visible movement and drags the foot, yet unable to lift itself from the ground, forward. The weight shifts one more time and another step is inched on. And again, the heel of one foot rises almost imperceptibly and drags the foot forward and another step is inched on. Each step speaks of weariness and pain, and a quest in spite of that. One by one, the feet pull themselves forward and haul the body across the stage in this terrifying, weighted effort. Halfway across the stage, the women are halted in this journey as if by some unseen attacker looming large in front of them. Acknowledging their arrested pathway, they begin to retrace their steps.

When investigating the relationship between dance and political movements in the twentieth century a paradox emerges: How could modernist art coexist and indeed diri ve in companionship with totalitarian ideologies? Emphatic individualism has come to define the modern American age and the modern artist. Yet such autonomy stands in direct conflict witii the Fascist and Communist waves mat crashed over Europe and rolled tfirough Depression-era New York in the first half of the twentieth century. This paper traces a lineage of movement ideas that traveled to the United States from Germany during that time. I will briefly consider the chorie principle of the German dance pioneers and how ideas of monumental mass movement emigrated to and were assimilated into the dance world of 1930s New York. The coexistence of two trends, the mass dance and modern concert dance, offer a way to trace the dissemination of movement ideas that organized in tandem with emerging political movements on bom sides of me Atlantic. I will examine how die leftist New Dance Group grew out of me New York Wigman School under die direction of Hanya Holm. The Group used Holm's methods of movement improvisation to encourage amateur dance within the labor union revolution, while simultaneously supporting the development of professionals in die field. Over time, the Group had a lasting impact on American modern dance, encouraging collaboration among artists and racial equality for dancers.

The search for the “centre”… For a dancer, this word resonates physically first of all. Not so long ago, the dancer, when he was training, was systematically told to “find his centre”. But today, it is generally acknowledged that the body has no centre, and he doesn't miss it. The body of modern times has no need for a centre, because that absent centre, the core which would enable one to feel reassured, isn't there, has ceased to be there. For in the void of a body expropriated of its centre, there is room for dance.

To me, life is essentially movement, and much of my journey has been living so that I may dance. Now, as a woman of color confronting disabilities as well as heightened awarenesses in my post-cancer reality, I dance to live; my dance has become a functional ritual for the continuance of all of life. I believe that art in some of its highest forms can be healing, thus I create dances to sustain health, harmony, and balance of all forms of life and interconnected relationships—the dance of ecology.

This article considers the ethico-aesthetic potential of British choreographic practices that respond to questions raised by the current sociopolitical moment by staging im/possibilities and dis/orientation and by envisioning alternative understandings of the present. It embraces Karen Barad's new materialist onto-epistemology as an inspiring framework to discuss the significance of choreography that troubles accepted patterns of relationality and engages in a creative-critical remapping of experience.

In a society which judged the culture of its members less by the building of cities than by the transforming influence of writing, it is not unexpected to find that written dance notation is of a high quality. And, when it is further understood that the writing of this society is, itself, a form of line drawing, one is not surprised to find that excellent and accurate line drawings accompany the written text.

This is as true for dance description in present-day revolutionary China as it was in traditional China where the accuracy and complete documentation of Ming dynasty (1378–1644) ritual dance anticipated and exceeded Western efforts in this area. Although historical records suggest that dance notations in China may have existed as early as in the first millenium B.C., they appear to have been destroyed by the book-burning Emperor Shih Huang-ti at the end of the third century B.C. In other instances like those of the T'ang dynasty dance tablatures found in the caves of Tun-huang, the notations have not yet been adequately deciphered; thus, fully-documented rituals in China are best known to us from a period of time (circa. 1600), not far in years from the notes made regarding the famed Ballet Comique de la Reine or Arbeau's Orchésographie

One observes in the Ming dynasty records that movements were illustrated as well as described, the descriptions tending to be terse while the illustrations were more complete. In fact, the dance is better understood by studying the complete picture sequence than by following the characters. (Figures 1 and 2 are examples of two movements in sequence as shown in notation of Ming dynasty ritual dance). Regarding the translation of the characters that are found on the illustrations, Figs. 1 and 2: the vertical characters are essentially numerical, roughly equivalant to saying in English, “index number 5 and index number 6.” The larger characters, which are read horizontally from right to left, are descriptive in general terms only, and require a study of the drawings in sequence to be fully understood.

The medium of dance can refine its own instrument; the dancer gains fuller possession and utility of the body, of sensibilities, the uniqueness of total self. The rational and intuitive begin to flow freely into each other; the equipment becomes more subtle. Dance can thus be one more way, and a potent one, of enabling a human being to command more fully his powers.

Philosophical statements such as this exemplify the emphasis the dancer must put upon the ideal as well as upon the practical application of the real. Dance technique, how-ever, exhibits the gap between fact and theory. Today, the dance instructor has available literature related to kinesiology and research methods that could be of help to improve the theory underlying dance technique; but it appears that full advantage has not been taken of these resources to correct existing errors in technique.