Representations of war recur throughout art, whether celebrating the glories and heroism of conflict, or depicting its horrors and follies. This paper uses qualitative audience research to examine soldiers' own responses to the representation of soldiers in choreographer Rosie Kay's dance performance 5 Soldiers: The Body is the Frontline. This article explores how for military audiences the satisfaction of an internalized sense of authenticity allowed them to accept the performance as a legitimate representation; at the same time the presentation of war in a choreographic language meant that the performance was also abstracted, with theatrical and stylized elements that were far from authentic as a documentary. This paper proposes that it was the combination of authenticity with theatricality that generated empathetic investment and made 5 Soldiers an articulate witness to the military experience.

This article examines Rudolf Laban's theory of dance as it developed in his written and stage works from 1919 to 1926. Specifically, it shows how Laban defined dance as a form of positive liberty, which provided the anchor of what I label as his “embodied conservatism,” a conceptual and practical orientation of movement toward the goal of reshaping society according to principles of harmony as universal law. Bridging the history of dance with the history of political thought, I argue that Laban's theory of dance offered a theory of politics in response to social and political fracture during the Weimar Republic.

The identification of images of dance from antiquity is very difficult given the limitations of ancient forms of representation, the remoteness of the action itself, and the obscurity of its cultural contexts. These problems are magnified when one considers images of dance from preliterate cultures or those in which written language offers little insight. The following is an investigation into the representation of dance dating to the latter half of the Aegean Bronze Age, during the second millennium BC, as part of the visual culture of the Minoans and Mycenaeans from the island of Crete and the mainland of Greece respectively.

The Grand Union was a collective of choreographer/performers which during the years 1970–76 made group improvisations embracing dance, theater, and theatrics in an ongoing investigation into the nature of dance and performance. Grand Union's identity as a group had several sources: some of the nine who have been its members had known each other for as long as ten years when the group formed; they had seen and performed in each other's works since the Judson Church days. Most had studied with Merce Cunningham, and three had danced in his company.

One important and rich source for the group's genesis was Yvonne Rainer's work Continuous Project-Altered Daily (CP-AD). To understand the course of Grand Union's activities, it is useful to look first at the changing nature of CP-AD. Rainer began the piece in 1969, and in March 1970 presented a definitive version at the Whitney Museum. The performers were Becky Arnold, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, Barbara Lloyd (now Dilley), Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer and various readers.

Like Bojangles, by 1958 the Savoy had become an institution in the world of entertainment, and like Bojangles, it caught the imagination of thousands upon thousands of people during its 32-year history. The Savoy was a building, a geographic place, a ballroom, and the “soul” of a neighborhood. It personified a community and an era, and became a monument to the music and dance of “swing.” On its huge and shiny mahogany floor, the Lindy Hop was born, a dance that took the world by storm and would become as seminal as the waltz in the history of social dance. The Lindy Hop, together with countless other dances like the Flying Charleston, the Stomp, the Shim Sham Shimmy, Rhumboogie, Suzie-Q, Big Apple, Black Bottom and the Scrontch, were taken to an extraordinary level of performing perfection at the Savoy. Within its inner circle, great dancers and musicians set trends and styles in dance and music that ricocheted throughout the world. There were other ballrooms and clubs—Connie's Inn, Small's Paradise, The Cotton Club, The Lenox Club, The Kentucky Club, and the downtown clubs on 52nd Street—but there was only one Savoy.

One of the most heated debates in modern literary and aesthetic theory concerns the relevance to criticism in general, and to interpretation specifically, of information about an author/artist's intentions in creating a particular work. This intentionalist/anti-intentionalist debate is an important one for dance educators to examine and discuss with students, since teachers' beliefs about the relevance of an artist's intentions determine in large part the way they interpret and judge dances (and other works of art), and mentor student choreographers and critics. The critical advice of mentors who hold intentionalist assumptions naturally tends to be quite different from the input of those holding anti-intentionalist views.

The debate over artists' intentions began in earnest in 1946 with the publication of a provocative and now famous essay entitled “The Intentional Fallacy” by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley. In this work the authors attacked the intentionalist idea that to achieve a valid, or true, interpretation of a work we must ascertain whatever meaning its maker intended it to possess. The essay laid the groundwork for a rigorous anti-intentionalism, which held that works of art and literature are autonomous entities whose meanings are carried entirely by their internal structures and do not depend on the so-called meaning-intentions of their creators.

Spain's contribution to the evolution of theatrical dance is acknowledged within the categories of ballet and ethnic dance. Spanish folk dance elements have been incorporated into the classical ballet vocabulary, and exotic adaptations of dances from Spain have enriched the established ballet repertory: Fanny Ellsler's Cachucha, Petipa's “Spanish Dance” divertissement in Swan Lake, and Leonide Massine's Tricorne (The Three Cornered Hat) are wellknown examples. Soloists such as Pastora Imperio, La Argentina, José Greco, and Carmen Amaya have popularized around the world what has become known as the Spanish style of dance (for example, fandango, bolero, seguidillas, flamenco). However, Spain has not been associated with the history of early modern dance, a phenomenon largely attributed to a handful of American and German dancers.

Tórtola Valencia (1882–1955) claimed Spain as her country of origin, and made a flamboyant contribution to early modern dance in western Europe, Spain, and Latin America from 1908–1930. Her vast, eclectic repertory of Oriental, classical, and Spanish themes echoed the preoccupations of her contemporaries with whom she was favorably compared—in particular, Isadora Duncan, Maud Allan, Ruth St. Denis, Mikhail Fokine, and Anna Pavlova (1). In her time she received critical acclaim as one of the most famous dancers in Europe, yet she is not cited in the English language history of dance (2). This is only part of the mystery that weaves through the fabric of Tórtola Valencia's intriguing life and career.

Though scarcely remembered today, the Théâtre de la Chauve-Souris (The Bat Theater) in its heyday (1908–1943) was an internationally known musical theater under the direction of Nikita Baliev. Founded in Moscow in early 1908, it eventually became, because of the exigencies of history, a touring theater, a company equally at home in Paris, London, New York, and elsewhere. Despite its enormous popularity among general audiences, the Chauve-Souris was the first theater of its kind to enlist in its ranks artists from the Russian Imperial theaters, the public dramatic and light-opera theaters, and the experimental or avant-garde theaters as regular or frequent visiting performers, musicians, or designers. It was also one of the first, if not the first, theaters of its kind (at least in Western Europe) to engage a woman as its choreographer, Mme Elizabeth Anderson. On its first appearance in the West, Parisian critics variously identified the theatrical character of the Chauve-Souris as that of a cabaret, a night club, or a music-hall theater, none of which, as we shall see, adequately defines its nature. To understand the aesthetic premises of Baliev's theater, we need to review briefly the origins of the Chauve-Souris and the early careers of Nikita Baliev, Elizabeth Anderson, and Sergei Sudeikin, the principal designer for the Paris opening. The artistic mastery each brought to the group's first “saison russe” in 1920–21 produced a collaboration that led the critics to call the Chauve-Souris “une école d'avantgarde.”

In 1951, at the dawning of a decade that would be known by some for its suffocating conformity and political intolerance, Katherine Dunham created Southland, a dramatic ballet Americana about what was by then the century-long practice of lynching. In the program notes to the ballet that premiered at the Opera House in Santiago de Chile, Dunham wrote, “This is the story of no actual lynching in the southern states of America, and still it is the story of every one of them”. She spoke the Prologue onstage, in Spanish:

During the course of a summer dance workshop I attended many years ago, I learned a section of Doris Humphrey's Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor. Later, on occasion, I would “teach” this section to students thinking I was adding to their understanding of dance and its practice. As luck would have it, I was teaching this section again to students at the University of Wisconsin when one of my mentors, Claudia Melrose, stopped by to observe my work. Following class Claudia approached me and said, “That was very nice Tom, but what were they learning?” I replied, “They were learning a section of Humphrey's Passacaglia.” Claudia responded, “No, Tom. What were they learning?” In a flash I realized that I couldn't answer her; I hadn't really thought about the “what.” I realized the need to make a personal search for substance in dance education. Being at Wisconsin— “ground zero” for dance in higher education—I turned to the writings of Margaret H'Doubler and found in them a way of thinking that continues to inform my professional development. In many respects, H'Doubler's lifework acts as my point of departure in educational dance. As time has distanced me from my moment of epiphany, I find myself ever more in debt to the legacy of this remarkable woman.

This essay looks closely at the first stage of H'Doubler's development as a dance educator. Between the years 1916 and 1926, only a ten-year span, H'Doubler evolved from a women's basketball coach, admittedly ignorant of dance as art or in education, into the nation's foremost academic authority on the subject. Her vision of dance matured quickly and with amazing clarity; the moment of epiphany, while lying on her back in a studio in Carnegie Hall, served as the source for what she called a “way of thinking” that would serve her for the rest of her professional life. An assessment of H'Doubler's evolution as a dance educator during this period, and an analysis of her development along with her peers and colleagues in the field, provides important contexts from which to evaluate her subsequent contributions to dance in American education.

Although the face possesses potent social and symbolic meaning, the “dancing face” is rarely addressed in dance scholarship. In spite of its neglect, the face participates choreographically in the realization of aesthetic codes and embodied conventions that pertain to different dance styles and genres. I therefore turn to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's (1987) theory of “faciality” to understand the semiotic coding of the face in relation to the Busby Berkeley chorus girl. Although their work offers an important critique of universalist theorizations of facial expression, I argue that “facial choreography” offers scope to dismantle the legibility of the face that is produced through the overcoded “abstract machine of faciality.” To do so, I introduce the concept of a “choreographic interface” to explore how facial expression enters into a choreographic relationship with other faces and bodily territories. With this in mind, I explore two dancing bodies that engage the face in ways that complicate existing modalities of facial expression. I analyze a hip-hop battle and a neo-burlesque striptease number to show how the mobility and ambiguity of facial choreography opens a dialogic space through which meaning is generated and social and political critique take place.

Mary Wigman wanted to develop a new dance form, one that could express her personal perception of the spirit of her era and communicate her innermost feelings. What she created in her early choreographies, despite variations in specific works, was a dance in which one of the most prevalent constituents was mysticism, found in the purpose, process, and content of her choreography. It is by virtue of the element of mysticism that Wigman's artwork can be linked to a major aspect of the German Expressionist movement, which had come to full flower in art and drama during Wigman's artistically formative years.

German Expressionism was the attempt, by several German artists circa 1907-1925, to express the inner reality of a character, situation, or event rather than the external, scientifically verifiable facts, by portraying the essence, by giving form to experience to convey its universal significance. This expression of the artist's vision, which was intensely individual in style and inspiration yet universal in content, was often marked by distortion or non-realistic symbols used to attain a direct communication from soul to soul, that is, to express the essence of their vision so that it could be apprehended on a sensed level rather than on an intellectual level. The German Expressionist artists, as well as Wigman, developed their own, individual styles according to their particular art medium and individual personalities.

Some readers may find the style and organization of Ms. Ameri's article different from those that they are used to finding in Dance Research Journal. One must keep in mind that in Iran the performance of dance, with the exception of male folk dancing in front of all-male audiences, has been banned for over twenty-five years. Even the performance of solo improvised dance in private parties, such as weddings, can result in severe punishment. Prior to the 1978/79 revolution only one serious, but deeply flawed, article (Zoka' 1979) in Persian had appeared in print. Ms. Ameri's article is a pioneering effort, the first serious scholarly article to appear in print in Iran by an Iranian in a quarter of a century, and one that the reader can more readily appreciate when he or she realizes that the research materials available to dance researchers in the West, Japan, and other parts of the world do not exist in Iran. Thus, the work Ms. Ameri undertook was burdened by a lack of knowledge of trends in contemporary dance research that many of us take as commonplace; the article took great personal courage to write.

The field work for this study was conducted in Pingtung County, Taiwan over a five-month period in 1976 from February to July. The Paiwan tribe is one of the nine existing tribes in Taiwan; most of these people live in Pingtung County in the south (Fig. 1). Of the 300,000 Taiwan aborigines on the island today, approximately 45,000 are Paiwan. The methods employed in the collection of the data were: 1) observing and recording dances roughly in Labanotation, 2) participating in dancing, 3) filming dances, and 4) interviewing informants. Dances were observed in two ways – in their actual context, or especially elicited. Those elicited included some which are still performed today but were demonstrated for me by request apart from their natural context, and some which are no longer performed but were recalled by my informants. After my return from the field, Labanotation was refined and checked against films, and the raw data was then categorized and analysed. The purpose of the categorization was to identify the characteristics of Paiwan dances based on the data collected.

A total of 62 dances were witnessed in 12 villages of the 8 townships visited. Not all dance types were observed in each village (Figure 2). Some informants remember and can reconstruct more than others, so that data collected in each village may not necessarily represent the entire village repertoire of the present or the recent past. In many cases, the same movements were executed in dances of the same or different dance types. It is the associated song and song text rather than the movements that differentiates the dances.

In the twentieth century, dance performances in the Republic of Korea have undergone a number of changes in terms of settings, audiences, and performers. Since the 1970s dance activity has blossomed under the auspices of university dance and physical education departments; there has been a steady increase in the number of professors of dance and also in the number of students majoring in dance. With the regular academic calendar, a concert season has developed and professor-choreographers have been pushed to provide new dance pieces for these concerts. Many of the new works freely blend vocabulary from various styles of Korean dance, such as court, professional female entertainer (kisaeng) (I), mask, and farmers' dances, with spatial arrangements suited for a proscenium stage.

While this creative activity is indicative of the growth taking place in all areas of Korean society, older specialists in Korean culture and arts have noted that recent efforts involve changes in the movement qualities and moods created by dancers. As these specialists watch younger dancers perform the traditional dances they often lament that “something” is being lost (Lee, Du-hyon 1984).

Nearly twenty years ago, I took a graduate seminar on postcolonial theory with Edward Said in the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University. It was a heady experience: competitive grad students and young faculty members vied for his imperious (I realize the irony of the word in reference to Said!) attentions. We read novels—potent, searing, difficult novels—alongside some of the theorists of political struggle who would indelibly alter my understanding of what cultural resistance could mean. Said's recent death, which of course coincided with a period of distressing shifts in political tides, has placed pressure on those of us engaged with cultural analysis to probe even more deeply the significance of anticolonial struggle in cultural forms. As a dance scholar, I have found myself reflecting on the ways in which postcolonial theory might inform my understanding of the power of choreography to affect political change—but also on the ways in which dance can inform our readings of postcolonial theory.