Typologies are tools to help us understand the range of observed phenomena. Many typological categories are useful in dance research, contrasting various features in the data. Based on the identity of the recipient of the danced message, four types of dance can be identified: reflexive, participatory, sacred, and presentational. The conceptual axis between participatory and presentational dance is proposed as potentially significant for ethnochoreologists. Differences in the intended recipient of the communicated message affect the other components of the dance event, including the movement “text.”

At least in our example of two Ukrainian dances, participatory dances carry their communicative message over short distances, and utilize microscopic movement elements for this purpose. The message in presentational dances must be carried over a greater span, and macroscopic movement units tend to carry this communicative value. In both types of dance, the movement content is most complex at the structural levels which are most used in communication. Conversely, participatory dances are often simple on the macroscopic level, while presentational dances tend to have uncomplicated microscopic content.

The participatory-presentational axis can clarify important differences in activities often lumped together under the problematic category of “folk” dance. These conceptual categories may be of use for anyone studying dance in its cultural context.

When I arrived at nine o'clock, the deejay was spinning “trip hop” style disks in the “chill room” upstairs until the formal dance show was supposed to start at ten o'clock downstairs. Critical mass is important: the event did not begin until midnight; size of crowd and group energy are the determining factors for starting time in hip hop culture. Eventually, the audience of about two hundred consisted of black, white, Asian, Hawaiian, military, and civilian patrons who were mostly in their late twenties. “What's up, y'all? Y'all ready for the show?” asked Jamal, Honolulu hip hop promoter and emcee, to open the event.

Jamal proceeded to read from a script about the beginnings of American society's acceptance of “African American culture in the 1920s Jazz Age,” putting what was about to happen in historical context and giving the event an informative purpose. This scripted narration of hip hop's historical context at a club event reflected an interest in specific African American origins of the pop culture form expressed by many global hip hop leaders. Thus began “Urban Movement,” a November 1998 b-boy (breakdance) event produced at the Wave Waikiki nightclub in Honolulu, on the island of Oahu. What followed was a demonstration of the current-day variations of hip hop dance that began in the 1970s with virtuosic athletic b-boying or b-girling and “popping,” the phenomenal muscular control of the rapid-fire rhythmic isolations. Urban Movement provided several hip hop enactments that illuminated what I investigate in this essay—the interdependence of performance and performativity as dual forces in global breakdancing.

This article provides an account of improvisational artistry in live dance performance that construes the contribution of the dance performer as a kind of agency. Andy Clark's theory of the embodied and extended mind is used in order to consider how this account is supported by research on how a thinking-while-doing person navigates the world. I claim here that while a dance performer's improvisational artistry does include embodied and extended features that occur outside of the brain and nervous system, that this can be construed as “agency” rather than “thought.” Further I claim that trained and individual style accounts for how this agency acquires its artistic nature. This account thus contributes to the philosophy of improvisation in dance performance in a way that includes motor as well as cognized intentions.

My first idea was to compare Ausdruckstanz literature to work in other fields on the theorization of fascist aesthetics. This would establish a critical framework for the vexed question of the fascistization of German modern dance. As the research of Susan Manning, Marion Kant, and Laure Guilbert has made patently evident, Ausdruckstanz begs the question of dance and politics because of the easy and massive accommodation of German modern dance to the cultural policies of the Third Reich. The history of Ausdruckstanz has long been veiled, but the original research of these scholars persuades us to reconsider dance modernism from the political perspective. An early twentieth-century avant-garde art movement and an authoritarian state apparatus encounter each other at a moment crucial in the development of each; something new is being created, both artistically and politically, that reveals contradictory forces and tendencies at work. Only when these dance scholars lifted the veil and rewrote history could we begin to perceive dance in the full light of the political. They have inaugurated an area of inquiry that requires further work. But any serious critical development of dance study methodology must also be tested against their re-evaluation Ausdruckstanz.

Encounter #1 Hand-drawn Spaces: I step around the corner and into a small room, pitch black except for the dull glow of three projection screens; the center one flat in front of me, the other two angling out like welcoming arms reaching to the edges of the darkness. I stay back, keeping what distance is allowed me, so I can take it all in. With little fanfare, a figure moves into view. The figure is clearly a representation of a human, a biped whose movement quality is instinctually recognizable, yet it lacks all of the features by which we categorize and contextualize in that instant of perceiving an “other.” (Check the order of your personal list and see how you were socialized—Gender? Age? Race? Ability?) Instead, this figure is formed, or perhaps I should say indicated, by lines: a chest cavity of swirling blue; a kinked, mustard-yellow appendage extending out from what seem like perpetually hunched shoulders.

From even a few feet away I feel a bit detached from this “dancer.” Lacking individuality in the way I am used to experiencing it, I don't feel compelled to attend to its dancing. So I step closer. Here, almost surrounded by the screens, my customary fourth wall protection is lost. As if on stage, I finally join this dance, beginning to feel some of that sense, that connection—my body to your body, your moving to my moving—that has kept me in this field through many lean years. Yet who am I connecting with?

More figures begin to appear and disappear: some retreat out of sight; some seem to step off into the darkness only to emerge on a different screen; and some eerily advance at me, growing into looming giants just moments before fading into darkness. It's as if they are attempting to leave their screened-in world, but disappointed to find themselves no more than projected pixels of light.

It is well acknowledged that the court dances which developed in Europe from the seventeenth century onward spread to the rural areas of Europe and to the new world. What has not been properly recognized is that these dances — the quadrille, the cotillion, the contradance and the like — were taken up by Afro-Americans in North and South America and the West Indies and were modified and adapted to local cultural circumstances. In many cases — especially in the West Indies — they continue to be found today. Yet as similar as these dances may look or sound, their functions are not always necessarily the same as those of their European sources. At one extreme, they were “Africanized” for sacred purposes; at the other, they were re-formed and became the basis of a new world popular culture. An example of the former occurs on the island of Montserrat.

There country dance orchestras made up of various combinations of fife, fiddle, concertina or accordion, triangle, and two drums known as the woowoo and the babala (or babla) play for social dancing, but the same music is also used for inducing possession on other occasions, called “jombee dances.” On these latter occasions quadrille dance rhythms are intensified and gradually “Africanized” in order that individuals may become possessed and convey the messages of the spirits.

Dance is virtually always music-and-dance, unavoidably interdisciplinary and ready for “marriage,” or so the familiar metaphor tells us (Du Manoir 1664/1985; Humphrey 1959, 164). Apart from a few notable exceptions from within modern dance—like the silent dances of the 1920s and 1930s or the flamboyant rejections of musical tyranny by Merce Cunningham and Yvonne Rainer from midcentury—the centrality of music within dance and the “musicality” of the dancer have long been considered unquestioned facts of life.

Yet traditionally, there have been fundamental differences in practice and conceptual frameworks between these two art forms or (within the academy) “disciplines.” Music has a history of being thought “alone” and uncontaminated by matter outside itself. Often, it needs no other partner. Then, in dance, the performer is central—as Yeats famously wrote: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”—while in music, the score object, written by a composer, has been central and the performer, until quite recendy, relatively marginalized.

As Bharatanatyam dancers across the world talk about what they do through listservs, websites, and performance publicity—in academia's world dance courses and amidst international cultural diplomats—I keep re-encountering the Orientalist representation of a “pan Indian transhistorical” devadāsī. Her history is a linear deterioration of aesthetic quality and personal agency, from temple to courts and from courts to streets and to (deserved) abandonment from where the dancer and the dance must be rescued (see Hanna 1993; Banerji 1983).

The lifestyle of the sadir dancers of the early twentieth century was extensively researched by Amrit Srinivasan (1979–81) and documented in her ethnographic dissertation at Cambridge University 1984 and in subsequent articles.2 The devadāsī was selected for her talent. She was highly trained in dance, texts, and music, and she performed temple rituals. Her freedom from household responsibilities (grhastya) was made possible by the largesse of a patron, and bhakti theology legitimized “both the housewife and god's wife as parallel life-possibilities” both for women and for those men who could afford to support both kinds of liaisons. Temples frequently reimbursed devadāsī-s with bourses and land donations.

Dancers today persist in maintaining that dancers had no “technique” since they danced only for God, that they knew nothing of music or theory, performed in a vulgar manner, and that contemporary dancers are much more beautiful, intelligent, and better trained.

The spectacular popularity of Riverdance in 1994, in Ireland and abroad, prompted critical reflection on notions of cultural authenticity, ethnicity, and identity. The attention focused on step dance led to increased discussions of national characteristics. This essay argues that the perceptions of Irish step dance, at first local, then nationalized and globally exported, reflect larger issues of relevance to the Irish state. Although these perceptions have influenced the development of Irish step dance locally, nationally, and globally, the dance practices themselves have assisted in molding and maintaining these same perceptions. I will illustrate how the commodification of Irish step dance practice, particularly during the past five years, has acted as a major catalyst for the emergence of marginal dance practices and has reenergized the Irish step dance tradition. Throughout this essay, I use the expression “marginal dance practice” to contrast with competition dance culture, which I interpret as the mainstream, accepted canon.

Although no one grand theory of globalization exists, considerable thinking on the subject has emerged over the past several decades among theorists from both the humanities and the social sciences. The term “globalization” appeared in the mid-1980s to replace others such as “internationalization” and “transnationalization” as a description for our ever shrinking world and the perceived process of “cultural homogenization on a global scale” (Hoogvelt 1997, 114; King 1991, viii). Different paradigms exist in the literature and, for the most part, they fall within two areas: international relations and world-system-theory.

Scholarly studies explore dance from many points of view. They may focus on the historical development of a dance form, examine the context in which a particular dance event occurs, explore the background of those who dance and how this relates to social structure, or explore the movement process itself—the dancing. While all approaches to the study of dance provide potentially meaningful data and insights relating to the role of dance in its socio-cultural context, the heart of dance is the movement. Dance research that ignores the dancing (except for very broad descriptive statements) ignores a major component that has potential for revealing a great deal about those who create and use dance.

American researchers who have explored the movement process have, on the whole, worked independently (of each other or of other research projects), without working toward developing a widely understood methodology for examining dance movement and exploring its potential uses in other dance research. While such studies contribute to the knowledge of specific dances or dance forms, they overlook the need for common tools necessary for cross-cultural and comparative studies. To allow for the most meaningful research to be carried out, a discipline must develop tools and methodologies that have a certain consensus of validity and broad applicability. Only through use of such research procedures will it be possible to interrelate apparently diverse studies and evolve broad concepts relating to dance as human activity.

Against the backdrop of a four-year study into dance for people with Parkinson's, I examine one woman's claim that dancing makes her feel beautiful, and, as such, is fundamental to her well-being. I debate the challenge that this claim poses to those who argue that beauty in dance is at best unimportant, at worst disenfranchising. In debating this challenge, I create a link between aesthetics and health through a reformulation of the value of beauty in the context of chronic illness and well-being. This link then allows me to discuss how feeling lovely could become relevant and meaningful within the context of participating in dance.

I began to study philosophy at the same time that I began to study dance, at college in the early 1980s. Both of these choices surprised me at first, as I had originally planned to study politics and become a civil rights lawyer after college. I see now that these two areas of inquiry were routes toward figuring out how to bridge the divides between my academic self and my increasingly explosive physicality. Figuratively as well as literally divided into day and night, my academic experience and the club scene I thrived in were separated by geographic distance and differing class values—a study in the cultural bifurcation produced by the hierarchies of brain and brawn. But these body/mind boundaries were always porous for me, and they became increasingly so as I explored the epistemological origins of the Cartesian split in my survey of Western philosophy course while also taking my first modern dance class. My desire was to become both verbally and physically articulate, and I savored those moments when vague impulses or ideas found the right expressive gesture or crucial wording. By the time I was a senior, I was choreographing a quartet and writing a thesis on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1962). Somewhere along the way, philosophy and dance leaned into one another, beginning a duet that would lead to a life spent thinking and moving.

I worked on Trio A alone for six months in 1965. The dance initially consisted of a five-minute sequence of movement that would eventually be presented as The Mind Is a Muscle, Part I at Judson Church (on January 10, 1966). There it was performed by me, David Gordon, and Steve Paxton simultaneously but not in unison. An interim version of an extended, but not complete, The Mind Is a Muscle (Judson Church, May 22, 1966) was performed by William Davis, David Gordon, and Steve Paxton. In the final section of this version, called “Lecture,” Peter Saul executed a balletic solo version—that is, with pirouettes and jumps. In the final version (Anderson Theater, April 11, 1968) Trio A was performed by me in tap shoes (without balletic furbelows) at the end of the evening while Paxton, Gordon, and Davis performed it as a trio at the beginning.

The individual sequences last from four and a half to five minutes, depending on each performer's physical inclination. Two primary characteristics of the dance are its uninflected continuity and its imperative involving the gaze. The eyes are always averted from direct confrontation with the audience via independent movement of the head, closure of the eyes, or simple casting down of the gaze.

The excellent body of literature on African-American (or black) expressive culture often refers to the importance of improvisation in black vernacular dancing. In their discussion of key precepts upon which black vernacular dancing is based, Marshall and Jean Stearns explain that dance in the African diaspora “places great importance upon improvisation, satirical and otherwise, allowing freedom for individual expression; this characteristic makes for flexibility and aids the evolution and diffusion of other African characteristics” (1968, 15). Jacqui Malone notes that black vernacular dancing is “an additive process…a way of experimenting with new ideas; that mindset is Africa's most important contribution to the Western Hemisphere” (1996, 33). She goes on to declare:

This article argues that the performance of a dance entails varying degrees of openness and spontaneity and that, on these terms, any dance can be considered improvised. The first part substantiates this claim, whereupon the second part deals with the contingent question as to how dancers then handle openness and spontaneity differently in improvisation practices. To answer this question, the article turns to enactive and phenomenological clarifications of agency—our capacity to perform acts—and by analyzing the improvisation of Danish performer Kitt Johnson, indicates how this clarification can help us understand the different ways agency is exercised when improvising.

At the MTV awards show in September 1998, Madonna performed a spiritual song in a transparent white T-shirt with three Indian Odissi dancers in their classical regalia. Within two days of this event a representative of a Hindu religious sect, the Vaisnavs, condemned Madonna for debasing Hinduism and Indian women. A significant intercultural event, which had been generating pride for some sections of the Indian-American community, had once again exposed the lack of context and historicity in interculturalism. Odissi is not merely an aesthetically pleasing dance form from eastern India; its history is embedded in various ancient fertility cults tied to ritualistic Hindu temple worship by women dancers known as “mahari(s).” The dance was also performed by young male dancers known as “gotipua(s),” who performed outside the temple. Frederique Marglin traces Odissi to the powerful cult of Chaitanya (a Vaisnavite saint reformer) in the sixteenth century (1985). She explains that, like many indigenous dance forms, it was simply called nacha before its revival in the 1950s by dance scholars and male teachers. Thus, the dance is a product of a complex mix of Hindu nationalism, regional chauvinism, and national revivalism and is embedded in patriarchal views of the role and function of women in society. Madonna's commercial interculturalism failed to take note of this: By trying to glamorize an exotic tradition she, unsurprisingly, offended the self-appointed bearers of that tradition.

In the 1950s, the world saw the birth, growth, and development of a new dance genre, the choreographic creations of the professional state folk dance ensemble (1). The genesis of what became a worldwide phenomenon of professional, semi-professional and amateur folk dance ensembles, with the notable exception of the capitalistic Western powers and Japan, began, in my opinion, in response to the extraordinary success of the Ensemble of Folk Dances of the Peoples of the Soviet Union, known in the West as the Moiseyev Dance Company, under the artistic direction of founder Igor Moiseyev. This ensemble was begun in 1937 at the onset of World War II, but its major impact began with the political reformation of the world in the aftermath of the war. During this period the U.S.S.R.'s direct political domination of Eastern Europe and popularity and influence in other regions of the world led to widespread emulation of the Soviet model of different types of institutions, including the formation of professional state-sponsored dance companies. This dance symbol became so crucial that a small nation like Bulgaria had seventeen professional folk song and dance ensembles by the 1980s (Ilieva 1994, 35).

This article explores Vancouver-based multi-media collective Skookum Sound System's Ay I Oh Stomp's (2012) mobilization of “decolonial gesturings” as they create a future imaginary attentive to the past, critiquing the present, and venturing into the beyond. These gestures activate Indigenous futurities through traditional style Kwakwaka'wakw dance and choreographies of sea travel, popping as a “street dance” of holds and releases, and the mobilization of digital polychromatic shifting and looping. I illustrate how the video is a form of radical imagination tantamount to social change, and how it remixes dance, movement and gestures that “jump scale” out of colonial cartographies.

From Jill Johnston to Sally Banes, Susan Leigh Foster, Mark Franko, Ramsay Burt, and, most recently, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, dance historians and theorists have extolled the qualities of Yvonne Rainer's Trio A (1966) and discussed its significance in dance history. My relationship to this dance is unique. I first saw it at the Billy Rose Theatre in New York City in 1969, and in the same year I learned and performed it at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College. In November of 1970 I first performed it retrograde, and I first taught it in the summer of 1971. In the forty years since, I have continued to perform and teach it. One of the high points in this odyssey was performing it in a duet with Yvonne at Judson Church in Trio A Pressured, a 1999 piece that marked her return to dance after a twenty-five-year hiatus as a filmmaker.

What is it about this dance, beyond its ideas and groundbreaking methods, that has kept me wanting to perform it and others wanting to see and learn it? And how is the experience of doing it different from that of viewing it? How has it changed for me and across generations over the years? I must go back to that first experience with the dance to begin to answer these questions.