In 1949, Mabel Dolmetsch first published her work on dance history, Dances of England and France from 1450 to 1600, with their music and authentic manner of performance. Five years later, her companion volume, Dances of Spain and Italy from 1400 to 1600, appeared. Recently, both volumes have been reprinted by Da Capo Press, New York (1975), and they are thus readily available to anyone interested in the reconstruction of dances of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While Da Capo Press is to be applauded for providing these classic works with a renewed distribution, the absence of a modern preface discussing the progress which has been made in historical dance reconstruction since the original composition of these books may well mislead readers into believing that they represent the current state of the art.

In Romanticism and Post-Modernism, Edward Larrissy states, “It has long been recognized that Romanticism is a dubious essence” (1999, 2). Observing that the current tendency is to acknowledge a plurality of “Romanticisms,” he cites Arthur O. Lovejoy's article, “On the discrimination of Romanticisms,” originally published in 1924, in which Lovejoy argued that the term had taken on such a multiplicity of meanings that “we should learn to use the word ‘Romanticism’ in the plural” (1948, 235). Acknowledging multiple schools of Romanticism constitutes more than a “post-modern piece of de-essentialising,” according to Larrissy; it recognizes that the literary and artistic creations of the Romantic era were too varied to submit to “a unified Romantic discourse” (1999, 2). Lovejoy's thesis, so widely accepted in literary circles, holds promise for dance scholars working with repertory from the Romantic era that lies outside the mainstream of “dance history” as traditionally viewed from the perspective of the Paris Opéra. Embracing the possibility of multiple forms of “Romanticism” in the nineteenth-century ballet allows us to attach meaning to the balletic repertory of that era as it varied according to national setting and individual choreographer.

The articles that follow in this section developed out of an improvised dance and papers presented by a panel of scholars based in the United States and the United Kingdom at the Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS) 2008 conference at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs.

Critics described Pina Bausch's work as “absolutely contemporary” and as being “important dance heritage,” which is precisely the opposite of contemporary, namely, historical. This contradictoriness—though productive in its own right—is symptomatic of the perspective of dance journalism brought to bear on Pina Bausch's later works in particular. But even reviews of her earlier works are a far cry from perceiving the artist in a consistent manner, some even going so far as to criticize her for being “outdated.” Apparently, Bausch's art continuously poses a challenge for dance critics because it defies easy categorization in aesthetic terms, thereby undermining the implicit postulates and classificatory criteria underlying dance reviews. There is—at least in the German-speaking area—broad consensus regarding the functions of today's dance reviews as a text genre: as a translation of dance into language, dance reviews describe, analyze, and judge. With a focus on reviews of pieces by Pina Bausch, this essay proposes to investigate how dance is translated (“trans-posed”) by considering the questions: what do reviews do when they put things into words? How are their own seemingly firm categorizations and postulates thereby destabilized or at least opened to debate?

The majority of students come to us at the University of Chichester in the United Kingdom, where I am a dance lecturer, because they want to develop careers as dancers, choreographers, or dance teachers. They are usually attracted by the opportunity to improve their dance technique and/or to be creative rather than to align themselves with the more conventional avenues of academia, and for most writing will never be a career contender.

In this article I discuss the process of choreographing “traditional” and “folk” dances in the former Yugoslavia, aligned with Yugoslav socialist ideologies that glorified the collective cultural authorship of the people, which allowed for these dances to adopt a new dimension as they took the form of a choreographed spectacle. I explain how Yugoslav choreographers utilized archival research to create a repertoire of choreographic representations of Yugoslav identity in constructing what I theorize as heritage choreography. Reflecting on how ideology moved the collective body of the Yugoslav people through choreographed works deemed as heritage, I broaden the understanding of choreographing that differs from Western concert dance practices. Furthermore, I provide alternative examples of dance making that are rooted in local understandings of spectacle, thereby enriching the conversation about what the act of choreographing entails.

”Dance, dear body, do not think,” the message attributed to the serpent in Paul Valéry's poem “La jeune parque,” lends biblical connotations to the duality between body and mind, between dance and philosophy. A similar duality between movement and thought is found in Valéry's “L'âme et la danse” (1921), a mock Platonic dialogue in which three Greek philosophers respond to a group of dancers performing in front of them. In “L'âme et la danse” the action unfolds between the eminent philosophical figures of Socrates, Eryximachus and Phaedrus, and Athikte, a young woman dancer. More than a dialogue; it is a drama through which philosophy confronts dance, in which the philosophers, who are men, confront the dancers, who are women, and across the course of which the dancers are voiceless.

In this essay, I explore a confrontation between philosophy and dance through the tension between the roles Valéry accords to men and women in philosophical discourse. Women dance, men think. Freeing the dancer from the fetters of philosophical thought is akin to liberating women from the need to bother themselves with intellectual matters. Athikte, as the voice of dance, introduces an entirely different range of philosophical issues from those which, on the surface, animate the dialogue. But, above all, Athikte illustrates how an unproductive tension between philosophy and dance can be intensified through the uncritical preservation of gendered roles within philosophical discourse.