The most exuberant example of dance among the Jews is the dance at weddings. For this rejoicing, Jews have paid the most attention to how they danced in order to celebrate the new couple and also to enhance many different aspects of the marriage process. Written sources have recorded examples of wooing and wedding dances from the biblical period through all the vagaries of more than two thousand years of Jewish life. Today countless examples of wedding dances of the Jews still exist, but relatively little scholarship has focused on them.

Outstanding is the remarkable variety of all these dances and the paradoxical fact that they are all unified by the single Jewish phenomenon of a mitzvah. A mitzvah is a commandment of Jewish life; one of these is the commandment that one must dance at a Jewish wedding. This commandment has been honored through the centuries in all the diverse places Jews have been forced to live—the ghettoes, the Pale of Settlement, the mellah, imposed exile or changes through immigration and through choice.

Despite the popularity that the Yemenite Jewish dance has achieved among a general public, through Israeli folk dance and stage adaptation by groups such as the Inbal Dance Theater, scholarly treatment of this dance tradition is still in its early stages. My intent in this paper is to address an area neglected by other researchers: the examination of Yemenite Jewish dance in the context of village life in Israel, and further, the consideration of the social significance of the dancing. I will identify the significant social subsets of the village, examining the similarities and differences of dance repertoire and criteria for aesthetic evaluation among these groups as seen in the course of wedding celebrations. These similarities and differences will introduce the dimension of social meaning the intersection of form and function, symbol and meaning, dance and culture.

A moment for definition of basic terms: I use the term culture in its sense as a common conceptual framework, including beliefs, values, and symbols. Culture, as a common conceptual framework, is constantly enacted and re-enacted in actions, events, and symbolic expressions. This formulation is similar to Geertz's definition of culture as “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life.” I approach dance as one such symbolic form. Dance style is not arbitrary. It is a learned and patterned activity. By carefully investigation native attitudes, it is possible to learn how dance operates as symbolic and expressive behavior.

Identity, difference, and translation are important theoretical concepts in the field of translation studies and postcolonial studies. It is a basic assumption of this text that aesthetic and cultural translation is exposed to the paradox of identity and difference and that this paradox is particularly evident in artistic performance practices such as dance and choreography. Focusing on the artistic work of choreographer and dancer Germaine Acogny (Senegal), the text addresses artistic translation practices under postcolonial conditions in the global art market of so-called “contemporary dance.” The aim is to illustrate how contradictory, hybrid, and fragmented the cultural and aesthetic translation process is, how the global art market shapes the artistic strategies of translation, and how aesthetic productivity lies in the impossibility of translating cultural experience artistically.

”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.

For the past few years, critics, fans, and even Bill T. Jones himself have been talking about the artist's move from explicitly political, identity-based works to an investigation of aesthetics and pure movement. They talk about the more conventional makeup of Jones's current ensemble—the fact that Lawrence Goldhuber and Alexandra Beller are no longer in the company, dancers described in the New York Times as “imperfect” because “chubbier than the norm” (Dunning 2002). They discuss the fact that Jones rarely uses text these days and is no longer confrontational. He dances to Beethover and performs at Lincoln Center with the Chamber Music Society. In a 1997 mterview with Richard Covington, Jones explains this shift in his work by stating, “It's not quite as sexy to talk about. What was being said in those earlier works was as important as how it was being danced. Here, I'm trying to think about how it's danced first, trusting that the political, social, all those things are in our bodies literally, and in the eyes of the beholder” (Covington 1997).