Dance theorists and legal scholars argue that choreography is by nature ill-suited to the conceptual framework provided by copyright, even as there is widespread agreement that works of dance deserve the legal protection and cultural endorsement that its inclusion represents. I reexamine the factors that are often cited as barriers to choreography's suitability for copyright. I argue that choreography is better suited to the copyright regime than it appears, so long as we recognize that the artistic standard for substantial similarity should be different from the legal standard.

There is so much information available on flamenco in music books and magazines, on video and DVD inserts and film covers, compact disc jackets, and especially the Internet that it is difficult to determine what materials are worthwhile and reliable. In the world of flamenco, artists' and aficionados' opinions are inclined to be subjective. Given flamenco's exoticized nature juxtaposed with its current drive toward modernity, one wonders where the truth lies.

The biggest problem has been that Spanish and flamenco dance scholarship often contains questionable opinions and observations, as is the case in the book Flamenco, edited by Claus Schreiner, with contributions on Baile Flamenco by Schreiner and Marion Papenbrok (Schreiner 1990). There is some good material here on flamenco dancing, but it is tainted by a lack of understanding of flamenco dance history, for example, when Schreiner ponders “what is to be made of Carlos Saura's [films] Carmen [Piedra 1984/1986] or Blood Wedding? No matter how well Antonio Gades and his troupe dance in these films…they have little to do with true flamenco” (Schreiner 1990, 31).

In the last decade a new body of dance-oriented biomechanical literature has begun to develop. Much of this biomechanical research indicates that in some ways traditional dance pedagogical methods are in conflict with the physical realities of moving bodies in space and the scientific laws that govern the behavior of moving bodies in space, i.e., the laws of physics. A number of traditionally accepted instructional dance precepts are being revealed as inaccurate or impossible. For example, according to traditional dance pedagogical methods, the supinated or “sickled” foot is a strictly forbidden action. However, in her study of grand allegro steps, Ryman found that in turning leaps, the push-off foot “sickled” during the take-off phase. Indeed the laws of science dictate that such twisting is essential for providing the torque necessary in any turning motion. Ryman's documentation of the “sickled” foot is an example of the limitations in the traditional dance teaching methods that currently are being exposed by dance-oriented biomechanical research.

From 1933 until 1946-47 Margot Webb and Harold Norton performed on the Afro-American vaudeville circuits of night clubs and theatres in the Northeast and the Midwest. Known professionally as “Norton and Margot,” they were one of the few Afro-American ballroom teams in history. Their career was emblematic of the frustrations, paradoxes, and double standards which existed for Afro-American artists in the United States. As a ballroom team, they faced the same obstacles as a Dean Dixon or a Marian Anderson: they were traveling on a white road posted with “No Trespassing” signs for the Afro-American. They followed on the heels of the 1920s, which was the golden era of Afro-American vaudeville, of the Cotton-Club-type, posh nightclub, and of “Black Broadway.” They preceded by two decades the civil rights era of the 1960s, when more opportunities became available to Afro-Americans in mainstream (or white) show business. Norton and Webb belonged to the swing era of the 1930s and the 1940s. However, due to the nature of their performance style and the racial tenor of their times, they were either too early or too late for success. It is in this sense that they existed between two eras.

“Disco” summons a variety of images to the minds of urban dwellers in the United States today. Many people think of teenagers carrying portable stereo tape players, sometimes called “ghetto blasters,” and recall how their loud and pulsating presence unceremoniously overwhelms all human life along their path. Some think of chic, glittering couples dancing the night away in dark discotheques. Whatever the image, disco is perceived as a style—of dancing, music, clothes. Disco is a social scene, a fad, a craze.

Disco is also, undeniably, a multi-media phenomenon, depending not only on the direct contact of social relationships but information and services transmitted by different forms of mass media. The movie Saturday Night Fever (1977) was possibly the single most important mass media event in heightening public awareness of disco dancing in the last several years. But every day, networks of media and entertainment industry ideas are negotiated and guided out to the public at large. These negotiations involve interplay between national and local television, the recording industry and local radio, local radio and the public, and then several levels of inter- and intra-community relationships. Popular images of disco are a conglomerate of data from these myriad sources.

Barnard College, Columbia University, hosted the 2004 Barbara Stoler Miller Conference in New York City, February 20–22, 2004. Called “Contesting Pasts, Performing Futures: Nationalism, Globalization, and the performing arts in Modern South Asia,” the conference recognized the growing scholarship in the field of South Asian performing arts. Since “performing arts” as a scholastic field of inquiry arrests little attention within the complex enormity of Asian Studies conferences, and diminishingly so, South Asian performing arts occupy just as little space within performing arts conferences (Association for Theater in Higher Education, Society for Ethnomusicology, American Anthropological Association, Society of Dance History Scholars, Congress on Research in Dance, and others), the 2004 Barbara Stoler Miller Conference certainly provided one of the few opportunities open to South Asian performance artists and scholars to discuss their most contemporary research works, to demonstrate and perform, and to get to know each other.

Barbara Stoler Miller, a Milbank Professor at Barnard, was a distinguished Sanskritist with strong interests in art history. She died of cancer at age fifty-two in April 1993. Among the corpus of the Sanskrit literature translations she published is Love Song of the Dark Lord: Jayadeva's Gitagovinda (Columbia 1977), a text that has been for centuries close to the hearts of many Indian dancers, and another edited by her, Theatre of Memory: The Plays of Kalidasa (Columbia 1984), presented a topic that has earned significant popularity in Euro-American academia.

In considering dance, the arts generally, human movement and physical education from a philosophical point of view, it has increasingly struck me that perhaps the biggest single area of confusion in the theoretical literature on these important aspects of human experience concerns the relationship of body to mind. This is, of course, a very large issue in contemporary philosophy, which I have tried to consider rather more fully in a recent book. But I want now to concentrate on one aspect of that issue, and to suggest that much popular talk and many theories of expression and meaning in the arts, especially dance, are vitiated by an underlying confusion about the emotions generally. In this paper I want to try to show just how a fallacious theory of the emotions creates insuperable difficulties for an understanding of any of the arts. It can, I suggest, be shown that though it is commonly accepted without question, this theory implies a position which few would want to accept, for a consequence would be that the arts, like the emotions in general, could not be intelligibly discussed. And even those who hold this traditional dualist view of the emotions usually contradict that consequence pragmatically, in that they exchange opinions about the arts as freely as anyone else.

As an example, consider the dilemma in which a teacher of dance, imbued with such a theory, would find herself if she were to trace out the consequences of it, though we should remember that the same issue of principle would apply in other art forms and to discussion of expression in other physical activities.

Ever since the question was first posed during the time of the House of Hillel and Shammai, there has always been an issue about how one dances before the bride. The action of Rabbi Aha who took the bride on his shoulders and danced with her exacerbated the problem seventyfold for other rabbis asked if they too could dance with a bride on their shoulder. Rabbi Aḥa actually reawakened the question and raised it to a new level: Does one even dance before or with the bride at all?

By turning to examples in the different Jewish communities including the Babylonian of the fourth century where Rabbi Aḥa lived, the European communities of the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries and also in Israel today, several different ideas as to how to dance before the bride emerge. These examples are to be found in various written sources such as the Talmud, the Shulḥan Arukh, Responsa literature and books by rabbis, as well as memoirs. The Talmud, written in the first half of the third century, is of great value for the study of Jewish history, law, theology, ethics and folklore. Examples of dance also appear there. Dance descriptions also appear in other commentaries by later rabbis, such as the definitive sixteenth century code by Rabbi Joseph Caro, the Shulḥan Arukh. Responsa literature too, provides us with dance information though it is a special genre of literature embracing every aspect of Jewish life, usually responses by rabbis to legal questions posed by individuals and communities. It is rarely an organized or systematic body of writings and of the several centuries when this vast body was produced, only a few hundred survive. Nonetheless, dance and questions of behavior during dancing at weddings are in evidence.

Doris Humphrey's deep humanistic concerns, as stated in dances such as New Dance and Passacaglia, and her dedication to the group as the most essential element of choreography might have allied her with those enthusiastic and vociferous dancers in the 1930s who were dedicated to effecting social change through movement. But although her image of a perfect society would seem to echo the visions of social equality promised by the new Soviet Union, visions which deeply influenced the work of many artists on the political left, she was not readily welcomed by the leftist contingent in dance. In part this was the result of Humphrey's ambivalence about the creative role of the group and her understanding of the singular nature of the artistic process. In part it was the result of her interest in abstraction and her disinterest in more concrete depictions of reality. Humphrey's approach, while visionary, was not essentially political because it did not deal with the “real” world. Writing about New Dance she described an idealized world, “where each person has a clear and harmonious relationship to his fellow beings” (1). The community in New Dance was an imagined community, perfect because it was not real, perfect precisely because it was removed from the passions and imperfections of 1930s America. This article explores the role of the group in articulating Humphrey's social vision and places it alongside experiments in group choreography by leftist dancers during this period.

On April 3,1917, dancer Valentine de Saint-Point performed at New York City's Metropolitan Opera House. It is accepted as common knowledge (a term which may be stretching the point somewhat, given the relatively small body of writings which refer to her) that she was a) a Futurist, b) one of the very few, if not the only, female Futurists, and c) the only, if not one of the very few, Futurists to perform in New York.

Actually, none of these “facts” is entirely documented. In this essay, I will leave the third point untouched, assuming this aspect of Saint-Point's singularity to be at least relatively accurate. The second point I will deal with obliquely; that is, rather than debating whether her position as a woman among the Futurists was unique, I will consider how she saw being female as meaningful in her work. The first point interests me as well—again, obliquely. I will not argue here for or against Saint-Point's definitive categorization as a Futurist. Instead, by verbally reconstructing a performance and analyzing a body of written work related to it, I will examine Saint-Point's associations with Futurism and other experimental movements in performance taking place within the same general timeframe.