DRJ: It has now been five years since your manifesto “For a Dancing Museum” first appeared. As is well known, this manifesto led you to become director of the Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne (2009). Do you believe you have achieved the goals you stated as crucial for a dancing museum, i.e., to displace the idea of “Center” from the institution; to dismantle the “nationalism” always lurking under the adjectival “national”; to move the focus from the noun “Dance” to the actioning of the verb “Dancing” in defining this museum?

At the dawn of the European refugee crisis, and in the middle of the ongoing sociopolitical and financial crisis in Greece, Greek choreographers started creating dance works that engaged immigrants and refugees. In most such initiatives, improvisation became the tool for bridging the disparity between the professional dancers and the “untrained” participants, who were often the vulnerable populations of refugees and asylum seekers. In this essay, I question the ethics and aesthetics of these methodological approaches utilized for staging encounters between natives and migrants through dance. In particular, I consider the significance of improvisation as potentially perpetuating hierarchical inequalities in the framework of Western concert dance, while I also highlight the ways that such artistic endeavors end up presenting immigrants and refugees as “Others.”

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.

This article explores Randy Martin's approach to dance studies at the dawn of the discipline in a set of essays written between 1992 and 1998 regarding dance, ethnography, and representation. On one hand, the Marxian basis of Martin's analysis is foregrounded in this article as Martin's working method, and on the other, a theory of the audience (the relation of the spectator to the dance) is identified as what links dance to socialism in Martin's thought; this is the main theoretical motor of his use of dance as an analytic method for social thought.

This article discusses dissemination of dances in and out of Sweden, and the dancing communities these processes create. The examples are the African-American Lindy Hop, which originated in New York City, and the polska, a couple dance considered to be the number one Swedish folk dance. Both dances were once used in local community dancing, while today they belong to dancing communities in many places around the world.

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.

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).

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.