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.

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.

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 this article, I argue that the spectacle of American football, and the performance practices of HBCU dance lines birthed within it and seasoned in queer nightclubs, propelled Black “femme-inintiy” from the sidelines to the center of choreographic and discursive practices of Black liberation. I wed queer Black feminism with Yoruba cosmology to analyze three protests instigated during three NFL events in 2016: Beyoncé's Super Bowl performance, the direct actions of Black Lives Matter activists at the Super Bowl, and Assata's Daughters’ protest at the NFL Draft. Ultimately, I theorize the generative potential of spectacle and uplift the organizing and labor of queer Black femmes and gender nonconforming people in the Movement 4 Black Lives.

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.

Through close analysis of primary and secondary source material related to Katherine Dunham's Tango (1954), this article examines the protest message of this dance work within the political and social context of the time. The article focuses first on Dunham's understanding of the Argentine populist political movement known as Peronism, and secondly on the Argentine reception of the piece's protest against Juan Domingo Perón's government. The article argues that, contrary to existing interpretations of the work, Tango articulated with the cultural policies promoted by Perón's government, rather than working as a protest performance against it.

This article analyzes three artistic acts of the subversion of precariousness in the contemporary dance community in Buenos Aires. It explores the participation of dancers in political groups that demand improvement of their working conditions. It examines how Marina Sarmiento's investigation of dance history stages a precarious body as an archive that deals with aesthetic colonialism. And lastly, it discusses the emergence of an aesthetics of precariousness in Fabian Gandini's work, which brings artistic ethics to the fore. The argument proposed in this article asserts that working conditions, history, and aesthetics represent three dimensions of contemporary dance practice that operate simultaneously and determine the precariousness in the Argentinian dance community.

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.

Laura Dean's creative output in minimalist art spans interconnected work in dance, music, and drawing. Throughout the early 1970s, Dean represented her compositional structures as works on paper, which present an expanded visualization of her artistic experimentation with color, symmetry, repetition, and form. Dean rejects the reconstruction of her performance works, instead she advances a notion of dances as impermanent. Situating Dean in the context of serial and conceptual art in which the material art object is deemphasized in favor of communicating compositional logic, I argue that Dean presents a choreographic legacy premised on the intentional disappearance of her work in favor of perpetuating ideation and concept.