The first part of the twenty-first century has been marked by particularly fraught social and racial tensions in the United States, brought to awareness internationally by the Black Lives Matter protest movement that started in 2014 and the vitriol espoused by the 2016 Republican presidential candidate. Randy Martin's work offers paradigms for interrogating the relationships between dance and its sociopolitical contexts that are highly relevant at this historical juncture. Drawing on some of Martin's key concepts, this article explores choreographic agency and creative strategies in dances that respond to issues of social injustice, mass incarceration, and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Works by Joanna Haigood (Zaccho Dance Theatre), Amie S. Dowling, filmmaker Justin Forbord, and Kyle Abraham (Abraham.In.Motion) focus on narratives of oppression and disenfranchisement yet also inspire resistance and hope.

Since being listed as intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO in 2010, Kalbeliya dance from Rajasthan is now generally conceptualized as an ancient tradition from India. However, this same dance practice, also known as a form of “Indian Gypsy” or “snake charmers’” folk dance, appears to have originated as recently as the 1980s. This article gives an account of the swift development of Kalbeliya dance from its first appearance on stage in 1981 to the present. Ethnographic research with Kalbeliya dancers’ families has elucidated how this inventive dance practice was formed to fit into national and transnational narratives with the aim of commercializing it globally and of generating a new, lucrative livelihood for these Kalbeliya families. As a new cultural product of Rajasthani fusion, the dance finds itself at the crossroads of commercial tourism and political folklorism and is grounded in neo-orientalist discourses (romanticism and exoticism).

In America, around 1900, Edith Wharton wrote in her autobiography, “[O]nly two kinds of dancing were familiar…: waltzing in the ballroom and pirouetting on the stage”. Wharton missed her earliest opportunity to see Duncan, in 1899, when a Boston philanthropist and Newport hostess featured the young dancer at a garden party:

No doubt, the young Duncan's earliest performances must have looked peculiar. She neither waltzed nor pirouetted. She did not kick up her legs; she manipulated no skirts; she rarely portrayed any specific character. Legend even has it (though not quite accurately) that she was maverick enough at a very tender age to disavow her toe dancing lessons. In her more semantically polemical moments, Duncan rejected the label “dancer” altogether, in order to disassociate herself from the questionable antics of her colleagues. Instead, she set herself apart as an “artiste.” That is what she listed as her occupation on the birth certificate for her second child, Patrick Augustus Duncan, in 1910.

Iranian women's comic improvised traditional theatre is a rich and important, but little-known, source of performative and textual material that has been rarely documented or discussed by serious students of folklore and dance, either in Iran or in the West. I argue that this amateur theatrical form performed and created by women for other women is the single most important source representing the multivocality of traditional Iranian women of all classes. Both in content and performance, these theatrical plays or games are a unique form of expression that needs several analytic approaches to elucidate its meaning and place in women's lives as well as in the wider area of traditional Iranian performance practices.

The term coined by S. A. ‘Enjavi-Shirazi, the Iranian folklorist and literary scholar, to describe the theatrical plays performed by and for women, bazi-ha-ye namayeshi, is probably best rendered in English as ‘theatrical’ or ‘dramatic’ plays. The bazi-ha (ha denotes the inanimate plural in Persian) are basically folk or traditional plays and games (bazi can mean either play or game, namayeshi translates as dramatic) that are primarily created and performed domestically by women throughout many parts of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan.

This study proposes to investigate how anxiety is related to the dance experience and to a person's creative behaviour within that experience. A number of assumptions regarding the creation, improvisation, composition, and performance of dance have centered around the relationship of anxiety to the dance experience. These assumptions point to anxiety as being integral in the creative behaviour of dancers and as being a vital ingredient for good performance. Others suggest that the dance experience is a medium of expression which reduces tension or anxiety. (See Barron 1972:96–97 and Leith 1972:246.)

This exploratory study looks at the creative potential that an individual brings to a simulated studio composition session. The study also investigates the relationship of this creative potential to dancers' self-reported anxiety and their creativity in performing the composition.

Martha Graham wrote this passage about the opening of Night Journey (1947) in her autobiography Blood Memory (1991). Night Journey tells the story of Jocasta who at the end of her life is reluctantly forced by the blind prophet Tiresias to relive the most significant and thus painful moments of her life. Graham too, at the end of her own life, seems almost to have been forced, perhaps by time or perhaps by the obligation to fulfil a publisher's contract, to write her autobiography (1). There is a nice symmetry here.

The dimming of the house lights focuses attention on the still darkened stage, although awareness of the others in the auditorium and its quieted bustle does not entirely fade. From the stage, the sound of several people taking five or six measured footsteps in unison, then stopping, momentarily precedes the lights (stage and house) fading quickly up to reveal nine performers. They stand, facing out, dressed in ordinary clothes (shirt and jacket, jumper and skirt, different colors), steady gaze directed at the audience. They stand in the gaps between a series of reflective slabs, each of the same regular dimensions, slightly wider and taller than the performers themselves. Behind the performers is a further line of panels cut from the same material. After a brief pause, the space darkens.

Every year, for hundreds of thousands of tourists, seeing “real Hawaiian hula” in a hotel or in a packaged lū'au setting is standard fare. Commonplace too is receiving one's introduction to hula through any of the many competitions that take place annually in Hawai'i and, with increasing frequency, throughout the world. Still others find hula marketed for its exercise benefits, peddled as the latest fitness fad in gyms and malls across the country. But is hula the allure of exotic dancers evoking prurient responses from tourists, one moment tantalized by undulating hips only to be teasingly chastised the next to “keep your eyes on the hands”? Is it the crisp, impeccably synchronized movement danced before panels of judges at the several hula competitions that mark the year for many hula hālau? Is hula the movement, the meaning conveyed through the movement, or the full context out of which movement casts itself into an art form that inspires passion and perpetuates a traditional way of living?

For Mary Kawena Pukui, credited with helping to bring the rich traditional context of hula into the present, hula is “a general name for many types of Hawaiian folk dances” (1942/1980, 70). Pukui's laconic description says everything, and nothing. Everything because hula is the unique dance of the Hawaiian people. Everything because despite the homogenizing influence of hula competition, which has brought only a limited range of the vast hula repertoire to the public's attention over the past thirty-five years, hula encompasses many different styles and types of dances. But it says nothing because hula simply cannot be reduced to Hawaiian folk dance. Hula is a moving encyclopedia inscribed into the sinews and postures of dancers' bodies. It carries forward the social and natural history, the religious beliefs, the philosophy, the literature, and the scientific knowledge of the Hawaiian people.

Our research team members spent an entire summer interviewing pre-professional contemporary dancers with the aim of understanding their conceptions of health in relationship to their creative projects. At the beginning of autumn we (co-workers Martyne, Catherine, and myself) came together in our comfortable office to begin our data analysis. We had previously planned to use a computer-based, qualitative research analysis program to wade through our sizeable volume of data. We were ready to look systematically for themes emerging from our nine hours of interviews. Unexpectedly, however, things turned out differently, and we found ourselves excitedly reliving the interviews we had had with the interviewees. Through the act of listening and formally recording, we had succeeded in giving rich voice to the participants and the touching stories we were sharing anew were as revealing as when we heard them firsthand. Directing the project, I was pleased to notice how the interviews had found echoes in our own experiences; and, in fact, our discussions were being influenced by and filtered through our own subjective perspectives.

This article examines some recent dance exhibitions where a strong speculative involvement of choreographers from the so-called trend of “conceptual dance” has been at stake. Both the open question of the history of dance and performance and the possibility for choreographic thinking to engage with the forms of the exhibition display became objects of experimentation in important projects and museum pieces conceived by Boris Charmatz, Xavier Le Roy, and La Ribot. In turn, the latter activated further concerns around the way dancers and choreographers address the question of heritage and its transmission; in this regard, examples of Richard Move and Jérôme Bel are also brought in the discussion. The article considers these shifts within the hypothesis of a dance museum currently engaging with a wider statement and critique about the “time-based arts” (a term first coined in the context of film, video, and new media museum conservation) and the ongoing new, time-related configurations of the exhibition space.

Much has been said of the tradition of quadrille dancing that exists in the Caribbean. This dance and music repertory was first introduced there in the late eighteenth century by European colonists who wanted to recreate some of the aristocratic lifestyle they would have enjoyed in their country of origin. But soon after its introduction, people of African descent whom the Europeans had forcibly introduced in the Caribbean appropriated the dance and transformed it to fit the new environment.

In his overview of Caribbean music, Kenneth Bilby noted that the most ubiquitous music traditions of the Caribbean seem to be the ones that grew out of the European social dances and music genres of an earlier era (1985, 195). Establishing a parallel with the Creole music of the Seychelles, which bears strong resemblance to Caribbean forms, John Szwed and Morton Marks (1988) suggested that the French contredanse and quadrille were instrumental to the emergence of the Creole repertories, primarily because, just like many of the Caribbean islands, the Seychelles were French colonies in the eighteenth century.

Most scholarly work on Afro-American social dance has been concerned with its structural aspects, primarily the question of African retentions. The work of Melville Herskovits, Joann Kealiinohomoku, Linda Wharton and Jack L. Daniel, Chadwick Hansen, Robert Farris Thompson, John Q. Anderson, Gertrude P. Kurath, Jan Hertzberg, Lydia Parrish, and others has touched on this issue.

Though this approach to the study of Afro-American vernacular dance is far from exhausted, it ignores certain significant aspects of black dance culture. Once it is established that the structural aspects of Afro-American dance are in fact African-derived, the researcher is free to raise questions concerning the function, meanings, and uses of the dance.

The anthropologist-dancer Katherine Dunham has stated that dance has greater tenacity than any other cultural form and that it is the most permanent cultural link with the past. Certainly the dance of Afro-Americans is identifiable on the basis of its continuity with both traditional and contemporary African movement. Until recently, most Afro-Americans conducted their lives in relative isolation from whites. Isolation rather than inherent tenacity may explain the similarity between their dance forms and those of contemporary Africans.

Choreographers have begun experimenting with artist-driven archives using digital technologies, exhibitions and installations, and live performance as a way to generate new work from their own archival materials and increase access to their body of work for audiences. This article focuses on three recent artist-driven archive projects by notable American choreographers Eiko & Koma, Bebe Miller Company, and Jennifer Monson. Drawing on interviews with the choreographers as well as on analyses of the three projects, I suggest that these projects' most important contribution is the idea that archives are not separate from a choreographer's body of work, but are indeed a part of his or her creative process and artistic production.

This article focuses on Randy Martin's concept of mobilization and its relationship to Christoph Menke's philosophical category of force—being the grid rather than the movement, being the potential to move rather than movement in space and time, force and mobilization align. They are rallying calls for change and transformation, for different articulations of bodies and social kinesthetic energies. They both are impersonal nonsubjectified vehicles for an open process of doing and undoing, which is a political process.

Uday Shankar's career as a dancer and choreographer has been under frequent inspection by dance historians and scholars in both the South Asian and Euro-American worlds. To date, some articles, books, and biographies have documented various aspects Shankar's life, which provide factual details about his performance career (Banerji 1982; Khokar 1983; Mukhopadhyay 2004; Singha and Massey 1967). While these biographies serve as an important source in their delineation of Shankar's life and his works, there have been few attempts at critical analyses and evaluation of Shankar's body of choreographic works. Scant scholarly interests in Shankar have mostly described him as one of the many exotic “oriental” dancers in Europe.

In 1916 the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929) took the Ballets Russes out of war-torn Europe for a tour across the North American continent. The tour was scheduled to run from January to April 1916, with short seasons in New York at the beginning and the end. As it turned out, the company returned for a second tour that ran from late September to January 1917, during which time, however, Diaghilev's former lover and principal star dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky (1889–1950), replaced him as director.

In this article I discuss the cultural differences at the heart of the Ballets Russes' failure to conquer America in 1916–1917, and why that failure had to be edited out of history. Specifically, I look at three aspects of the publicity and critical reception: elitism, patriotism, and modernism. The publicists of the company both misunderstood and underestimated their audience, but in dance research, their prejudices have been taken for granted. The “eye-witness accounts” of Diaghilev's employees and the histories of the company written in the first half of the twentieth century have largely gone unquestioned since, but contemporary primary sources of the North American tours tell a different story. By contrasting the first tour with the second, which received less publicity and better reviews, I emphasize the practical experience of touring in the New World and how differently American critics evaluated the achievements of the two Russian directors of the company—Diaghilev (for the first tour) and Nijinsky (for the second).

Professor Beardsley's paper is distinguished by his customary clarity. Many of the distinctions he draws will undoubtedly be useful not only for dance theoreticians, but for dance critics as well. Nevertheless, the way that these distinctions are placed in the service of a putative characterization of what constitutes a dance “moving” seems to us problematic. This brief note will be devoted to exploring the adequacy of Professor Beardsley's proposal.

Beardsley appears to conclude his paper by stating a condition requisite for a motion to be counted as a dance “moving.” He writes,

We interpret Beardsley's basic point here as the claim that a superfluity of expressiveness (above the requirements of practical exigencies) is a defining feature of a dance “moving.” However, in our opinion, this attribute represents neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of dance.

Philosophers writing on aesthetics used to preface their essays by deploring the low standard of thought prevailing in that subject. Since they never tried to show that dullness and folly were less rampant in other fields, one had to recognize in this practice a mere ritual. But one can always speculate on what social purpose rituals had once served. Similarly, philosophers who nowadays write on the aesthetics of dance preface their papers by deploring the tendency of philosophers to neglect the topic. Since they produce no hard evidence of such neglect, this practice too has to be seen as a ritual, and this ritual also calls for explanation. It reflects some unease about the place of dance in the philosophy of art, but the reasons for that unease are not obvious. This paper suggests ways in which the theory of dance might not fit easily into the theory of art in general, or why it might be felt not to do so.

I

Writing on dance certainly has a low intellectual profile. I had supposed that among the data to be reckoned with were a failure on the part of Hellenistic writers to write dance histories comparable to those histories of painting, sculpture, and music that were so widely read and quoted in the Renaissance, and a corresponding failure in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to write handbooks and treatises on the practice of dance comparable to the well-known treatises on the other fine arts from that encyclopedia-ridden age.