In the Western music world a score written by a composer is distributed to members of an orchestra who individually learn their parts, come together to rehearse under the guidance or a conductor, and then perform before the public. In the drama world a script written by a playwright is distributed to actors who individually learn their parts, come together to rehearse under the guidance of a director, and then perform before the public. In both worlds a creator has written a kind of “instruction manual” for trained readers to use when preparing for an event to be seen and heard by the public. In both instances the performers as well as a conductor or director read the instruction manual, and each may contribute to interpretation in the process of “translating” that leads from the written medium to the performance medium. And in both instances differing views have evolved regarding how much liberty individuals should take in interpreting or modifying what is on the notated or scripted page as they prepare for performance.

Today, Bollywood dance has become a term used by film professionals, amateur performers, and audiences to refer to dances choreographed to Hindi film songs. The question of what Bollywood dance is, however, remains debated in both movement and text. In classes, Bollywood dance movement varies in quality and style from song to song, instructor to instructor, and choreographer to choreographer. Costume choices, facial expressions, gestures (as interpretations of sung lyrics), “jhatkas and matkas” (percussive “emphasizing] … pelvic movement”) (Kabir 2001, 189), wrist whirls, and turns, all set to film music could be identified as essential ingredients of “Bollywood dance.” Yet, this definition only begins to skim the surface of what constitutes Indian film dance, as Hindi films make up approximately one-third out of the more than eight hundred films produced in India every year (Nandy 1995). Popular films produced by language-specific regional cinemas include song and dances that often retain a degree of regional specificity. While it is important to recognize the similarities shared by these dance traditions, it is also necessary to acknowledge the definitional slippage underlying the collo quial use of the term “Bollywood Dance.” For the sake of clarity, I limit the term “Bollywood dance” to a description of choreography inspired by Hindi films. This includes combinations taught in dance classes and performed on stages. I use “Hindi film dance” to refer to song and dance sequences contained in the films themselves.

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.

T.S. Eliot's “Burnt Norton” initially appeared in 1936, but eventually this poem became the first of the Four Quartets (1943), a cycle expressing the poet's most mature meditations on time and the timeless. The Quartets confirmed Eliot's already well-established position as a modernist poet, but they also suggested a new sense of spiritual resolution, in part reflecting his journey from religious doubt to newfound faith through his conversion to Anglicanism in 1927. Throughout his work Eliot had described moments of sublime spirituality, but these do not usually endure within the framework of the early poetry. In “Burnt Norton,” however, he embarked on a sustained exploration of time and transcendence. In a striking invocation of this theme, the speaker alludes to dance as representative of the human experience of timelessness:

Eliot's definition of dance seems paradoxical, claiming that it is neither still nor in motion, yet both. Its spatial and temporal locations are indefinable and unfixed; the place to which Eliot refers cannot be named—the still point is simply there—but the speaker cannot say where.

Kathak, a classical dance form of Northern India, portrays an iconographic representation of the cultural constructs of the Hindu world view, most particularly, the ideology of gender roles within the culture. Essentially a dance form that emerged from within the Hindu religious beliefs and practices, Kathak was significantly influenced by the bhakti movement popularized in the early medieval period on the one hand, and on the other, by its incorporation in the Moghal courts after the fifteenth century. However, I limit my arguments to the Hindu concept of gender and its portrayal in the performance of Kathak. This paper focuses on the fluidity of gender performance in light of the indigenous philosophical concepts of “oneness” or non-dualism exemplified in Kathak abhinaya (1). This study is inspired by my observation and participatory experience as a dancer-performer of this form.

Every so often I receive a request to anthologize my 1987 article, “The Balanchine Woman: Of Hummingbirds and Channel Swimmers” (Daly 1987), in which I used the feminist theory of the male gaze to analyze a prototypical pas de deux. So far, I have declined each one, or proposed that the article be published in tandem with “Dance History and Feminist Theory: Reconsidering Isadora Duncan and the Male Gaze,” a 1992 essay that critiqued the very theory that had enabled the earlier work (Daly 1992). While I am grateful that “Hummingbirds” made a meaningful contribution to our understanding of how feminist theory could be a useful framework for dance scholarship, I also appreciate that both feminist theory and dance studies have come a long, long way since the groundbreaking paradigm of the male gaze.

When I wrote “Hummingbirds,” feminist theory was the most creative, rigorous, and productive discourse around. It articulated what had emerged as the fundamental issue of twentieth-century arts and humanities: representation. Feminist theory infused dance studies with a fresh, compelling set of questions that were quickly taken up, especially by younger scholars, critics, and artists. We were challenged to shift our angle of vision and expand the field of our vision. As a result, our critical acuity was honed, the dancing we chose to study became more inclusive, dialogue was opened with other disciplines, and dance literature as a whole grew more incisive, complex, and engaged.

But no question, framework, or theory ever remains fixed. I began to question the theory of the male gaze almost as soon as “Hummingbirds” was published. When I attempted to adapt the model to my historical research on Isadora Duncan, I bumped up against its limits, which led me to other theories and more questions. It also led me to critique the then flourishing “success-or-failure” brand of feminist criticism, whose brittle, reductive analyses were not only unconvincing scholarship but problematic politics as well. So I wrote “Dance History and Feminist Theory” as a companion piece to “Hummingbirds.”

Our panel, on “Dancing Democracy,” was conceived and organized this spring and summer, well before September 11. The New School turns out to be a prime location for the topic, and its unanticipated urgency, given the proximity of the New School to ground zero and its historical connection with the self-consciously democratic endeavor of modern dance. This was a genre that sought to distinguish itself as a democratic art form, in response to the perceived elitism of the European ballet. It was here at the New School in the 1930s that dance classes, recitals, and a now-famous series of lecture-demonstrations helped to cohere the young modern dance community.

Talk of dance and democracy has crystallized again 60-some years later, the result of a convergence of three intellectual and artistic trends.

First, there is the growing concern that a people once known for their civic associations are now, as sociologist Robert Putnam famously put it, “bowling alone.” Political philosophers such as Benjamin Barber have been analyzing the theory and practice of civil society as fundamental to the operation of what he terms “strong democracy.” We don't have to make an either-or choice, Barber tells us, between the purely public space of an invasive government and the purely private space of a crassly commercialized market.

Though his dance criticism constitutes no more than a few pages, the nineteenth-century poet Stéphane Mallarmé has come to be considered an important dance theorist. His dance essays set forth a complex and original view of dance as a poetry of the body and prefigure contemporary efforts to study dance as a system of signs. Mallarmé's prose style is, however, notoriously obscure and resistant to translation. Thus despite the power and beauty of their literary expression, his ideas on dance remain largely inaccessible without critical examination. Through a close reading and translation of several of his key passages on dance, this essay will seek to clarify his theory of the aesthetico-metaphysical function of dance and his concept of its relationship to his own art, poetry.

Notation plays a very important role in today's society. It acts as a communication medium between inventors and those who will implement their ideas. Without notation our knowledge of the past and present would be limited by our memory and prone to errors in oral transmission. Although we take for granted the existence of a suitable notation in almost all fields of human study, this is not true in the field of human movement. For example, in Western theatrical dance, no adequate means to record masterpieces existed until the twentieth century and thus most works from the past have been lost. In response to the literacy problem in dance, a number of systems have been developed in the past five centuries to record human movement, but most of these have failed to be practical under rigorous working conditions. Only a few have attracted substantial professional interest. The difficulty is that a dance notation must capture on paper a precise record, at each moment in time, of the position of each body part in three dimensions of space, as well as provide comprehensive information about movement dynamics and choreographic intention.

This essay looks at the works of Selma Selim Sırrı (b. 1906) and her father Selim Sırrı Tarcan (1874–1956), who wrote on dance in the 1920s, a period that marked the transition from the Ottoman Empire to modern Turkey. The Ottoman Empire ruled across the Mediterranean world between the thirteenth and twentieth centuries, collapsing after World War I. The Republic of Turkey was declared in 1923, distancing itself from the Ottoman tradition to adopt a westernization reform program. Written in the early Republican era, the works of Selma Selim Sırrı and Selim Sırrı Tarcan mark the shift from Ottoman dance traditions to a more Western approach to dance. Inspired by Isadora Duncan, Selma Selim Sırrı (1926) explored the idea of modern dance for Ottoman women in a booklet entitled Selma Selim Sırrı Hanım'ın Bedii Raksları (The Aesthetic Dances of Miss Selma Selim Sırrı, see Fig. 1). Her father was the author of Halk Dansları ve Tarcan Zeybeği (Folk Dances and the Tarcan Zeybek, see Fig. 2), a book that focused on the process of refining folk dances, in particular the zeybek genre, to suit the tastes of an educated, urban audience.

The physical appearance required in dance, particularly in terms of body weight and fat, is often a demand that hovers over the aspiring and professional dancer's career (Vincent, 1979). This investigation was intended to measure various aspects of body composition in different types of dancers, as well as use various methods. Measurements of percent body fat and lean weight may serve as a means of quantifying appearance in dance so that dancers may be guided towards appropriate body composition goals. This may be more reflective of the dancer's true physique than relying simply on total body weight, which does not take proportions of muscle and fat into account. Kirkendall and Calabrese (1983) have noted that attention must be paid to lean mass in dancers as well as percent fat. A method of evaluating the relationship between height, lean mass (fat free weight), and total weight was developed for this study to address the issue of proportion (i.e., a dancer who perhaps has a low percent fat level but is still considered too “heavy” because of a large muscle mass).

Although hydrostatic weighing has been noted as “the gold standard” in body composition measurements (Nash, 1985), such methods are often unavailable or impractical for professional dancers or university dance departments. Anthropometric (or “skinfold”) methods have greater practicality, but may lack the individual accuracy of hydrostatic methods (Nash, 1985). Recently, electrical impedance has been cited as a convenient alternative to both underwater and skinfold techniques (Harrison & Van Italli, 1982; Presta, et al. 1984).

During the late 1920s, representatives from the English Folk Dance Society came across an unusual custom in a narrow valley in the northwest of England. Every Easter a small group of men would dance through the local streets, accompanied by a silver band and led by a whip-carrier who cleared a space in which they could perform.

On the face of it such ceremonial activity was similar to the annual practices of English morris and sword dancers whose repertoires and customs Cecil Sharp had rescued from oblivion in the early years of the century. Certainly, in broad terms, the custom conformed to Sharp's definition of the morris as a ceremonial performance by men only, in special dress, and at a particular time in the local calendar (1909: 10–12).

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).

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.

Agon has often been cited as a key composer/choreographer collaboration, and its choreographer, George Balanchine, himself considered it “the most perfect work” to come out of his creative relationship with composer Igor Stravinsky (I). It is surprising, therefore, that so little has been written regarding the details of the interaction of music and dance. Most writers have concentrated on the dance or on the musical aspects of Agon, or have made only broad generalizations about its musical/choreographic structure.

In this article, I begin the analysis of structural relationships between music and dance with the main focus on rhythm. This is perhaps an obvious starting point for analysis, but it seems an especially important one, given the rhythmic complexity of the musical score and Balanchine's acknowledgement of the rhythmic lead that music provided forhim (2). It was Stravinsky's rhythmic style that Balanchine so often referred to when admiring the composer's work (3). In Agon, Balanchine seems to have been far less concerned with responding to pitch structure than to the rhythmic content of the music.

The first time I saw films of the Wigman solos on video, I experienced a vague, ambivalent feeling of recognition: something in these dances felt very familiar, although the choreography retained its historical strangeness seen through the eyes of a contemporary dance student. The uncanniness of the experience functioned as a powerful trigger to think about something that concerned me but that at first I couldn't fully understand. For one thing, it made me think of my dance education in Ecuador, and it occurred to me that there could well be significant similarities between Ausdruckstanz and Ecuadorian modern dance (I shall develop this idea at the end of this essay). In a personal research project in 2007, while studying at P.A.R.T.S. between 2004 and 2008, I learned and performed three of Wigman's solos: Seraphisches Lied, Pastorale, and Sommerlicher Tanz, from Mary Wigman's dance cycle Schwingende Landschaft. At that time I realized I was dealing with a totally different physicality for which my contemporary training was insufficient, and I had to seek different technical tools in order to perform these solos. First, I realized I had to develop other modes of muscular tension, as my training in release techniques did not suffice. Second, I was bound to consider movement not purely as a physical activity (I imagine that Wigman would have dismissed such an option as mere gymnastics) but rather as a tool for expressing a subtext. Despite these insights, my approach remained rather vague. The mere knowledge that I was dealing with a different physicality and mental involvement did not enable me to define them accurately.

In an essay entirely devoted to the subject of dance in Alain Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics [Petit manuel d'inesthétique (Badiou 2005b)], we find the following contentious statement: “Dance is not an art, because it is the sign of the possibility of art as inscribed in the body” (69). At first glance, this statement seems strangely familiar to the reader versed in writing about dance, particularly philosophical writing. “Dance is not an art”: Badiou critiques Mallarmé as not realizing this as the true import of his ideas. It is familiar because it attests to a certain problem in aesthetic thinking, one that relates to the placement and position of dance and the works that comprise its history into what can be seen as certain evaluative hierarchies, particularly vis à vis the relation of dance to other art forms, and in particular, those involving speech and writing. Dance seems to suffer from a certain marginalization, subtraction, or exclusion, and its practice seems to occupy a place of the perennial exception, problem, or special case. The strangeness of the statement, on the other hand, relates to the widespread view outside of academic writing that the status of dance “as art” is actually completely unproblematic. What follows therefore is a critical commentary on this assertion of Badiou, placed both in the context of Badiou's writing, and in the wider one pertaining to the problem of exclusion just outlined.