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.

This article is concerned with epistemological questions of dance, specifically, the nature of dance knowledge. The aim is to address the role of our bodily activity and the tactile-kinaesthetic sense in epistemology and to clarify the concept “bodily knowledge”—knowing in and through the body. I start with reflection on the standpoints of traditional epistemology and a feminist critique of it, then, extending the concern with epistemological inquiry of dance knowledge, explore Sondra Fraleigh's and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's notions of cognitive capacities of the moving body. Finally, setting out from the groundwork of Edmund Husserl's, Edith Stein's, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, I use some key concepts from Michael Polanyi's epistemology to describe the nature of bodily knowledge. The argument is that there is a distinction and a connection between “skill” and “knowledge” in respect to the body's movement. Gilbert Ryle's “know how” implies abilities ranging from bodily skills to abstract contemplative cases, but it cannot explain “know how” in the absence of skill. Thus, the rationale underlying this discussion can be put more clearly by asking why dance teachers are able to teach dance students movements they can no longer execute themselves.

Listening to the work presented at the 2001 meeting of the Congress on Research in Dance, “Transmigratory Moves,” one could not help noticing that both established and emerging dance scholars were in the process of attempting to find a fuller and more accurate way of understanding the relationship between global political and economic forces and movement praxis. The following articles (all extended versions of work presented at the conference) exemplify different aspects of these new initiatives in our field. As Shanti Pillai points out in her piece, the term “globalization” has tended to provoke two kinds of responses: either panic over the global imposition of American corporate culture, or else celebration of cultural hybridity and the resilience of indigenous forms. Both of these responses can often present a reductive view of what are, in fact, highly complex phenomena. All three of the articles presented here attempt a more nuanced narrative of the effects of traveling choreographic and movement practices.

When investigating the relationship between dance and political movements in the twentieth century a paradox emerges: How could modernist art coexist and indeed diri ve in companionship with totalitarian ideologies? Emphatic individualism has come to define the modern American age and the modern artist. Yet such autonomy stands in direct conflict witii the Fascist and Communist waves mat crashed over Europe and rolled tfirough Depression-era New York in the first half of the twentieth century. This paper traces a lineage of movement ideas that traveled to the United States from Germany during that time. I will briefly consider the chorie principle of the German dance pioneers and how ideas of monumental mass movement emigrated to and were assimilated into the dance world of 1930s New York. The coexistence of two trends, the mass dance and modern concert dance, offer a way to trace the dissemination of movement ideas that organized in tandem with emerging political movements on bom sides of me Atlantic. I will examine how die leftist New Dance Group grew out of me New York Wigman School under die direction of Hanya Holm. The Group used Holm's methods of movement improvisation to encourage amateur dance within the labor union revolution, while simultaneously supporting the development of professionals in die field. Over time, the Group had a lasting impact on American modern dance, encouraging collaboration among artists and racial equality for dancers.

Discussions about globalization tend to fall somewhere between two poles. One invokes the paranoia of what Appadurai (1996) refers to as a McDonaldization of the world, in which local practices, identities, and economies give way to the homogenizing mandates of capitalism. The other rejoices over the emergence of so-called hybrid cultural forms, interpreted as signs of the resilience of non-Western societies, as harbingers of the dawn of some new age of multicultural understanding, or as proof of the political power of consumers (Garcia Canclini 1995). Both views often underestimate the complexity of the relationship between the local and the global, and lose from view the fact that this relationship can be understood only in terms of historical conditions operating in specific contexts. While capitalism plunders the world, littering its path with Tommy Hilfiger, Pizza Hut, and the ever-popular sitcom Friends, there are many examples of the ways in which local populations do not passively consume what is thrown at them, but actively reinterpret and selectively combine elements of mass-mediated culture within preexisting frameworks and markets (Diawara 1998; Feld 1988; Martinez 1999). Moreover, the indigenization of global culture opens up the possibility of alternative experiences of modernity, which do not fall under the rubric of American culture but instead refer to other geocultural identities (Ching 2000).

When I was asked to organize a panel for the 2001 Congress on Research in Dance (CORD) conference in honor of my friend and colleague Deborah Jowitt, I thought of calling it “Life After Dance.” I was thinking about how research and writing can be a way for dancers to go on living in their profession when they're no longer actively dancing, as Deborah Jowitt has done. But I also see the products of dance research as giving life back to the profession. I wanted the session to approach research from different points of view. The four presenters I invited here are all friends of Deborah Jowitt; all of them are writers and teachers. Their papers revealed four very different personalities, actively engaged in interpreting dance as a presence in our lives.

When I arrived at nine o'clock, the deejay was spinning “trip hop” style disks in the “chill room” upstairs until the formal dance show was supposed to start at ten o'clock downstairs. Critical mass is important: the event did not begin until midnight; size of crowd and group energy are the determining factors for starting time in hip hop culture. Eventually, the audience of about two hundred consisted of black, white, Asian, Hawaiian, military, and civilian patrons who were mostly in their late twenties. “What's up, y'all? Y'all ready for the show?” asked Jamal, Honolulu hip hop promoter and emcee, to open the event.

Jamal proceeded to read from a script about the beginnings of American society's acceptance of “African American culture in the 1920s Jazz Age,” putting what was about to happen in historical context and giving the event an informative purpose. This scripted narration of hip hop's historical context at a club event reflected an interest in specific African American origins of the pop culture form expressed by many global hip hop leaders. Thus began “Urban Movement,” a November 1998 b-boy (breakdance) event produced at the Wave Waikiki nightclub in Honolulu, on the island of Oahu. What followed was a demonstration of the current-day variations of hip hop dance that began in the 1970s with virtuosic athletic b-boying or b-girling and “popping,” the phenomenal muscular control of the rapid-fire rhythmic isolations. Urban Movement provided several hip hop enactments that illuminated what I investigate in this essay—the interdependence of performance and performativity as dual forces in global breakdancing.

My main focus is to reveal the existence of global influences on the development and teaching of somatic principles and disciplines and to discuss why these influences are not in the forefront of somatic inquiry. I hypothesize that the search for “the universal” or “the humanistic” or “the biological” as a throughline of body-mind investigation has encouraged a monocultural approach to somatic pedagogy and the promotion of the field. Second, it is of interest that it has been through the work of those founders of somatic disciplines who are women that it has become possible to retrace more easily some of these global influences on twenty-first-century somatic studies. I also posit that through the lives and experiences of women leaders a more emotional voice enters the holistic paradigm. This paper aims to raise questions, not to be exhaustive in its pursuit of data regarding all the intercultural complications of somatic practices, including questions emerging from gender politics. It is a continuation of the inquiry, begun during the panel “Paradigms and Approaches: The Future of Somatics in Dance” at the Dancing in the Millennium conference in July 2000 (jointly sponsored by CORD, SDHS, DCA, NDEO. LIMS, NDA. among others) regarding the dissolution of any potentially monolithic views of the history and etiology of “somatics,” as well as somatic movement applications in dance (Green 2000; Fortin 2000), with a specific eye to examining how cultural and religious movement practices from diverse cultures have provided philosophical underpinnings and influential theories and practices to the field.

I first met Edna Ocko in the early 1980s. She was my mother-in-law's best friend from college days, someone who wrote about dance in the 1930s and took a dim view of critics since. My husband was a little in awe of Edna, and the first time she came to the house, I was told to cook an extra pound of pasta because Edna was coming. To my amazement, she was almost as tiny as my grandmother. We had a lot of pasta left over.

Edna Ocko, or Edna Meyers, as we knew her, was a formidable woman. She had been a communist in the 1930s and remained at heart a member of the Party, bonded by decades of friendship to the comrades-in-arms of her youth. She was punchy and articulate, with strong opinions and political convictions that never wavered even when she was named as a communist by Jerome Robbins before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. She was also a first-rate dance critic who knew the difference between art and propaganda, could tell good choreography from bad, and wrote with verve. She was a crack editor, with a nose for a story, who understood intuitively how to balance different voices and views: unsurprisingly, her best days as a dance journalist coincided with the Popular Front, which embraced liberals and leftists alike. Finally, she was an intellectual, curious, well read, stimulated by ideas, who counted even balletomanes like Lincoln Kirstein among her colleagues.

Earlier this week I viewed the 1990 film Longtime Companion for the umpteenth time, watching with the kind of obsessive fascination one usually reserves for a slow-motion train wreck or for the video-loop collapse of two gigantic buildings in lower Manhattan: you know what's going to happen, and you're horrified, and yet you simply cannot turn your eyes away. Written by Craig Lucas, Longtime Companion was the first Hollywood film to deal with the AIDS epidemic in the United States and, predictably, it concerns itself almost exclusively with gay men of the sort who spend part of each summer at Fire Island and part of every day at the gym, mediated for middle America through the point of view of a straight woman: homosexual culture for the masses.

While recent research in the United States indicates that gay and bisexual men comprise half the male population in dance, a very limited amount of scholarship focuses on the experiences of gay men and boys in dance education (Hamilton 1999). Cultural heterosexism and homophobia certainly contribute to this conspicuous absence of scholarship and discourse, as does institutionalized heterosexism in concert dance and Western social dance forms (Adair 1992; Burt 1995; Hanna 1988). Given the rich and compelling dance research in gender (Albright 1997, 1998; Bond 1994; Case et al. 1995; Crawford 1994; Daly 1998; Stinson et al. 1990; Stinson 1998; Thomas 1993) and feminist theory (Albright 1990; Banes 1998; Daly 1991, 2000; Foster 1996; Shapiro 1998; Stinson 1993), one questions the absence of scholarly analysis surrounding gay issues in dance education. Unfortunately, dance and dance education may unwittingly reproduce asymmetrical power relationships, social inequities, and sexist patriarchy by reaffirming the status quo operating in contemporary American culture. In doing so, the profession ignores vast educative opportunities for diminishing homophobia and antigay bias. In view of the relatively large numbers of gay men and young adults in the field, the lack of serious discourse and study of these critical issues is disheartening. I am reminded that Susan Stinson importantly asked the dance community these ethical questions nearly two decades ago. Regrettably, her cogent questions remain largely unanswered:

Journalism it's often remarked, is the first draft of history. In dance, reviews in mass media provide the bedrock for much historical research. The dance boom, which came along in the mid-1960s, led to a boomlet in opportunities for writers in New York City, chiefly in the Village Voice and the Soho Weekly News, weeklies that supported the work of Deborah Jowitt and Marcia Siegel, pioneering writers in the alternative press, and provided outlets for many other young critics.

The Dance Touring Program of the National Endowment for the Arts created a demand for writers across the country. With the end of the DTP in 1986, performances, and the need for reviewers, fell off outside New York. During the 1980s we lost several publications—Dance News and Ballet News, and even the Soho Weekly News—that had nurtured fledgling critics. Through the 1990s, space for dance in the Village Voice kept shrinking. There have been fewer opportunities for young writers to hone their skills in public. But around 1997, services by and for dancers began turning up on the burgeoning World Wide Web. Anyone with a search engine could find them. A parallel universe was born.

In the United States, educators of most school subjects, including arts and dance, are developing alternative measures to evaluate student learning at all educational levels. These measures can substitute for or supplement the short answer, multiple-choice, often standardized tests in common use. To differentiate this form of assessment of student learning from “tests,” innovators identify it by interchangeable names: authentic, performance, or performance-based assessment. In this essay I use these terms interchangeably. The innovators of authentic assessment focus on what students actually understand about the subjects they learn and if they can demonstrate their learning/understanding in two ways: in performance (doing) and with comprehension (explaining). In the study of dance, students more often demonstrate their learning by doing/dancing than they do by explaining. With both graduate and undergraduate dance students, I have experienced how performance-based assessment can facilitate the interaction of doing/dancing and explaining.

Space was always central to Merce's choreographic intention for the dance; there were twenty-one different spatial paths, which carried the dancers through the space, not just into it. He says the “summer” part of the title came later. Chance processes were used to determine entrances and exits, number of dancers onstage, who did what phrase when, and so forth. Merce had completed most of the time-consuming chance operations in New York, before rehearsals began in Connecticut. At Connecticut College we worked in a wonderful space— the enormous parlor/ballroom on the ground floor of a large, handsome stone dormitory. Tall windows opened onto an expanse of green lawn and vistas of lush and stately shade trees. It was a hot and humid summer, as summers in New London tended to be. A summer space.

The movement vocabulary is comprised of a variety of turns—slow turns, fast turns, jumping turns, turns ending in falls, and complex combinations of turns, as well as leaps, jumps, leg extensions, arabesques—a vocabulary far more balletic than had appeared in previous Cunningham group dances and yet, although the actual shapes and combinations of steps look deceptively like classical ballet, the abrupt changes in direction and speed, the rhythmic permutations unrelated to Morton Feldman's music, the devouring of space using walks, runs, skips, and leaps, and the surprising use of falls to the floor were not at all familiar to ballet dancers when they came to perform Summerspace. Nor were these ballet dancers attuned to the concept of “stillness.”