Faustin Linyekula stages what I shall call “geo-choreography” in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). What is choreography if not an embodied practice that demands a continual reordering of space? Geo-choreography reorders the urban landscape choreographically without colonizing it. Instead, it establishes a network of architectural sites within that landscape whose effect I shall endeavor to describe in this essay. In 1993 Congolese choreographer Linyekula went into exile for eight years, during which time he attended university in Kenya and studied theater in London, only to be pressured by the British government to return to Kenya, where he was introduced to dance theater. In 2001 Linyekula returned to the DRC, where he founded his contemporary dance company, Studios Kabako, in Kinshasa, the country's capital. Working out of both Kinshasa and Paris, Linyekula established an international career as an experimental dance maker. After five years (in 2006) he transferred his company from Kinshasa to his hometown, Kisangani. Located in the northeastern DRC, this haunted urban terrain has been devastated by political violence, including that of the Second Congo War (1998–2003) and its aftermath. In trying to rediscover a sense of belonging for himself and for others, Linyekula is presently designing a network of studios for emerging artists throughout Kisangani. Linyekula's dance company and network of studios taken together, and housed under the same name of Studios Kabako, encourage a fluid movement between the social and the artistic.

Alvin Toffler made an eloquent plea in 1967 for the construction of cultural statistics that would give artists, policy-makers and social scientists a reliable map of where the arts enterprises had been and where they seemed to be going. Only slow progress has been made since then.

To take the example that will concern us in this research note, how much solid information do we have concerning the “dance boom” that reportedly took place during the Sixties and Seventies? A “dance boom” can refer to many things. It can mean rapid growth in the size of the dance audience; in the number of dance companies; in the amount of amateur participation in the art; in the number of dance performances; and so on. These aspects of the art might not all show the same trends. For instance, the number of dance performances might have increased faster during the “boom” than the number of companies—or vice versa—suggesting two very different developments. Actually, the only firm documentation we possess concerning the boom in the amount of dance activity has to do with the size of the audience, and we have that only for the Seventies, not the Sixties. Surveys done by the Louis Harris polling organization put the percentage of Americans aged 18 years and older who attended at least one live dance performance in the years 1973, 1975 and 1980 at 9%, 16% and 25%.

In the first few moments of Parallel Passions, the program devised for Mavin Khoo Dance and toured extensively around Britain in the fall of 2003, the halflight atmosphere creates difficulties in distinguishing among dancers (Fig. 1). Bodies, genders, technical backgrounds, and ethnicity become subsumed for a few short moments to a greater purpose that is unconcerned with the trappings of identity, and the viewer begins to wonder optimistically how this will evolve. The effect is not sustained, however, and another evening of worthy crosscultural experiments in dance forms unfolds. Being momentarily surprised in this way helped to develop some interesting ideas. What remains in memory are those extraordinary moments where the project of Modern Britain seemed suddenly to have shape and be given expression. The eclectic mix of the dancers and their heritages, cultural and professional, was abandoned as a preoccupation. This allowed, albeit momentarily, a protean practice to peep through the layers of cultural ritual. The embrace of ballet and bharatanatyam cited in the promotional literature became momentarily irrelevant. But then, as if recalling the essence of the project and its obligation to teach lessons about sympathy and tolerance through the arts, a touring show financed by six different funding sources remembered itself and resorted to comparing and contrasting, later abandoning seriousness altogether for a light-hearted jazzbased club number. During a ponderous second half the dancers looked to be willing a connection that would not come, and then it was over.

This article examines dance pieces premiered in the Nordic countries at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015. Framed by the heated debates on current immigration policies, as well as prevailing tropes of a theater of migration and the figure of “the migrant,” the analysis centers on the potential for creating spaces of resistance in the encounter between choreographic performance and spectators. Drawing on analytical concepts such as migratory aesthetics and choreographic agency, the focus is on the interrelationship between the choreographic articulations of experience of migration and their materialization before an audience.

I recently had the opportunity to reread Allegra Fuller Snyder's “The Dance Symbol” (1974), in which she claimed a central role for dance in non-literate cultures:

Snyder explained that dance is able to occupy this all-inclusive, central role in maintaining and transmitting knowledge within such cultures because it communicates through what she calls the “dance symbol”. The dance symbol is the outer and observable aspects of the dancer (movement, costume, and paraphernalia) which are, in turn, both derived from and stand in relation to and for a culturally-specific environment, subsistence pattern, and mythic complex.

I would like to start with an anecdote. When my daughter was five weeks old, she had a stiff neck, and almost couldn't turn her head at all to her left. So, my wife and I went to see an osteopath. The doctor's practice was a family business: father and son—both of them neurologists and chiropractors—work on scores of bodies day by day, manipulating and treating them. The father is also an osteopath; the son is still learning to become one. We saw the son. He treated our daughter who screamed and turned red and in turn got her back straightened, but not quite as straight as it should have been. So, the son got his father, who showed him another trick or two, explained them to his son and to us, and left again. Our daughter was now really aligned, and the son said: “Well, this is how it goes. I am still learning. While I push and pull and push and pull, my father just needs one grip and the work is done.” Our daughter sneezed. “Do we need to come back?” we asked. “No, one time is sufficient. Good-bye,” he replied and left for his next patient.

The Tewa Indians of the San Ildefonso Pueblo perform the Navajo Dance which is a parody of their Navajo neighbors. This dance event involves ritual play, humor, and sex role reversals; it also dramatizes the Pueblo Indian's stereotype of the Navajo. In this paper, I will first describe the dance event as performed on April 28, 1974, and analyze some of the symbolic elements of the event. I will then argue that the Navajo Dance is one way that Pueblo Indians deal with their ambivalent and contradictory friend/enemy relationships with the Navajo.

Project-based work is common within “precarious” working contexts. Within contemporary dance, short-term funding opportunities often result in the production of “sharings,” works in progress, and one-off performance events. This paper considers the relationship between the outputs of projects and the ontology of choreographic “works.” Drawing on Frédéric Pouillaude's conception of choreographic works as both public and resistant, I examine entities produced through projects, which, borrowing a term from choreographer Hamish MacPherson, I label “work-sketches.” Furthermore, I reflect on the correlation between “immaterial labor” and the concept of the choreographic work, thinking through the commodity form of work-sketches and probing the relationship between socioeconomic contexts and dance work ontology.

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.

In a relatively well-known article, Monroe Beardsley defines dance as a sequence of motions that is designed primarily for the pleasure given through either rhythm or expressiveness (1). In reply, Sally Banes and Noël Carroll graciously, but firmly, reject Beardsley's account by claiming that he further requires a “superfluity of expressiveness” and by arguing that this feature is neither necessary nor sufficient for dance (2). Their reasons for denying the sufficiency option are ones that we can easily accept, it seems to me. However, their reasons for denying the necessity option are problematic. In brief, they invoke post-modern dance practice, and cite as a counterexample to the definition Yvonne Rainer's Room Service (1964), which ostensibly comprised nothing but pedestrian movements and tasks such as mattress carrying (3). Because Room Service for post-modernists is a “task dance,” conveying no more expressiveness than one usually finds in such activities, Banes and Carroll conclude that a superfluity of expressiveness cannot even be a necessary condition of dance, at least from the 1960s onwards. Furthermore, anticipating the retort that Room Service may not really be a dance to begin with and thus not a true counterexample, they offer four different criteria that would cause the work to be categorized positively. My primary intent in this article is to reveal that those criteria misfire and actually cause it to be excluded from dance.

Dance in a particular cultural tradition may be analyzed from any of several different perspectives, which may be classified in two categories. In the first, analysis may be structural or stylistic. By structure I mean the set of relationships among discrete movements characteristic of a dance tradition; it is similar to grammar in language (cf. Woodard 1976). Style refers to the general qualities of a dance tradition or classes of the tradition: tempo, energy level, parts of the body used, characteristic number of dancers, smoothness or abruptness of movements, body decorations and objects manipulated in the dance (cf. Lomax 1968:222-273). Although this category is concerned with analysis of dance qua dance, it may justifiably be argued that a kind of meaning inheres in pure structure and style, and therefore that their analysis is an explication of meaning.

Other ways of analyzing dance in a cultural tradition approach meaning in a different way. Meaning is sought in the relationship between structure and style on one hand and other aspects of the culture on the other.

In 2012, Susan Manning, Rebecca Schneider, and Janice Ross collaborated across their home institutions of Northwestern University, Brown University, and Stanford University, respectively, to found a research initiative interrogating the field of dance studies. This manifold project, Dance Studies in/and the Humanities, receives funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through 2015 and includes a series of public roundtable discussions. This conversation—abridged from the original event—took place during two such roundtables at Brown University in June 2013, and it features substantial contributions from scholars Michelle Clayton, Mark Franko, Nadine George-Graves, André Lepecki, Susan Manning, Janice Ross, and Rebecca Schneider. Speakers address what dance studies may need, want, or do in this current historical moment. Manning articulates her experience being “inside” and “beside” dance studies through teaching in an integrationist/assimilationist model that promotes dance as a subfield in humanities (and occasionally social science) departments. Franko asserts that dance studies formed as a result of an epistemological break in the 1980s and adds that interdisciplinary frameworks can also support this relatively new field.

Through embracing the partiality that comes with interdisciplinarity, Clayton encourages participants to investigate generative misunderstandings. Ross provides a comprehensive account of the crisis in the humanities, and Lepecki connects this crisis to the permanent state of war in the U.S. and emphasizes the importance of theory in dance studies. Falling short of Afro-pessimism, George-Graves calls for dance studies to infiltrate the upper echelons of higher education administration, and Schneider articulates post-structuralism's link to the Global South while calling for more scholarly representation from this area of the world. Through exploring possibilities for embodied knowledge, reenacting post-structuralism, and embracing partiality, these scholars address the expanding aperture of dance studies in a global economy. Topics identified for future discussion include decentering the whiteness of dance studies transnationally, exploring how dance studies methodologies are currently utilized in academia, and expanding dance studies beyond the American academy.

The dominant narrative regarding breaking history is that the dance developed as an “exclusively male” expression of inner-city “machismo.” In this study, I challenge this narrative by bringing in the voices of breaking's often-neglected founding practitioners. By juxtaposing primary testimonies with mainstream representations, I aim to show how women have histoirically played a critical role in the dance, and how hegemonic discourse has obscured our understanding of hip-hop's beginnings. I also consider how uncovering the role of women in breaking's history reframes prevailing conceptualizations of its gender performance.

This article approaches dance through the lens of new materialist theories (speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, thing theory, posthumanism, etc.), considering the possibility that objecthood need not align with inertness and movement need not be excluded from the realm of the substantive. Deploying a practice-based methodology informed by participation in works by Simone Forti and Maria Hassabi, as well her own movement investigation, the author considers theoretical positions that counter the persistent association of dance with ephemerality while also broadly questioning the relationship between dance and theory.