Sylphides and wilis, white gauze and moonlit glades: these are the stereotypical images of the Romantic ballet. A cursory look at the lithographs of the period leaves the viewer with visions of an airy-fairyland far removed from industry, labor, colonialism, or any of the bigger and beastlier concerns of the early nineteenth century. But despite its bias towards otherworldliness, the Romantic ballet was not entirely divorced from the concerns of its time. It shared many interests with the drama, literature, and fine arts of the period and like them drew many of its themes from the material world, although it tended to select and exploit these themes for their color and spectacle rather than utilize them to convey sociological truths or instigate reform. An example of such a “realistic” ballet is Jules Perro's Catarina, whose protagonist is a more robust creature than the sylphs and fays that dominated the period: a female bandit.

How does one come to terms with the “already said” or the “already danced”? I ask this in light of the many instances where contemporary dance has insistently undertaken—as a condition of its own renewal—a critique of past works that have been transmitted through the oral tradition. This undoing of the oral tradition's dominance has instantiated a new relation to the past in contemporary dance. Hannah Arendt throws some light on this process when she quotes Walter Benjamin, for whom modernity required that we find a different way of connecting with the past—one that would replace transmission with citationality. To cite, in speech act theory, as in dance, presupposes that the authority of the past be replaced with that disquieting ability of the past to infiltrate the present in a disembodied way (Arendt 1974, 291). The challenge of citation to the prestige of oral person-to-person transmission of a dance has introduced a new way for contemporary artists to relate to and re-embody past works.

Animals have provided a theme and a model for movements in dance from time immemorial. But what image of man do danced animal portrayals reflect? What questions of human identity and crisis do they reveal? Do the bodies of animals provide symbolic material for the ethical, political, and aesthetic questions raised by man's mastery of nature?

The exploration of the boundary between man and animal—in myths and sagas, in the earliest records of ritual and art, and in the history of knowledge—is part of the great nature-versus-nurture debate. In the Bible the relationship is clear: Adam, made in the image of God, gives the animals in Paradise their names. In this way he rules over them—but Thomas Aquinas's commentary on this biblical text makes clear that the act of naming animals in Paradise is a step toward man's experiential self-discovery. Since then the hierarchy seems to be beyond doubt. Homo sapien, as the animal significans, is distinguished from other animals by his ability to speak, his upright gait, the use of his hands, and the capacity to use instruments and media—man as what Sigmund Freud called the “prosthetic god” (1966, 44).

In a society which judged the culture of its members less by the building of cities than by the transforming influence of writing, it is not unexpected to find that written dance notation is of a high quality. And, when it is further understood that the writing of this society is, itself, a form of line drawing, one is not surprised to find that excellent and accurate line drawings accompany the written text.

This is as true for dance description in present-day revolutionary China as it was in traditional China where the accuracy and complete documentation of Ming dynasty (1378–1644) ritual dance anticipated and exceeded Western efforts in this area. Although historical records suggest that dance notations in China may have existed as early as in the first millenium B.C., they appear to have been destroyed by the book-burning Emperor Shih Huang-ti at the end of the third century B.C. In other instances like those of the T'ang dynasty dance tablatures found in the caves of Tun-huang, the notations have not yet been adequately deciphered; thus, fully-documented rituals in China are best known to us from a period of time (circa. 1600), not far in years from the notes made regarding the famed Ballet Comique de la Reine or Arbeau's Orchésographie

One observes in the Ming dynasty records that movements were illustrated as well as described, the descriptions tending to be terse while the illustrations were more complete. In fact, the dance is better understood by studying the complete picture sequence than by following the characters. (Figures 1 and 2 are examples of two movements in sequence as shown in notation of Ming dynasty ritual dance). Regarding the translation of the characters that are found on the illustrations, Figs. 1 and 2: the vertical characters are essentially numerical, roughly equivalant to saying in English, “index number 5 and index number 6.” The larger characters, which are read horizontally from right to left, are descriptive in general terms only, and require a study of the drawings in sequence to be fully understood.

This essay discusses three recent British contemporary dance works that radically rework the spatial relation between audience and performer. These are Nicola Conibere's Assembly (2013), Katye Coe's (To) Constantly Vent (2014), and Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small's Voodoo (2017). The essay draws on Henri Lefebvre theorization of the social and political production of space to analyze the kinds of reworkings of space-time that these works enact. It argues that the works evade capture by the apparatuses that maintain normative ideologies, not only those governing the reception of art but also the apparatuses of racial classification.

The medium of dance can refine its own instrument; the dancer gains fuller possession and utility of the body, of sensibilities, the uniqueness of total self. The rational and intuitive begin to flow freely into each other; the equipment becomes more subtle. Dance can thus be one more way, and a potent one, of enabling a human being to command more fully his powers.

Philosophical statements such as this exemplify the emphasis the dancer must put upon the ideal as well as upon the practical application of the real. Dance technique, how-ever, exhibits the gap between fact and theory. Today, the dance instructor has available literature related to kinesiology and research methods that could be of help to improve the theory underlying dance technique; but it appears that full advantage has not been taken of these resources to correct existing errors in technique.

In 1975, German choreographer Kurt Jooss created his last dance, Dixit Dominus, for Swedish-based Indian dancer Lilavati Häger. After Rani Nair reconstructed what is often seen as a “minor” work, she then created Future Memory (2012) to engage more directly with her inheritance, from caring for the personal things and stories that surrounded the piece to re-working its promise of dancing between European and Indian forms. Working outward from my position as dramaturg and historian for this project, this essay addresses the potential and precariousness of contemporary dance's experiments with redoing history at the intersection of multiple contested legacies.

As authors who contributed to an edited volume, we were startled to learn that editors added a subtitle that broadly declared French balletic supremacy. This text, entitled The Opera Ballet: Three Centuries of Supremacy Beginning with Louis XIV [Le Ballet de l'Opéra: Trois siècles de suprématie depuis Louis XIV] (Auclair and Ghristi 2013), presents the notion of “supremacy” as a seductive value, and it is disturbing, to say the least. It is first and foremost a false assertion. The editors cannot seriously suppose that the Paris Opera Ballet, during the course of three centuries, occupied a position of dominance; and such a notion requires, in any case, detailed discussion establishing the criteria that are considered to define and delimit said domination. Such a title participates in a type of competition better identified with nation states, capitals, or European theaters after the seventeenth century. To suggest that the Paris Opera Ballet has always existed as a place of cultural “supremacy” is first of all to ignore the question of métissage, and to overlook how the institution adopted exogenous knowledge and savoir-faire; it is a rejection of dance history that occurred elsewhere, entirely separate or sometimes in opposition to the productions of this single cultural institution. Most disturbing of all is the highlighting of the notion of “supremacy,” or a superiority and power over others. By valuing the notion of domination, the editors encourage readers to envision dance and the broader world in terms of inferiority and superiority (between classes, genders, nations, and cultures). The Paris Opera Ballet may have acted in the service of such an ideology in the past, and may do so again in the future; however, the role of a scholarly publication should be to analyze discourses of propaganda, not to reproduce them.

In the San Francisco Weekly in 2002, reviewer Bernice Yeung referred to butoh as a “bizarre and mysterious art.” Although it has become a leading postmodern and international art form in the last thirty years and is familiar to contemporary arts festival viewers around the globe, butoh is still referred to as bizarre, tortured, disturbing. As a butoh practitioner who has seen many butoh performances in Tokyo, the United States, Canada, and Sweden from 1981 to 2006, I have come to believe that its grotesque elements, though important, do not constitute the core of butoh. Rather, it is the basic Buddhist value of compassion that inspires butoh's content and powerful expression. In the above remarks by Ohno and Hijikata, the founders of this esoteric art form, stretching out a hand or stepping a crippled step forward in crisis are acts of compassion, and it may be this compassionate aspect of butoh that engenders its appeal.

“What does it mean to reconstruct a dance?” wonders Martin Nachbar in his text “Training Remembering.” Following Henri Bergson, he proposes an explanation in terms of images that are actualized in ways that involve not only the visual sense, but also hearing, touch, and proprioception. Remembering something is actualizing it through the senses. Such sensory actualization is instrumental not only to literally remember moments from our own past, but also to our modes of engaging with the thoughts, ideas, experiences, and creations of others. In this process, Nachbar observes, our own body, with its movement knowledge and experiences, becomes the frame through which remembering takes shape, while at the same time this frame may be questioned and trained anew within the process.

In the late Sixties, Nam June Paik, one of the creators of videoart, expressed his concern that “it is about time we make the distinction between video art and video taped art.” Looking at TV and video dance of the Seventies and early Eighties one feels compelled to agree with Paik, realizing that a distinction must finally be made between video dance and video taped dance. Even when given the opportunity to create a work for video, rather than adapt a proscenium piece, choreographers frequently continue composing dances from a theatrical point of view which are then more or less successfully captured by the media. In other words, instead of creating videodance — a blending of structural and perceptual elements intrinsic to dance and the media — makers unintentionally slip into the genre of video translations of existing works or of videodocumentation. It appears that this state of affairs is chiefly due to two factors. Dancers and choreographers, on the one hand, do not always seek opportunities for hands-on experiences in a television studio or even with portable video equipment (other than shooting a record tape in place of a dance score). Such a practice does not allow for an understanding of the nature of the medium and excludes a creative integration of its expressive potentials. The number of media artists, on the other hand, who are familiar with the nature of dance is small. Independent artists, such as Charles Atlas, Doris Chase, and Jeff Bush or TV directors Fred Barzyk and Rick Hauser, are a minority, and individual dance/performance/media artists, such as Birgit Cullberg, Amy Greenfield, and Elaine Summers are still exceptions.

In 1933, the year Hitler was named chancellor of Germany, Ruth Page and Harald Kreutzberg launched a “new and rather surprising partnership” with a joint recital in Chicago. Page and Kreutzberg were, on the surface, unlikely artistic collaborators: she, an American ballerina and he, an exponent of the German new dance. Nevertheless, their partnership lasted four years—from 1932 through 1936—a fairly long term considering the usual obstacles to collaboration magnified by physical distance. With Chicago as the focal point they toured the Midwest and other regions of the United States, Japan, and Canada. The collaboration offered the two artists a number of advantages. Page had certain difficulties to surmount in achieving her goal of becoming a choreographic entrepreneur in the post-Diaghilev international ballet world: besides being a woman—a decided disadvantage when it came to being taken seriously as a choreographer, artistic director, and impresario in the ballet world—she lived in Chicago, outside the dance mecca of New York. She could parlay her collaboration with Kreutzberg into a cosmopolitan, modernist identity, thus preempting the threat of consignment to Midwestern obscurity. Kreutzberg, for his part, was in need of a continuous and widening stream of performance venues in which to develop his unique gifts as a solo performer; moreover, he had to contend with the rising fascism and homophobic militancy of the Third Reich as a gay man whose identity was antithetical to the nation-state of which he was ultimately to become a pawn.

There is evidence for the existence of some kind of grammatical structure in a passage from Golek Lambangsari, a Javanese classical court dance for women, composed by Sasmintamardawa of Jogjakarta, Java. In the passage under examination Sasmintamardawa used two different choreographic methods for manipulating the Javanese classical dance material: first, the more usual traditional, multipart variations with their connecting transitions; and second, very short, simple variations which seem not to have transitions between them. An analysis of the boundaries between the phrases in this passage reveals that the boundary conditions are different for each choreographic method, and further, for each level of the structure of the passage. The latter discovery indicates that the structure of the passage (no matter which choreographic method is considered) is different at each of three levels which I define in the boundary analysis—phrase, subphrase, and basic movement unit—and that there is some overall organizing grammatical principle causing this to be so. An explanation of Jogjanese classical female dance style phrase structure precedes the boundary analysis of the passage from Golek Lambangsari.

The phenomenon of spirit possession exists throughout Africa and many other parts of the world. Recent studies view possession as a performance, concentrating on the manner in which mediums become possessed and a description of the ensuing action. The following study of the Ondo ceremony of the Anago-Yoruba in Dahomey, while concerned with this, focuses more specifically on the numerous symbolic references to possession within the dramatic framework. Possession cannot be meaningfully discussed solely as a state of dissociation. As a performance it is made up of complex arrangements of symbols—visual, aural, and kinetic. The combination forms the reality of possession as witnessed by the audience. An examination of each element in the ritual complex deepens one's understanding of the others and of the whole. Dance specialists, particularly those analyzing dance cross-culturally, should be sensitive to all contextual elements in order to perceive patterns of thought and philosophical ideas expressed kinetically. This paper considers a number of crucial ritual elements: first, imagery in oral tradition, which reveals the personalities of the gods involved in the ritual; second, shrine architecture and priestly regalia, which symbolizes man's relationship to the divine; and third, the possession dance, which unifies the vast array of references to possession in time and space.

This article questions how the historically revisionist history of “the West,” as initiated by Thomas Hanna, informs systems of inclusion, exclusion, and power within the field of “somatics.” Hanna, who coined the term somatics, sought in so doing to root the burgeoning field in a “Western” tradition of philosophy and science that he fundamentally misconstrued. Meanwhile, Hanna's work to formulate a historically and philosophically Western basis of a somatic field continues to provide cover for white somatic practitioners whose institutionally minted somatic forms extract philosophical and practical knowledge from non-white body-mind practices internationally. Subsequent accounts of somatics consequently articulate both the Western history of somatics and its “non-Western influences” on false grounds. This article theorizes the colonial and Western supremacist holdovers within a somatic field that nonetheless gives lip service to postcolonial discourse. Finally, by rebuilding an approach to the “deep time” history relating sōma and somatics, this article proposes how the field of somatics could reground its understanding of the “first-person experience of the body,” informed by Afropessimism, Black Accelerationism, and Afrofuturist thought.

Contemporary dance in Senegal emerged and thrives at the interstices of the local and the global. Multiple expectations and values, of which gender and sexuality are no small part, converge at the site of creation and production, enlisting choreographers to navigate oftentimes conflicting ideologies. Based on ethnographic research, this article examines three works by Senegalese men that employ gender and sexual transgressions alongside the artists’ seemingly contradictory verbal articulations of their work. Using the local-global entanglement as an analytical framework, I argue that these works offer ambiguous assemblages of masculinities that challenge conventional masculinity in Senegal, thereby elucidating the potentiality for contemporary dance to transcend singular meaning-making capacity.

The radical innovations of African-American artists with artistic form during the 1960s and 1970s, according to black performance theorist Fred Moten, led to a new theorization of the avant-garde. His book, In the Break: The Radical Aesthetics of the Black Tradition, discusses the poetry and jazz music of artists, from Amiri Baraka and Billie Holiday to Charles Mingus, and extols their radical experimentation with the structures and conventions of aurality, visuality, literature, and performance dominant in European art and aesthetics. In this essay, I consider the implications of these processes of resignification in relation to the choreographic legacy of the artist, Eleo Pomare, whose work and career during this period was both experimental and radical and, I will suggest, critical to the formation of a transnational, multiracial conception of modern dance.

Among the Yoruba-speaking people of Nigeria recreational dances are a popular art form usually performed at purely social gatherings such as weddings, funerals (of elderly people), or child-naming ceremonies. They are distinct from the more symbolic dances which may accompany such social events, or even from the more formally structured and often public events such as historical festivals, initiation rites, and ancestral remembrance ceremonies. The recreational dances, which are performed mainly for relaxation and entertainment, are also opportunities to express and communicate emotions arising from the occasion being observed. Social ceremonies in Yoruba society are simply inconceivable without recreational dances.

Social festivities are of course not the only occasions for these dances; they are also performed on non-specific occasions for purely aesthetic fulfillment or as an expression of general well-being. At the end of a day's work, for example, friends or relatives get together to relax, or as they say, “múfàáji”—’ catch relaxation.’ At such fàáji evenings dance performances feature prominently alongside story-telling and riddle contests, games, poetry chants, or merely sharing anecdotes. Occasionally, too, a popular dance form may find performance space at the end of a successful symbolic ceremony, when the inclusion of a different form, both thematically and conceptually, is no longer a distraction from the desired goals of the ceremony. At such times recreational dances produce a cathartic effect following the tension of the event's significant symbolism.

In 1700 the London theatrical world was in crisis. The quality of English plays had deteriorated during the 40 years of restored Stuart rule. Playwrights, believing themselves to be working in the tradition of the finest Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic poets, were churning out ranting tragedies, stripped of the subtle heroes and comic relief of Shakespeare, and amoral comedies, rarely showing the sparkling wit of Jonson. The two London theatre companies were locked in bitter competition for the small, mostly aristocratic audience, and managers compromised the poets and actors by introducing into their plays music-hall entertainments, from ventriloquists to tumblers. At the center of the crisis, however, was not the lack of playwrights of genius nor a fickle, world-weary audience; rather British drama was seriously weakened by a tradition that had since 1660 allowed the play to become the vehicle not only for spoken drama, but for large quantities of music and dance as well.