In this article I employ modern dance pioneer Martha Graham's memoir Blood Memory (1991) to complicate understandings of autobiography. Following a deconstructive perspective (Buse and Stott 1999; Derrida 1994) and taking up feminist critiques of both autobiography (Benstock 1988; Chanfrault-Duchet 2000) and the effects of embodiment (Phelan 1997; Albright 1997), I theorize autobiography as a haunting interstice between writing and the body. I suggest that while the written account is an important means to chart a life, there are forms of autobiography that remain unrepresentable in the frame of writing. This impossibility is most poignant in Blood Memory as Graham struggles to represent the autobiographical significance of the embodied performance yet is haunted by the inability to fully articulate in writing its significance for her. I argue that in encountering the written autobiography we should not disavow this haunting but rather acknowledge its importance as a means of encountering that life.

To trouble tacit assumptions about written autobiography, I ask, How might written autobiography be understood as haunted? And how might dance serve to illustrate its haunted state? Lastly, what are the possible effects of understanding written autobiography as haunted? To address these questions I first consider the unsettled encounter with Graham's Blood Memory. I theorize the effects of this encounter as stemming from the shadowy but persistent presence of Graham's danced oeuvre as an alternative form of autobiography and argue that this oeuvre could also be considered an autobiographical text. Then placing the “proper” written autobiography in dialogue with the danced autobiography, I posit the haunted status of autobiography itself–as always already troubled by multiple and alternative textual productions of self that can be both bodily and written in form. Finally, I suggest the possible effects of considering autobiography in this way.

At the first National Dance Congress and Festival, which was held in New York in May 1936, Edna Ocko, the dance editor of New Theatre Magazine, told the assembled delegates, “One cannot minimize the importance of an artist's social point of view, for it is he who, bringing his ideas before vast audiences, can organize and direct social thought” (25). Noting that young, politically aware choreographers had already embraced the political potential of dance, Ocko listed several topical social themes recently explored in choreography, including the need for “Negro and white unity”—an assertion championed by other speakers and formally adopted in the final session of the gathering when the delegates passed the following resolution: “Whereas the Negro People in America have been subject to segregation and suppression which has limited their development in the field of creative dance, be it resolved that the Dance Congress encourage and sponsor the work of the Negro People in the creative fields” (Ocko 1936, 27 and “Resolutions” 1936, 94).

In introducing and teaching art-critical skills—i.e., the skills of description, analysis, interpretation, and judgment—the greatest challenge for teachers of college and university dance students is to teach them confidently to formulate interpretations of the dances they see. With modest effort and practice students are able to gain proficiency in describing the visible features of a dance, as well as in marshaling descriptive/analytical evidence into defensible reasons for an aesthetic judgment. But the concept of interpretation is often difficult for students to grasp for two reasons. First, interpretation is tied to the philosophically slippery term “meaning.” Second, there is little consensus among theorists, artists, critics, and educators on what “interpretation” actually is, or how to go about doing it. This uncertainty in the professional ranks naturally filters down to students, causing some of them to grow nervously silent when faced with questions about meaning in dances and other works of art. Once silenced, of course, students are more likely to accept at face value the interpretive arguments of others rather than to develop their own aesthetic perspectives.

If students are to become critically literate, however, it is imperative for dance educators to explore with them various approaches to interpretation. Only then is it possible to present to students—as I will try to do here—an account of interpretation that they will find sensible, easy to articulate, and directly applicable in their own critical practice.

One of the most widespread and dramatic styles of folk dance performance throughout much of Europe over the past six centuries has been sword dancing, specifically the linked styles—often called “hilt and point” or “chain” sword dances—which were first reported in the late Middle Ages and are still practiced in a number of countries. In these dance styles, a group of dancers, normally ranging from four or five up to twenty-odd, moves through various figures, minimally lines and circles but often using very complex and demanding movements. The dancers are connected to one another by swords, or sword-like implements of metal or wood, which they usually hold with the hilt in their right hands and the point of the next dancer's sword in their left. The dancers have traditionally been men or boys, often members of a guild or profession, or in rural areas, the men of a parish or district.

The dances are usually presented in the winter, most often during Carnival time or Shrovetide in much of northern and central Europe, or on Boxing Day or Plough Monday in England. But they might also take place on a local patron saint's feast day or other popular holiday. In Spain and Portugal the dances have been performed at Corpus Christi, in the summer. In many countries they have been presented to entertain royalty, wealthy tourists, folklore collectors, or other distinguished audiences. Particular speeches, songs, or short dramas have sometimes been associated with these dances. It has not been uncommon for a piece of mock combat to take place, perhaps with a fencing scene. A dramatic moment in some dances comes when the swords are locked or laid together. They then can be displayed in a star shape to the audience; used as a platform for a performer to stand on; or placed around a performer's neck, for an “execution”, sometimes followed by a “resurrection.” Nonetheless, the emphasis and originality of this style of dancing lies in the linked movements of the dancers, connected by their swords.

This essay gives an overview of recurring themes and concerns in Trisha Brown's work through close readings of three dance pieces from three very different periods in her career: Trillium (1962), from the early stages of Judson Dance Theatre; Roof Piece (1973), when Brown was working in close proximity with visual artists in SoHo; and Newark (1987), from the period when the Trisha Brown Company had begun performing in major international theaters and arts festivals. Throughout the successive phases or cycles of her choreographic career, Brown has continually pushed the boundaries of her work as if never satisfied but always restlessly needing to move on. Nevertheless, looking back from the first decade of the twenty-first century, two artistic concerns emerge that have remained in constant, productive tension throughout Brown's long career as a dancer and choreographer. On the one hand, she has searched for new ways of moving by working with improvisation and by investigating through body images the neuro-skeleto-muscular sources of movement. But the ways in which she has set innovative new movement nevertheless exemplify a radical, often conceptual approach to choreographic structure. Her work thus forecloses safe, known, predictable aesthetic experiences and pushes the spectator to find and appreciate new, previously unknown qualities.

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.

The written history of German sword dance has seen a number of quaint twists. With the rediscovery in 1455 of a short Tacitus quote (98 C.E.) presumably proving the existence of the sword dance in ancient Germanic times, claims were soon made that it had persisted for millennia. From the late nineteenth century onward, nationalists and body culture theorists, each in their way, favored the idea of revitalizing an ethnic German dance form. This article aims to delineate the respective discourses, and illustrates these by portraying the choreographic renditions of an imagined German sword dance tradition by Olga Desmond and Harald Kreutzberg.

This article meditates on the interconnectedness of the making and meaning of an Indigenous contemporary dance work that draws on intergenerational Jicarilla Apache basket weaving practices. Rulan Tangen choreographed the piece, performed by Anne Pesata, which is inspired by Pesata's lived experiences as a Jicarilla Apache woman and fifth generation basket weaver. Tangen—who identifies as mixed culturally, including Native, Polynesian, and European heritages—founded and directs Dancing Earth: Indigenous Contemporary Dance Creations, an intertribal company which originated in 2004. Tangen created the piece in February 2014 to honor Pesata and other Indigenous women leaders. The choreographer's commitment to undertaking projects that respond to Native elders' contemporary concerns and dancers' interests also guides its themes. Alongside music, the piece uses recorded voiceover that Pesata created and spoke. The voiceover makes transparent Pesata's familial connections with basket weaving and other Jicarilla Apache epistemologies and practices. The dance also elucidates relationships between basket weaving and Pesata's movements throughout, culminating in the creation of a figurative basket. According to Pesata, the dance “tells the story of the journey that you go through in making a basket from start to finish.”

This article chronicles the formation and first season of the dance company Ballet Caravan (1936–1940) with a special focus on the role of Lincoln Kirstein in the troupe's founding. This account of the Caravan's early history draws upon an array of primary sources to offer new perspectives on the company's relationship to modern dance circles and its parent organizations (the American Ballet and School of American Ballet, co-founded by Kirstein and George Balanchine in 1934). It traces Ballet Caravan's touring activities during 1936 (including its debut at Bennington College) and details ballets created for the company by Lew Christensen, Eugene Loring, and William Dollar, as well as previously unknown early choreographic work by Erick Hawkins. This account reveals that Ballet Caravan was initially conceived of neither as a dancer-driven initiative nor a deliberate attempt by Kirstein to pursue an American artistic agenda (as it has been previously understood by scholars), but rather was a practical response to institutional crises in the larger Balanchine–Kirstein ballet enterprise. The American Ballet and Ballet Caravan thus reveal themselves in 1936 as more contiguous than distinct, sharing personnel and aesthetic values, as well as the involvement of Balanchine himself.

José Limón's The Moor's Pavane, subtitled “Variations on the theme of Othello,” premiered on August 17, 1949, at the American Dance Festival in New London, Connecticut. The original cast consisted of José Limón as The Moor, Lucas Hoving as His Friend, Pauline Koner as His Friend's Wife, and Betty Jones as The Moor's Wife. With costumes by Pauline Lawrence and music arranged by Simon Sadoff (conductor and pianist for the José Limón Dance Company) from Henry Purcell's Abdelazar, The Gordian Knot Untied, and The Pavanne and Chaconne for Strings, the work was quickly recognized as a major modern dance classic. Now more than forty years old, The Moor's Pavane continues in the repertory of the Limón Dance Company, as well as in that of many ballet companies throughout the world.

John Martin, reviewing the premiere in The New York Times, declared that Limón had “definitely made a place for himself among the best of them” with his latest work. And Louis Horst wrote in The New London, Conn., Evening Day, “With a quartet of dancers… José Limón has, within the strict limitations he has set himself, produced a gripping and absorbing composition.” Horst also praised the dancers, noting that ”[t]he performance by the quartet was on a very high level, especially the stunning portrayal of the Iago role by Lucas Hoving, which was one of unforgettable malevolent intensity”.

How to describe my experience? Some Indigenous peoples have prescribed, specific protocols around introductions, but this is not the case where I'm from. Or, if it was this way in the past, we've lost the knowledge of those introductory protocols. I respect that we should give space to those who have Indigenous ways of introducing themselves. As an Alutiiq woman who lives in a kind of diaspora from my island home of Kodiak in Alaska— and my villages of Port Lions and Afognak—I don't always know how to describe my experience. I am an artist. I live in Canada. I make dance, video, photos, texts.

The nineteenth century brought a tidal wave of immigrants from many European countries to the United States. The immigrants tended to cluster in various areas across the country. One group came from what is now known as Czechoslovakia and settled in an area of eastern Iowa. Today, Cedar Rapids has the largest Czech community in the state. The population of the town and its metropolitan area is 125,000 and the Czech population is estimated at 30%, counting third and fourth generation Czechs.

From their earliest arrival in the community around 1852 the Czechs congregated in an area that became known as “Little Bohemia,” where they formed their own community life. They continued their traditional hobbies of lace-making, egg-painting, theater, music, gymnastics, and dancing.

The Zimbabwean writers Catherine Buckle and Nyaradzo Mtizira reimagine kongonya dance in their works Beyond Tears: Zimbabwe's Tragedy (2002) and The Chimurenga Protocol (2008), respectively. Both the European-born Buckle and the black Zimbabwean Mtizira harness the dance to evoke the post-2000 jambanja experiences associated with Zimbabwe's controversial “Third Chimurenga,” or the fast-track land reform program, beginning in 2000. Their contrasting depictions of dance epitomize the differing views on Zimbabwe's land reform program. Largely, whereas Buckle's novel is a memoir which personalizes a farmer's encounters with dancing African/Zimbabwean “land invaders,” Mtizira's is a panegyric that collectively reimagines a nation's defiant revolution against purported forces of Western imperialism. Both writers’ representations of the post-2000 Zimbabwe's dance performances are therefore colored and compromised by racial subjectivity.