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.

During her tenure as Trent University's Canada Research Chair, Marrie Mumford created the Indigenous Performance Studies program and redefined her research goals as “Naadmaagewin … The Art of Working Together in Our Communities.” Anishinaabeg grandmothers in the United States who participate in the Mother Earth Water Walks around the Great Lakes requested the creation of a work about water. The journey began in 2011 at Trent, with Rulan Tangen working with student investigations that led to the creation and production of a work-in-progress. This new work developed into a site-specific work in 2012 and intergenerational workshops that resulted in the creation of a major new work that has since been performed in Santa Fe, New York City, and New Zealand. This article charts the journey of this original work on behalf of the act of clean water.

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 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.

The majority of students come to us at the University of Chichester in the United Kingdom, where I am a dance lecturer, because they want to develop careers as dancers, choreographers, or dance teachers. They are usually attracted by the opportunity to improve their dance technique and/or to be creative rather than to align themselves with the more conventional avenues of academia, and for most writing will never be a career contender.

Many creative people have produced films using dance as the main or secondary subject matter. The past decade has brought such major studio productions as The Turning Point (Ross, 1977), Nijinsky (Ross, 1980), Saturday Night Fever (Badham, 1977), Flash Dance (Lyne, 1983), Staying Alive (Stallone, 1983), Breakin' I & II (Silberg 1984), and Dirty Dancing (Ardolino, 1987), and independent films like In a Rehearsal Room (Hahn, 1975), Dune Dance (Brown, 1981), and Space City (Brentano and Horn, 1980), as well as much of the rock-video genre. The directors and/or choreographers of these films have produced dances for the camera that often could not, or at least did not, exist except on the television or movie screen. Angles chosen to frame shots and the rhythm of editing used to determine pace were selected for the cinematic value they produced. They expressed either the creative impulses of the filmmaker, those of the choreographer interpreted by the filmmaker through an active collaboration, or (only rarely) those of the choreographer as filmmaker. In these cases the techniques unique to film and video have been used to create dance events for the screen.

But what of dance works that have been choreographed to be seen on the proscenium stage? It is, perhaps, even more challenging, if not as apparently creative, to try to preserve on film or tape the composition and pattern and inherent rhythm of such choreography; that is, to bring a faithful translation of the choreographer's vision to the audience in front of the screen. Dance film that strives to provide the same aesthetic result as that of the staged choreography is a demanding art form in its own right; it draws upon all our understanding of the principles of documentary film and of visual perception. What makes this such a difficult task? Why is it so hard to maintain the energy, the excitement, and the aesthetic values of the performance when presenting the content of the prescribed space and the specific time of the real world, on the screen? The reason may be that we do not yet fully understand the interactions that occur between that objectively limited space of the world and the subjectively defined space produced by the camera.

In the West, the categories of music and dance are generally thought of as related, but distinct performing arts. Those of us who devote our time to studying and performing music often forget that no sound is produced without physical movement and that in most (if not all) cases performers have learned to move in certain ways in order to produce a desired pattern of sounds. Yet when we attend a piano recital we may very well enjoy the performance without actually seeing the pianist's fingers in motion on the keyboard. The movements of western “classical” musicians are, for the most part, aimed at producing sounds, and it is these sounds that the audience is expected to apprehend and appreciate aesthetically. In Okinawan “classical” music (koten ongaku), however, the “musical aesthetic” relies on a combination of formalized patterns of movement and sound, particularly in the playing of the two drums, collectively called tēku. The movements of the Okinawan drummer are thus more than a means to correct sound production they have aesthetic significance in their own right. Some of these movements, in fact, produce no sound at all. Others, though highly contrastive visually, may produce sounds which are acoustically the same.

Interplay of the visual and the aural is found in performance traditions around the globe. In East Asia alone there are numerous genres in which dancers sound drums – Japanese and Okinawan Ancestor Festival dances (bon-odori in Japan, eisā in Okinawa), the Korean “monk's drum” dances (puk-chum) and hourglass drum dances (sol-changgo), to name a few. In these dances, however, the “drummer” is more readily identifiable as a “dancer.” He or she moves through space; the striking of the drum is but one of the activities which the audience beholds and may not be the primary one. Usually these dances are accompanied by music performed by “non-dancing” musicians, whose ensemble may include drums other than those played by the dancing drummer.

Critics described Pina Bausch's work as “absolutely contemporary” and as being “important dance heritage,” which is precisely the opposite of contemporary, namely, historical. This contradictoriness—though productive in its own right—is symptomatic of the perspective of dance journalism brought to bear on Pina Bausch's later works in particular. But even reviews of her earlier works are a far cry from perceiving the artist in a consistent manner, some even going so far as to criticize her for being “outdated.” Apparently, Bausch's art continuously poses a challenge for dance critics because it defies easy categorization in aesthetic terms, thereby undermining the implicit postulates and classificatory criteria underlying dance reviews. There is—at least in the German-speaking area—broad consensus regarding the functions of today's dance reviews as a text genre: as a translation of dance into language, dance reviews describe, analyze, and judge. With a focus on reviews of pieces by Pina Bausch, this essay proposes to investigate how dance is translated (“trans-posed”) by considering the questions: what do reviews do when they put things into words? How are their own seemingly firm categorizations and postulates thereby destabilized or at least opened to debate?

In Romanticism and Post-Modernism, Edward Larrissy states, “It has long been recognized that Romanticism is a dubious essence” (1999, 2). Observing that the current tendency is to acknowledge a plurality of “Romanticisms,” he cites Arthur O. Lovejoy's article, “On the discrimination of Romanticisms,” originally published in 1924, in which Lovejoy argued that the term had taken on such a multiplicity of meanings that “we should learn to use the word ‘Romanticism’ in the plural” (1948, 235). Acknowledging multiple schools of Romanticism constitutes more than a “post-modern piece of de-essentialising,” according to Larrissy; it recognizes that the literary and artistic creations of the Romantic era were too varied to submit to “a unified Romantic discourse” (1999, 2). Lovejoy's thesis, so widely accepted in literary circles, holds promise for dance scholars working with repertory from the Romantic era that lies outside the mainstream of “dance history” as traditionally viewed from the perspective of the Paris Opéra. Embracing the possibility of multiple forms of “Romanticism” in the nineteenth-century ballet allows us to attach meaning to the balletic repertory of that era as it varied according to national setting and individual choreographer.

The Irigwe, numbering around 17,000, are the third largest of several dozen so-called “plateau pagan” tribes on the Jos Plateau in Benue-Plateau State, Nigeria. Situated on the western edge of the Plateau around 20 miles west of the towns of Jos and Bukuru, the Irigwe have their own language and social traditions which clearly distinguish them from the other plateau tribes. They are currently reknowned all over the Plateau, indeed all over Nigeria, as skilled dancers. The focus of this paper will be to describe and analyze briefly the importance of Irigwe dance groups as emissary delegations, traditionally between various Irigwe sub-groups, and nowdays also between Irigwe as a whole and the rest of Nigeria. The maintenance of boundaries between socio-cultural groupings which regularly interact often involves agents of one sort of another who serve (on a de facto if not on an explicit basis) as bridges between the groupings. Dance group members in effect form such bridging agents in Irigwe.

Irigwe is a segmentary society lacking any traditional political chieftaincy. Twenty-five semi-autonomous agnatically based tribal “sections” are bound together on the one hand by each section's having exclusive responsibility for performing one or another ritual felt to be necessary for the tribe, and on the other hand by cross-cuting affinal and cognatic bonds mediated by both primary and “secondary” intersection marriages (Sangree 1972). The Irigwe divide their 25 sections into two geographically discrete clusters: Rigwe, the “parent” division, south of the swiftly flowing Ngell River with 10 sections, and Nyango, the “child” division, north of the river, with 15 sections.