It's a Tuesday night in Belfast. Christina and Leanne are running their salsa class in Mercury's basement dance room. Afterwards, Christina has arranged to go dancing at the Hairy Hound with her friend Annabel, who is attending Christina and Leanne's class. Leanne will go home and prepare for her school teaching the following day. Christina wants to forget the illnesses and stresses back home for the night and needs no preparation to be at her reception desk the next day. Annabel is in her mid-fifties. She won't go to any classes, or she won't go out, alone. It's not healthy, seemly, or the done thing in her mind. This attitude makes it difficult for Annabel. She's been a widow for nearly thirty years, and now that the children have grown up, her time to herself has to be carefully coordinated with others. She loves to dance but she is fearful that she might appear single, desperate, alone, and looking for a mate beyond the three-minute dance partner. She sits in the Hairy Hound with Christina, who is more youthful, in her thirties, dressed to attract attention, but in a married way. For Annabel, the salsa nights are a night out rather than a night in alone. They are a chance to move to the music she loves and to gossip and socialize and catch up with her female friends. For Christina, the salsa night is an opportunity to dance after the salsa job and a chance to show off how attractive she still is before going home to the husband she so dearly loves.

In an essay entirely devoted to the subject of dance in Alain Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics [Petit manuel d'inesthétique (Badiou 2005b)], we find the following contentious statement: “Dance is not an art, because it is the sign of the possibility of art as inscribed in the body” (69). At first glance, this statement seems strangely familiar to the reader versed in writing about dance, particularly philosophical writing. “Dance is not an art”: Badiou critiques Mallarmé as not realizing this as the true import of his ideas. It is familiar because it attests to a certain problem in aesthetic thinking, one that relates to the placement and position of dance and the works that comprise its history into what can be seen as certain evaluative hierarchies, particularly vis à vis the relation of dance to other art forms, and in particular, those involving speech and writing. Dance seems to suffer from a certain marginalization, subtraction, or exclusion, and its practice seems to occupy a place of the perennial exception, problem, or special case. The strangeness of the statement, on the other hand, relates to the widespread view outside of academic writing that the status of dance “as art” is actually completely unproblematic. What follows therefore is a critical commentary on this assertion of Badiou, placed both in the context of Badiou's writing, and in the wider one pertaining to the problem of exclusion just outlined.

The first time I saw films of the Wigman solos on video, I experienced a vague, ambivalent feeling of recognition: something in these dances felt very familiar, although the choreography retained its historical strangeness seen through the eyes of a contemporary dance student. The uncanniness of the experience functioned as a powerful trigger to think about something that concerned me but that at first I couldn't fully understand. For one thing, it made me think of my dance education in Ecuador, and it occurred to me that there could well be significant similarities between Ausdruckstanz and Ecuadorian modern dance (I shall develop this idea at the end of this essay). In a personal research project in 2007, while studying at P.A.R.T.S. between 2004 and 2008, I learned and performed three of Wigman's solos: Seraphisches Lied, Pastorale, and Sommerlicher Tanz, from Mary Wigman's dance cycle Schwingende Landschaft. At that time I realized I was dealing with a totally different physicality for which my contemporary training was insufficient, and I had to seek different technical tools in order to perform these solos. First, I realized I had to develop other modes of muscular tension, as my training in release techniques did not suffice. Second, I was bound to consider movement not purely as a physical activity (I imagine that Wigman would have dismissed such an option as mere gymnastics) but rather as a tool for expressing a subtext. Despite these insights, my approach remained rather vague. The mere knowledge that I was dealing with a different physicality and mental involvement did not enable me to define them accurately.

This article both argues for and contests the discourses of transformation that characterize the production and reception of neo-burlesque striptease. Through an experiential, ethnographic, and critical methodology, I reflect on how this genre engenders performances of transformation through the passage of dress to undress, at the performer–spectator exchange, and through shifting corporeal values, changing representations of female eroticism and the reclaiming of a nostalgic femininity within the neo-burlesque mise-en-scène. Yet in line with critical debates in cultural studies, I seek to question the extent to which utopian notions of transformation occur beyond the level of the “performance text” to incorporate change in the economic and social realities of neo-burlesque performers and audiences. In response I argue that neo-burlesque striptease is a site of class privilege in which performers have the necessary economic and intellectual capital through which to stage a critique of the striptease body, which could not necessarily be replicated in other sites of production. Yet I also recognize that neo-burlesque performance offers important opportunities for personal and social transformation through the ways in which women experience their disrobed bodies in an affirmative public space and through the creative control they exercise in the construction of their bodily display.

Where is expression in Cunningham's choreography? Are the moving bodies on stage expressive? If so, what are they expressing and how does such expression occur? Several of the finest theorists of dance—among them, Susan Leigh Foster, Mark Franko, and Dee Reynolds—have already approached the question of expressivity in the work of Merce Cunningham. Acknowledging the formalism and astringency of his choreography, they nonetheless insist that expression does indeed take place. Foster locates expression in the “affective significance” as opposed to the “emotional experience” of movement (1986, 38); Franko finds it in an “energy source … more fundamental than emotion, while just as differentiated” (1995, 80); and Reynolds identifies expression in the dancing subject's sensorimotor “faculties” as they are deployed “fully in the present” (2007, 169). Cunningham himself has defined expression in dance as an intrinsic and inevitable quality of movement, indicating that his search to capture, isolate, and frame this quality is central to his choreographic process. As a critical theorist (rather than a dance historian), I am interested in expression as a more general, or cross-media, category and therefore find the efforts by Cunningham and his critics to define expression differently, to free it from its subservience to the psyche, refreshing, unconventional, and suggestive. I have become increasingly convinced that Cunningham's practical and theoretical interventions can illuminate more traditional literary and philosophical discourses on the aesthetics of expression and that they have particular resonance when juxtaposed with the approach to expression developed by Theodor Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory of 1970. Similar to Cunningham, Adorno complicates the category of “expression” by shifting its location from subjectivity, understood primarily as a psychic phenomenon, to embodiment, understood as a function of locomotion and sensual existence (in Franko's words, “something more fundamental than emotion, while just as differentiated” [1995, 80]).

Arnold Genthe's 1915 photograph of Anna Pavlova, taken as she leaps into the air, is perhaps the earliest photograph of free movement in dance (Fig. 1). Unlike many other early images, with long exposure times necessitating static poses or wires to hold up the dancers, this photograph depicts actual movement. This claim to authenticity and actuality is a powerful part of its appeal; looking at the image, viewers are sure that they are witnesses to a faithful reproduction of Pavlova dancing, that they are seeing the dance of the past. Considered in this manner, the photograph is an example of the revelatory power of the camera to show us what has been.

However, Genthe's photograph is not a powerful image simply because it is, authentically, of a dancer in motion. It might have mechanically frozen its subject in time, but the photograph communicates movement beyond the moment it depicts—beyond, in a sense, what it reveals photographically to what it evokes in the mind of the viewer. Viewers are able to see movement in details indicative of motion: the flowing fabric of the costume, Pavlova's bodily posture with raised and powerfully muscled thigh, the elevated arm gestures, and the sharply bent and thrusting toes. Additionally, the degree of blur in the photograph provides an indistinctness that is suggestive of something in motion; oddly, the partial obscurity of the picture prompts viewers to imagine more than they can see. All of these elements are evocative indications of movement; they are neither documentary nor part of what can be called photographic revelation, but are instead representational.

One at a time, the dancers entered the small chapel and crossed the green shag carpet to kneel before the virgin's portrait. For the three days of religious fiesta, her image would be the focus of the dancers' offerings. A faded color reproduction, the portrait was not honored for its aesthetic virtues. Rather, its significance was invocative and evocative: through it, the virgin's presence was invoked and her story evoked.

About four feet high, the virgin's portrait rested on a papier maché mountain half its size. On a lower ridge of the mountain was a statue of a kneeling man, cast in plaster. The man's size was equal to the mountain's so that his head reached the level of the virgin's knees. The overall effect was that the virgin on high looked down with compassion on a tiny mountain and a larger-than-life man. It was the opposite of traditional images of Mary looking up at Christ on the cross. Here, the man looked up from below at Mary (figure 1).

Since contact improvisation was “invented” in North America in the 1970s, it has gained widespread acceptance; teachers have been travelling extensively to conduct seminars and workshops. The dance form has been documented and researched from several viewpoints, but, as I see it, there is general agreement among practitioners and scholars—including United Kingdom-based Helen Thomas (2003), Norway-based Hilde Rustad (2006) and Eli Torvik (2005), and Cynthia Novack (1990), who worked in the United States—that contact improvisation is a form of nonhierarchical relations that entails an appeal to accept mutual responsibility for each other and that also implies a specific lifestyle. In her book Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture, Novack, as an anthropologist, perceives contact improvisation as embodied culture where the movements are central constitutional parts. Her position is that through the study of contact improvisation, “the history of the dancing serves as a vehicle for investigating powerful interrelationships of body, movement, dance and society” (8).

This article investigates the three versions of Mary Wigman's Hexentanz (Witch Dance) in the context of the different political regimes in which they were performed. The changing cultural milieus shaped—through Wigman's imagination if not necessarily consciously—the works' forms and iconographies. The witch figure relates to preindustrial, pre-Christian Germanic identity and sparked considerable interest among völkisch and indeed Nazi groups. Wigman's dances present a kaleidoscope of different treatments of the witch motif, encompassing (variously) the life reform movement, an intercultural fusion with oriental performance traditions, and a strand of paganism that also influenced National Socialism. They converge, however, around a unifying critique of modernity.

In this article, I investigate the historical precedents of site-adaptive dance. After walking through the mobility discourse as applied to site-specific art by such scholars as Miwon Kwon, Fiona Wilkie, and Victoria Hunter, I examine the mobile site works of North American choreographers Ann Carlson, PearsonWidrig DanceTheater, Eiko & Koma, and Stephan Koplowitz as exemplary of early attempts to take site dance on tour. Finally, I argue for the value of employing the lens of adaptation to analyze such works, both for the field of site performance and for the larger cross-disciplinary dialogues that could be activated.

Recent scientific research provides evidence to suggest that it is more than coincidental that principles of training are held in common by Tai Chi, Sweigard's Ideokinesis, and Bartenieff's Fundamentals. The reason that principles of training for the neuromuscular facilitation of human movement can be found to cross diverse methods and forms of training is, quite simply, that they work. This statement comes as no surprise to individuals who have utilized these principles of training. However, only recently has objective scientific evidence been published that suggests the potential efficacy of this kind of training. Beyond comparing principles of training and current scientific research, the purpose of this paper is to build a testable hypothesis that can provide a focus in dance science for the beginnings of experimentation in neuromuscular facilitation training.

This article analyzes ways in which dance as labor and artist as a specific subjectivity relate to the material conditions of their production within contexts shaped by neoliberal notions of freedom, ideologies of liberal democracy, and the logic of global capitalism. The discussion focuses on contemporary dance practices that embody some of these values by striving to be more egalitarian, thus giving performers more agency in how they participate in creative processes that lead to a collectively created performance work. This analysis emphasizes the tension between these collaborative practices and modes of producing and distributing financial and symbolic, as well as cultural forms of capital in ways that resist and/or reproduce exploitative aspects of capitalism. Examining some works by Yvonne Rainer, Xavier Le Roy, and Tino Sehgal enables the theorization of the entrepreneurial artistic archive as well as practices of crediting creative labor in relation to notions of capital, ownership, collaboration, and consequently who dance-art makers and performers become as politically progressive artists.

In everyday thinking art is very often linked to emotion and, more generally, to a kind of emotional and spontaneous way of relating to the world that contrasts with the rational and controlled intellect that, for example, science is understood to cultivate. Emotion is also commonly linked, via bodily existence, to femininity and the private sphere—the home (see, for example, Heinämaa and Reuter 1994; Sihvola 1999. These conceptualizations reveal a tendency toward typically Western dichotomies between art and science, emotion and reason, body and mind, private and public, and woman and man (see also Domagalski 1999; Sandelans and Boudens 2000).

Furthermore, working life and emotion have long been seen as separate; only emotion-free employees and institutions have been perceived as being efficient because emotional control, self-restraint, and rationality bolster stability and predictability in working life. Thus, emotions belong somewhere else. In fact, Lloyd Sandelans and Connie Boudens (2000, 48) note that we have had the habit of building special quarters for the exercise and display of emotion such as concert halls, movie theaters, football fields, and therapist's offices. This does not mean, however, that emotions can be eliminated from working life, as many studies on emotion at work have shown (Ashkanasy, Hartel, and Zerbe 2000; Fineman 2000, 2003; Hochschild 1983).

In this article, I specify and historicize the modes of communication that were at play among practitioners of contact improvisation+ and between the dancers and their audiences throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s. I argue that contact improvisation's turn away from dance as a performed visual medium and toward the tactile experience of the participants exceeds a phenomenological reading and instead needs to be considered in light of anarchist theories of mutual assistance in which group behavior supports individual development. At the same time, however, Steve Paxton, the founder of the form, became concerned precisely with its opacity for an audience. I locate this ambivalent engagement with the performance of a participatory action in the edited video recordings that Paxton made together with Lisa Nelson, Nancy Stark Smith, and Steve Christiansen. These mediated videos, aligned with the rise of video art, paradoxically aim to spark a stronger connection than Paxton thought was possible during the live demonstrations of the form.

As a scholar and practitioner of Bharatanatyam I would like, foremost, to express my gratitude to Kapila Vatsyayan for her comprehensive, in-depth studies of Indian classical dance forms. Her work includes attention to both distant and recent epochs in the history of Indian dance as well as to current practice. Her analysis of many divergent sources has laid the groundwork for any academic study of classical Indian dance. She not only provides an exhaustive account of Indian dance in the past and present but also interprets the relationship among aesthetic theory texts, historical dance practice, and contemporary, classical Indian choreography in a nuanced and sophisticated manner.

Because the strengths of Vatsyayan's research are manifold, I restrict my consideration here to a narrow focus. Specifically, this discussion focuses on her concept of dance technique as an integral part of her analytical framework. This essay also addresses the ramifications of her methodology for current and future work in the field of dance studies. In particular, I consider how Vatsyayan's understanding of the bodily subject offers an important paradigm for current writings within dance scholarship, especially those that interpret dance praxis in relation to social theory (1). Moreover, I limit my attention to two of Vatsyayan's major works: Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts and Indian Classical Dance.

What of dance is welcomed in the museum, and what remains on the outside? Artist Tino Seghal's “constructed situations” redirect this question, reworking relations of inside and outside, participant and observer, subject and object through a collective bodily attending to the situation itself. This article explores the conspiratorial techniques activated by This Situation (2007) to consider how dance moves in and with the museum. These techniques, which are derived from or affiliated with those of performance (the intricate negotiation of bodies, movement, and time in relation), include repetition, remixing, distributed movement, conspiratorial breathing, the compliment, disjunctions between words and gestures, and more as part of the work's ecology of practices. As interpreters of the piece in Montréal (and, as such, embodied archivists), the three authors take up key issues such as tensions between ephemerality and preservation, dance's anarchival propensity, and the contagious corporeal techniques of the piece that pass between interpreters and visitors, human and object materialities, and which traverse heterochronicities of the event and its resonances. We propose that what is specific to Sehgal's work within the museum is a holding of movements and relations as a way of persistently making and unmaking its forms, contents, and relations—as a way of making art contemporary, so to speak, via dance's propensity to always begin again. This commitment to re-beginning is what we term Sehgal's impersonal ethics: how This Situation (re)activates and relies on the generation of intensive but ambiguous embodiments.

This paper represents an attempt to raise three points with regard to the study of dance and social anthropology. First, I have stressed the importance of an anthropological perspective in contrast to other perspectives in connection with ethnographies of dance. Second, I have briefly outlined a few ontological and epistemological implications of treating social anthropology itself as a language-based, rather than as a Behavioural science. Third, I have only barely indicated the epistemological consequences involved in accepting the idea of a personal anthropology.

In fact, it is the latter point which suffers most from the following brief treatment, for while the subject matter for a deeper analysis is present in this essay (i.e. the parts of texts of articles written before I read anthropology), it has mainly been subjected to a fairly standard anthropological critique. There are those who might say that this could have been done without the benefit of the idea of a personal anthropology.

In 1917 Margaret H'Doubler, on a year's leave from the University of Wisconsin, had been given a difficult assignment. Blanche Trilling, her chairman, had asked if she would search the dance studios in New York City for a kind of dance activity “worth a college woman's time.” Studying philosophy that year at Columbia University, Margaret H'Doubler had complied with pronounced lack of enthusiasm, her predominant interest being in teaching basketball. Her time nearly expired, she found herself, however, suddenly excited when, at the music school of Alys Bentley, she saw children on the floor moving in their own ways to a stimulus provided by the teacher.

“Of course,” she recounted later, “Get on the floor where you are relieved from the pull of gravity … and see what the natural, structural movements are.” She continued to visit Miss Bentley's studio during the short time that remained and began to organize a course in “new dancing” to be offered almost immediately in summer school in Madison.