This panel honors the work of Deidre Sklar, the 2014 recipient of Congress on Research in Dance's award for Outstanding Scholarly Research. Panelists Ketu Katrak, Ann Cooper Albright and Miriam Phillips, along with panel moderator, Ray Miller, discuss the impact of Sklar's work on their own research and teaching as well as its impact on the contemporary scholarship in the field of Dance Studies.

Invited Panelists: Ray Miller (Moderator), Ann Cooper Albright, Ketu Katrak, and Miriam Phillips

You are not quite old enough to be my blood ancestor, but I am going to figure you as one anyway. My desire to claim you as a relative, intellectually speaking, is based on the groundbreaking work you have done across the fields of dance, performance studies and critical cultural studies. Your monograph Dancing with the Virgin: Body and Faith in the Fiesta of Tortugas, New Mexico (2001a) and seminal essays such as “On Dance Ethnography” (2001a) and “Can Bodylore Be Brought to Its Senses?” (1994) have demonstrated that we do not need to leave the body behind as we engage with new theories of cultural meaning. I had always admired your work and thought you were an interesting scholar and fun to be around, but it was being part of your panel on “corporeal rhetorics” during the international “Theory and Practice” conference in Paris, France, in 2007 that helped me make connections between our academic trajectories. This experience really pushed my thinking into new directions. I want to quote your abstract for that panel:

My remarks are part of a panel honoring Dr. Deidre Sklar, the 2014 recipient of the CORD Award for Outstanding Scholarly Research. I discuss the impact of Sklar's work in the field of Dance Studies in general and on my own scholarship in particular.

I am both honored and humbled to comment about the impact of Deidre Sklar's work on my research and teaching. More than anything, I consider Dr. Deidre Sklar a kind of dance ethnology big sister. I first learned of her when I was a student at the University of California Los Angeles's (UCLA) internationally recognized former dance ethnology program, where Deidre had attended nearly a decade before me. Those of us who went through this unique and intensive program often felt as if we knew each other, even if we had never met. The program was a kind of nation of black sheep; we were kindred spirits in our love and participation of different kinds of global movement practices at a time when ballet and modern dance were exclusively the norm. Also, our mentors, Allegra Fuller Snyder and Elsie Ivancich Dunin, made it a point to share the distinctive investigations of our predecessors. So I think it was in this context that I first learned of Deidre. Over the years, I recall short but poignant conversations with her which left me pondering for months afterwards. Some of our fleeting encounters occurred in the bustling dark hallway of an American Anthropology Association (AAA) conference hotel in San Francisco, taking in the arid air outside of the Cross-Cultural Dance Resources (CCDR) meeting space in Flagstaff, or smelling fire-baked tortillas and hearing cocoon rattles as we stood observing the awe-inspiring Yaqui Easter ceremony in Tucson. As a newbie dance ethnologist in those years, I found Deidre's strong, direct ways, her laser sharp insights, thought provoking questions, and bold comments somewhat intimidating—all features I have grown to admire and value now.

This talk was given at the panel in honor of the author who was recipient of the CORD 2014 Award for Outstanding Scholarly Research in Dance. Having been encouraged to continue in the tradition of “thoughtful, rigorous and engaging” work, the author takes on the concept of “rigor,” reframing the word to apply to the rigorous pursuit of intellectual, aesthetic, and inherent passion, curiosity, and learning grounded in academic discipline that drove her own research, fieldwork, and writing.

Attempting to uncover and document the history, or rather histories and pre-histories, of queer tango is difficult. Superficially, the history ought to be easy. The term “queer tango” barely existed before 2001 when it was first used by LGBT dancers in Hamburg, Germany. It was perceived of by them as a riposte to “hetero-normative” leader-follower relationships in mainstream Argentinian tango, proposing instead women as leaders, men as followers, same sex couples and “active” rather than passive followers. Queer tango has subsequently been characterized by the emergence around the world of queer tango organizations, of international festivals, and an international community of dancers, thriving by contact through social media. Yet as the author, who is collaborating with writers and dancers Birthe Havmøller and Olaya Aramo in editing The Queer Tango Book, an online anthology of writings about queer tango, has found out, there is still no settled agreement as to what, precisely, the term means; there is disagreement about the premise that “hetero-normative” tango was quite as oppressive to women in the ways it was originally made out to be, and there is no agreement—indeed so far, precious little discussion—as to which dance practices in Buenos Aires and beyond from the late nineteenth century onward might legitimately be enlisted as forming the pre-history. Were the men-only prácticas, which ran for decades, a part of it? Or women teaching each other at home? When so little was written down, how is one to find out?

In February of 2014, a contemporary dance company based in Jackson, Mississippi, created a movement installation within the Mississippi Museum of Art. This paper examines how words shaped the experience of the participant-researcher as a docent spoke over the performers, as the dancers physically responded to words spoken by spectators, and as the performers recited text found on the museum walls. Through a process of critical reflection, the author considers how the presence of text within the museum performance space functioned to create meaning and to awaken the awareness of the performers and spectators.

Through the focus of historical inquiry into the monthly performances of Austin Ballet Theatre in Austin, Texas, a local amateur company, at the Armadillo World Headquarters, a psychedelic and “outlaw country” music hall, from 1972–1980, this paper explores an example of dance phenomena surviving outside of normative discursive support through the textual mediation provided by specific newspaper reviewers. The frequency and unique nature of these ballet performances created the circumstances that generated a more open, reciprocal, and diachronic conversation between the participants involving dance and text—a conversation that generated functioning narratives of identity.

In post-industrial Michigan cities of Flint and Detroit, there is a need for art that brings residents together while addressing community issues. Collaborations in dance and poetry engage both traditional and nontraditional audiences while creating a unique visual and audio performance. Separately, the art forms receive less interest. Performing together outdoors, dance and poetry receive more viewer attention, while in traditional dance settings, the message of the two forms is reinforced by one another. “Intersections of Dance and Poetry in Post-Industrial Michigan” examines five collaborations in Flint and Detroit that address community issues while reaching across divisions of class and culture.

In this paper, I explore recent theoretical offerings on transmodernism in literature and critical studies and its appropriation and transference into the field of dance studies Through writing transmodernism in dance, I offer a model that is timely and necessary. This framework is articulated through historical trajectories focused on a case study, notably through the work of French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj. Drawing upon Annonçiation (1995), the concept of dancing /writing transmodernism reflects the epistemological values from the interstitial transference of composite/nonlinear/scaffolded texts, including the rethinking of the biblical narratives, musical textures, and corporeal/physical textures.

Bharatanatyam has manifold systems of writing/documentation. They are in the form of sculptures, paintings, inscriptions, and treatises. They are also in the form of personal notes by dance masters (Nattuvanars), notated descriptions by scholars, by wealthy merchants, travellers, and the court and temple dancers (Devadasis) themselves.

The female mind, body, and voice were used to embody the choreographies envisioned by the male Nattuvanars. But the qualitative fulcrum of this dance remained in extempore exposition. Every repertoire had a pedagogy that was fundamentally dynamic in its transfer and performance but also written and preserved. The Devadasi envisioned compositions as a representation of her psyche each time, both in practice and performance. Therefore the same repertoire gets reinterpreted every time by her, but within the structured pedagogy accorded by the composition and the choreographer. Let us investigate if the term choreography is useful in representing this unique process.

This paper discusses the ways in which Labanotation contributes to the analysis of human movement in anthropology. It is based on the experience of the authors, who, as graduate students in anthropology, were involved in research projects where they used Labanotation for the collection and analysis of data. We argue that the ability of Labanotation to accurately represent body movements and gestures, as well as the spatial relationships between moving agents, makes it useful for analyzing different dimensions of social life as enacted by moving bodies. It also records action from the moving person's point of view, which conforms to the ethnographic practice of taking into account local meanings attached to particular kinds of social action. As such, it can be used at different stages of ethnographic research and for different analytical purposes. To illustrate, we present topically diverse ethnographic projects where Labanotation was used: (1) documentation of the New Year ritual of the Lahu Na Shehleh from Northern Thailand for the purpose of preserving the dance and teaching it to younger members of the community, (2) understanding local meanings of ballet dancing in the Philippines, and (3) identifying tacit learning of social norms among children in Ayacucho, Peru.

Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Mexica writing utilized a largely pictorial system in which bodies undertaking actions (pictorial-iconic presentation) and hieroglyphic text were used to both document and communicate information. Between 2006 and 2010, one of Mexico's most renowned innovative and interdisciplinary performance ensembles, La Máquina de Teatro, worked with Mexica documents and sculptures in the creation of its Trilogía Mexicana (Mexican Trilogy). I discuss fragments of the performance and studio-based creative processes as they translated from the wordless fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writing into an embodied, corporeal, moving form for a twenty-first-century performance stage, specifically aiming to explore notions of memory, temporality, history, and postdramatic theatre.

The paper examines the role of traditional couple and group dances of the Skolt Sámi in negotiating their history and identity. The research is based on archival and literal material from Finnish folklore archives as well as ethnographic fieldwork among the Skolts in 2014. It is addressed that the Skolts, despite their dramatic history, have been able to revive and preserve their dance traditions in many ways, and today they are reflecting their dance history from new perspectives, rewriting it and integrating it to their contemporary hybrid identities. Having lived between many different cultures for centuries, their identities are characterized by many points in their social and personal histories, and dancing is a part of the routes they have traveled within these experiences. Today, dancing provides them a strategy to negotiate both with their history and identity in contemporary society.

Building on the work of interdisciplinary literary and dance scholars from Frank Kermode to Carrie Preston, this paper attends to depictions of Isadora Duncan appearing in novels, poems, and portraits by modernist writers such as Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, and Gertrude Stein, among others. These diversely experimental texts hold in common a preoccupation with Duncan's perpetual motion, emphasizing shifts in her personal life, choreography, and performance quality over time. “Writing Bodies” theorizes the different expressive roles her image takes on, arguing that the texts use Duncan's image to query the relationship between embodied movement and its literary representations.

Crossing between texts, bodies, and the senses, dance literacies bring fresh perspectives on how new literacies can function, especially non-alphabetic or non-text-based literacies. Reading and writing in an expanded understanding of literacy are interpretive means of interacting with texts, of embedding and discerning meaning, of making sense of movement or choreographic information, of composing and performing, and of creating documentation and archive. Makers and viewers of dances act as readers, and writers, and authors. These roles are permeable in dance literacy, shifting with the context of the dance phenomenon or artistic practice. This paper engages with the dance practices of two dance companies to explore issues of shared-authorship, documentation, multimodality, body-text relationships, and reader-writer permeability: the Bebe Miller Company during their creation of A History and RikudNetto, who composes through Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation. What literacy events and practices are present in the studio? What range of written literacies are used and how? Where and how were these literacies learned? In what ways might they cross the so-called literacy-orality divide? Drawing from questions and frameworks of the New Literacy Studies, this paper invites a critical look at dance literacy in context.

There are many ways in which Haitian Vodou ceremonies defy Western binaries of ritual and performance, sacred and profane, and choreography and improvisation. Vodou, a danced religion, is an embodied practice. Souvenance Mystique refers to a place and an event. Eponymously named, it is a mystical remembrance that occurs annually in a weeklong ritual of Vodou ceremonies in the Artibonite Valley outside of Gonaives, Haiti. At Souvenance, the reference to memory and remembrance is embodied, and therefore Souvenance greatly reflects what Diana Taylor refers to as a repertoire of embodied memory. As a scholar, choreographer, and practitioner of Haitian folkloric dance, I have read this ritual in terms of its significations occurring through various signs such as the practitioners' clothing, their proximity to one another, movement, gesture, and ritual choreography.

Souvenance is a site where the multiplicity of histories and bodies signify in relation to one another. While arguably an embodied history in itself, Souvenance also writes. The practitioners enacting the several-days-long ceremonies inscribe upon the surface of the earth. Repetition reinscribes ritual pathways, while a particularly important and meaningful pathway is traversed only twice—at daybreak toward a site and then at sundown returning to the central peristyle. It is the landscape that is inscribed by the practitioners. However, they also become written upon by sweat and sacred blood. In this paper, I will explore the ways in which the rituals at/of Souvenance write history annually and how, simultaneously, the history of Souvenance is being written.

This paper details the theoretical frameworks, methods, and preliminary results from a year-long study of rhetorical agency in undergraduate dance majors. Over the course of two semesters at a BFA Dance Performance and Choreography program, I facilitated a series of extracurricular dance labs for a group of five first- and second-year students. Throughout the academic year, I interviewed the dancers, recorded the lab sessions, and collected free-writes from the participants. This wealth of data can shed light on the relationship between conceiving dancers-as-authors and the emergence of agentic personal narratives in university students. This study offers implications for future research on rhetorical agency as a pedagogical or compositional tool, as a lens for hearing and sharing dancers’ narratives, or as a means to explore authorship in other disciplines.