In a now classic study Mitchell demonstrated that dances quite beside their aesthetic interest offer important insight into social structural processes. Dances characteristic of the transitional period in Africa frequently offer valuable insights into patterns of changing social organization and into the cultural perspectives of the participants. I am going to scrutinize here some features of dances now being exchanged in Western Equatorial Africa—in particular among the Pahouin peoples or Yaounde-Fang speakers of northern Gabon, Southern Cameroons and Equatorial Guinea. These peoples traditionally had simple non-market economies. In recent years they have been brought rapidly into a modern economy through the introduction of cash crops and migrant labor. The question arises: what is being exchanged in the distribution of these dances and what is the consequence of this exchange? In a transitional economy there are almost surely other values in transaction than those measurable in modern currency.

Since the mid-1990s European dancers and audiences have played a significant role in the revival of interest in Yvonne Rainer's dance work. Two key examples of this are the restaging of Rainer's Continuous Project-Altered Daily (CP-AD) in 1996 by the French group Quatuor Albrecht Knust and the more recent creation and trial of the Labanotation score of Trio A in London. In her reminiscences printed above, Pat Catterson suggests that Trio A' s “relaxed natural quality, equality of parts, its tame simplicity, and durational patience may be out of synch with today's Zeitgeist.” During Charles Atlas's documentary, Rainer Variations, Rainer herself suggests today's audiences would no longer be prepared to sit through the long slow works she made during the Judson period. If this is currently the case with audiences in the United States, it is not so on the other side of the Atlantic. European audiences for innovative dance and live art seem prepared to take the time to experience and appreciate slow, demanding, experimental work.

European choreographers and dance artists who have been interested in Trio A often have a keen and sophisticated, if idiosyncratic, interest in dance history. Artists I have spoken to suggest this interest helps them build on what has already been done and makes them aware of a broader range of creative possibilities. Some say they find it useful to discover dance artists in the past who were working in ways that are similar to their own practices. For example, Xavier Le Roy, who took part in the 1996 restaging of Rainer's CP-AD, performed the “chair pillow” section from it during his 1999 performative lecture Product of Circumstances. His discovery of ordinary, task-based, and pedestrian movement in Rainer's work affirmed his own research into similar kinds of movement.

One of Antony Tudor's choreographic concerns is the emotional life and societal role of women. His best known early works, Lilac Garden (1936), Dark Elegies (1937), and Pillar of Fire (1942) explore the feminine realm and the differences in power between men and women that relegate women to their particular place in society. In both Lilac Garden and Pillar of Fire the central issue is the difficulty women face in finding romantic love in polite society. In both pieces women face uncertainty and confusion until the right man steps in to fulfill their destiny. In Dark Elegies, gender is not the central issue, but the scenario is the same: underneath the explorations of personal and communal grief, the struggle to cope with the loss of young children, is a clear and critical thread of gender differentiation.

Tudor connects gender with the ways people handle grief—women get lost in grief, men cope with it—and with the leadership roles in the Dark Elegies community. Men are the driving forces in the community. They are the comforters and have the capacity to lead the group through the stages of the grieving process into resignation. Women are the passive members of the community. They can neither help themselves nor each other, but must depend on their men for solace and salvation.

Dance critic Walter Terry was in the audience the evening of Rosalind Pierson's last, glorious performance with Virginia Tanner's Children's Dance Theatre (CDT). In his review for the New York Herald Tribune of that July 1953 Jacob's Pillow performance, Terry discussed the girls' connections to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, described the outdoor performance setting, the program, and the children as “wonderfully disciplined yet gloriously free in movement.” He concluded his performance description with this paragraph:

In this article, I explore the way that the creation and presentation of Lloyd Newsom's Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men (1988) for DV8 confronted the choreographer, performers, and audience with questions about the ethics of sex and romance and the treatment of gay men during the AIDS crisis. To analyze the complex affective relationships within and around the piece, I follow Emmanuel Levinas's ethical theory of the face in conjunction with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's related theory of faciality, which I interpret as referring to a disciplinary situation in which subjects are created through a process of terrorizing and shaming.

This article introduces the digital humanities and dance studies project Mapping Touring, and employs it in an analysis of Denishawn's touring prior to and immediately following the company's 1925–26 tour to Asia. Situated within the archival turn in dance, Mapping Touring emphasizes the possibilities of spatial and comparative analysis for touring dance artists, with information about their location and repertory drawn from archival sources, gathered and stored in a database, and plotted on interactive maps. With Denishawn as a case study, I contend that digital mapping can make visible some of the implications of travel and touring for the circulation and spread of theories of embodiment contained in dance repertory.

This essay argues that Trio A suspends dramatic form and develops an autonomous aesthetic process, called ambulatory performance. To explain this concept, it turns to Michel de Certeau, who claims that walking eludes formal unity and makes “spaces” for phenomena excluded from representation: everyday life, which is composed of ceaselessly moving singular “footsteps.” In this way, ambulatory performance emulates cinema, whose successive motion also relays quotidian experience. In order to identify a common theoretical basis for dance and media, the essay then relates this successive motion to the concept of automatisms, which film scholars have used to challenge medium specificity in response to the rise of digital cinema.