The demand for ultra-leanness imposed on today's ballerina has evolved over primarily the last thirty years, and did not characterize the traditional classical ballet that dominated the field during its preceding four hundred years. Evolving public taste has tended to prefer increasingly slender figures, and the more Olympian levels of performance dancers must now exhibit further reinforce the demand for extreme leanness.

The author's forty years of dance education experience and performance of classical ballet have made her aware that excellent training has become ever more widely available to the younger members of our society. Their rigorous training— continued well into the high school years—supports the achievement of a high level of technical and aesthetic perfection. Today's elite classical dancers are trained to make ever more revolutions in ever more complex and faster paced turns, and to do quicker and more intricate allegro work. They are trained to execute more complex jumps with greater elevation, and to sustain their balances with less preparation time. Furthermore, as the quality and quantity of professionally-oriented ballet schools have increased dramatically, today's dancer is facing an exponentially increased level of competition.

Increasingly demanding techniques and more intense levels of competition require today's dancers to meet what are, in the author's view, extreme standards of leanness. Each year among the hundreds of beautifully trained dancers who audition for the few vacancies available in professional ballet companies, many are rejected on sight because they do not project the proper, or ideal, body image: long legs, long arms, long neck, oval shaped head; a body of excellent proportions; and, perhaps of greatest importance, a “bone-thin” frame. Ballet masters recognize that extreme leanness enables the dancer to become more energy-efficient, physically articulate, and agile; it facilitates partnering and pointe dancing; and projects an aesthetically pleasing athletic, or sylph-like, image to the public that subsidizes the art.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, Filipino men patronized the popular American social institution of the taxi dancehalls, comprising nearly one quarter of the taxi dancehall patrons in major cities such as Detroit and Los Angeles (see Cressey 1932). Taxi dancehalls were at the height of their popularity during this period, often serving as a key site of sociality amongst and between immigrants. Women were employed as dancers for hire, and men, predominantly immigrants, were their principal patrons. Filipinos, workers and students alike, came dressed in McIntosh suits, eager to spend their hard-earned wages on taxi dancers. Here, Filipino men made rare social contact with women—taxi dancers who were largely white, occasionally Mexican, and very rarely Filipina (see Meckel 1995 for a detailed study of taxi dancers). Filipinos would purchase their dance tickets, choose their favorite girl within a group of taxi dancers, and move to the music of a live band. For ten cents per dance number, slow or fast, Filipino men could choose to dance with the same dancer until their tickets ran out or opt for the pleasures of another. Like a taxi ride, each dance came with a ticketed price and the expectation of a tip, either in the form of a drink, a sandwich, or perhaps even a marriage proposal.

Ballet and modern dance are aesthetic endeavors which utilize the human body as their primary instrument of expression. It therefore has been suggested by some dance theorists and authorities that competent aesthetic performance in these idioms requires support from enhanced physiologic capabilities including flexibility; muscular strength, power, and endurance; and cardiovascular endurance (American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation, 1974, p. 405; Arnheim, 1980, pp. 74-85; Fitt, 1988, pp. 318-319; H'Doubler, 1974, pp. 150-151). However, original scientific investigations of dance physiology are in their infancy and have not yet fully substantiated these commonly held assumptions.

Modernity, once a prerogative of the West, is now ubiquitous, experienced diversely by people all over the world. The changing notions of modernity are historically linked to the development of the public sphere. This article broadly attempts to map the discourse of modernity to the evolution of Kathak, a premier classical dance from India. The article has two threads running through it. One is the development of the public sphere in India as it relates to anti-colonial nationalism, the formation of the modern nation-state, and globalization. The other focuses on transformations in Kathak as they relate to changing patronage, ideology, and postcolonial history. I emphasize the latter to mark the transitions in Kathak as emblematic of Indian national identity and national ideology to a new era of cultural contestation. This emergent public domain of culture is coined as “public modernity” by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai in contemporary India. It is linked to economic reforms, or “liberalization,” leading to globalization and a resurgence of communal politics. Both of these make culture, tradition, and identity central to the contestation of power among the diverse social formations in India.

This article is part of a larger work in progress in which I am exploring meanings of community, tradition, and performance practice among contra dancers, callers, and musicians, and looking at this material from a local, regional, and national perspective (1). In this article I analyze the contra dance world as a community built around expressive culture and discuss some of the ways in which community is formed on the dance floor and maintained through the regular repetition of dancing and music making at specific dance events. I will look at context as well as at aesthetic, behavioral, and social factors, in order to see how the processes of performance create multiple dimensions of meaning for those involved—processes that lead to the formation of community. Because participants are engaged with actions associated with creativity, identity, and learning, each will have his/her own experience of what this “community” means. The continuous interplay between individual experience and group interaction during performance, seen as a subtext to a relationship between marginal group and dominant culture, represents a complex cultural microcosm empowered by many voices.

Reconstructing and citing historical dance pieces as well as making the dance stage a site for archiving dance performatively have become major trends in contemporary dance (as this issue of DRJ demonstrates). Contemporary choreographers have left behind the incessant striving to create new movements and instead are engaging in dialogue with the past. While the “avant-garde” in Western stage dance was once perceived as embodying the “new” and was believed to be different from dance forms considered marked by tradition, these demarcations are now being challenged by both dance historians and artists (Franko and Richards 2000; Burt 2003). What's more, reenactments increasingly destabilize distinctions between the artistic and academic fields as they highlight the performative nature of “doing history” and present modes of research that involve lectures, texts, and documentation in a stage setting. As such, the past is a playground for the present—a notion of history that is also encouraged academically by a critical historiography that reflects on the narrative structures implicit in doing dance history (White 1990; Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer 1999). History as well as the act of memory are now considered a process that “constitutes, stages, re-stages, and constantly modifies its object while simultaneously creating new models and media of commemorating” (Fischer-Lichte and Lehnert 2000, 14; my translation).

Turns are an important part of dance vocabulary. Turns in place on one foot — pirouettes, attitude turns, and turns in arabesque, for instance — form a category of ballet movements that are difficult to learn well, and require considerable skill in control of the body.

Three characteristics of turns are important in the proper execution of the movement: body form, rate of turn, and balance. The aesthetic body form can be learned only by example and by careful criticism from a dance teacher. Turnout of the supporting foot or a straight horizontal leg in anarabesque turn are important aspects of a good turn in a purely artistic sense. But other properties of a turn, the most important of which are rate of turn and balance, are open to physical analysis, an understanding of which may give the dancer and dance teacher a better sense of the turning process.

Three considerations addressed here are the importance of the distribution of body mass around the rotation axis, the way the torque for the turn is exerted and angular momentum generated, and the way a dancer maintains balance over a supporting point. In order to investigate more carefully the way a dancer initiates a turn by exerting a torque on the floor, experiments were carried out in which this torque, and the resulting angular momentum of the dancer, could be measured.

In this article, based on my dissertation, “A Dream Journey to the Unknown: Searching for Dialogue in Dance Education” (2003), I will describe several qualities, or themes, related to dialogue. These ideas may facilitate dialogue in dance education and bear significance for reflecting the nature of dialogical education more generally. In addition, my intent is to uncover the personal nature of my search for dialogue. Before describing the themes, I briefly outline the research process.

The process began in 1997 when I was invited to take part in an art education project that was situated in an elementary school in Helsinki, Finland. I was aware that I was about to turn back to something that I thought I had already left behind. I had recently completed another study concerning my own dance teaching practice (1996). I had joined the so-called teacher research movement with a desire to understand the dynamics of the teaching and learning situation in the context of dance from an experiential point of view.

This article compares Rudolf von Laban's and Mary Wigman's practices and theories of gestural flow with Walter Benjamin's theory of gesture as interruption. For Laban and Wigman, gesture mirrors a vitalist understanding of life that is based on the rediscovery of transhistorical continuities between human and cosmic energy. Benjamin's Brechtian gestures address inscriptions and manipulations of bodies, which provide comment on the conditions of society by subjecting to critique the essentializing aspects of historical and vitalist flow. Addressing in particular forms of vibration as both enriching and destabilizing the gestural from its margins, my article explores how vibratory energy indicates a self-reflexive theory of media, but also a revolutionary charge, in Benjamin; how it engenders a politically ambivalent process of transmission between dancers and audience in Laban; and how it becomes an actual mode of movement in Wigman. The historical inquiry contributes to a genealogy of vibration in contemporary dance.

To reenact nine solos Mary Wigman performed during her first U.S. tour (1930–31), Fabian Barba establishes a contract with the audience based on representational codes of modernist dance in the early twentieth century. As one enters the theater, a little program is found on one's seat with the intended course of the evening. The program mentions the place and date of the reenactment—in German, with an English translation, as it might have been during the American tours—but not the year. Reading it, we learn that six solos, Aus dem Tanzcyklus “Schwingende Landschaft” (From the Dance Cycle “Shifting Landscape“), dated 1929, will be performed. There will be an eight-minute intermission after which three other solos are to follow: two from Visions and one from Celebration. The program is printed in the typography of those days and the contractual agreement of the dance concert—written in small letters as is usually the case with contracts—is indicated at the bottom: “The audience is kindly asked not to leave the room during the intermission. At the end of the recital and upon demand from the public, two dances can be shown again as ‘encores.’”

Among all the arts in western culture, dance may have the most to gain from feminist analysis. Certainly the two are highly compatible. Dance is an art form of the body, and the body is where gender distinctions are generally understood to originate. The inquiries that feminist analysis makes into the ways that the body is shaped and comes to have meaning are directly and immediately applicable to the study of dance, which is, after all, a kind of living laboratory for the study of the body—its training, its stories, its way of being and being seen in the world. As a traditionally female-populated (but not necessarily female-dominated) field that perpetuates some of our culture's most potent symbols of femininity, western theatrical dance provides feminist analysis with its potentially richest material.

Theater dance is an interdisciplinary form, and some of the most interesting advances in progressive and experimental dance work in recent years have been interdisciplinary in nature. Where Anglo-American dance scholarship is concerned, however, a “theoretical turn” that has led some dance scholars to develop interdisciplinary methodologies has proved highly controversial. Interdisciplinarity is in danger of becoming a specter haunting dance scholarship.

Dance has not been alone in finding this transition difficult. As art historian and cultural theorist Mieke Bal has recently noted, one challenge facing the academy today is to find “a theoretical link between linguistic, visual and aural domains that blend so consistently in contemporary culture but remain so insistently separated as fields of study in the academy” (Bal 1999a, 10). Where dance is concerned, corporeality needs to be added to Bal's list of domains. This essay explores some of the reasons underlying resistance among Anglo-American dance scholars to the use of interdisciplinary methodologies. By doing so it aims to give an account of the public space in which recent examples of theater dance from Europe and the United States map out complex webs of relationships between corporeal, linguistic, visual, and aural levels of signification.

No critic of phenomenology, arguably, has been more influential in prefiguring recent discourses on power, gender, and sexuality that have emerged in dance studies in recent decades than the philosopher-historian-critic Michel Foucault. The number of dance scholars directly citing Foucault, and the number influenced indirectly by his ideas through intermediary theorists such as Judith Butler—perhaps the single most popular one—is so large as to require an essay of its own just to survey. Virtually every analysis of choreographic practice that has addressed these topics since the 1980s has drawn directly or indirectly on Foucault's theories. Indeed, the very mention of the term “discipline” in current dance scholarship (and many related fields as well) more or less automatically makes reference to Foucault's genealogical study of incarceration, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison, translated into English as Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison, and, in particular to the chapter, “Les corps dociles” or “Docile Bodies” (Foucault 1975, 137–171; 1975/1995, 135–170).

Twentieth century technology has given rise to new and exciting methods for the analysis of human motion. With the aid of the motion picture camera a dancer's kick can be frozen and details invisible in normal viewing can be isolated and analyzed. Electrical detecting devices can uncover secrets about the inner workings of the body, its nerves and muscles. Platforms sensitive to the changing dynamics of a movement can tell us how the body generates force, how it locomotes itself and creates artistic effects and qualities which were previously thought of as “mystical” and “denying natural laws”. Numerous ballet technique manuals offer explanations as to the correct execution of dance movements. Although these descriptions are largely in agreement with one another, they are often in conflict with kinesiological information about the general functioning of the human body. Little research exists in the specific area of kinesiology and dance.

It is therefore the goal of the present research to clinically examine one selected dance movement, the grand battement devant, in order to form a kinesiological model of its skeletal and muscular components. This information may help provide a means of assessing the great heritage of traditional ballet theory based largely on personal experience and trial and error, and form a foundation for new theory based on objective analysis. The problem was to discover skeletal and muscular patterns when the grand battement is performed with both legs parallel (patellae facing anteriorly), and with both legs “turned out” (femurs laterally rotated as much as possible at the hip joints).

This article deals with the representation of Kenyan national identity through dance. It analyses the reenactment of a series of ethnic dances at Bomas of Kenya, a cultural center located just outside Nairobi and part of the network of National Museums of Kenya. As an institution resulting from a strategic political investment in both Kenya's immaterial heritage and the tourist industry, since its inception in the early 1970s Bomas of Kenya has played an important role in conveying the idea of ethnic harmony and national unity. The comparison with Cut Off My Tongue (2009), the show by Kenyan writer and performer Sitawa Namwalie in which dance is interwoven with political satire to frame reflections on negative ethnicity, serves to highlight the implications that different approaches to dancing bodies, through such concepts as identity, embodiment, archive, and memory, could have for a meaningful political future.

Despite Yvonne Rainer's subversive refusal to stage Trio A as a spectacle, to have it represent or narrate social structures, or to engage with the audience in a traditional manner, the landmarks of canonization have all been put upon it. The Banes-produced 1978 film of Rainer dancing Trio A was recently exhibited while the dance was performed live simultaneously by Pat Catterson, Jimmy Robert, and Ian White at the Museum of Modern Art, the institution that determines what constitutes important modernist and contemporary art in the United States and, indeed, the Western world. In conjunction with Rainer's famous NO Manifesto, Trio A appears in nearly every publication on so-called postmodern dance and art. Moreover, the key documentary on postmodern dance Beyond the Mainstream—containing Trio A—is screened in most dance history courses when postmodern dance is discussed. As a result, the choreography became not only a staple on syllabi in dance departments but also in disciplines such as gender studies, film and art history, or communications. Even Susan Au's Ballet and Modern Dance, a conservative historical text utilized in many dance history classes, defines Trio A as “one of the most influential works in the modern dance repertoire” (Au 2002, 155).

Can contemporary choreography claim to challenge the societal status quo by producing liberatory or transgressive work, or has it rather become enshrined in the logic of capitalism and establishment culture? This paper looks critically at twenty-first-century participatory, collaborative modes of performance to investigate how their corresponding aesthetic choices and working methods reflect (often implicit) political stances, such as manifestations of democracy. Using examples from several Western countries, current trends will be assessed against the backdrop of 1960s and 1970s performance theory and practice by assessing the ramifications of the shifting fault lines between dance/performance, the market economy, and political ideologies.