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 study proposes to investigate how anxiety is related to the dance experience and to a person's creative behaviour within that experience. A number of assumptions regarding the creation, improvisation, composition, and performance of dance have centered around the relationship of anxiety to the dance experience. These assumptions point to anxiety as being integral in the creative behaviour of dancers and as being a vital ingredient for good performance. Others suggest that the dance experience is a medium of expression which reduces tension or anxiety. (See Barron 1972:96–97 and Leith 1972:246.)

This exploratory study looks at the creative potential that an individual brings to a simulated studio composition session. The study also investigates the relationship of this creative potential to dancers' self-reported anxiety and their creativity in performing the composition.

Our research team members spent an entire summer interviewing pre-professional contemporary dancers with the aim of understanding their conceptions of health in relationship to their creative projects. At the beginning of autumn we (co-workers Martyne, Catherine, and myself) came together in our comfortable office to begin our data analysis. We had previously planned to use a computer-based, qualitative research analysis program to wade through our sizeable volume of data. We were ready to look systematically for themes emerging from our nine hours of interviews. Unexpectedly, however, things turned out differently, and we found ourselves excitedly reliving the interviews we had had with the interviewees. Through the act of listening and formally recording, we had succeeded in giving rich voice to the participants and the touching stories we were sharing anew were as revealing as when we heard them firsthand. Directing the project, I was pleased to notice how the interviews had found echoes in our own experiences; and, in fact, our discussions were being influenced by and filtered through our own subjective perspectives.

The dimming of the house lights focuses attention on the still darkened stage, although awareness of the others in the auditorium and its quieted bustle does not entirely fade. From the stage, the sound of several people taking five or six measured footsteps in unison, then stopping, momentarily precedes the lights (stage and house) fading quickly up to reveal nine performers. They stand, facing out, dressed in ordinary clothes (shirt and jacket, jumper and skirt, different colors), steady gaze directed at the audience. They stand in the gaps between a series of reflective slabs, each of the same regular dimensions, slightly wider and taller than the performers themselves. Behind the performers is a further line of panels cut from the same material. After a brief pause, the space darkens.

This article examines some recent dance exhibitions where a strong speculative involvement of choreographers from the so-called trend of “conceptual dance” has been at stake. Both the open question of the history of dance and performance and the possibility for choreographic thinking to engage with the forms of the exhibition display became objects of experimentation in important projects and museum pieces conceived by Boris Charmatz, Xavier Le Roy, and La Ribot. In turn, the latter activated further concerns around the way dancers and choreographers address the question of heritage and its transmission; in this regard, examples of Richard Move and Jérôme Bel are also brought in the discussion. The article considers these shifts within the hypothesis of a dance museum currently engaging with a wider statement and critique about the “time-based arts” (a term first coined in the context of film, video, and new media museum conservation) and the ongoing new, time-related configurations of the exhibition space.

Much has been said of the tradition of quadrille dancing that exists in the Caribbean. This dance and music repertory was first introduced there in the late eighteenth century by European colonists who wanted to recreate some of the aristocratic lifestyle they would have enjoyed in their country of origin. But soon after its introduction, people of African descent whom the Europeans had forcibly introduced in the Caribbean appropriated the dance and transformed it to fit the new environment.

In his overview of Caribbean music, Kenneth Bilby noted that the most ubiquitous music traditions of the Caribbean seem to be the ones that grew out of the European social dances and music genres of an earlier era (1985, 195). Establishing a parallel with the Creole music of the Seychelles, which bears strong resemblance to Caribbean forms, John Szwed and Morton Marks (1988) suggested that the French contredanse and quadrille were instrumental to the emergence of the Creole repertories, primarily because, just like many of the Caribbean islands, the Seychelles were French colonies in the eighteenth century.

Most scholarly work on Afro-American social dance has been concerned with its structural aspects, primarily the question of African retentions. The work of Melville Herskovits, Joann Kealiinohomoku, Linda Wharton and Jack L. Daniel, Chadwick Hansen, Robert Farris Thompson, John Q. Anderson, Gertrude P. Kurath, Jan Hertzberg, Lydia Parrish, and others has touched on this issue.

Though this approach to the study of Afro-American vernacular dance is far from exhausted, it ignores certain significant aspects of black dance culture. Once it is established that the structural aspects of Afro-American dance are in fact African-derived, the researcher is free to raise questions concerning the function, meanings, and uses of the dance.

The anthropologist-dancer Katherine Dunham has stated that dance has greater tenacity than any other cultural form and that it is the most permanent cultural link with the past. Certainly the dance of Afro-Americans is identifiable on the basis of its continuity with both traditional and contemporary African movement. Until recently, most Afro-Americans conducted their lives in relative isolation from whites. Isolation rather than inherent tenacity may explain the similarity between their dance forms and those of contemporary Africans.

Choreographers have begun experimenting with artist-driven archives using digital technologies, exhibitions and installations, and live performance as a way to generate new work from their own archival materials and increase access to their body of work for audiences. This article focuses on three recent artist-driven archive projects by notable American choreographers Eiko & Koma, Bebe Miller Company, and Jennifer Monson. Drawing on interviews with the choreographers as well as on analyses of the three projects, I suggest that these projects' most important contribution is the idea that archives are not separate from a choreographer's body of work, but are indeed a part of his or her creative process and artistic production.

This article focuses on Randy Martin's concept of mobilization and its relationship to Christoph Menke's philosophical category of force—being the grid rather than the movement, being the potential to move rather than movement in space and time, force and mobilization align. They are rallying calls for change and transformation, for different articulations of bodies and social kinesthetic energies. They both are impersonal nonsubjectified vehicles for an open process of doing and undoing, which is a political process.

Professor Beardsley's paper is distinguished by his customary clarity. Many of the distinctions he draws will undoubtedly be useful not only for dance theoreticians, but for dance critics as well. Nevertheless, the way that these distinctions are placed in the service of a putative characterization of what constitutes a dance “moving” seems to us problematic. This brief note will be devoted to exploring the adequacy of Professor Beardsley's proposal.

Beardsley appears to conclude his paper by stating a condition requisite for a motion to be counted as a dance “moving.” He writes,

We interpret Beardsley's basic point here as the claim that a superfluity of expressiveness (above the requirements of practical exigencies) is a defining feature of a dance “moving.” However, in our opinion, this attribute represents neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of dance.

Philosophers writing on aesthetics used to preface their essays by deploring the low standard of thought prevailing in that subject. Since they never tried to show that dullness and folly were less rampant in other fields, one had to recognize in this practice a mere ritual. But one can always speculate on what social purpose rituals had once served. Similarly, philosophers who nowadays write on the aesthetics of dance preface their papers by deploring the tendency of philosophers to neglect the topic. Since they produce no hard evidence of such neglect, this practice too has to be seen as a ritual, and this ritual also calls for explanation. It reflects some unease about the place of dance in the philosophy of art, but the reasons for that unease are not obvious. This paper suggests ways in which the theory of dance might not fit easily into the theory of art in general, or why it might be felt not to do so.

I

Writing on dance certainly has a low intellectual profile. I had supposed that among the data to be reckoned with were a failure on the part of Hellenistic writers to write dance histories comparable to those histories of painting, sculpture, and music that were so widely read and quoted in the Renaissance, and a corresponding failure in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to write handbooks and treatises on the practice of dance comparable to the well-known treatises on the other fine arts from that encyclopedia-ridden age.

In 1916 the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929) took the Ballets Russes out of war-torn Europe for a tour across the North American continent. The tour was scheduled to run from January to April 1916, with short seasons in New York at the beginning and the end. As it turned out, the company returned for a second tour that ran from late September to January 1917, during which time, however, Diaghilev's former lover and principal star dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky (1889–1950), replaced him as director.

In this article I discuss the cultural differences at the heart of the Ballets Russes' failure to conquer America in 1916–1917, and why that failure had to be edited out of history. Specifically, I look at three aspects of the publicity and critical reception: elitism, patriotism, and modernism. The publicists of the company both misunderstood and underestimated their audience, but in dance research, their prejudices have been taken for granted. The “eye-witness accounts” of Diaghilev's employees and the histories of the company written in the first half of the twentieth century have largely gone unquestioned since, but contemporary primary sources of the North American tours tell a different story. By contrasting the first tour with the second, which received less publicity and better reviews, I emphasize the practical experience of touring in the New World and how differently American critics evaluated the achievements of the two Russian directors of the company—Diaghilev (for the first tour) and Nijinsky (for the second).

Uday Shankar's career as a dancer and choreographer has been under frequent inspection by dance historians and scholars in both the South Asian and Euro-American worlds. To date, some articles, books, and biographies have documented various aspects Shankar's life, which provide factual details about his performance career (Banerji 1982; Khokar 1983; Mukhopadhyay 2004; Singha and Massey 1967). While these biographies serve as an important source in their delineation of Shankar's life and his works, there have been few attempts at critical analyses and evaluation of Shankar's body of choreographic works. Scant scholarly interests in Shankar have mostly described him as one of the many exotic “oriental” dancers in Europe.

Dancing has been an intrinsic segment of life for almost every nation in the world. Throughout every race, or creed, dance has symbolized the expression of a custom, tribe, religion or personal reflection. Dance has long been considered a part of the arts and looked at very closely from this perspective; however, when turning to the physiological nature of dance, there is very little information to be found.

Dancers are usually not considered highly trained aerobic athletes. One reason for this may be due to the fact that few in the dance world have taken the initiative to study the physiology of dancers. Most dancers themselves are more concerned with other aspects of dance than with the physiological components.

Different dance forms attract different people. Dancers involved in folk dance, ballroom dance, ballet, and modern dance differ in both their background and participation profiles (Nieminen 1997) and in their reasons for participating in dance (Nieminen 1998). In Finland, the 1980s can be considered a golden age in the field of dance education. It was the decade that at long last saw the start of university-level and vocational dance education in the country. At the same time students of physical education were given the opportunity to specialize in dance pedagogy. The new Finnish Opera House in Helsinki also generated a great deal of publicity for dance in general. All this gave impetus to a demand for qualified dance teachers and increased the number of people involved in art dance. Since the 1970s, folk dance has also become more popular than in previous years and today there are many innovative folk dance choreographers who want to see folk dance not only as the transmission of tradition but also as a theater-art form. The latest changes to take place in the field of folk and ballroom dance are partly due to the new four-year program for folk and ballroom dance instructors offered by the Oulu Conservatory of Music.

Every few years there is a resurgence of interest in what has come to be known as danse du ventre or, less elegantly, belly dancing. By whatever name it may be called, however, this dance has inevitably elicited an exaggerated response from those not accustomed to the social background to which it belongs. In the past a climate of disapproval has hampered any attempt at serious evaluation of this dance form; at the present time the situation has reversed to a point where the enthusiasm of its protagonists has become the chief hindrance to an objective assessment. A dance whose enduring charm has managed to survive not only a body of disparaging commentary, but the spurious and tawdry aura surrounding so many of its practitioners, seems deserving of a fresh appraisal.

This essay is the result of a long and tortured preoccupation stemming from my personal history of growing up in Kolkata, India, with a strong tradition of leftist cultural forums; the current escalation of religious fundamentalisms globally; and my questions about the signifying potential of performing bodies in this context. While I have tried to untangle and understand the complicated issues in this search for the secular dancing body in the context of Indian performance, I have been able to arrive only at a series of questions, which, in riotous recoiling, have constantly spun new questions and interjections. I offer my journey through these questions as considerations in thinking through one of the directions of contemporary Indian dance.

While I had been trying to understand the secular traditions in Indian dance for a while, questions around it grew especially urgent with the growing power of Hindu fundamentalism in India, and in particular with the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, by an angry mob of “Hindus” on the grounds that the mosque had been built by Muslim ruler Babar in the sixteenth century, supposedly after destroying a Hindu temple dedicated to Rama which preexisted in that spot. This incident, followed by the Hindutva claim that a new temple dedicated to Rama be built on that spot, sparked offa horrifying spate of communal violence. That the Babri had been one of the last vestiges of the shaqri style of architecture in India was hardly raised. But the overwhelming of cultural icons by religious ideology as mobilized by fundamentalists was indubitable.

Israel is a society of Jewish immigrants who have returned to their ancient biblical homeland. It is also a complex society made up of people of varied cultures and ideologies, enduring changing economic and political situations. For the past eighty years, Israeli dancers have reflected and helped to shape the internal dialogues of Israeli life and contributed to a global exchange of dance ideas, especially with modern dancers from Europe and America.

The independence of ancient Israel came to an end in C.E. 73, when Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem after fierce battles with the Jews. The great revolt against Roman rule (132–135) failed, and in its wake the Romans banished the Jews from their country. Thus began a two-thousand-year exile, during which the Jews in the diaspora preserved their religion, suffered anti-Semitic persecutions, and dreamed of returning to their land, to Eretz Israel—Zion.

In the Western music world a score written by a composer is distributed to members of an orchestra who individually learn their parts, come together to rehearse under the guidance or a conductor, and then perform before the public. In the drama world a script written by a playwright is distributed to actors who individually learn their parts, come together to rehearse under the guidance of a director, and then perform before the public. In both worlds a creator has written a kind of “instruction manual” for trained readers to use when preparing for an event to be seen and heard by the public. In both instances the performers as well as a conductor or director read the instruction manual, and each may contribute to interpretation in the process of “translating” that leads from the written medium to the performance medium. And in both instances differing views have evolved regarding how much liberty individuals should take in interpreting or modifying what is on the notated or scripted page as they prepare for performance.

This essay undertakes to illuminate the work of Randy Martin by surveying a range of theories offering hypothetical answers to the question of why dance seems to generate more energy than it demands, an experience often reported by those who engage in it. Coming from the disparate disciplines of social history, psychology, neurobiology, phenomenology, and aesthetics, these theories do not necessarily conflict with one another nor do they agree about dance's energizing capacity. Taken together, however, they lend greater insight into Martin's concept of “mobilization,” and the analysis of them answers Martin's call to evaluate dance from within the presumption of conditions of abundance rather than scarcity.