THE PHILOSOPHICAL THINKING OF MODERN DANCE ART AND THE APPLICATION OF MARXIST PHILOSOPHY IN ITS CREATION

Nation, Class, and Ethnicities in Modern Dance of the 1930s Mark Franko (bio) Modern dance in Depression-era America distinguished itself from other forms of theatrical dancing by its “primitive” style and psychological content. The primitive aspect of psychological content led to modern dance’s markedly affective—or emotional—expression. But the role of what I shall refer to generically as “feeling” was not limited to physical styles; it also played a part in the cultural politics of subjectivity subtending class and racial tensions during the Depression. In fact, it was through theatrical manifestations of feeling in modern dance that concepts as different as psychological depth and ethnic identity became symbolically wedded to movement. Once psychology and ethnicity were concomittantly embodied, as it were, modern movement could bear testimony to national, class, and ethnic identity. In other words, expressive bodies conveyed significant ideological content, and were themselves ideological constructs. A critical theory of ideology is, therefore, indispensable to the reassessment of modern dance during this period. The ways in which personal bodily experience and ideology were conjoined in modern dance performance can be illustrated not only by dances, but also by the modernist critical discourse generated in response to them. The general aim of this article, however, is to explore the relation between performances of feeling and ideology in modern dance of the 1930s. Between 1931 and 1935, Martha Graham, Jane Dudley, and Asadata Dafora danced distinctly different versions of subjectivity. Their only commonality was “primitivism,” by which I mean a commitment to embody psychological identities in their movement. This commitment to embody identity also defined the general goal of an ideological program. In Louis Althusser’s thinking, interpellation, or “hailing,” functions precisely through this ascription of identity to the subjects of ideology: “All ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject.” 1 I argue that the feelings a dance unleashes in its audience [End Page 475] constitute that dance’s hailing of its audience’s subjectivity. Thus, the “psychological” factor in historical modern dance, its primitivism in sum, was not originally solipsistic testimony to “feelings” as sacrosanct depth, but rather interpellation of spectators as subjects of nation, class, and race. 2 Modern dances, in other words, were a very public and potent form of interpellation. To anticipate the following discussion somewhat too schematically: affect, emotion, and possession in the dances we shall examine hailed the (white) American national, the (proletarian) working class, and the “Negro,” respectively. Since each choreographer’s hailing was ideologically imbued, I refer to the discursive field within which the psychological attained cultural embodiment simply as “feeling.” The following comparative study of Graham’s Primitive Mysteries (1931) and Frontier (1935), Dudley’s Time Is Money (1934), and Dafora’s Kykunkor, or Witch Woman (1934) shows how a concept of the primitive in thirties modern dance was sufficiently elastic to account for Graham’s nativist modernism, Dudley’s Marxism, and Dafora’s Pan-Africanism. 3 I “Primitivism” indexes the tendency of modern dance to conjugate body and feeling in diverse and opposed understandings of “authentic” cultural identities. Dance critic John Martin relied on the term to differentiate modern dance of the 1930s from ballet and ethnic dance. He called modern dance “the externalization of emotional states in terms of physical action.” 4 Although he was committed above all to high modernism, Martin’s criticism receives sustained attention here because he situated all modern dance within a theory of the primitive that diminished the central importance of aesthetic innovation to modernism. That differently inflected performances of feeling were accounted for in critical discourse as “modern” is, of course, part of what rendered them effective interpellations. Yet because Martin did not wish to acknowledge dance’s ideological power, he rendered the meanings of “primitive” and “modern” interdependent and mutually restricting. In four essays appearing in The American Dancer between 1936 and 1937 Martin dismissed the term modern as an unfortunate misnomer. It signaled the new, whereas he argued for modern dance’s traditional, even archaic, features adapted from primitive dance. 5 It is worth quoting him at length on this idea: The [primitive] dance was primarily a serious medium...

Dancers have self-reported a link between spinal extension movements and low back pain (LBP). Researchers have not reported the total number or frequency that spinal movements occur in ballet, modern, or hip-hop dance classes or performances. The purpose of this study was to report the number of spinal movements dancers are exposed to in different dance environments. We analyzed 65 dance videos on YouTube.com for dance movements within 7 dance environments: ballet class and performance, modern class and performance, and hip-hop breaking, ciphers (large groups), and battles ("1v1s"). Two reviewers recorded counts of spinal (spinal flexion, extension, lateral flexion, and rotation), impact (jumps, leaps, and falls), and partnering movements (lifts, catches, and leans). Data analyses were processed in Jamovi (the jamovi project, Sydney, Australia). We reported movement totals, percentages, frequency, ranges, means with standard deviations (SD), and medians with interquartile range (IQR). We calculated significant differences using Mann-Whitney U tests. Video length ranged from 3 to 141 minutes (mean ± SD: 38.4 ± 38.3, range: 138). the average spinal extension movements ranged from 2 ± 0.8 to 7 ± 9.6 movements per minute across genres. Modern dance class had the most spinal flexion (89 ± 53.6), rotation (60 ± 40.8), and lateral flexion (74 ± 20.7) movements. Ballet performance had the most spinal extension movements (77 ± 69.8), jumps (74 ± 48), and leaps (19 ± 18.2). Hip-hop breaking had the highest number of falling movements (2 ± 2.3). Partnering movements were only present in ballet performance, modern dance performance, and hip-hop breaking environments. Movements that increase LBP occur often in all 3 dance genres. Dancers can expect frequent exposure to spinal extension movements; therefore, we recommend strengthening back and core musculature for all dancers. We recommend that ballet dancers also strengthen their lower extremity muscles. For modern dancers, we recommend strengthening their obliques. For hip-hop dancers, we recommend increasing muscular power and muscular endurance.

Reviewed by: Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion Tresa Randall Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion. By Susan Manning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. pp. 296. $34.95 cloth. Susan Manning offers a meticulously researched theoretical examination of race, sexuality, gender, spectatorship, and reception in American theatre dance. Manning calls upon critical race theory and queer theory to interrogate the relationships between two distinct, if overlapping, forms of American dance in the mid-twentieth century: modern dance and Negro dance (Manning uses the anachronistic term for what was later called black dance and African American dance). As she argues, Negro dance and modern dance were mutually constitutive categories, forged through interdependent representations of blackness and whiteness. Modern dance occupied a space of white cultural privilege, in which the unmarked white body could speak universally, while the black bodies of Negro dancers remained marked as different. Throughout the book, Manning is clear about her revisionist intent. With postmodern challenges to stable representations of race, gender, and sexuality in mind, she looks back to the 1930s through the 1960s, and questions how spectators from various social locations constructed meaning of danced representations. Theorizing spectatorship as a series of sociohistorical encounters, she proposes that "cross-viewing"—when spectators from various social locations observe each other observing performance—creates the potential for social change. Manning's study consolidates previous studies of gender, sexuality, and race in dance. The field of dance studies has seen an explosion of work on early twentieth-century dance over the last two decades by authors such as Ramsay Burt, Julia Foulkes, Thomas DeFrantz, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Linda Tomko, and Mark Franko, who have replaced celebratory biographies of major figures with examinations of the social, historical, and political contexts of dance practices. In her 1993 study of Mary Wigman, Ecstasy and the Demon, Manning looked at gender and nationalism; here, she turns her attention to race and sexuality. Informing her analysis are primary sources such as reviews, photographs, audience surveys, video and film documentation, choreographic notes, oral histories, and a comprehensive survey of relevant periodicals. Describing almost twenty choreographic works and dance events, she weaves together biographical information on choreographers with information about patronage, venue, critical reception, and spectatorship. The book is organized into an introduction and four chapters, which proceed both chronologically and thematically. Chapters one and two describe the modern dance and leftist dance networks of the 1930s as they related to Negro dance, with emphasis on issues of representation, reception, and patronage. In these chapters Manning introduces the central contrast between "metaphorical minstrelsy" and "black self-representation" that informs much of her argument. "Metaphorical minstrelsy" is Manning's term for the way white modern dancers such as Helen Tamiris and Ted Shawn created danced representations of African American subjects. For example, Tamiris's Negro Spirituals (1928) presented abstractions of concepts such as slavery [End Page 771] and oppression in order to express solidarity with African Americans, while Shawn's Negro Spirituals (1933) used the music to represent emotionalism and religiosity. Edna Guy also staged dances to spirituals and used other black source material in "The First Negro Dance Recital in America" in 1931; pointing out the contrast with white modern dancers, though, Manning calls this "black self-representation" (30), for Guy framed her dances within the context of African American history and culture. As Manning demonstrates in later chapters, black self-representation as a convention gained currency among spectators and critics after 1940 with the work of Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, and later Alvin Ailey. In the 1930s, however, it was an emerging theatrical convention in dance that was not broadly legible; Guy and her contemporaries in Negro dance struggled to maintain patronage and to attract the attention of either the dance press or the African American press. Chapter three is central to Manning's reperiodization of both modern dance and Negro dance, for she demonstrates that after 1940, "the culturally marked body became the province of Negro dance, as modern dance deployed the newly privileged unmarked body" (118). The 1940s witnessed new credibility for the performance of diaspora among Negro dancers alongside redefinitions of whiteness with the rise of "mythic abstraction" as the...

RETRACTED: Contemporary dance and the problem of evaluation: A consensual approach in the Chinese case

*Presentation de l'editeur : «The definitive history of twentieth-century theatrical dance, enhanced with more than 200 exceptional photographs This book chronicles one hundred years of dramatic developments in ballet, modern, and experimental dance for stage and screen in Europe and North America. The volume is magisterial in scope, encompassing the history of theatrical dance from 1900 through 2000. Beginning with turn-of-the-century dancer-choreographers like Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Michel Fokine, and a bit later Vaslav Nijinsky, and proceeding through the profusion of dance styles performed today, the book provides an unparalleled view of dance in performance as it changed and grew in the twentieth century. Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick set dance in broader cultural and historical contexts, examine specific dance works, and explore the contributions of outstanding choreographers, performers, visual artists, impresarios, composers, critics, and other figures. They discuss the breakaway barefoot dance of the early 1900s and demonstrate its links with later forms and styles. With unusual detail, fascinating illustrations, and wide-ranging insights, this book is an indispensable guide to the transformations in the dance scene of the twentieth century. There is simply no other history of twentieth-century dance that is as detailed, comprehensive, and readable as No Fixed Points. Much thought has gone into it, along with prodigious research.--Lynn Garafola, co-editor of The Ballets Russes and Its World » *TABLE DES MATIERES : Preface --Chapter 1 New Dance: America's Pioneers (1900@-1940)--Vaudeville and spectacle extravaganza--exercise and dress reform--Fuller, Duncan, Denishawn Chapter 2 Experimentalism in Ballet: Fokine, Diaghilev, and the Russian Legacy (1900@-1930s)--End of the Petipa era--Fokine--Diaghilev--Nijinsky--Massine, Nijinska, Balanchine--other Russians in the West--worldwide influence of later Ballets Russes Chapter 3 Central European Modern: Ausdruckstanz, the Dance of Expression (1910@-1945) --Laban--Wigman--Schlemmer and the Bauhaus--solo concert dancers--Kreutzberg and Georgi--Jooss--Ausdruckstanz and National Socialism Chapter 4 Ballet Comes to America (1900-1940s) --Early visitors--Russians in America--Ballet Russe tours--Regionalism, Americana themes--unaffiliated Americans Chapter 5 America After Denishawn: The Heroic Age of Modern Dance (1920@-1940s) --Modernism defined--role of John Martin--Graham, Humphrey, Weidman, and Holm--political themes--Bennington summer dance program Chapter 6 Ballet in Western Europe: The Rise of National Traditions (1900-1960s) --Expatriate Russians in the West--Rambert, early Tudor, de Valois, Ashton and English Classicism, Fonteyn, early Cranko, early MacMillan, Festival Ballet--hegemony of the Paris Opera, Lifar, de Cuevas, Kochno, Petit, Charrat--Denmark's Bournonville legacy, Lander Chapter 7 A World Apart: Dance in Russia and the Soviet Union (1900@-1960s)--Innovation in Moscow--the Russian Revolution--the experimental 1920s--Socialist Realism, the dramballet--the late 1950s limited thaw Chapter 8 Ballet in America Comes of Age (1935@-1965) --Balanchine in America--American Ballet Theatre-- Chapter 9 Modern Dance in America: The Second Generation and Beyond (1935@-2000) --Sokolow, Lang--King, Shearer--Limon--Horton--Dunham, Primus--Ailey Chapter 10 New American Moderns: Schism and Transition (1940s@-2000) --Cunningham--Hawkins--Nikolais, Louis--Taylor--Waring Chapter 11 Beyond the Boundaries: Postmodernism (1960@-1980) --Precursors--Robert Dunn and the Judson Church--new spaces--Halprin, Rainer--Paxton and contact improvisation--Brown--Monk--Childs--early Tharp Chapter 12 Internationalism: The Merging of the Disciplines (1950@-2000)--Merging before 1950-- Chapter 13 Ballet Rising (1960@-1990s) --The ballet boom--government funding--Nureyev, Makarova, Baryshnikov--the revival of full-evening classics--Cranko, MacMillan--the dominance of Balanchine Chapter 14 Ballet's High Tide (1960s-2000) --New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre--The Joffrey, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Harkness, Les Ballets Trockadero--Regional Ballet in America--Canada--Great Britain--France--Germany--the Soviet Union and the New Russia--Denmark, Switzerland, Spain Chapter 15 Late Modern: Pluralism and the Ascendancy of Style (1960s@-2000) --The global vision, Chapter 16 Musical Theater in America (1900@-2000) --Minstrelsy, tap, chorus lines, operetta, ballroom--Ziegfeld, Cohan, Miller, black musicals, Princess Theatre musicals--the Golden Age, 1930@-1980--reemergence of tap--revival fever Chapter 17 Dance in the Movies (1900@-2000)--The silents----the talkies--Berkeley--Astaire--Balanchine--the Golden Age of the Hollywood musical, 1942@-1957--Broadway shows on film--decline of the studio system--the backstage world of ballet

<p>藝術上的意義是落實在感官可及的場域，抑或說藝術讓意義與我們的身體自我發生親密的糾纏關係。當我們在美學態度下體驗某個藝術作品、藝術行為時，我們首先被凝聚成藝術狀態的意蘊所打擊，之後才面對此意蘊進行詮釋。當美學去探索劇場表演，為了不忽略藝術的感觸力這一面向，便有必要將支配著表演在時空中發生的身體性以及觀眾的身體存在雙方都納入考量。尤其當代舞所展開的，是藝術上之意義所不可或缺的「具體性」。本研究從現象學的視角闡明分析當代舞幾種重要的流派各自所揭露的身體性，最終專門探討何曉玫若干舞作以具體的方式所展演的「身體思維」。</p> <p> </p><p>Meaning in art is related to our embodied self. When we experience any artistic behavior, we first of all are affected by a meaningful configuration, prior to our actually interpreting it. When esthetics investigates a stage performance, both the embodiedness in space and time of what happens on the stage, as well as the spectator’s being embodied, should be taken into account, in order to adequately grasp the affective power of art. Especially in the case of contemporary dance, meaning is to be considered as something “concrete” and “embodied”. On the basis of evidence taken from modern dance, contemporary dance, as well as recent works by the choreographer Ho Hsiao-mei, this paper explores the bodily dimensions inherent to dance performances from a phenomenological stance, so as to elucidate in which manners dance performances make artistic meaning interact with our bodily self.</p> <p> </p>

In the practice of modern dance, many people pay attention to whether the movements are the same as what the teacher has done, whether the rhythm and speed have kept up with the music, and rarely pay attention to the most important part of movement texture, without observing the movement texture shown by the teacher in doing demonstration movements. In modern dance, the performance of movement texture can judge the professionalism of the dancer. How should we train the movement quality of modern dance is the issue to be discussed and studied. In modern dance performance, the accuracy of movement performance and dance texture are inseparable, different dance movement texture, the dance feeling is different, and there is a clear difference in the dance performance with or without movement texture. The main content of this essay is to talk about what kind of importance dance texture has in modern dance, and to explore the strategy of enhancing dance texture in modern dance.

Chapter 3 discusses Western theatre dance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that in this period the dance work-concept acquires a particular “thickness,” clear contours and regulative force in at least some ballet and modern dance practice. Dance comes to be understood as generating authored, repeatable, persistent, and autonomous works that function both as guiding structures for performers and as a focus of appreciation for audiences. Specific developments such as dance “symphonism” and the so-called new ballet are explored, and commonalities in the way the work-concept develops in ballet and modern dance are considered. The chapter also examines one consequence of the work-concept’s consolidation in this period, namely its retrospective application to older ballets and dances by practitioners and historians keen to establish a canon of choreographic achievement.

The authors developed a novel infant behavior recognition system based on a pressure distribution image. The system can recognize an infant's status (quiet, moving and crying), posture, body parts' positions and movement unrestrainedly. It can, in recognizing the behavior, cope with the infant's rapid growth and unique physique. The algorithm of the infant behavior recognition system is summarized as follows. 1) First, the system measures the pressure distribution image with 384 pressure sensors distributed in the bed. 2) The authors propose score; this is calculated by using the measured pressure distribution image and indicates kinetic energy of the infant's activity. Based on the activity score, the system decides the infant's status. 3) If the infant is quiet, the system estimates the infant's physique. 4) Based on the estimated physique, the system recognizes the infant's posture and body part movement. Experimental results reveal that the system successfully recognizes infants' status (quiet, moving and crying), posture, body parts position and movements.

A nonverbal communication involves movements of different body parts to communicate a particular message. Hand, face and lips movements or other movement of body parts are regarded as gesture. In this paper we have proposed a method based on hand gesture recognition to recognize the different gesture used by deaf person to communicate using scale-invariant feature transform (SFIT) algorithm. This will make a bridge between deaf and dumb people and normal public. In earlier system the uses of colour markers and gloves for gesture recognition has been used but it resulted in delay in processing time and sometimes inconvenient for the user. This system will focus on hand gesture recognition and development of human computer interface (HCI) system which will achieve accuracy, real time implementation of gesture processing and reduced processing time.

Sixty-two college-aged, ballet and modern dancers evaluated their bodies and themselves in different dance and non-dance settings. In a self-report survey design, dancers' body esteem, fitness esteem, and self-esteem (an overall self-evaluation) were measured in three different contexts. Dancers rated their body esteem, fitness esteem, and self-esteem the lowest in a dance class context. Their body, fitness, and self-esteem were all rated significantly higher in the two other contexts – a dance performance and a party with friends. Body esteem in all contexts, for both ballet and modern dancers, was always rated lower than fitness esteem. Ballet and modern dancers did not differ in their body esteem and fitness esteem scores; however, modern dancers reported higher self-esteem than ballet dancers across the contexts.

The study was designed to determine how individuals become socialised into folk, competitive ballroom, ballet and modern dance through an investigation of background variables, the influence of significant others and the participation profiles of dancers, and the identification of those socialization and involvement variables that best discriminate among different groups of dancers. The subjects were 308 adolescent and adult dancers of at least 16 years of age who had pursued their main dance form for a minimum of three years. The data were collected by questionnaire, supplemented with some additional data gathered through personal interviews. Differences between the four dance groups were analysed using t‐test, Chi Square analyses, analyses of variance, Scheffe's multiple‐range test and discriminant analysis. Most subjects were from the middle or upper socio‐economic classes. Most art dancers were women while social dancers displayed a more even distribution of sexes. Ballet dancers were youngest and ballroom dancers oldest when they started dancing. Mother's influence was significant among those who had started dancing at a young age while a friend of the same sex was influential among all respondents regardless of the age at which they had taken up dancing. Among men the influence of a friend of the opposite sex was also significant. The involvement of other family members in dance correlated most strongly with folk dancing, least strongly with modern dance. The dance teacher or coach was perceived as the most encouraging person in every dance form. The most wide‐ranging past and present dance activities were found among modern dancers. The variables which best discriminated between dance forms were starting age, the variety of present dance activities and the intensity of practising one's main dance form. Such differences in socialisation into different dance forms should be taken into account when developing dance and dance teacher education curricula, teaching dance and planning recreational dance activities. [1] This article is based upon research conducted as part of doctoral disseration research at University of Jyväskylä. This author gratefully acknowledges the Finnish Ministry of Education for providing financial support.

To examine how individuals perceive synchrony between music and body motion, we investigated the characteristics of synchrony perception during observation of a Japanese Radio Calisthenics routine. We used the constant stimuli method to present video clips of an individual performing an exercise routine. We generated stimuli with a range of temporal shifts between the visual and auditory streams, and asked participants to make synchrony judgments. We then examined which movement-feature points agreed with music beats when the participants perceived synchrony. We found that extremities (e.g., hands and feet) reached the movement endpoint or moved through the lowest position at music beats associated with synchrony. Movement onsets never agreed with music beats. To investigate whether visual information about the feature points was necessary for synchrony perception, we conducted a second experiment where only limited portions of video clips were presented to the participants. Participants consistently judged synchrony even when the video image did not contain the critical feature points, suggesting that a prediction mechanism contributes to synchrony perception. To discuss the meaning of these feature points with respect to synchrony perception, we examined the temporal relationship between the motion of body parts and the ground reaction force (GRF) of exercise performers, which reflected the total force acting on the performer. Interestingly, vertical GRF showed local peaks consistently synchronized with music beats for most exercises, with timing that was closely correlated with the timing of movement feature points. This result suggests that synchrony perception in humans is based on some global variable anticipated from visual information, instead of the feature points found in the motion of individual body parts. In summary, the present results indicate that synchrony perception during observation of human motion to music depends largely on spatiotemporal prediction of the performer’s motion.

Recent progress in stochastic motion prediction, i.e., predicting multiple possible future human motions given a single past pose sequence, has led to producing truly diverse future motions and even providing control over the motion of some body parts. However, to achieve this, the state-of-the-art method requires learning several mappings for diversity and a dedicated model for controllable motion prediction. In this paper, we introduce a unified deep generative network for both diverse and controllable motion prediction. To this end, we leverage the intuition that realistic human motions consist of smooth sequences of valid poses, and that, given limited data, learning a pose prior is much more tractable than a motion one. We therefore design a generator that predicts the motion of different body parts sequentially, and introduce a normalizing flow based pose prior, together with a joint angle loss, to achieve motion realism. Our experiments on two standard benchmark datasets, Human3.6M and HumanEva-I, demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of both sample diversity and accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/wei-mao-2019/gsps

Pedestrians’ road crossing decisions and body parts’ movements