American Dance Research Articles

Review: Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical

Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical , by Todd Decker. Broadway Legacies. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xv, 309 pp. When the not-yet-venerable drama critic of the New York Times , Brooks Atkinson, proclaimed on February 20, 1927, that “Negro plays are in the wind just now,” he had a strong degree of insider knowledge.1 His topic was Paul Green's In Abraham's Bosom , which won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. However, another “race” play was already in the air: Dorothy and Dubose Heyward's Porgy opened on October 10. In Abraham's Bosom included in its mixed-race cast Jules Bledsoe, who had already made a brief name for himself in Frank Harling and Laurence Stallings's mixed-race Deep River (1926), billed as both “A Jazz Opera” and a “Native Opera.” However, Green would have preferred as his lead Paul Robeson, who turned down the part, as he did another role that would be taken by Bledsoe, Joe in Show Boat . But Robeson did join the cast of Porgy as Crown in March 1928, prompting an expansion of its music (which Robeson complained strained his voice). He then left abruptly—breaking another contract in the process—to play Joe in the London production of Show Boat , which opened on May 3. He became indelibly associated with the role and with its signature song, “Ol' Man River.” Robeson necessarily figures prominently in Todd Decker's new study of Show Boat , which covers the show's “making” up to its opening night on Broadway on December 27, 1927, and its subsequent “remaking” on stage and screen over the next seventy or so years. Brooks Atkinson presumably knew of Show Boat long before its premiere, but even if he did not, what he claims is “in the wind” seems to be that collision and collusion of circumstances beloved of those of us fascinated by digging around in archives to piece together the complex jigsaws that …

Dance sport: injury profile in Latin American formation dancing

Latin American formation dancing ranks among the technical-compositional types of sport and represents a discipline of dance sport due to its performance- and competition-orientated mode. Despite its high degree of popularity and a movement profile favouring injuries, there has been a lack of studies as to health hazards and damage in Latin American formation dancing. The aim of this study is to analyse formation dance-related health hazards and their causes. A total of n = 100 (m: n = 52, f: n = 48) Latin American dancers of the German top-level league participated in this anonymised retrospective cross-sectional investigation. Mean weights of the male dancers were 75.2 kg and respectively 58.2 kg for the females, mean body height/size were 1.82 m (m) and 1.67 m (f) and mean BMI 22.2 (m) and 20.0 (f), respectively. At least one each traumatic injury/chronic damage was sustained by 69.3 % (m) and77.6 % (f) of the dancers in the course of their dance sport activities. Almost all (97.9 %) injuries occurred during the training. A total of 409 injuries/overuse damages (= 4.1 injuries/athlete) wasreported with 80.4 % traumatic injuries and 19.5 % chronic damages. Female dancers were more often injured than their male counterparts. The lower extremity was the most commonly affected body region [64.5 % (m) and, respectively, 71.2 % (f)], followed by upper extremity (m: 21.2 %, f: 17.6 %) and spinal column/trunk region (m: 12.0 %, f: 8.5 %). Blockages and pulled muscles were the most common complaints reported by males with contusions and pulled muscles being reported by females. Chondropathy/osteoarthrosis were the most frequent chronic diseases. Of all injuries sustained, circa two thirds were caused by extrinsic and circa one third by intrinsic factors. The injury profiles/patterns in Latin American formation dancing show on the one hand parallels to the individual partner dances. On the other hand, typical and gender-specific movement elements seem to reflect in the injuries and chronic damages/diseases of formation dancers. This is to be taken into account when injury prevention measures are considered. There is also a need for further studies to allow a more differentiated analysis.

Seeing the Invisible: Maya Deren's Experiments in Cinematic Trance

In July 1791, the story goes, a small voodoo gathering in Santo Domingo sparked the Haitian Revolution, the first black anti-colonial revolution in history. The glorious history of the “Republic of the black Jacobins” was often celebrated by Surrealist artists in New York and Paris in their exposé of the decadent state of colonial powers in the aftermath of the Second World War. For instance, Haiti is central to André Breton's anti-colonial manifesto, Aimé Cesaire's idea of negritude, Rudy Burckhardt's lyric film symphonies, and Zora Neale Hurston's novels on creole culture. In New York, negritude did not have quite the same revolutionary appeal as in Paris, where Josephine Baker was hailed as a Surrealist goddess of “natural” beauty and power. But the electric Haitian voodoo performances of dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham attracted a diverse community of African-American artists, émigrés, intellectuals, and communist sympathizers in the off-limits clubs, cafés, and private parties in Harlem. In its uncontainable, carnivalesque power, open forms, and sexual energy, Haitian voodoo captured an attraction to the “primitive” that affected American intellectuals and popular culture alike. Before becoming a Hollywood star, Dunham, of mixed West African and Native American roots, traveled to Haiti to study voodoo rituals for an anthropology degree at the University of Chicago. Fusing American dance, European ballet, and voodoo movements, she became a symbol of the black diaspora. In a recent film interview, Dunham recalls how her young assistant (or “girl Friday,” in the parlance of the time) Maya Deren was fascinated by Haitian dance and would use it to steal the show in rehearsals, public performances, and glitzy parties. The daughter of Russian Jewish émigrés and Trotskyite activists, Deren was struck by the power of this syncretic dance, which blended different cultural backgrounds and formed political consciousnesses while always providing entertainment and energizing dinner parties and giving voice to invisible deities. In her experimental filmmaking, Deren infused this magnetic power of dance into cinema.

The Trends of Qualitative Research and Academic Writing in Korean and American Dance Journals I and This Researcher

The Trends of Qualitative Research and Academic Writing in Korean and American Dance Journals I and This Researcher

Indians and wannabes: Native American powwow dancing in the Northeast and beyond

An excellent introduction to the many complexities and facets of powwows. It entices the reader to recognize the importance of bodies in motion in particular, dance in forging social worlds and mediating power relations. Zoila Mendoza, author of Creating Our Own: Folklore, Performance, and Identity in Cuzco, Peru An outstanding interpretation of Native American powwow dancing that reveals its significance in the context of colonial and postcolonial history and across cultures and borders. As dancer and dance scholar, Axtmann brings a keen eye and her own kinesthetic knowledge of dance to her groundbreaking interpretation of the movement styles of powwow dances. Elizabeth Fine, author of Soulstepping: African American Step Shows In her meticulously researched book, Ann Axtmann has added a new dimension to our understanding of Native performance. This rich ethnographic and cultural analysis will be of tremendous interest to scholars, students, and the general public. Axtmann makes a strong and moving case for the power of the dancing body. Julie Malnig, editor of Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader Thousands of intertribal powwows occur every year throughout the United States and Canada. Sometimes lasting up to a week, these sacred and traditional events are central to Native American spirituality. Attendees dance, drum, sing, eat, reestablish family ties, and make new friends. In this compelling interdisciplinary work, Ann Axtmann examines powwows as practiced primarily along the northeast Atlantic coastline from New Jersey into New England. Focusing on the centrality of bodies in motion, she introduces us to the complexities ofpowwow history, describes how space and time are performed along the powwow trail, identifies the specific dance styles employed, and considers the issue of race in relation to Native American dancers and the phenomenon of playing Indian by non-Natives.Ultimately, Axtmann seeks to understand how powwow dancers express and embody power and what these dances signify for the communities in whichthey are performed.

The Birth of Festivals out of the Spirit of the Alternative Scenes of the 1980s: International Programmes and Festivals (from the field of Contemporary Dance and Performing Arts)

Abstract The article briefly describes the festival landscape in the field of performing arts and contemporary dance in Slovenia since World War II. The beginnings of contemporary dance festivals reach back to the mid-1970s, when the Kinetikon Cultural Association establishes Ljubljana Dance Days, although foreign dance companies had come to Ljubljana before that (José Limón, 1957, and a range of European and American dance companies at the turn of 1960s and 1970s). After Slovenia's independence, we witness the first wave of festival foundings in the mid-1990s, and the other after 2000. The article also attempts to outline the reasons for the increased volume of production in the field of contemporary dance art in the 1980s.

Abstracts from the 2013 48th Annual American Dance Therapy Association Research and Thesis Poster Session

Abstracts from the 2013 48th Annual American Dance Therapy Association Research and Thesis Poster Session

Cotillion Dance as an Embodiment of Class

This paper suggests that social dance, specifically cotillion, teaches students to internalize and reflect ideas relevant to constructions of class. An examination of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cotillion dance (also referred to as private balls, public balls, assemblies, and dance halls) shows a physical manifestation of class that can still be seen in the modern day dance world. This paper examines social dance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I use historical references, specifically Elizabeth Aldrich's From the Ballroom to Hell: Grace and Folly in Nineteenth-Century Dance, Linda Tomko's Dancing Class, Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, and the Library of Congress Web site to foreground this idea before turning to some modern day case studies. Employing historical as well as interview-based methodologies, the paper combines interviews from present day cotillion directors with my own experiences in the cotillion and professional ballet communities. The paper concludes that social dance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sets up a tradition still carried forth today—one that is more about classed aspirations and courtship and less about dance technique or physical ability.

Floating Worlds: Japanese and American Transcultural Encounters in Dance

The repurposed metaphor “floating worlds,” from Japanese woodblock prints, highlights political junctions when transcultural American and Japanese dance collide and reconfigure. The first “floating world” is an “Ethiopian Concert” presented by Commodore Matthew Perry's Japanese Olio Minstrels in celebration of The Treaty of Peace and Amity (1854). The second challenges nostalgic Western notions of an “Old Japan” through the aggressively westernized Tokyo School of Music, where modern dancer Michio Ito trained for an opera career. Third, a post–World War I Peace Festival in Washington, DC, which included Ito's “eccentric dances,” documents an early Japanese diaspora within mainstream America. The final “floating world” conversely locates transcultural America outside of the United States through Ito's “Spirit of ’76” spectacle, staged for Occupied Forces following his unjust deportation to Japan. I apply analytical concepts of transcultural historians to imagine a global past that is less recognized, but no less nuanced, than the global present.

朝輝記太留（1878-1938）の「体育ダンス」に関する考察：運動と音楽のリズムの間の関係に着目して

Kitaru Asahi studied dance education in the USA from 1918 to 1919, and after returning to Japan he introduced American dance teaching materials, which he recommended to Japanese physical education teachers through publications and courses in dance education. The present study attempted to clarify how the idea of recommending Gymnastic Dance was realized through the dance teaching materials. First, we analyzed the characteristics of exercise consisting of steps and movements in the dance teaching materials that were introduced by Asahi. We then analyzed the relationship between the rhythm of the exercises and the rhythm of music through reference to these materials. The results were as follows: It was found that the teaching materials introduced by Asahi described various combinations of steps and movements in the dance exercises. These included walking, circling, hopping, jumping, stamping, pointing or twisting. When students exercised using the dance teaching materials, these combinations of steps and movements created active, dynamic and nimble sensations in the students through up and down, sideways, forward and backward changes in body position. It was found that these combinations of steps and movements changed the timing and direction of the exercises many times. Asahi's idea of recommending Gymnastic Dance was reflected in these characteristics of steps and movements. Also in the relationships between the rhythm of the exercises and the rhythm of music, active, dynamic and nimble sensations were evident, helping the students to perform powerful jumps. Various combinations of different exercises and music were able to change the dance rhythm to a more dynamic, high-energy form. If these different exercises and music were performed in contrasting rhythms, each component would appear to be more dynamic and singular. It appears that Asahi's idea to recommend Gymnastic Dance to Japanese physical education teachers was based on these relationships between the rhythm of exercises and that of music. Asahi expected that students in the 1920s who studied Gymnastic Dance would incorporate these active steps and movements when they danced together with classmates, and that this would assist them in realizing their goals in Physical Education.

Paul Taylor's Meticulous Musicality: A Choreomusical Investigation

While his contemporaries were moving away from traditional music and toward experimental, Paul Taylor embraced American folk music and baroque composers. Both genres typically have simple meters and lend themselves to choreographically friendly units of eight counts. Taylor creates movement that works through the expected meter and, consequently, the phrasing of the music. Using a choreomusical lens, this essay concentrates on moments in Big Bertha (1970) and Esplanade (1975) to argue that musical and choreographic phrases are often at odds in the dances of Paul Taylor, creating intricate and engaging work that has expanded the scope and significance of American dance.

The Peggy Clark and Oliver Smith Collections in the Library of Congress: Documenting the Visual History of American Dance and Theater

Scholars of theater and dance will appreciate two large and important collections of original design materials in the Music Division of the Library of Congress: the Peggy Clark Collection, acquired...

American Realness curated by Thomas Benjamin Snapp Pryor (review)

Reviewed by: American Realness curated by Thomas Benjamin Snapp Pryor Clare Croft American Realness. Curated by Thomas Benjamin Snapp Pryor. Abrons Arts Center and PS 1, New York City. 10–20 January 2013. Click for larger view View full resolution Rob Fordeyn, Stephen Thompson, and Ondrej Vidlar in Trajal Harrell’s Antigone, Sr. (L). (Photo: Ian Douglas.) Among New York’s annual performance-festival cavalcade, the American Realness (AR) festival was the scrappy downtown option for dancegoers seeking experimental performance when it was founded in 2009. Four years later, AR has emerged as a leading venue for some of the most exciting work in American dance, making it an ideal site at which to consider the relationship between contemporary dance and the still incredibly powerful twentieth-century modern/postmodern dance canon. Twentieth-century dance modernism often emphasized form (albeit to different ends), asking audiences to pay attention to the shapes that dancers made with their bodies. Much of the postmodern dance of the late twentieth century critiqued modernist choreographers’ often-virtuosic emphasis on physical form, expanding the range of physical actions that could count as interesting shapes for dancers to assume. AR’s 2013 presentation of well-known and mid-career experimental choreographers suggested that postmodern dance’s exploration of the quotidian—in both movement vocabulary and performers’ affect—remains central. One festival standout, Jeanine Durning’s solo inging, clearly tracked in this refusal of visual spectacle, layering dance and language to make audiences question how they pay attention to bodies in motion. But postmodern dance’s refusal to engage with expressiveness, epitomized in Yvonne Rainer’s 1964 “No Manifesto,” has greatly lessened. Many AR choreographers, often performing in their own creations, toyed with engaging the audience and their fellow performers in an affective exchange; they shifted the emotional charge within the theatre by emphasizing performance qualities that could be called “energy” or “presence.” Rather than attending to the particularities of what the body does as the audience’s entry point into the work, choreographers like Miguel Gutierrez, Jennifer Monson, and Trajal Harrell brought audiences into heightened states of attention that made even the most pedestrian actions seem spiritually or even erotically charged. These artists moved through and past postmodernism’s refusal of visual spectacle, finding different possibilities for what spectacle might mean in simple gestures and on bare stages. [End Page 562] Among the works included in the festival, Harrell’s Antigone, Sr. (L), performed at the Abrons Arts Center, and M2M (Made to Measure), presented at PS 1, most explicitly confronted the relationship between dance history and contemporary dance-making. Harrell describes the series that includes both pieces as an imagined meeting between the 1960s postmodern Judson Church dance scene and Harlem’s voguing ballroom community. Arguing that this “historical impossibility” (as Harrell calls it) would have had multiple outcomes, he created multiple works, labeling each by size: XS, S, M, L, XL, and M2M (made to measure). In each iteration, Harrell and his stunning casts of male dancers question how attention to race and communities beyond the iconic postmoderns—the Judson Dance scene—shifts what counts as postmodern dance today. Antigone, Sr. (L) redefined what constitutes a large dance in its level of spectacle. The almost three-hour, intermission-less extravaganza had multiple elements, including a range of solo voguing performances; several slow, speaking sections; and a large-scale though surprisingly bare-boned set. The principle of DIY queer performance aesthetics—that everyday objects can be transformed into imaginative fantasy—was taken up as a choreographic compositional mantra. The work began with a series of solos featuring beautiful men who loosely borrowed from voguing’s extravagant arm gestures. Over time, the solos layered and commented rhythmically on one another. Later, Harrell and Thibault Lac sat on a mattress, drawling out a list of oddly patched-together pop-culture references: “We are Girls.” “We are Mary Kate and Ashley.” The men’s recitation became less about what they said and more about the control they exercised over the confused though engrossed audience. Harrell compelled the audience to join him in Antigone’s alchemy when, mid-work, he sent several dancers climbing through the audience carrying individual strands of...

Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: or, the task of the dancer

The choreographic element in Jacques Rancière's notion of “police” is used to advance the concept of “choreopolice,” which can then be set in opposition to “choreopolitics” to redefine “choreography” and release it from imperative, or normative (i.e., policed) constructions of movement. Hannah Arendt's notion that freedom is the telos of politics identifies how within several types of choreography (TURF street dance, Tania Bruguera's Arte de Conducta, and Sarah Michelson's Devotion Study #1 — The American Dancer), the dancer's task is to search and enact that freedom, over and over again.

Dorothy Madden (1912–2009), American Revolutionary. A Centenary Tribute

Dorothy Madden was an inspirational dancer, teacher, writer and choreographer; she studied with many of the great figures of American modern dance including Holm, Nikolais, Graham, Humphrey and Limón, and in particular Louis Horst, whose protégé she became. In the early 1960s she was invited to the UK by the Ministry of Education to introduce her approach to American modern dance into the British education system. As is noted in Valerie Preston-Dunlop and Luis Espana's film The American Invasion 1962-72, her work was seminal to the development of contemporary dance in the UK. Her students who include choreographers Rosemary Butcher, Sue Maclennan and Janet Smith as well as educationalists June Layson, David Henshaw and Stuart Hopps, helped shape British contemporary dance. This essay is based on interviews made with Madden in the late 1990s, research into her archive held at Trinity Laban, and interviews with her colleagues and students. It provides a historical overview of her work and explores her lasting, though largely forgotten, influence on the development of contemporary dance in the UK.

2014 Black Women and Health Politics Panel-Het Heru Healing Dance and Auset Aum Tam Qi Gong Healing: Holistic Approaches to Dance/Movement Therapy

After ten years of research on Black women and breast cancer, I have concluded that there are structural prohibitions against Black women being able to shape the national public health policy dialogue on breast cancer. Despite being the demographic most likely to die from this disease, stigma against Black women (Motsemme 2004, 2007, 2011; Jordan-Zachery 2008; Berger 2004; Cohen 1999) still shapes survival rates. In the struggle to survive in a context in which political institutions ignore their lives, Black women have taken their health into their own hands. Thus, in this paper, I have begun to examine the and collective alternative healing strategies and practices of Black women that constitute a wholly distinctive location for mobilization and collective action by Black women in pursuit of their health.According to the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA), dance/movement therapy is the psychotherapeutic use of movement to further the emotional, cognitive, physical and social integration of the individual (www.adta.org). Psychological and physical interventions including dance and movement creative art therapies have been studied for use with oncology, orthopedic and mental health patients, to name a few, measuring a variety of outcomes including those relating to quality of life. In this paper, I will examine the Het Heru Healing Dance (2010) and the and Auset Aum Tam Qi Gong for women, to further explore the potential contributions of dance and movement as creative arts therapies for women’s wellness and improvement in overall quality of life. The increasing desire for alternative treatment options and the increasing popularity of dance/movement therapy opens the way for the Het Heru Healing Dance and Auset Aum Tam Qi Gong to increase the quality of life for women by providing (1) an accessible and fundamentally unique method of dance and movement therapy, (2) an opportunity for group support, and (3) a space for women to reflect on how they holistically understand and perceive their health, to ask questions, and to expand discussions on innovative new ways to enhance wellness. Unlike the ADTA dance/movement therapy based on the limited mind/body binary intervention, I argue the Het Heru Healing Dance and Auset Aum Tam Qi Gong create new possibilities for optimizing health and healing because they are holistic dance and movement forms rooted in the Metu Neter Paut Neteru methodology based on the complimentary, interdependent and unifying 11 Laws of Maat (Amen 1990, 2003). The Paut Neteru method is the cosmologic basis of behavioral change in Kamitic spiritual science. African worldview theory, therefore, provides the theoretical framework for this study, and scholarship on dance/movement therapy in Psychology, African Studies, Africana Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies and and Cultural Studies provides the historical context and contributes to the overall thesis.

Anthropometry and somatotypes of competitive DanceSport participants: A comparison of three different styles

Anthropometry in dance and aesthetic sports has been shown to play an important role in selection and performance criteria. The aim of the present study was to examine variations in somatotype and anthropometry in three different competitive dance styles: DanceSport Standard, Latin American and Ten Dance. Anthropometry and somatotype data were collected from thirty couples competing in Standard (n=24 individuals), Latin American (n=14) and Ten Dance (n=22) styles. A single tester (ISAK Level 1) carried out all anthropometric measurements using the Heath-Carter protocol and somatotypes were calculated using the Heath-Carter's decimal equations. Results indicated that the mean somatotype for the male dancers was 2.4–3.9–3.2, whilst for females it was 2.7–2.7–3.5. Factorial analysis reported Standard dancers scored significantly higher for ectomorphy, sitting height and arm span than Latin dancers (p<0.05). Correlation analysis with the Standard dancer's International Ranking highlighted moderate positive correlation with mesomorphy (r=0.434, p<0.05) and negative correlation with ectomorphy (r=−0.546, p<0.001). The findings of this study show that somatotypes differ among DanceSport participants by dance style. Compared with other aesthetic sports, male and female dancers were less mesomorphic and more ectomorphic. Standard dancers tend to be more ectomorphic with greater height, longer arm span and greater sitting height compared with Latin American dancers. Although Standard dancers were ectomorphic, those dancers who had higher mesomorphic ranking had higher places in the dancers’ international ranking.

Too Black, Too Gay: The Disco Inferno

A review of Tim Lawrence's Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture (Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2003).

Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of African American Dance Theater, Community Engagement, and Working It Out by Nadine George-Graves. 2010. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. vii + 230 pp., photographs, notes, index. $29.95 paper.

Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of African American Dance Theater, Community Engagement, and Working It Out by Nadine George-Graves. 2010. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. vii + 230 pp., photographs, notes, index. $29.95 paper. - Volume 45 Issue 2

(Im)Mobile bodies: Contemporary semi-professional dancers’ experiences with injuries

The purpose of this research was to examine semi-professional contemporary dancers’ experiences with injuries. Similar to athletes, dancers are often injured. Much of the previous research on dance injuries, however, has focused on ballet where the professional requirements and high technical level create demanding work conditions. Semi-professional contemporary dance differs from this context due to its technique and work environment. In this study, I investigate how contemporary dancers experience injuries. From a Deleuzian perspective, I examine the connections between the body, injury, and the dancing identity within the culture of contemporary dance. The empirical material from semi-structured interviews revealed that while most participants suffered injuries, they generally ignored their injuries and continued to dance as, they argued, their passion for contemporary dance overrode the need for caring for their injuries. Consequently, the cultural environment for amateur dance facilitated injury experiences similar to professional dance.