Concert Dance Research Articles

Psychological Safety in the Western Concert Dance Technique Class

Psychological Safety in the Western Concert Dance Technique Class

Crip slutaesthetics: Erotic object choreographies and temporal fractures in burlesque

Direct, communicative and largely accessible, the choreographic tools of nightlife performance often elicit dramatic reactions from spectators, whether sexy, funny, surprising, glamorous or all of the above. This article follows pleasure, joy, erotics and pain across crip slutaesthetics into the choreographies of crip nightlife, based on interviews with four burlesque artists based in the United States with diverse experiences of sickness, neurodivergence, trauma and disability. I use movement analysis alongside attention to other artistic practices foundational to burlesque such as prop and costume creation to unravel the ways that performers Sweet Lorraine, Poison Ivory, Chaos X Machina and Jaqueline Boxx integrate their divergent bodymind experiences into compelling aesthetics and justice-oriented frames. I argue that crip slutaesthetics, that is the aesthetic qualities of crip sexual performance, can offer tools towards undoing ableism as it is entangled with racism, homophobia and transphobia that are often silenced by more formal concert dance worlds in the effort to deny embodied difference as well as pleasure from the proscenium stage.

Under the volcano: Encountering La(r)val anxieties in Metal

This article explores how recent intercultural contemporary concert dance collaborations in Asia and Australasia address questions of authorship and the subjectivity that concert dance performances produce. The work examined here is Metal (2020), created by Melbourne-based company Lucy Guerin Inc and Ensemble Tikoro, a heavy-metal choir based in West Java led by composer Robi Rusdiana. This work is critically analysed in terms of the production of subjectivity in dance and the influence of culture, politics and hegemonic regimes of representation in contemporary performance. Metal, which features five dancers and eight choir-members, was created in both Melbourne and Bandung. The work incorporates the aesthetics of heavy metal music culture; but it is a shadowy and decelerated piece. It has a quiet, disappearing-at-the-edges quality and a dramatic structure that develops through a series of enigmatic interactions between two groups. In these meetings, body practices and cultural practices are negotiated in a process of gradual unlearning, problematizing the conventions by which performers are turned into subjects. It is the depiction of solidities returning to a state of flux. The work was partly inspired by the place of its creation: the slopes of the active Tangkuban Perahu Volcano. Motifs of shifting earth and molten flows are referenced in both the composition of movement and sound, and in the work’s dramaturgical structure. As the work progresses, the fragments merge, culminating in a long series of tableaux performed in a wash of red light. In this volcanic scene, the performers are finally suspended in a state of potential subjectivity or becoming-individual. In this way, Metal points to the possibility of a choreographic practice that is a reversal and return to plurality, a subjectivity that is not multicultural but properly transcultural.

Channels Through the Humane The Exiled Body in Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern

Abstract: This article examines contemporary choreographer Crystal Pite’s celebrated work Flight Pattern (2017), created for the Royal Ballet, which depicts an unspecified group of refugees as allegory for the “human” condition. In striving to choreograph exile outside of place and time, Pite rewrites the refugee as a purely bodied condition of transience, and thus corporealizes what Alexander Weheliye calls a “travelling theory.” The work thus strategically obfuscates the political in the image of the refugee, serving a State-run stage; moreover, it downplays the significance of race to the refugee crisis in complement to a predominantly white company. Reading this dance against key texts of biopolitical discourse, I show how the refugee figures as a symbol of the magnitude of biopower and as such is ontologically tied to the notion of the population—yet the refugee is never engaged at the level of embodiment. Flight Pattern thus offers a critical intervention: how does the West envision the refugee as an individual body? On the dancerly body, this entails citations of Western concert dance’s conventions of aestheticized alterity, raising the specter of the “relatable abject”: a figure that is Other to its audience and yet invites their empathic projection. Flight Pattern thus raises important questions for researchers about the implications of aesthetic inquiry into biopolitical crises: what dance can capture—and what it erases—of the experience of refugitude and the struggle for recognition and legibility on the stage of international politics.

“Dancer as collaborator, co-author, co-owner, co-creator: power relations between dancer and choreographer”

ABSTRACT In contemporary concert dance, the efforts and creative powers of dancers can be overlooked and devalued against those of the choreographer. Might a binary relationship between the mind and the body haunt the relationship between the choreographer and dancer with the looming specter of a female body that is obedient, fertile, and shaped? This article explores whether dancers in contemporary concert dance should be credited in the choreographic process, creation of a technique, and in performance when they have actively contributed to the creative process. Weaving in my autoethnography examining my experiences as a dancer and choreographer in New York City, this article explores different models of working and creating engaging with the scholarship of dance practitioners and philosophy, dance, and feminist scholars. Seeing through a Marxist and Feminist lens, power relations are examined between choreographers and dancers, unraveling how these relations result in who is credited and whose labor and precarity is recognized. The trope of dancers, specifically female dancers, being mere instruments or muses is deconstructed in the re-examination of the relationship between modern dance pioneers Lester Horton and Bella Lewitzky.

Black and Blue: The women who reclaimed tap

When Black and Blue opened on Broadway in 1989, it brought together some of the greatest names in tap dance: Henry LeTang, Cholly Atkins, Fayard Nicholas, Jimmy Slyde, and Savion Glover: men who had defined the art form and would continue to do so. But there were also nearly a dozen women, including Deborah Mitchell, Dianne Walker, and Germaine Goodson. “Chorus girls” have long been the unsung heroes of tap and published histories typically obscure the contributions of Black women to the art form. Furthermore, professional networks that advocate for Black concert dance have largely ignored tap, due in part to theories of racial uplift, respectability politics, and the historical associations between tap and blackface minstrelsy. In this article, I argue that the careers of Mitchell, Walker, and Goodson offer an alternative. Analysis of their performances in Black and Blue reveals how they used their dancing bodies to reclaim tap as a source of pride, while simultaneously reasserting the role of women within the form for future generations.

Choreography as Ideology: Dance Heritage, Performance Politics, and the Former Yugoslavia

In this article I discuss the process of choreographing “traditional” and “folk” dances in the former Yugoslavia, aligned with Yugoslav socialist ideologies that glorified the collective cultural authorship of the people, which allowed for these dances to adopt a new dimension as they took the form of a choreographed spectacle. I explain how Yugoslav choreographers utilized archival research to create a repertoire of choreographic representations of Yugoslav identity in constructing what I theorize as heritage choreography. Reflecting on how ideology moved the collective body of the Yugoslav people through choreographed works deemed as heritage, I broaden the understanding of choreographing that differs from Western concert dance practices. Furthermore, I provide alternative examples of dance making that are rooted in local understandings of spectacle, thereby enriching the conversation about what the act of choreographing entails.

Rechoreographing Homonymous Partners: Rancière's Dance Education from Loïe Fuller

Abstract Contemporary philosopher Jacques Rancière has been criticized for a conception of “politics” that is insensitive to the diminished agency of the corporeally oppressed. In a recent article, Dana Mills locates a solution to this alleged problem in the most recent Rancière book translated into English, Aisthesis, in its chapter on Mallarmé’s writings on modern dancer Loïe Fuller. My first section argues that Mills's reading exacerbates an “homonymy” (Rancière's term) in Rancière's use of the word “inscription,” which means for him either a vicious literal carving on living bodies or else a virtuous figurative carving on nonliving bodies. The former, I call “bodily carving,” while the latter is the “corporeal writing” that I take Mallarmé to affirm in Fuller. My second section observes that Rancière himself misses a homonymy in Mallarmé on Fuller, namely, “dance,” meaning either “ballet” or dance in general (including Fuller's). My third section concludes that Rancière's chapter on Fuller includes another “dance” homonymy, meaning either “concert dance” or what I term a new “art of meta-movement” in Fuller. The latter art, I conclude, is equivalent to Mallarmé’s “corporeal writing” and can be understood as a new form of dance education, in pursuit of a worker-dancer utopia.

Asking Evolving Questions to Decenter Whiteness in the Dance Studio

Historically there has been an overvaluing of Whiteness in Western concert dance. Marginalization of dancers who identify as Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, and of color continues at all levels within the field. Much work is currently addressing systemic inequity in dance. One area available to all dance educators is personal reflection and curious examination of our habits, choices, and practices. This autoethnographic essay seeks to contribute by identifying ways that teachers can understand and address inequity productively in the dance classroom and within ourselves.

Sculpting Time: Sara Rudner in Her Studio

Sculpting Time: Sara Rudner in Her Studio

Modernist Continuities: Queer Jewish Dances, the Holocaust, and the AIDS Crisis

AbstractDuring the height of the 1980s AIDS epidemic in the United States, LGBTQ+ Jewish choreographers agitated for gay rights by using Holocaust allusions to address the AIDS crisis. Modernist practices in their work generate a long modernist midcentury that reframes established historical binaries between modernist and postmodernist concert dance modalities. This article argues that choreographers who drew upon Holocaust memory to address the AIDS crisis engendered a queer Jewish imaginary by engaging Jewishness from ethnic Ashkenazi (European) Jewish American lineages of modernist dance as social justice, Jewish cyclical temporal logics, and histories of being scapegoated for societal ills. It demonstrates how Meredith Monk's Book of Days (1988), David Dorfman's Sleep Story (1987), and Arnie Zane's The Gift/No God Logic (1987) fostered Jewish queerness in modernist artistic practices during a time that LGBTQ+ American Jews developed a queer Jewish consciousness. These choreographers’ works connect queer Jewish modernisms to varied temporalities of global modernity.

Dancing with the Revolution: Power, Politics, and Privilege in Cuba

Dancing with the Revolution: Power, Politics, and Privilege in Cuba

Injury Rates and Characteristics Associated with Participation in Organized Dance Education: A Systematic Review.

Several studies and recent systematic reviews have investigated injury in dance settings and have largely focused on specific concert dance genres (i.e., ballet, contemporary) and elite levels (i.e., pre-professional, professional) of dance. Less is known about the health of those who participate in dance education settings, namely teachers and students from private dance studios. Given that these individuals constitute a large proportion of the dance community, greater clarity of risks in the dance training environment could benefit an underserved majority by informing the development of effective injury prevention strategies.<br/> Objective: The primary objective was to describe injury rates and characteristics associated with participation in organized dance education settings.<br/> Methods: Six electronic databases were searched to April 2021 (Medline, EMBASE, SportDiscus, CINAHL, SCOPUS, Cochrane). Selected studies met a priori inclusion criteria that required original data from dance teacher and student samples within formal dance education settings. All genres of dance were eligible. Studies were excluded if no injury outcomes or estimates of dance exposure were reported, if injuries occurred during rehearsal and performance, or if dance was used as a therapeutic intervention or exercise. Two reviewers independently assessed each paper for inclusion at abstract and full text screening stages. The quality of included studies was assessed using the Joanna Briggs Institute Level of Evidence tool.<br/> Results: The initial database search identified 1,424 potentially relevant records, 26 were included and scored. Most studies (n = 22) focused on dance students only, three included only dance teachers, and one study included both. Among both dance students and teachers, the majority of injuries reported were overuse or chronic and involved the lower limb. For studies that reported injury rates (n = 14), estimates ranged from 0.8 to 4.7 injuries per 1,000 dance hours, 4.86 per 1,000 dancer-days, and 0.21 to 0.34 per 1,000 dance exposures.<br/> Conclusions: Based on the current research, dance students and teachers experience a similar rate of injury to concert and professional dancers, and their injuries are most commonly overuse injuries involving the lower extremity. There have been few high-quality investigations of injury specific to the dance training environment. Therefore, consensus around the burden of injury in the dance education settings remains difficult. Future dance epidemiological investigations that examine the burden of injury among dance teachers and students, include operational injury and exposure definitions, and utilize prospective designs are warranted.

Making Dance Work in West Africa: Women Artists in a Shifting Landscape of Institutional Patronage

This article considers the stakes articulated by French-speaking West African women who claim dance as work opens up critical perspectives on the global political economy of concert dance. African states encouraged creative dance work following independence, but in the era of structural adjustment, French state-affiliated institutions took the lead as foreign patrons for African contemporary dance. Juxtaposing these women’s reflections on their trajectories as dance artists with an account of the institutional politics surrounding patronage in the region, I argue that these women reenvision the value of cultural labor as a substantive contribution to their societies and economies in West Africa.

“It Must Be Preserved”: Adolph Bolm's Revival of Le Coq d'Or

“It Must Be Preserved”: Adolph Bolm's Revival of <i>Le Coq d'Or</i>

Dancing After Life: Flexible Spacetimes of Black Female ResistDance

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the intersection of concert dance, cultural memory, Black womanhood, and non-linear spacetime from an Afro-European perspective. Inspired by Black feminist methodologies, the text interweaves performance analysis, historical context, interdisciplinary theory including my own concept of perforMemory, and auto-ethnographic experience gained through participant observation. My writing moves along three lines of inquiry tuned in the key of C: contextualizing, conjuring and contemplating. The article offers a case study of I Step on Air, a contemporary dance piece created by Nigerian-German dancer-choreographer Oxana Chi (Berlin/New York) and dedicated to Ghanian-German poet and activist May Ayim. By including an interlude with the choreographer's own creative writing about the piece, the article also provides the reader with the precious perspective of Oxana Chi on her process. The article is a reflection on/of the resonances between movement, writing, and activism. Let's celebrate the power of Black women to resistDance, step by step, move by move, breath by breath…

Stepping to the fore: The promotion of Irish dance in Australia

This article contributes to scant literature on Irish dance praxis in Australia by demonstrating how the confluence of global and local factors have permitted Irish dance in Australia to step to the fore. Irish step dance is a globally recognizable genre that has dispersed through, first, the migration of Irish people throughout the world and, more recently, through itinerant theatrical troupes. In Australia, a significant node of the Irish diaspora, Irish step dance has managed to achieve unusual prominence in a dance landscape that has traditionally been dominated by genres from within the Western concert dance canon. Drawing on both extant literature and ethnographic data, this article examines three threads from the narrative of Irish dance in Australia. First, the general choreographic landscape of the nation is described, showing that the preferences of Australian dance audiences have been shaped to privilege styles that are popular onstage and on-screen, with the resulting marginalization of culturally-specific genera. Second, localized effects of the global contagion instigated by the development of the stage show Riverdance are explored. Here, the domains of aesthetics and decisive marketing strategies are discussed, showing how engagement with Australian audiences was achieved. Finally, the article introduces an idiosyncratic localized influence, the children’s musical group The Wiggles, which was conceived independently but which also promoted interest and enthusiasm for Irish dance in Australia by engaging with young children and presenting propriety of Irish dance as available to all, regardless of cultural ancestry.

Digital Media Marketing for Dance: Enhancing Audience Engagement with Ballet Companies and Concert Dance Performance

Digital media play increasingly important roles in daily life, including directly influencing users’ interactions with others. Digital media marketing has become an increasingly important tool for dancers and the dance industry. Audience members and observers of the dance industry have grown and larger demographics beyond the dance world have been engaged through digital media marketing efforts and social media platforms. Analyzing audience engagement on social media platforms can provide data to assist dancers, dance studios, dance companies, dance programs, etc. to define their target audience and push them to reach a larger and/or different audiences. In this paper the author (1) assesses the impact of digital media marketing on audience engagement in ballet dance companies and concert dance, and (2) how to effectively strategize to increase audience engagement, in dance.

Manifestations of surveillance in private sector dance education: the implicit challenges of integrating technology

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to illuminate the challenges of integrating new technologies in private sector dance education and explores the formation of digitally mediated identities in adolescent female dancers. Autoethnographic research is supported by Foucauldian theory as well as surveillance and social media scholarship. Research examines how the imagined audience, produced by live-streamed closed-circuit television (CCTV), perpetuates the status quo in systems of Western concert dance education and creates new dimensions in dance competition culture. The values of the dominant class are embedded in institutional systems of training. Structural systems of oppression exclude marginalized groups and maintain the status quo. The argument is extended to include how the imagined audience produced by social media plays a role in reinforcing dance’s established exclusionary aesthetic, as dancers create online identities to meet perceived audience expectations and build cultural capital. The discussion explores ways in which the imagined audience exacerbates current concerns in the field of dance education. Existing socioeconomic and institutional barriers perpetuate patriarchal values and reinforce gender expectations. In a post-pandemic world, teachers and students will negotiate new dimensions in dance education produced by manifestations of surveillance as this technological mediation will continue to be the norm.

Post-Traumatic Expression in Western Contemporary Concert Dance Choreography: A Practice-Based Perspective

As a professional Western contemporary dance choreographer and practice-based scholar whose research focuses on the expression of post-traumatic states, I have tracked the evolution of my own post-traumatic history’s impact on my choreographic work of the past decade and a half in the context of its reception by audiences, larger creative trends in the field, and my own understanding. This article outlines the methodology observed in what I have identified as the three phases of my post-traumatic choreographic course—narrative, somatic, and political—and each of these phases’ outcomes in regard to artistic practice and identity reframing.