Concert Dance Research Articles

In Transit: The Formation of the Colonial East Asian Cultural Sphere by Faye Yuan Kleeman (review)

Reviewed by: In Transit: The Formation of the Colonial East Asian Cultural Sphere by Faye Yuan Kleeman Emily E. Wilcox IN TRANSIT: THE FORMATION OF THE COLONIAL EAST ASIAN CULTURAL SPHERE. By Faye Yuan Kleeman. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. 320 pp. Cloth, $52.00. What attracted me to this book was its final chapter, “Dancers of the Empire,” which provides one of the first English-language treatments of the history of concert dance in East Asia prior to 1945. The chapter follows somewhat parallel lives of two women, Choi Seunghee (Sai Shōki/Ch’oe Sŭng-hŭi 최승희/崔承喜, 1911–1969) and Tsai Juiyueh (Cai Ruiyue 蔡瑞月, 1921–2005), who became the leading figures of modern dance in colonial Chōsen (Korea) and Taiwan, respectively. It also details the early artistic trajectory of Ishii Baku (石井漠, 1886–1962), the founder of modern dance in Japan, as well as the larger context of the introduction of ballet and Western modern dance to Japan in the early twentieth century, in connection to the work of Japanese writer Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935) and the development of the Imperial Theater in Tokyo. In many ways, this chapter reflects the themes of the book as a whole, which traces the complex lives of individuals who traversed and existed between various parts of the Japanese empire. While many of these interstitial subjects became tools and casualties of the imperial project, they also paradoxically gained mobility and subjectivity from their participation in it, becoming media stars, cultural icons, and public figures both notorious and heroic. [End Page 648] In all of the cases—and this seems to be Kleeman’s central concern in the book—the intercultural connections these individuals helped to forge ultimately transcended both the standard histories of the empire and the popular images that settled upon these figures in the postwar era. Although careful to avoid romanticizing their lives, Kleeman nevertheless reveals aspects of idealism, tragedy, and individual agency that are often lost in accounts of the Japanese empire and its corresponding East Asian cultural sphere. It is significant, too, that nearly all of the figures Kleeman examines in the book are women. As she writes in the chapter on women writers and colonial Taiwan, “[These figures] provide feminine (and thus alternative) readings to the male-dominated racial and cultural discourse of the empire” (p. 185). We see these themes play out in all of their complexity in the lives of the dancers Choi and Tsai. Both women grew up in the colonies under Japanese rule and traveled to study in a cosmopolitan but quickly transforming Tokyo of the 1920s and 1930s. There, they learned a Japanese form of German-inspired modern dance together with other students from across the empire, mentored by the then internationally known Ishii Baku. Both quite successful, Tsai and Choi toured extensively during the colonial period, Tsai with the Ishii troupe across Japan, South China, and Southeast Asia, and Choi on her own tours across the United States, Europe, Central and South America, as well as the northern regions of the Japanese empire, especially Korea, China, and Manchuria. Choi, whose career is better documented, was clearly shaped by Japan’s imperial policy. Although initially interested in modern dance, she was pushed both by Ishii and by the Japanese media to serve as an ethnic icon of Korean culture, becoming known mainly for her modern interpretations of Korean folk and traditional dance. Later, after Japan’s culture policy shifted to a mandate of assimilation under the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,” Choi developed what she called “East Asian dance” and created many new works on Japanese and Chinese themes, also incorporating elements of Indian and Siamese dance, which she continued until the end of the war. In the immediate postwar period, both dancers returned to their homelands—Choi initially to Seoul and Tsai to Taipei—only to find themselves heavily persecuted by the postcolonial governments there. Tsai was jailed, put under surveillance, and prevented from accepting foreign performance invitations, while Choi was labeled a collaborator and finally moved in 1946 to North Korea. Both women continued their work but remained taboo topics in Taiwan and South Korea...

African American Cultural Technology: The Lindy Hop, the King of Pop, and the Factory Worker's Experience

AbstractAfrican Americans have been integral in shaping the aesthetics of modernity generally, and with respect to dance in particular. Through labor, art, cultural technology, and social life, African American aesthetics have breathed life into modern and contemporary American culture. The stress and fatigue of machines, labor, capitalism, and racism, imposed on bodies during the industrial revolution and in the post‐industrial era have provided raw material for black artistic expressions during the mid–to‐late twentieth century. Furthermore, this artistic expression, fueled by the angst of changing times generally and tensions facing African Americans in particular, has served as American catharsis through the creation of innovative cultural expressions. This article analyzes the dialectical relationships of industrialization, racism, and modern aesthetics, through the lens of the innovative African American social dance form, the Lindy Hop; and the virtuosic pop performances of Michael Jackson. The important contributions of the Lindy Hop as a dance style and Michael Jackson as a performer have had a profound impact on the aesthetics of modernity in American social and popular concert dance. To better understand the relationship between industrialization and the African American shaping of aesthetics of modernity, this article analyzes black experiences and embodiment of industrial labor and the ways that African Americans drew from their particular experiences of industrial labor toward the creation of critical cultural technology.

Digital Media Reviews

This quarterly column offers reviews of free and fee-based music resources in a variety of digital media, including online subscription services and databases, World Wide Web sites, mobile applications, CDROM products, and music-related software of any kind. Some reviews may cover a number of related sources together. Excluded from this column are reviews of media in purely digital audio format that would normally be reviewed as sound recordings.Dance in Video: Volume I. [Alexandria, Virginia]: Alexander Street Press, 2008-. http://alexanderstreet.com/products/dance-video (Accessed 29 May 2013). [Requires a Web browser, Adobe Flash Player, an audio- enabled device, and an Internet connection with a minimum bandwidth of 400kbps. Annual subscription ranges from $1,172 to $2,647; perpetual rights start at $10,000 plus a $125 annual access fee and range up to $25,000 plus a $500 annual access fee; pricing for both subscriptions and perpetual rights is dependent upon library size and budget. Discounts are available for consortial purchases; unlimited simultaneous users.]Introduction & ContentDance in Video: Volume I has been pre- sented by Alexander Street Press as con- taining 500 hours of video footage provid- ing an overview of 20th Century concert dance, including the forerunners and pio- neers of modern dance, covering ballet, tap, jazz, contemporary, experimental, and improvisation1 but the actual content seems to be heavily focused on traditional ballet, while only providing in-depth cover- age of a few particular choreographers in more modern dance form, and only a smat- tering of videos having to do with dance styles of particular regions and cultures. It contains videos dating between 1960 and 2012, with the bulk of the content from 1980-2012. Some of the footage is readily available on DVD, but in comparison to the institutional prices for DVDs, the Dance in Video database is a bargain (for example, the videos from Charles Dennis's Alive and Kicking series alone would cost more than $11,000 if purchased on DVD.)2Within Dance in Video, there are more than seven hundred individual videos faceted into many categories, the broadest being Performance (443), Choreography and Composition (326), History and Philosophy of Dance (195), Instruction (121), and Dance Theory (88). The collec- tion includes performances by companies such as Merce Cunningham Dance Com- pany, The Royal Ballet, Pilobolus, The American Ballet Company, Doug Varone and Dancers, and Eiko and Komo. One of the more interesting collections of videos included are a series of thirty-six Master- classes provided by the George Balanchine Foundation, in which ballet greats such as Allegra Kent and Maria Tallchief can be ob- served teaching Balanchine's choreography of particular roles to younger dancers.Interface DesignAlexander Street Press has been in the process of rolling out a new interface for its collections since fall 2013.3 The initial release has both simple and advanced searching capabilities, with robust faceted searching which appears on the left-hand sidebar of search results to further refine results. The ability to create custom video clips and playlists has been retained in the new platform, which allows one to book- mark and share custom playlists of videos, but as of the time of this review, this feature was only working for onsite users. In a per- sonal communication Alexander Street Press let the author know they were looking into this issue, and they suspect it involves a proxy issue for remote users. There is an extensive list of known issues with the new Alexander Street Platform posted on their website.4The video controls provided are intu- itive, including play/pause, fast forward, and rewind buttons, as well as a volume control slider. There is also a button that allows the user to jump back in thirty sec- ond increments. The layout of the screen can toggle between three views: default, thumbnails, and full-screen. …

Producing Christian docility: The female body in contemporary American evangelical dance

Abstract Contemporary American evangelical dance, both in novice and professional iterations, is a burgeoning subculture, that in its pursuit of excellence in honour of God, deploys many of the dominant discourses of power utilized by western concert dance, such as ideal body type in terms of size, race and gender. In addition to these discourses, contemporary Christian dance establishes additional discourses of power designed to promote an evangelical Christian message through such elements as movement vocabulary, costume and musical accompaniment. Dance studies scholars have utilized Foucault’s notion of ‘docile bodies’ as a technology of power to investigate the practices of ballet pedagogy and performance in western concert dance in general. However, no scholars to date have looked at the particular ways in which these practices are implemented by the subculture of American evangelical dance. This article examines the practices of two contemporary, professional, Christian dance companies in terms of movement vocabulary and costume choices to uncover the complex ways in which these companies cultivate discourses of power that contribute to a particular kind of docile body, the docile body that is controlled, disciplined and de-eroticized for Christian worship. I argue that uncovering the ways in which these practices contribute to docility in Christian dance leads scholars to a greater understanding of the dynamics between religious beliefs and the body in contemporary society.

Identity Attachment Influences Contemporary Dancers’ Career Transition

Abstract The career of a dancer in Western concert dance is often short, owing to factors such as family, injuries, low level of income, change of interests, unemployment, ageing, and frustration with working conditions. In this field, career transition has been portrayed as a multi-layered and comprehensive life change in which one of the key features is the loss of the identity as an artist. Despite this general understanding, there is little research on dancers’ identity and its possible relation to career transition. The paper focuses on describing the relationship between a dancer’s identity and injury based career transition through concepts of self and identity drawn from social psychology. The concepts of the self and identity are described through the metaphor of a circle that consists of three layers: the innermost (the self), the middle (the personal identity) and the outermost (the social identity) layer. In the article, the function of these layers and their inter-relationships in dancer identity is approached by interpreting stories constructed from the interviews of three former Finnish contemporary dance artists. The paper reveals that the vocational identity of the interviewed dancers is emphasized differently. This suggests a connection especially between the occupational (e.g. social) identity and the personal identity. In relation to career transition, attachment to dancer identity by the interviewees is described either as a facilitating or hindering factor. Thus the article suggests that the attachment to dancer identity does bear significance to the process of the life change of dancers.

Even as We Keep Trying: An Ethics of Interculturalism in Jérôme Bel's Pichet Klunchun and Myself

In 2004, Singaporean presenter Tang Fu Kuen commissioned French avant-garde choreographer Jérôme Bel to create a work in collaboration with classical Thai dancer-choreographer Pichet Klunchun. The resulting piece is unlike most intercultural collaborations. In the world of concert dance, East–West interculturalism takes place in a variety of ways: in costuming or set design, in theme or subject matter, in choreographic structure, in stylings of the body, in energetic impetus, in spatial composition, in philosophical attitude toward art making. Bel's work, titled Pichet Klunchun and Myself, does not combine aesthetics in any of these ways. In fact, the piece may more accurately be described not as a dance but as two verbal interviews (first by Bel of Klunchun and then vice versa) performed for an audience and separated by an intermission. There is no actual intermingling of forms—Thai classical dance with European contemporary choreography—in this performance. The intercultural “choreography” here comprises a staged conversation between the artists and some isolated physical demonstrations by each.

Bullying victimisation and social support of adolescent male dance students: an analysis of findings

This analysis (n = 33), drawn from the findings of the author’s larger mixed method research study, investigated bullying and harassment of adolescent male students (ages 13–18) pursuing dance study at the pre-professional level in the United States. Procedures for this analysis included review of primary and secondary sources from the international literature in psychology, adolescent and public health, paediatrics, sexuality studies, and dance education, an adapted version of the Dancer’s Social Support Scale, and data from online surveys and in-depth interviews. Findings indicate significant bullying of adolescent males engaging in western concert dance training. Analyses reveal pervasive heterocentric discourses and continued homophobic attitudes surrounding the adolescent male dancer and his experiences regardless of his sexual orientation. The importance of social support in and outside the dance studio especially support from his dance teacher-director, best friend in dance or school, and his mother figure prominently. Findings from research on bullying in the general and sexual minority populations are discussed. Pragmatic and critical approaches for understanding bullying and supporting bullied adolescent male dancers are presented.

Manaakitanga in Motion: Indigenous Choreographies of Possibility

This collaboratively-written essay explores manaakitanga —a Maori term referencing reciprocal hospitality and connectivity—both in a dance piece/practice called Mitimiti that Jack Gray is making for the concert dance stage, and in this essay itself, with its exchanges between Gray and dance scholar Jacqueline Shea Murphy. Both the dance, and the essay, suggest that stepping forward in connection, in relational and mutually beneficial exchange, is itself a process of indigeneity.

Night's dancer: the life of Janet Collins

Dancer Janet Collins, born in New Orleans in 1917 and raised in Los Angeles, soared high over the color line as the first African-American prima ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera. Night's Dancer chronicles the life of this extraordinary and elusive woman, who became a unique concert dance soloist as well as a black trailblazer in the white world of classical ballet. During her career, Collins endured an era in which racial bias prevailed, and subsequently prevented her from appearing in the South. Nonetheless, her brilliant performances transformed the way black dancers were viewed in ballet. The book begins with an unfinished memoir written by Collins in which she gives a captivating account of her childhood and young adult years, including her rejection by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Dance scholar Yael Tamar Lewin then picks up the thread of Collins's story. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with Collins and her family, friends, and colleagues to explore Collins's development as a dancer, choreographer, and painter, Lewin gives us a profoundly moving portrait of an artist of indomitable spirit.

Reclaiming Heritage and Healing Through Dance: Pearl Primus and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 01. Lynne Fauley Emery briefly mentions Primus's first trip to Africa in her groundbreaking work Black Dance from 1619 to Today (Palo Alto, Cal.: National Press Books, 1972), 264, as does Julia L. Foulkes in Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 175. I wrote a lengthier account of her travels in my book African-American Concert Dance: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 170–72. Primus wrote a number of articles based on her earliest travels to Africa: for example, see a wonderfully detailed account of the function of dance in different ethnic groups in her essay “Africa,” Dance Magazine (March 1958): 43–48.

Somatics in the Dance Studio: Embodying Feminist/Democratic Pedagogy

ABSTRACT Since the 1970s, somatics have increasingly become a part of the dance training landscape. Although the psychophysical benefits seem sufficient in themselves to warrant inclusion in dance, this article explores another possible outcome of embracing somatic pedagogical principles, a change that affects not what is taught in a dance class, but how dance is taught. Although much of contemporary educational philosophy has moved away from the traditional authoritarian model, authoritarian practices still pervade Western concert dance to the detriment of the field (Lakes 2005, 16). To move forward as an art form, there is a need to “transform … our pedagogical outlooks” (Fortin 1998, 67). This article seeks to illuminate common threads between somatic and feminist/democratic teaching to further the discourse on pedagogical practices in dance. The author also traces the impact of incorporating somatic principles in her teaching and her resultant evolution away from traditional methods toward a more egalitarian approach.

Where Are All the Women Choreographers in Ballet?

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Victoria Looseleaf, “A Female Force,” Dance Magazine, vol. 85, no. 3 (March 2011): 26–28, 30, 32. 2. Barbara Crockett, “Regional Dance America: Our Regional Heritage,” Dance Teacher Now, vol. 20, no. 6 (1998): 34, 36. 3. Victoria Morgan, “Deep Background: Theater and Dance Unite: A Voice Is Heard,” Dance/USA Journal, vol. 17, no. 1 (Summer 1999): 10–11, 13. 4. Lea Marshall, “‘Ballet Is Woman’? Not in the Artistic Director's Office,” Dance Magazine, May 4, 2010, http://www.dancemagazine.com/blogs/guest-blog/3349 (accessed December 7, 2011). 5. Judith Mackrell, “The ladies vanish,” The Guardian, May 12, 2009, 24, http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/may/13/dance-sadlers-wells-southbank?INTCMP=SRCH (accessed December 7, 2011). 6. John Martin, “The Dance: Events Ahead,” New York Times, September 27, 1942, X8; Anna Kisselgoff, “Bronislava Nijinska Is Dead at 81,” New York Times, February 23, 1972, 44; Jennifer Dunning, “Harlem Dancers and Diaghilev Days,” New York Times, January 28, 1983, C3; Anna Kisselgoff, “Nijinska, in Her Time, Was a Ballet Avant-Gardist,” New York Times, May 11, 1986, H9. 7. Jennifer Dunning, “Dance,” New York Times, April 4, 1982, TG3; Anna Kisselgoff, “Ballet: Pennsylvanians Open Season,” New York Times, April 7, 1982, C17. 8. Jennifer Dunning, “A Pennsylvanian Night of Dances by Women,” New York Times, April 9, 1982, C4. 9. Jennifer Dunning, “The Emphasis Is on the Avant-Garde,” New York Times, August 30, 1981, 72; Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance That Startles and Challenges Is Coming from Abroad,” New York Times, October 13, 1985, H1. 10. Jennifer Dunning, “Making Ballets, Just the Way Men Do,” New York Times, May 15, 1994, H8. 11. Robin Lakes, “The Messages behind the Methods: The Authoritarian Pedagogical Legacy in Western Concert Dance Technique Training and Rehearsals,” Arts Education Policy Review, vol. 106, no. 5 (2005): 3–18; see also, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1979), 135–69. 12. Alastair Macaulay, “For Ballet, Plots Thicken Or Just Stick?” New York Times, August 8, 2010, AR4. 13. Ibid.; see also, Alexandra Tomalonis, “Did Mrs. Harkness Win?” DanceView, vol. 24, no. 1 (2007): 19–25. 14. See Mindy Aloff, Preface, Agnes de Mille, Leaps in the Dark: Art and the World, ed. Mindy Aloff (Gainsville, Fl.: University Press of Florida, 2011), xiii–xIv. 15. See, for example, Joellen A. Meglin, “Blurring the Boundaries of Genre, Gender, and Geopolitics: Ruth Page and Harald Kreutzberg's Transatlantic Collaboration in the 1930s,” Dance Research Journal, vol. 41, no. 2 (2009): 52–75; Ann Barzel, “A Portrait of Catherine and Dorothie Littlefield,” in Dancing Female: Lives and Issues of Women in Contemporary Dance, ed. Sharon E. Friedler and Susan B. Glazer (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997): 23–44; Frank W. D. Ries, “Albertina Rasch: The Concert Career and the Concept of the American Ballet,” Dance Chronicle, vol. 7, no. 2 (1984): 159–97.

Dance anthropology and the impact of 1930s Haiti on Katherine Dunham's scientific and artistic consciousness

Katherine Dunham (19092006) was one of the most critically and commercially successful dancers of the twentieth century. She established and ran the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the earliest self-supporting predominantly black dance company and one of the first modern dance troupes to achieve international success. She was also one of the first African Americans to conduct anthropological fieldwork, and the first anthropologist to explore the function of dance in rituals and community life. Her observations of dance rituals whilst working as a graduate researcher in 1930s Haiti played a formative role in her dance. Her choreographic method combined Caribbean cultural forms with ballet and modern dance practices and has had a profound but rarely acknowledged influence on twentieth century dance. This article examines Dunham's anthropological memoir, Island Possessed (1969), to explore the formative role that Haiti played on Dunham's scientific and artistic consciousness. It contends that Island Possessed articulates a highly reflexive engagement with ethnography, re-envisaging anthropological research as a space of intercultural exchange. It shows how the text sheds light on a lifelong project by Dunham to enact an artistic and cultural legitimization of Haiti by incorporating its ritual dance forms onto the concert dance stage, an endeavour that would ensure a significant Haitian influence over North American dance throughout the mid-twentieth century.

Hasidic Drag: Jewishness and Transvestism in the Modern Dances of Pauline Koner and Hadassah

Hasidic Drag: Jewishness and Transvestism in the Modern Dances of Pauline Koner and Hadassah Rebecca Rossen On February 27, 1932, Pauline Koner, an emerging talent in U.S. concert dance, presented a series of solos at New York City's Town Hall. For this occasion, Koner, who was Jewish, premiered Chassidic Song and Dance, in which the choreographer portrayed a young Hasidic Jew.1 To a certain extent, the folksy and mystical Chassidic Song and Dance was not so different from the other dances that constituted Koner's repertory in the early 1930s. Indeed, aided by an array of vibrant costumes, the U.S.-born soloist would effortlessly transform herself over the course of an evening into a bouquet of foreign types—Hindu goddess, Moorish gypsy, Javanese temple dancer, Andalusian maid, Spanish flamenco dancer, and Russian peasant girl. However, Chassidic Song and Dance offered one critical distinc tion. In all of her other ethnic solos, Koner portrayed female characters; in Chassidic Song and Dance, she presented herself as a boy—in Jewish drag. Koner was not the only female dancer performing in Jewish drag on New York stages in the 1920s and 1930s. In Bar Mitzvah(1929), Belle Didjah depicted an Orthodox boy on the verge of manhood; YeshivaBachur(1932) was one of several dances in which Dvora Lapson portrayed a Talmudic student; Benjamin Zemach, a male choreographer, adorned an ensemble of Jewish women and men in Hasidic outfits for a 1931 concert; and Lillian Shapero offered a more abstract rendition in her Hasidic Sketches (1936). Jewish drag was also prevalent on U.S. and European Jewish stages and Feminist Studies37, no. 2 (Summer 2011), © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 334 Rebecca Rosseti 535 screens in the early-twentieth century. The Viennese choreographer Gertrud Kraus cross-dressed in The Jewish Boy and Song of the Ghetto in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and Judith Berg danced in drag throughout Poland in Menachem Mendel and Pilpul Tants in the years leading up to World War II.2 The most famous female-to-male drag performer was Molly Picon, an influential figure in Yiddish theater and film who frequently cross-dressed in such Second Avenue stage hits as Yankele (1922-1925) and the films Ost undWest(East and West; 1923) and Yidl mitn Fidl(Yidl with His Fiddle; 1937), presaging Barbra Streisand's Yeshiva "boy" in Yentl (1983). Feminist schol ars working in Jewish cultural studies have discussed Picon's Jewish trans vestism, but there are no studies that consider this substantial trend in U.S. concert dance more broadly.3 Although Koner did not perform on Yiddish stages in Manhattan, many of her peers did, demonstrating that performers, choreography, and representational modes flowed sinuously across town and genre. In these drag performances, stagings of Jewishness became entangled with choreographies of gender and nation, resulting in ethnically ambiguous and androgynous figures who simultaneously bolstered and evaded the frameworks that defined them. The role of gender in the staging of Jewishness in U.S. modern dance cannot be underestimated. Indeed, Jewish American choreographers have not only struggled with the ethnic and racial histories that have been in scribed on their bodies but also with their gendered histories.1 When choreographers such as Koner staged Jewishness, they inevitably staged gender as well. This article considers the provocative intermingling of gender, Jewishness, and embodiment in U.S. modern dance during the interwar and immediate postwar years in the dance works of Koner and the Pales tinian-born Hadassah, who, like Koner, perpetuated, and even capitalized on, an exotic persona. However, in Hadassah's 1947 signature work, Shuvi Nafshi (Return Oh My Soul),5 she replaced cross-dressing with cross gesturing. Instead of presenting Jewish drag, this choreographer's dances effectively appropriated and recontextualized ritual gestures restricted to Jewish men. Both Koner and Hadassah undeniably reproduced certain stereotypes about the East and Eastern European Jews. Nonetheless, their ethnic (and gestural) transvestism challenged essentialist notions of 336 Rebecca Rossen gender and ethnicity and, in Hadassah's case, dramatically undermined the androcentrism of traditional Judaism. To a certain degree, this article aims to coalesce feminist studies, Jewish cultural studies, and dance studies in order to more fully...

Vanishing: Dance Audiences in the Postmodern Age

Focusing on declining attendance at dance concerts in the United States, this essay raises questions about how we, as artists, are thinking about what we are doing in contemporary concert dance, what we value, how we teach, and the place of dance in today's postmodern culture. The views of scholars, critics, and artists are considered in the course of this investigation.

When men dance: choreographing masculinities across borders

Issues in the Pink and Blue West Maverick Men in Ballet: Rethinking the Making it Macho Strategy (Jennifer Fisher) Kristopher Wojtera, Aaron Cota What We Know About Boys Who Dance: The Limitations of Contemporary Masculinity and Dance Education (Doug Risner) David Allan, Michel Gervais Is Dance a Man's Sport Too? The Performance of Athletic-Coded Masculinity on the Concert Dance Stage (Maura Keefe) Fred Strickler Rennie Harris Transcending Gender in Ballet's LINES (Jill Nunes Jensen) Christian Burns The Performance of Unmarked Masculinity (Ramsay Burt) Donald McKayle, John Pennington Historical Perspectives Pricked Dances: The Spectator, Dance, and Masculinity in Early 18th Century England (John Bryce Jordan )Seth Williams Gender Trumps Race? Cross-dressing in Early Blackface Minstrelsy (Stephen Johnson) Paul Babiak: Diary of Channeling Juba Rehearsals Ausdruckstanz, Worker's Culture and Masculinity in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s Yvonne Hardt Hellmut Gottschild Legacies of Colonialism Invented Hypermasculinity: Colonial Influences on Dance Styles in Egypt, Iran, and Uzbekistan (Anthony Shay) Jamal Native Motion and Imperial Emotion: Male Performers of the 'Orient' and the Politics of the Imperial Gaze (Stavros Stavrou Karayanni) Namus Zokhrabov Ibrahim Farrah: Dancer, Teacher, Choreographer, Publisher (Barbara Sellers-Young) Saleem Azouka From Gynemimesis to Hyper-Masculinity: The Shifting Orientations of Male Performers of South Indian Court Dance (Hari Krishnan) Naatyaachaarya V.P. Dhananjayan Arun Mathai Appendix A: Notes on Personal History Interviews Appendix B: Questions for Personal History Interviews Notes on contributors

The Curious Case of Kykunkor: a dansical/musical exploration and reclamation of Asadata Dafora's Kykunkor, or the Witch Woman (1934)

It has never been easy to categorize or define the 1934 Broadway phenomenon that was Asadata Dafora's Kykunkor, or the Witch Woman. To date, the production, comprised of African song and dance, has been almost exclusively claimed, analyzed, and anthologized by dance scholars who frame the work as a formative example of black concert dance and African diaspora. This article refutes (and broadens) the sole concert dance definition and position of Kykunkor by situating the work within the musical theatre arena. In doing so, Kykunkor is shown to be not only an antecedent of the contemporary dance-dominant musical (or dansical) but also an example of the musical theatre Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Art Work), with its integrative musical construct/aesthetic. As such, Kykunkor represents a liminal form of the musical, setting the precedent for future musical theatre hybrids, variants, and/or mutations while serving as an example of complexity, diversity, and fluidity within the genre.

Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston (review)

Reviewed by: Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston Brenda Dixon Gottschild Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston. By Anthea Kraut. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2008. Anthea Kraut and Zora Neale Hurston have been living together for most of the new millennium. Looking over the publishing information at the front of Kraut's book—a reworking of her doctoral dissertation—informs us that portions of chapters appeared in previous journals and anthologies as early as 2001. Dance researchers adhere to habits of meticulous research and detailed detective work in completing our tasks. We have to: most scholars—not to mention lay people—have little sense of what we do or how dance research (except dance anthropology) could be of interest or relevance to other disciplines. In other words, we lack credibility. To compensate, dance scholarship has become one of the most thoroughly researched interdisciplinary pursuits of our era, and dance scholars take up residence with their topics. This work is no exception. With admirable dexterity of language and a minimum of jargon, Kraut opens the door and invites us in to a world of subtle readings and intertextual implications that surround this little-known piece of American cultural history and performance politics. Who knew that the illustrious Hurston was an accomplished dancer, choreographer, and producer of traditional dances in staged concert versions? And who would surmise that this information, as analyzed and deconstructed by Kraut, could resonate with as much meaning for literature, gender studies, and history scholars as for those of us in performance studies? Utilizing a theory of invisibilization, "… to borrow Brenda Dixon Gottschild's term for the systematic omission of the Africanist influences on American performance practices," (x), Kraut paints a landscape fraught with the assumptions of white privilege that placed Hurston in the "damned if we do, damned if we don't" trap that too often straitjackets Africanist creative endeavor. One example: Hurston's efforts to place traditional Caribbean and African American dances on the American concert stage as an antidote to stereotypical interpretations are, themselves, received as reinforcements of the stereotype. In Chapters 3 and 4 Kraut zeroes in on "The Great Day," Hurston's most elaborate folk (or traditional) revue, discussing in detail the backstory in creating this work and the issues arising in performing "authenticity." Indeed, authenticity and essentialist performance politics as played out in black and white America in the 1930s—particularly the left-leaning but Eurocentric New York concert dance milieu—are keynotes of this work. In Chapter 6, "Black Authenticity, White Artistry," the interactions that Hurston engaged in with Doris Humphrey, Ruth St. Denis, Mura Dehn, Helen Tamiris, Irene Castle, and theater director Irene Lewisohn are subjected to Kraut's scrutiny to scope out the ways that racialized relations affected the depth and quality of these interactions, largely at Hurston's expense. Throughout Kraut managed to unearth amazing print documentation (newspaper reviews and articles, personal letters and accounts) to tell this story. And the extraordinary [End Page 207] visuals belong in the "a picture is worth a thousand words" category, with dance as a microcosm for the racialism that pervaded society as a whole. Brenda Dixon Gottschild Temple University Copyright © 2010 Mid-America American Studies Association

Misnomer: Reflections on a Dance Performance

GHANA STUDIES / Volumes 12–13 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2011 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 249 MISNOMER: REFLECTIONS ON A DANCE PERFORMANCE SHERON WRAY Introduction African Dance troupes were integral to constructions of nationhood and pan-Africanism at the time of independence (Acogny 1988). There has been a tendency to forget their significance as part of a broader political culture in which building a repertoire of dances from a vast array of ethnic groups contributed to a national voice. The dancing body and drumming hands function as a form of memory and a material language forming an interlocking genealogical heritage across the continent. The term “African dance” is a misnomer, oversimplifying the weight and significance of the multiple languages of a varied cultural inheritance. The dances in Ghana are not like those in Senegal, and distinct from those in Guinea—distinctions which are not so easily detected by the untrained eye or ear (Fig. 1). Between the 1950s and 1970s, many national African national dance troupes were established including the Ghana Dance Ensemble. Keita Fodeba, founder of Les Ballets Africains de Guinea, was accused of defaming ethnic dances. In his defence, he argued that the company was creating access to “correct” ideas about life in Africa. Dances were altered by fusing diffuse regional dances, using interchangeable musical parts, extending aesthetic emphases, making visible plural gender participation, and staging them in auditoriums before secular audiences thus desacralizing their ritual function. The notion of traditional African dance is problematic (Welsh-Asante 1993); it is more reflective of post-colonial rhetorical aspirations than practice in dance performance. The dances of Africa are now part of the world stage and are equally subject to dynamic gainful scrutiny. Since the 1980s there has been a wave of NGO-funded cultural interventions across the 250 Ghana Studies • volumes 12–13 • 2011 continent that has had a significant impact on the evolution of “contemporary ” African dance. The space of contemporary African dance has thus become part of a shared heritage, which, in turn, implies the multicultural politics and aesthetic predilections of the global cultural capitols. In Africa, contemporary African dance is mainly performed for a rarefied audience made up of expatriates, NGO and corporate personnel. It remains to be seen if local audiences will gravitate towards these new practices. Whilst it is an interesting zone of experimentation, the artists themselves often divest themselves of all vocabulary that might label them “traditional” and therefore non-progressive. In general, the adoption of the contemporary African dance idioms implies attaining higher professional status within a spectrum of interconnected international performance venues and residencies. Finance and distribution of new work by and for Euro-American markets is the goal rather than an ideological debate about to purposefully breaking the rules of tradition or modernity. Figure 1. Ghana Dance Ensemble, whole company (Photo: R. Lane Clark) Wray • Misnomer: Reflections on a Dance Performance 251 Collaborative Work with Ghana Dance Ensemble, July 2009 I had the opportunity to collaborate with the Ghana Dance Ensemble (GDE), a professional dance company based at the University of Ghana, Legon, as part of a performance staged on 27 July 2009. At the University of Ghana, dance scholarship has been part of the University curriculum , initially under the auspices of the Institute of African Studies, since 1962. Working with a company grounded with such specialized historical knowledge and trajectory within dance practice was largely unknown to me in spite of my performance with African American dance idioms. I am a choreographer and director whose origins are from within the African Diaspora and my dance background might be summarized as having a European foundation. By way of England, my training and professional work stems from concert dance though my interest in my own origins that have taken me to Jamaica, Cuba, Gambia, Guinea, Trinidad, and Ghana for the first time in 2004. I came to this collaboration with a suitcase full of questions . I had only seven days to unpack, to layout how to ask them and how to process the feedback, and at the same time to construct a piece of work to share as the opening event for...

Navigating Liminal Space in the Feminist Ballet Class

The historically autocratic teaching model of Western concert dance provides both student and teacher with the comfort of expected ritual and outcomes. That comfort is greatly disrupted, however, in employing a pedagogy that has student empowerment at its center—feminist pedagogy. This paper will focus on the conditions of the liminal space created in shifting to a process-based educational approach from a traditionally product-driven training model.