Dance Ensemble Research Articles

Managing Culture: Discipline, Artistry, and Alternative Education in Ghana's State Dance Ensembles

Contributing to discourses on cultural nationalism, the postcolonial African state, and national dance, this article explores the politics of “managing” culture in West Africa by showing how members of Ghana’s two state dance ensembles mediate the surrounding disciplinary machinery to create possibilities for “self-improvement.” Initially, this discussion elucidates the processes by which national performers become “soldiers of culture” as their bodies and characters are trained and retrained with rigorous militaristic precision. Subsequently, it highlights performers’ artistry, examining how they tactically circumvent—or dance in between—this disciplinary apparatus, harnessing state institutions for personal ends. While taking advantage of the ensembles’ alternative education to develop artistic, social, and entrepreneurial skills, performers are also shown to ironically use these troupes as platforms to reproach their state/employer.

Black Dance and Cultural Representation in Britain - Commodification of Dance and its Effects on African Forms: The Case of Adzido Pan-African Dance Ensemble

Black Dance and Cultural Representation in Britain - Commodification of Dance and its Effects on African Forms: The Case of Adzido Pan-African Dance Ensemble

A Platonic Sextet for Strings

SummaryThe use of traditional string figures by the Dr. Schaffer and Mr. Stern Dance Ensemble led to experimentation with polyhedral string constructions. This article presents a series of polyhedra made with six loops of three colors which sequence through all the Platonic Solids.

Choreographing Asian America by Yutian Wong. 2010. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. x + 280 pp. notes, bibliography, index. $27.95 paper.

choreographers or events to ausdruckstanz, which informed a certain moment of nation building, enables the reader to see changes in scale. Whereas Keefe showcases individuals, Hardt shifts to masses and the communities that chal- lenge national formation and the processes of mechanization associated with capital. Many of the other pieces provide thick descriptions of movement vocabularies that construct masculinities in different contexts. In the contributions by dancers Fred Strickler and Rennie Harris, artists and teachers of differ- ent generations respectively from the Midwest and East Coast of the U.S., dance seems to have insinuated opposing masculinities within the communities in which each came of age. Such accounts of the diverse means by which movement registers and enacts larger social anxieties attendant to constructions of masculi- nity recur throughout the book. From Jennifer Fisher’s and Jill Nunes Jensen’s respective explorations of the hyperbolic imagination and expression of gendered relationships in classical ballet to Stephen Johnson’s essay on transvestite acts in Juba’s minstrel shows, this collection encourages both thinking through the body as scripted through matrices of gender but also the body as a sight of negotiation, perhaps even resistance, to the norms that obtain in a given time and place or through highly codified forms of corporeal expression. Here Juba’s self- conscious play of gender might become the sur- prising antecedent to the choreography of Alonzo King. To be clear, my pairing of these two pieces does not gesture toward some ima- gined racial link but rather to an awareness of the constraints regulating people’s expressive capacities at distinct moments in time. For me, the collection produces its most substantive arguments in relation to how mas- culinity physically manifests under and as differ- ent regimes of power (e.g., Namus Zokhrabov’s recounting of the politics within the Azerbaijan State Dance Ensemble). The invention of traditions, the propping up of national and international discourses on particular demon- strations of masculine power, the assertion of moving men as an exercise in modernity— these are the elements of the book that promise to advance dance and masculinity studies together. Along this line, the “legacies of coloni- alism” section furthers the steps begun by some of the earlier contributions. The emphasis here on overlapping disciplinary mechanisms that inform the perception of moving bodies articu- lates why bodies matter in particular configur- ations, spaces, and times (Anthony Shay’s essay, for example, includes a wide overview of these issues). The labor of dancers harnessed to imperialist and nationalist ideals, often sim- ultaneously, is worth exploring because the pro- cesses of empire and nation-state formation have long been analyzed in gendered terms. But the work here insists that these sorts of ana- lyses must not only function at the level of dis- cursive abstraction. Enactments of power can be the subtle acts of bodies moving independently or together; perhaps this is the principal reason to study when men dance. However, the Introduction emphasizes pho- bia; When Men Dance is situated as a response to strategies that have marginalized dancing males. In this vein, the project seems not so distant from that of institutions such as The Gold School (a dance education venue in Massachusetts), which recently premiered its anti-bullying piece “accept ME.” Perhaps the field of dance studies requires this intervention. The editors seem to think so, for the Appendix reveals questions posed to generate discussion of stereotypes faced in the course of men’s dancing careers. Because the brief narratives continually return the reader to the potential difficulties in choosing to be a male dancer, the volume as a whole shades a bit too much toward the therapeutic, at least for me. On the other hand, a nice bit of therapy for $29.95 is a good deal, and the reader will certainly learn something along the way. Sean Metzger Duke University Choreographing Asian America Choreographing Asian America by Yutian Wong. 2010. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. x + 280 pp. notes, bibliography, index. $27.95 paper. doi:10.1017/S0149767711000453 “Can you name an Asian American choreogra- pher?” (1)—so begins Yutian Wong’s ground- breaking study, Choreographing Asian America. This book carefully and critically fills the silence that would presumably follow this question. I suggest silence because the two sites the DRJ 44/1 • SUMMER 2012

Artistic Dialogue and Artistic Exchange through Movement

This article will narrate the process of working in artistic collaboration utilizing traditional Ghanaian dance forms and Western dance-making methods while incorporating a common artistic thread between the two cultures. Invited to create a new work of choreography for the Ghana Dance Ensemble (GDE), the author as guest artist choreographer explored ways of creating a hybrid dance work that honored the artistic footprint of GDE. The choreographer engaged company members, consisting of both dancers and musicians, in daily rehearsals and dialogue about the artistic process and the aesthetic roots from which each artist was grounded. Compositional structures were explored cross-culturally. Traveling out to several field sites, the choreographer was able to view and participate in sacred ceremony for more grounding and artistic information. From this process, a dialogic space was created in which new meanings were shared between cultures and traditional artistic values re-imagined. Dialogue through conversation was not the only exchange of importance. An additional dialogue was that of dancing bodies viewing each other, adapting and integrating change firmly grounded in each other's originating aesthetic footprint. Equally important was the exchange in a culture where it is inherent that the music sounds the dance and the dance moves the music. Thus the dialogue extended itself where the choreographer tried on new ways of thinking about the sounding body just as GDE integrated the choreographer's approaches and made it their own through their own processes of creative invention.

Wendy Hilton: A Life in Baroque Dance (review)

Wendy Hilton: A Life in Baroque Dance. By Wendy Hilton and Susan Bindig. (Wendy Hilton Dance & Music Series, no. 14.) Hillsdale, NY: Pen - dragon Press, 2010. [xvii, 295 p. ISBN 9781576471333. $65.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Wendy Hilton (1931-2002), a British historical dancer, teacher, choreographer, and scholar, was a pivotal figure in the development of baroque dance performance and scholarship. This book, described the back cover as a memoir, is the first account of her life and work, and as such is a very welcome addition to the slim historiography of the historical dance revival. Any - one who has been involved in the field would inevitably be drawn to a book that offers insight into Hilton's role in its genesis: i.e., her dance education, the sources of her skills and knowledge, the extent of her work, the development of her teaching style, her creative process in dance reconstruction and choreography, and her intellectual growth during the course of her career. (Disclosure: I took classes with Hilton at the International Early Dance Institute, Montclair State University, and Universite Laval). Started on the recommendation of (p. 270), only the three first chapters of Hilton's book were near completion at the time of her death. Susan Bindig, her former student, colleague, and friend, edited and completed Hilton's work, linking what had been written for later chapters with memoirs and correspondence of colleagues and friends, as well as information from Hilton's personal papers and other sources. The book is divided into three parts. The first part (chaps. 1-6) contains Hilton's reminiscences of formative events that marked her early years in England from 1931 until 1959. She writes about her family, experience growing up during World War II, initial interests in dance and music, dance training, early career as a dancer working for dance companies and movies and television productions (and supplementing her income by modeling for artists), and her first meeting with the dance specialist Belinda Quirey. This section presents fascinating anecdotes not only of well-known twentieth-century dance figures such as Marie Rambert and Audrey de Vos, but also of famous movie personalities such as Audrey Hepburn, Clark Gable, and Peter Sellers. In the second part (chaps. 7-11), Hilton discusses her work in historical dance in England from 1956 until 1971. She talks (at times quite waspishly) about learning from and collaborating with Quirey, meeting other dance historians such as Melusine Wood, Cyril Beaumont, and Karl Heinz Taubert, and forming the Domenico Dance Ensemble, an early-dance company. A research grant from the Arts Council of Great Britain allowed her to travel to France, Germany, and Sweden. Meeting with pianist and Bach specialist Rosalyn Tureck led her to visit the United States in 1968 and emigrate there in 1971. The third part (chaps. 12-18) focuses Hilton's career in America from 1971 until her death in 2002. This part begins chronologically but deliberately backtracks at two points: chapters 13 to 15 cover the years 1971 to 1994 and mostly explore Hilton's work the East Coast, at the Juilliard School, Rutgers University, and SUNY Purchase, along with her problems with torticollis that eventually ended her performing career; chapters 16-17 concentrate her work the West Coast from 1968 to 2001, in particular the summer workshop she directed at Stanford University from 1974 to 2001; and chapter 18 returns to 1994 to give an account of Hilton's last years: her work as editor of the Pendragon Dance and Music series (later renamed after her), her memoirs, her cancer, death in 2002, and commemoration. In the third part, the narrative changes from first person to third, incorporating fragments written by Hilton as quotations. The problem of doing so is that the emotional connection established between the reader and the original writer (Hilton) is unfortunately lost. …

Sangre (Blood)

Sangre (Spanish for “blood”) is a series of choreographic works developed in Toronto by Colombian artist Olga Barrios. The project was presented in three phases and united by the theme of dehumanization of violence through acts of war. These works are framed within a multidisciplinary approach in which the staging of dance is supported by elements of theatre, video, and music. The choreography involves research into the themes of rhythm, image, and theatricality. Many places in the world deal with longstanding social conflicts. Colombia, my country of origin, has a history with strong issues of social violence that are related to the social/political environment of inequality and corruption. This conflict has lasted more than four decades and its end seems further away every day. Because of this ongoing situation and its involvement in every facet of Colombian society, everyone has a story to tell. Every day there is news of horrendous acts happening in small towns, usually affecting innocent people caught in the middle. Most of the people in Colombia no longer know to whom this conflict belongs or the motivations behind it. They have to live with the consequences: the fear in the atmosphere, and the dehumanization caused by war. There are many acts related to this social violence of war such as kidnappings, massacres and forced displacements. Based on the resonance of some of these acts, I began the choreographic process of the series Sangre. Each piece in this series focused on one of these acts. Thus, the piece “Behind Windows” was initiated by the theme of kidnapping, “Los Ausentes” (The Absent Ones) focused on a massacre, and the dance installation “Moving Earth” centered around images of forced displacements. The first piece “Behind Windows” was choreographed and performed as a solo in the McLean Performance Studio at York University as part of the MFA thesis concert “Cuatro.” The second piece of the series, “Los Ausentes,” was choreographed for the six dancers of the York Dance Ensemble and was presented in the Sandra Faire and Ivan Fecan Theatre at York University as part of the second MFA thesis concert “Penumbra.” The last piece “Moving Earth,” is an exploration of a specific site resulting in the creation of a dance installation where the nature of the space changed the dynamic of spatial composition. This final piece was presented at Arta Gallery in the Distillery District in Toronto. In developing my choreographic work, I used strong contrast between elements of narrative, movement, music and theatre. I also explored my own reality as a woman whose life is affected by technology and information of the contemporary world; however, I found it important to maintain some sense of history and a flavour of the past. In the use of video I explored how the two-dimensional world of video can play and negotiate with the three-dimensional world of the body in performance. This project was possible thanks to the collaborations of many artists and friends: Project Supervisor Carol Anderson (Professor at MFA Dance Department at York University) ; Composer/Musicians Diego Marulanda and Luisito Orbegoso; Visual Artists , Maria Flawia Litwin, Alexandra Gelis and Trevor Schwellnus; Dramaturg Alejandro Roncería; Costume Designer Ruth Gutiérrez. Dancers: Krista Antonio, Brittany-Brie D’Amico, Hannah Greyson-Gaito, Mellisa Kwok, Jennifer Lee and Caroline Vukson. Adriana Sabogal, Fay Athari, Amy Stewart, Mayahuel Tecozautla, Amanda Paixao and my husband Juan Carlos Márquez.

The Sankofa Drum and Dance Ensemble: Motivations for student participation in a school world music ensemble

The Sankofa Drum and Dance Ensemble is a world music ensemble at the elementary level that focuses on Ghanaian music in the Ewe tradition. The ensemble consists of students in grades 4 through grade 8 and is one of the few world music ensembles in the school board. This article will examine the qualitative data from the interviews of nine students participating in the ensemble at the time of study (2007), exploring both their motivations for joining and for remaining in the Sankofa Drum and Dance Ensemble. Motivations will be examined categorically, considering the different musical, psychological and social motivations the students cite as their reasons for ensemble participation. The data concludes that there are many musical, psychological, and social reasons for ensemble participation and offers implications for music education.

The oral tradition in the Sankofa Drum and Dance Ensemble: student perceptions

The Sankofa Drum and Dance Ensemble is a Ghanaian drum and dance ensemble that focusses on music in the Ewe tradition. It is based on an elementary school in the Greater Toronto Area and consists of students in Grade 4 through Grade 8. Students in the ensemble study Ghanaian traditional Ewe drumming and dancing in the oral tradition. Nine students were interviewed for their perceptions of the effects of their ensemble participation on their lives. Feelings about being taught through the oral tradition instead of through notation were extremely strong. Students much preferred being taught aurally. Their comments on the aural and written musical learning styles are quite insightful and have powerful implications for music education.

Dancing in the House of Koryak Culture

This paper explores two interrelated themes found in the anthropol- ogy of ethnic dance ensembles in Kamchatka, Russia: authenticity and the place of individual in society. I use two elite dance troupes (one professional, the other semi-professional) to analyse local categories of cultural authenticity. People in Kamchatka were vocal about representations of indigenous dance on the stage and critiqued dance performances on the basis of whether or not they lived up to their expectations for a proper representation of traditional forms. These cri- tiques are consistently made with respect to the representations themselves and are wholly detached from ethnic (or other) identities of the performers. They provide insight into the nature of authorised knowledge of cultural traditions in Kamchatka. The second part of the paper explores the role of children's dance ensembles in cultural revival movements in small villages. Performing tradi- tional indigenous Kamchatkan dance is not a case of memorising a set stock of moves and positions but entails finding oneself through an individually crea- tive engagement with a style modelled by elders. In both cases, I argue that a semiotics of dance focuses our attention on what symbols do (as opposed to simply what they mean) within a cultural field.

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...

An Interactive Music Environment for Large Groups with Giveaway Wireless Motion Sensors

interfaces (e.g., Siegel and Jacobsen 1998; Paradiso et al. 2000; Aylward and Paradiso 2006) allow a single dancer or small group of dancers to control music with their actions, but these do not scale to allow for hundreds of participants to interact concurrently. Various vision-based tracking systems are able to extract considerable nuance from dance ensembles (e.g., Wechsler, Weiss, and Dowling 2004; Obermaier 2004; Camurri et al. 1999), but they generally exploit a highly structured and stable stage environment with tight lighting constraints. The problems of cost, data-communication bandwidth, and system responsiveness become increasingly difficult as the number of participants increases. A system that could effectively give control to a large number of dancers offers the possibility of environments with extremely responsive music and lighting, engaging users with a heightened sense of expressiveness. To address these issues of large-group musical mapping, we have developed a scalable system first introduced in Feldmeier (2002); Feldmeier, Malinowski, and Paradiso (2002); and Feldmeier and Paradiso (2004) that can effectively gather data over an essentially unlimited audience size. The system consists of wireless sensors that are given to audience members to collect rhythm and activity information from the crowd that can be used to dynamically determine musical structure, sonic events, and/or lighting control. (A block diagram of the system is shown in Figure 1.) The sensors are small and lightweight, and they can therefore be either worn or held by a participant. To detect the participant's motion, they have radio-frequency (RF) transmitters that send a short pulse of RF energy whenever they encounter a dynamic acceleration greater than a predetermined level. Finally, they are inexpensive enough to be viable as disposable, giveaway items for large crowds. The sensors' RF pulses are collected by receiver base stations that have limited sensitivity, enabling the development of zones of interaction around each one. In this manner, multiple base stations can be used in a venue to create distinct areas where the controller takes on new functions. This zoning information can also be used to direct the music and

Reinado do Rosário de Itapecerica (MG): Da Festa e dos Mistérios, and: Folia de Reis: Tradiçāo e Fé (review)

Reviewed by: Reinado do Rosário de Itapecerica (MG): Da Festa e dos Mistérios, and: Folia de Reis: Tradição e Fé Suzel Ana Reily CD Review: Reinado do Rosário de Itapecerica (MG): Da Festa e dos Mistérios(2005), Associação do Reinado do Rosário de Itapecerica/Viola Corrêa Produções Artísticas; Folia de Reis: Tradição e Fé(2006), Viola Brasileira Show Produções e Eventos. Although Brazil has the largest population of Roman Catholics in the world, the musical traditions associated with popular Catholicism in the country have received very little academic attention. For this reason alone the two sets of double CDs, Reinado do Rosário de Itapecerica (MG): Da Festa e dos Mistérios and Folia de Reis: Tradição e Fé, are most welcome. They offer some of the first accessible recordings of two central spheres of Brazilian popular Catholic expressions amongst some of the poorest sectors of Brazilian society: The Festival of [Our Lady of] the Rosary, a quintessential form of African-Brazilian Catholicism that involves performances by several types of percussion-based dance troupes, and the folias de reis, mummer-like ensembles that go from house to house during the Christmas season to bring the blessing of the Three Kings in exchange for donations to stage a collective festival on January 6, Kings' Day. Both [End Page 173]CD sets were supported by the Centro de Memória Digital of the University of Brasília and funded by Petrobas, which has become a major sponsor of Brazil's cultural heritage. To make the recordings, the production teams took advantage of events where they would have easy access to the ensembles. However, because the two events were distinct, the two sets present rather different ethnographic approaches. The Reinado do Rosáriodocuments the various percussion and dance ensembles that performed during the Festival of the Rosary in Itapecerica, Minas Gerais, in 2004, depicting thereby local forms of a widespread form of religious expression. Folia de Reiswas recorded during the annual Meeting of Folias de Reis ( Encontro de Folias de Reis) promoted by the local government of Brasília in 2005, which attracted numerous ensembles from various parts of the country. The sets are accompanied by booklets containing explanatory texts. A special touch was added through the inclusion of direct quotes made by performers; these quotes give the reader a powerful glimpse into the ways in which participation in the ensembles is experienced by devotees. The complete sung text of each track is also provided, allowing one to follow the ritual scripts during listening. The more extensive booklet accompanies the Reinado do Rosário. Alongside an overview of the festival structure, there are three short studies. The first by historian Marcos Magalhães provides a contextualization of the festival through a general discussion of the emergence and dissemination of devotion to Our Lady of the Rosary in colonial Minas Gerais, highlighting the role of the black confraternities as havens for the preservation of black memory. This is followed by literary critic and sociologist Sebastião Rios's informed reading of the texts used by the ensembles in their toadas(songs); he shows how their themes articulate with the cultural legacy of the mainly black performers, drawing attention to the secretive—or "mysterious"—dimensions of the tradition. The section of perhaps greatest interest to ethnomusicologists comes at the conclusion, in Roberto Corrêa's discussion of the musical elements in the ensembles' repertoires, which includes musical transcriptions of some melodies and percussion parts. While the texts have been carefully crafted to avoid exoticizations, one is still left a bit disappointed by the fact that none of the writers seem to have undertaken extensive field research into the specific traditions they have represented. Thus, the texts are often rather general, at times quite problematically so. In linking contemporary practices in the Festival of the Rosary to the African context, "the Bantu" tend to be represented as a coherent and unified entity. Moreover, there are several different types of performance groups that participate in the Festival, including moçambiques, marinheiros, catoptés, vilões, but no clear explanation is provided [End...

Staging the Nation: Authenticity, Authentication, and Authority in the Ghana Dance Ensemble

This paper will explore the migration of local and global markers of authority as members of the Ghana Dance Ensemble (GDE) negotiate the ideologies of nationalism, attempting to re/create cultural forms that will be judged “authentic” by both indigenous and international communities. This will include examining how Western and local practices have merged to re/establish power relationships between choreographers and performers as they work to devise strategies that give an aura of authenticity to various dance forms.

War in Rapanui Music: A History of Cultural Representation

This article examines historical associations between music and war on the Polynesian island of Rapanui (Easter Island; figure 1). Throughout Polynesia, bellicose themes appear in the lyrics of songs commemorating legendary battles and warriors, as well as in depictions of combat in staged and un-staged performances appealing to tourist and indigenous audiences alike. On Rapanui, spears, clubs and other artefacts of war embellish performances by contemporary music and dance ensembles, together with dance moves that imitate martial activity. One recently successful ensemble has even taken the name Matato'a (an ancient term meaning ‘warrior’ or ‘guardian') as a means of symbolizing their cultural guardianship. While these performances are aimed at the tourist market, they are not devoid of local significance. Indeed, the recent push to generate a diverse repertoire of Rapanui music for cultural performances has arguably assisted in the revitalization and preservation of precontact songs, chants, and dances that would otherwise be consigned only to the memories of Rapanui elders and the dusty pages of obscure ethnographic works.

Cultural Education in Ghana: A Case Study of Dance Development in the University System

In 1962, when the Ghana Dance Ensemble (then the National Dance Company of Ghana) was formed at the Institute of African Studies of the University of Ghana for research into African dance-theatre, ...

Urban Bush Women: Finding Shelter in the Utopian Ensemble

Urban Bush Women are an African-American women's dance ensemble that have repeatedly sought the utopian ensemble — a collective that forms alliances through community rather than through the notion of the hero — in their performance of African diaspora experiences. The Urban Bush Women collectively create an idealized space, realized in their dances by physical contact between the performers' bodies. The company, founded by lawole Willa Jo Zollar, began presenting work in 1984 and has continued to develop an extensive and evocative dance repertory. At times overtly political, the dances embody the black female experience in a way that "invites critical interpretive readings largely because of the way in which aesthetic and political agendas are intertwined". While recent articles about the Urban Bush Women discuss the political nuances of their work, the repeated use of the collective ensemble is a unique feature of the company's dance style that merits further discussion.

Venice Theatre Biennale 2003: visionaries and peacemakers, building and rebuilding

This article reviews the 2003 Venice Theatre Biennale, with particular focus on the choices made by its artistic director, Peter Sellars, whose agenda was multicultural and who focused on societies that aspired to economic justice in the twenty-first century. Featured productions are the Cambodian choreographer Sophiline Cheam Sapiro's Samritechak, a version of Othello, and Lemi Ponifasio's Samoa-based Paradise, performed by Mau, the theatre dance ensemble he founded to speak for a group of Pacific islands.

ANTHONY SHAY, Choreographic Politics: State Folk Dance Companies, Representation and Power (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002). Pp. 290. $65.00 cloth; $19.95 paper.

Anthony Shay's Choreographic Politics fills an important gap in the research of the history of folk dancing, a gap opened by the controversial status of “state folk dance ensembles,” whose performances have often been neglected or despised by folklorists and dance scholars. Staged folk dances have always charmed audiences with the energy they embed in their performances but they have also puzzled them, because it is clear that they are more of a “representation” than a true reflection of a locality's reality. The analysis of “state folk dance ensembles,” then, moves on the edges of folklore and “fake lore,” the art of dance and the ethnography of dance. Choreographic Politics touches on this very sense of illusion and disillusion, focusing on the politics of state folk dance ensembles, a cultural product of the post-war era.

Folklore and Oral Tradition

Whereas some of the cultural models for folklore are of a relatively constant nature, performing situation and variation are characteristically unstable features of oral tradition. There is no definition of folklore that would cover the whole discipline. Folklore in its oral and traditional form is in most cases transmitted orally and serves as shared tradition-based creations of a cultural community. I would not include public sector or applied folklore within this concept of oral tradition: the manifestations of applied folklore include folk festivals, various folk song and dance ensembles, or folklore festivals held all over the world. Applied folklore does not have the status of folklore proper. The Folklore Archive of the Finnish Literature Society has used an inventory or classification system based on the division of folklore into loosely defined genre groups. This system is particularly applicable to manuscript materials (older material in archives) and is still in use. It should be stressed that this system was created on the basis of Finnish folk material and therefore includes non-universal, national categories. But it was augmented as researchers in folk traditions turned their attention toward new materials and subject areas. The bulk of early collecting efforts was concentrated solely on ancient oral (folk) poetry in the Kalevala meter; gradually interests broadened to include Marchen (tales) as well, and the first half of the twentieth century saw the gradual inclusion of legends, rhymed folksongs, proverbs, and so forth. In time, the system covered the bulk of Finnish agrarian oral culture. For the sake of clarity, the following sketch of contents has been slightly simplified.