Dance World Research Articles

‘I wanted to be Darcey Bussell’: Motivations and experiences of female dance teachers

Dance, analogous to professional sport, constitutes an interesting occupation in that there are relatively few vocations in which the athleticism of the body is inextricably linked to the ability to perform and teach. Dance teachers could pursue teaching as a career as a way to remain involved in the physicality of dance to maintain a sense of self as a dancer. Dance teachers make up a large proportion of the professional dance world in the United Kingdom and yet little is known about their role, training, continuing professional development and motivations to engage in a dance teaching career. To address this lacuna, research was undertaken with ten female dance-teachers (24 to 71 years). Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data, from which two key themes emerged as salient: (i) staying in dance; (ii) dance teaching as a career: challenges and skills. Pursuing a career in dance teaching was viewed as a way to maintain a sense of self as a dancer. Participants who had been dance performers appeared to view teaching as a natural career progression. The complex skills required of a dance teacher were highlighted and participants positioned dance teaching as a highly specialist career.

Grandma...Is That You? Life among hip-hopping seniors

Grandma… Is That You? How would you like to dance your way into old age, instead of fearing it? One film about hip hopping seniors might be just the inspiration you need by Dante Puleio What is your grandmother doing right now? What if I told you she could be a dancer, performing for 18,000 people as part of the New Jersey Nets NETSationals Senior Hip Hop Dance team? You would most likely shake your head and say, “Nope, not my grandmother,” to which I would reply, “Have you seen Dori Berinstein’s documentary Gotta Dance”? This 95- minute film follows the story of a New Jersey basketball team sponsoring a dance troupe for their halftime shows, specifically comprised of people over 60 years old. This film divulges every aspect of the premiere of the NETSational experience. It starts with the audition and leads the viewers through rehearsals and performances, to the media’s and the fans’ crazed response, and takes the audience to the end of the basketball season. It’s a moving story of thirteen would- be dancers, baring their souls and dreams to fans and strangers all over the world. Why should you watch this? Let me answer this by asking you another question. Where do you picture yourself as a senior citizen? If you’re having a hard time answering that, it’s understandable, most dancers do. For dancers, it seems the future is a blurry, scary place that tends to be placed on a shelf far out of reach, in hopes that it never comes to find us, in hopes we’ll steer clear from the rigidity of age and the loss of mobility. This film helps dilute that fear. It allows the viewer to see another option for what may lie ahead. Whether we like it or not we will all be senior citizens one day, looking back on our long lost youth in dreamy nostalgia. One way to combat lingering over that scenario is by spending an afternoon being inspired by people making the choice to take a chance. They don’t allow any obstacle to stand in the way of making a positive change in their lives. Gotta Dance does exactly what documentaries are supposed to do. It lures you into understanding what it is to be in someone else's shoes, while reminding you of your own perspective. Gotta Dance connects you to each senior by allowing the audience to see what their lives are like and what drew them to the audition. You get a taste of the difficulties that litter the path of success for the older generation, while exposing the perspective of the younger dancers who are working with and choreographing on the senior citizen dance team. Viewers get insight about both sides, as well as a great deal of hope and inspiration. Each part of the film demonstrates different aspects of dance world, like the amount of fun it is being a performer, the glory of the cheers, and the fulfilling validation once the hard work has been appreciated by the masses. It also lets the viewer experience the stress involved, the nerves and fears of dancing in front of 18,000 to 20,000 people. A less familiar side of the process emerges here, too, a side that younger dancers may not yet be familiar with. We begin to understand what it is to be over sixty years old, going through all of this and trying to accomplish these things for the first time. These senior hip hoppers have the same goals as the twenty- somethings but they have weaker, slower bodies and brains to pursue them with. Their motor coordination is not what it was forty years ago, which can be frustrating. The young dancers choreographing on them experience frustration as well. They may sympathize with these seniors,

No Time to Eat? Think twice about taking shortcuts with your health, or your dancing will suffer

No Time to Eat? Think twice before taking shortcuts with your health, or your dancing will suffer by Isaac Lai Lather, rinse, and repeat. Life as a dancer in a college setting ties you onto to a constantly cycling schedule, forcing you to keep moving with it or fall off. When do you eat? Daily schedules of dancers follow the typical pattern of multiple technique classes back to back, rehearsals, academic classes and coursework tossed into the mix, more rehearsals, and, if there’s time, extracurricular activities. These elements were all present in Kristyn Brady’s recent Dance Magazine article about the schedules of dance students in three college institutions: Juilliard, Indiana University, and Harvard. If you’re in a setting where heavy involvement in performance projects and classes are stressed, there’s always pressure to stay busy and active. In fact, when students are not involved in projects, they may develop a sense of disconnect from their department. Performance and studio opportunities provide exposure to life in the professional dance world and offer incredible learning opportunities. However, a major side effect of this scheduling overload is the effect it can have on shaping dietary habits. As a fourth-year dance major at UCI, I find that when day is fraught with nonstop movement and there’s always somewhere to be, some things get pushed back on the list of priorities. Food consumption becomes one of them. Picture this: You wake up to shrill beeping of the alarm penetrating the brief moment of peace you had achieved in sleep. Reaching over to put an end to the annoying intrusion, you feel the ache of your muscles gained from yesterday’s technique class. Glancing briefly at the clock through squinted eyes, you notice you have 45

Dance on its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies ed. by Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot (review)

Reviewed by: Dance on its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies ed. by Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot Ariel Nereson DANCE ON ITS OWN TERMS: HISTORIES AND METHODOLOGIES. Edited by Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013; pp. 456. Since the mid-1990s, dance studies has integrated with other disciplines, including performance studies, visual studies, cultural studies, and others. The 1997 volume Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance set a standard for this kind of interdisciplinary work, and others—Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader (2001) and The Routledge Dance Studies Reader (2010)—have sprung up in response to the field’s increased visibility in academia. In their new collection, editors Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot aim to re-center dance studies onto dance itself: onto movement and its phenomenal and material qualities. They argue that dance studies’ interdisciplinary forays, while rich and provocative, have compromised the study of dance on its own terms: “[i]n their eagerness to adopt theoretical language from other disciplines, dance scholars have lost fluency in their own language” (4). This language emphasizes familiarity with particular schools of movement analysis and notation, allowing for scholarship that springs from dancing itself rather than beginning with external concerns about the body as a site or sign. Dance on Its Own Terms provides great depth in terms of modeling strong, dance-centered scholarship, but represents a fairly narrow range of dance itself. The editors divide the volume’s sixteen chapters into three sections that emphasize, respectively, spectatorship and reconstruction, physical/kinesthetic dance histories of particular figures, and methods of dance notation. Section 1 begins with Karen Eliot’s analysis of canon formation in British ballet circa World War II, including her timely reminder that “the mechanics and politics of canon formation … do not operate uniformly across the disciplines” (13). Ann Dils’s reflective chapter on restaging the challenging Jean Cocteau/Darius Milhaud farce Le Boeuf sur le Toit (1920) for a contemporary college audience provides a clear analysis of race and gender issues within the work, and also a model for imagining our pedagogical practices alongside our artistic ones. Deborah Friedes Galili offers the highly useful notion culture of reconstruction, terminology that frames her investigation of the “institutional structures and artistic and scholarly discourses” that determine reconstruction practices across geographies (67). Betsy Cooper convincingly demonstrates that the Production Code Administration’s censorship assessments about the “decency” of a dance in Golden Age Hollywood films were linked to a high art/popular entertainment binary that reified balletic movement, even if those choreographies [End Page 586] technically violated the code. Harmony Bench reads Beyoncé’s viral “Single Ladies” choreography (2008) as a negotiation of gender and sexuality within internet culture, offering an exemplary integration of a dance-centered perspective (movement analysis of the choreography itself and its lineage) with contemporary theoretical concerns (kinesthetic transfer through digital media). In section 2, Catherine Turocy’s strong essay on how dancers (and scholars) in the present might enter into the spatial world of Baroque dance includes an invaluable series of exercises for readers and dancers that demonstrates the Baroque understanding of space, physicality, and aesthetics. Bales’s own excellent chapter in this section, a comparative movement analysis across three different interpretations of pas de deux (Marius Petipa, George Balanchine, and William Forsythe), connects movement itself across the three dances and to disciplinary questions in dance criticism and history in rich and compelling ways. Carrie Gaiser Casey examines the shape of maternal relationships between Anna Pavlova and her ballerinas through a feminist lens, arguing that we acknowledge the contradictions inherent in these relationships “as an integral part of dancer experience” (226). Geraldine Morris carefully parses the collaborative strands of Frederick Ashton’s 1937 ballet A Wedding Bouquet (music by Gerald Berners, text by Gertrude Stein) to argue for an integrated analysis of movement, music, and literature. In her Laban-based analysis of Anna Sokolow’s 1945 solo Kaddish, Hannah Kosstrin performs vital recovery work, tracing the evolution and adaptation of the choreography through several dancers, including Sokolow herself. Finally, Jessica Zeller focuses on the uniquely American pedagogy of ballerina Rochelle Zide-Booth to provide a useful overview...

Creating Musical Theatre: Conversations with Broadway Directors and Choreographers by Lyn Cramer (review)

Reviewed by: Creating Musical Theatre: Conversations with Broadway Directors and Choreographers by Lyn Cramer Rockford Sansom Creating Musical Theatre: Conversations with Broadway Directors and Choreographers. By Lyn Cramer. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2013; pp. 304. Creating Music Theatre: Conversations with Broadway Directors and Choreographers offers critically minded interviews with some of Broadway’s most prolific and honored directors and choreographers. Lyn Cramer’s selection of interviews features both veterans and rising stars, many of whom are well-known to the dance community, though they may not have received mainstream attention. The focus of this book ultimately calls attention to how each interviewee perceives his or her role and personal artistic process as a director/choreographer. Through entertaining personal accounts and process-oriented dialogue, each interviewed artist offers practical advice and insights into the theory and practice of musical theatre dance. The catalog of interviews presents choreographers and directors whose work crosses virtually every form of the performing arts, yet all have had great influence and success in musical theatre on Broadway. The twelve interviews include: Rob Ashford (Thoroughly Modern Mille), Andy Blankenbuehler (In the Heights), Jeff Calhoun (Bonnie and Clyde), Warren Carlyle (Chaplin), Christopher Gattelli (Newsies), Kathleen Marshall (Anything Goes), Jerry Mitchell (Legally Blonde), Casey Nicholaw (The Book of Mormon), Randy Skinner (White Christmas), Susan Stroman (The Scottsboro Boys), Sergio Trujillo (Jersey Boys), and Anthony Van Laast (Sister Act). Cramer states that through the interviews she aims both to transcribe a contemporary director/choreographer’s creative methodology and to explore each of their personal journeys through the musical theatre world. Every interview contains a fairly systematic arc. Cramer begins with the individual’s background and early entertainment career, predominantly highlighting how each dancer transitioned into a choreographer and then, if applicable, director. Each artist describes seminal works in his or her career, and the influence that these works have had on more recent projects. Cramer then shifts to the creative process and delves into topics like using research to create dance, the nature of collaboration, preproduction concepts, casting, and rehearsal techniques. Each interview ceremoniously closes with a request for advice to young dancers moving to New York City for the first time. In the foreword Cramer argues that she intends the interviews for three different audiences: the musical theatre performer searching for audition and rehearsal advice; the aspiring director/choreographer looking for inspiration; and the researcher investigating how each artist perceives their own creative process. The greatest strengths of this text lie in the material for the first two audiences. The interviews are intensely pragmatic; Cramer and each choreographer speak artist-to-artist and dancer-to-dancer in frank, simple, and consistently practical terms that dancers at any level of the theatre industry will find insightful and useful. Through questions like “[o]nce they’re hired, is there something dancers need to know before they walk into the rehearsal room?” [End Page 308] (45) and “[d]o you communicate with your creative team any differently, regardless of whether you’re choreographing, directing, or both?” (75). Cramer keeps the conversations refreshingly balanced and practical, avoiding inquiries that could have easily turned unproductively erudite. Her casual yet respectful tone as interviewer encourages the choreographers to offer humorous and intriguing antidotes that concurrently entertain and reinforce the lessons they are trying to teach. A few of the interviews even contain harmless jabs at some of the icons of the dance world and a playful lampoon of elements within the theatre, such as the audition process, out-of-town tryouts, and so on. Cramer also avoids dance jargon and interpolates explanations about each artist within the interviews, making the book user-friendly to those who do not have extensive musical theatre knowledge. For the researcher, Cramer does ask questions that critically explore every director/choreographer’s aesthetic theories and praxis. The discussions of each artist’s early mentors and how these influences have affected his or her process stand out as noteworthy examples. Additional significant dialogues include the artists’ explanations of how a choreographer transitions from early choreographic concepts to the rehearsal room, and how to best utilize the rehearsal process. Cramer’s personal knowledge of musical theatre dance seeps through the interviews in...

Library Cataloging Reforms and Their Impact on Choreographic Works

It is self-evident to people in the dance world that dances are works in their own right. However, from an American library perspective, this fact was not fully acknowledged until twenty years ago, when the Library of Congress published cataloging instructions that finally treated “choreographic works” as autonomous entities. Still, these instructions may seem to neglect the role of the choreographer as creator. The latest developments in cataloging will have a dramatic—and beneficial—impact on the way dance works are described and discovered through library catalogs in the near future.

Esto es todo: La inspiración ¡a escena! (This is it: the inspiration ¡to show!)

El objetivo de este artículo es presentar una experiencia multidisciplinar desarrollada desde la asignatura de Expresión Corporal en la Universidad de Córdoba, con los futuros maestros especialistas en Educación Física. La experiencia, basada en el Método de Proyectos, pone en juego a un grupo de profesionales del mundo de la danza, las artes escénicas y la educación fomentando el trabajo cooperativo y el intercambio de experiencias con los futuros docentes. El proceso de aprendizaje está motivado por un hecho de la realidad social y cultural actual: el recorrido profesional de Michael Jackson, que se convierte en inspiración del proyecto, tanto durante el proceso como en la creación de la performance grupal.Palabras clave: Expresión Corporal, Método de Proyectos, resolución de problemas, trabajo cooperativo, evento socio-cultural.Abstract The aim of this communication is to present a multidisciplinary experience developed from the subject's corporal language at the University of Córdoba, with future teachers specialists in physical education. The experience, based on the method of projects, puts into play a group of professionals of the world of dance, performing arts and education by encouraging cooperative work and the exchange of experiences with the future teachers. The learning process is motivated by a fact of current social and cultural reality: the professional career of Michael Jackson, which turns into inspiration for the project, both during the process and in the creation of the group performance.Key words: Corporal expression, method of projects, problem solving, cooperative work, socio-cultural event.

The Roving Tree by Elsie Augustave (review)

Reviewed by: The Roving Tree by Elsie Augustave Marsha Jean-Charles The Roving Tree. By Elsie Augustave. New York: Akashic Books/Open Lens, 2013. ISBN 1617751650 300 pp. $15.95. The Roving Tree is a novel about a timeless topic: love. This love, however, is both dynamic and borderless. Elsie Augustave artfully creates a fictional narrative that elucidates and personalizes matters of dyaspora identity formation, interracial and transnational adoption, Black romantic and spiritual love across boundaries, and the Vodou cosmological tradition. In so doing, Augustave invites readers to navigate the complexity of being a Black Haitian woman—Iris Odys—in Duvalier’s Haiti, Black Power America, and post-independence Zaire. Beginning at the end of Iris’s life, the novel itself is a two-part story that she writes to her daughter as her last wish, a wish granted to her by the West African deity Aïda Wedo. By way of the tale she authors, we enter the novel and begin again in part 1. Iris Odys is a child born of rape and into financial poverty; her mother agrees to her adoption so that Iris can experience a world in which her very existence is not threatened by misogynoir. Once Iris embarks on a plane to New York to live with her progressive, upper-middle-class white family, she herself starts on a path through which she will discover the world of dance, delve into the world of Black identity and immigration politics, and come to appreciate the importance of spiritual guidance. Her life’s journey eventually takes her back to Haiti upon the death of her mother, to Senegal to visit a college friend, and finally to Zaire to lead a notable dance program and start her own family. This novel is transnational in every way: it is both about Iris’s passage and about the journeys of the people she loves, which she comes to learn in finding herself. The main characters move ceaselessly across national, spiritual, and traditional boundaries and toward a powerful love—a love for their families, people, and countries. The Roving Tree is a novel about the many ways love drives and sustains Haitian women of the diaspora in the face of hardship, violence, and inevitable mortality. Maternal love prompts Iris’s adoption, familial love catalyzes Iris’s trip to Zaire, and ancestral love protects Iris and allows her to write her story to her daughter. When at her mother’s grave, Iris concludes that “the best of Haitian Mother Earth had been washed to sea. She stood naked, barren, watching her fruitlessness become the source of hunger and unrest” [End Page 196] (135). In essence, Iris’s mother agrees to her daughter’s adoption because of financial poverty as well as her own inability to protect Iris from the hands of a conniving tonton macoute—but the loss of Iris is one that she is never able to overcome. Knowing this, upon the mother’s death, is what gives Iris the strength to continue living. Before Iris leaves Haiti, her grandmother informs her of her own ancestral grandmother who was from a noble family of warriors. Iris’s grandmother continues, “We have been transplanted to this land, but we’re Africans” (136). Thus begins part 2 of the novel. Remembering her grandmother’s hope that she would one day return to the African continent, Iris graduates from college and embarks on a life-changing (and -ending) trip to Zaire. Protected until the end of her life by her family’s Vodou traditions—in which she does not entirely believe—Iris is granted her final wish and allowed to speak to her newborn daughter by way of her written story. Love is a central force throughout this text—it is intertwined with its politics and its antithesis. In Zaire, Iris is reminded that the realities of Black people in the numerous places in which she has lived share many similarities. Moreover, her fiancé indicates that “Africa and Haiti need leaders who seek power because they have the country’s best in mind” (224). In fact, it is the inability of leaders and peoples to create countries and systems that address the needs...

Illicit worlds of Indian dance: cultures of exclusion

Until the 1930s no woman could perform in public and retain respectability in India. Professional female performers were courtesans and dancing girls who lived beyond the confines of marriage, but were often powerful figures in social and cultural life. Women's roles were often also taken by boys and men, some of whom were simply female impersonators, others transgender. Since the late nineteenth century the status, livelihood and identity of these performers have all diminished, with the result that many of them have become involved in sexual transactions and sexualised performances. Meanwhile, upper-class, upper-caste women have taken control of the classical performing arts and also entered the film industry, while a Bollywood dance and fitness craze has recently swept middle class India. In her historical on-the-ground study, Anna Morcom investigates the emergence of illicit worlds of dance in the shadow of India's official performing arts. She explores over a century of marginalisation of courtesans, dancing girls, bar girls and transgender performers, and de- scribes their lives as they struggle with stigmatisation, derision and loss of livelihood.

Dancing on water: a life in ballet, from the Kirov to the ABT

Dancing on Water is both a personal coming-of-age story and a sweeping look at ballet life in Russia and the United States during the golden age of Elena Tchernichova takes us from her childhood during the siege of Leningrad to her mother s alcoholism and suicide, and from her adoption by Kirov ballerina Tatiana Vecheslova, who entered her into the state ballet school, to her career in the American Ballet Theatre. As a student and young dancer with the Kirov, she witnessed the company s achievements as a citadel of classic ballet, home to legendary names Shelest, Nureyev, Dudinskaya, Baryshnikov but also a hotbed of intrigue and ambition run amok. As ballet mistress of American Ballet Theatre from 1978 to 1990, Elena was called the most important behind-the-scenes force for change in ballet today, by Vogue magazine. She coached stars and corps de ballet alike, and helped mold the careers of some of the great dancers of the age, including Gelsey Kirkland, Cynthia Gregory, Natalia Makarova, and Alexander Godunov. Dancing on Water is a tour de force, exploring the highest levels of the world of dance.

Intersections between the academic and ‘real’ worlds of dance at the British Dance Edition 2014: a report

Intersections between the academic and ‘real’ worlds of dance at the British Dance Edition 2014: a report

Martha Graham: gender & the haunting of a dance pioneer

This title offers a re-evaluation of one of the greatest contemporary dance pioneers of the twentieth century. It employs innovative feminist post-structural lens. 2013 is 22-year anniversary of Graham's death. In her heyday, Martha Graham's name was internationally recognized within the modern dance world, and though trends in choreography continue to change, her status in dance still inspires regard. In this, the first extended critical look at this modern dance pioneer, Victoria Thoms explores the cult of Graham and her dancing through a critical lens that exposes the gendered meaning behind much of her work. Thoms synthesizes a diverse archive of material on Graham from films, photographs, memoir, and critique in order to uniquely highlight her contribution to the dance world and arts culture in general.

From Employment to Projects: Work and Life in Contemporary Dance World

This essay discusses the question of labor in contemporary dance using the frame of broad changes in contemporary economy that generate some intensive debates on immaterial labor, new modes of production, precarity, and austerity across different disciplines. Dancers around the world are affected by these changes, and this essay reflects on current dance labor practices by addressing terms such as projects, mobility, and time in the organization of work. I hope both to broaden a discussion on dance labor and to map out anxieties, fatigue, and fear that characterize the Zeitgeist of contemporary artistic labor.

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.

‘CREATE YOUR SPACE!’ LOCATING CONTEMPORARY DANCE IN OUAGADOUGOU

ABSTRACTSince the turn of the century contemporary dance has been gaining momentum as a pan-African artistic movement in which a new generation of performers is engaging. In contrast to more popular forms of ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’ performance genres, this new movement has evolved within the cosmopolitan urban elite and is driven by processes of professionalization that lead to the creation of new, border-crossing artistic spaces. These spaces are characterized by new boundaries and inequalities, related to various modes of distinction reflecting the shifting grounds of social status – gendered, generational, knowledge-based and economic. Taking an artistic ‘capacity-building’ project targeting female dancers in West Africa as an entry point, the article analyses how the practice of contemporary dance in Ouagadougou leads to the emergence of a translocal social space embedded in a dense network of transnational relations and connected to global art worlds. It is argued that the unequal power relations characterizing the professional art world of contemporary dance reflect the tensions and contradictions of local urban societies in the making and at the same time contribute to a reconfiguration of urban spaces where new forms of rooted cosmopolitanism can be invented.

Cotillion Dance as an Embodiment of Class

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

Becoming a belly dancer: gender, the life course and the beginnings of a serious leisure career

Serious leisure careers have a beginning, middle and end, yet few studies examine the beginning stage of leisure careers dominated by women. Drawing from interviews with male and female belly dancers in the USA, this study examines how people join serious leisure activities. Results show that both men and women were interested in dance, arts and history, had personal ties to belly dance, and wanted an enjoyable form of exercise to match their capabilities when they entered the world of belly dance. Unlike men, the women in this study also experienced major life transitions, such as diminishing familial responsibilities, job and school issues, moving and shifting relationships. These findings have implications for the gendered nature of serious leisure.

Estonian Folk Dance: Terms and Concepts in Theory and Practice

The article provides an overview of the changes that have occurred in the concept of 'folk dance' in Estonia from the end of the 19th century until today. The diachronic analysis of both theoretical and practical discourses is based on Estonian-language paper and web publications where the word rahvatants (folk dance) has been used as a term or where the concept is defined; an inquiry among the members of a folk dance group, and my personal ethnographic fieldwork in the folk dance world of Estonia. My borderline position between the roles of a dance researcher and a dancer and folk dance teacher in practice makes it possible to switch between different discourses and find their intersections. Shifts that occur in terms and concepts used in both scientific and public classifications, as well as in specialised discourses situated between them, reflect varied trends in the Estonian dance tradition during the 20th century and explain the development of the present situation.

Research on the Optimization of Flexibility Selection of Limb Aesthetics in the Dance Movements Based on Dynamics and Geometry Morphology

With the improvement of the quality of life, people start to pursue after some artistic beauty of spiritual level. It is particularly hot to manifest body language in the aesthetics. As an art form of body language, we focus on this form of limb aestheticst, and dance is still rare both at home and abroad .Some standardized regulations of dance moves are investigated in the current dance training ,which is demanded in the world of dance very urgently. This paper researches on the real problem that dance moves flexibility in dance training through the mathematical geometric principles. We hope this research will make the dance moves in dance training more in line with the current limb aesthetics, and perfect the blank of this field in domestic. Meanwhile, we hope that this research method can provide some reference for the other domestic aesthetic research on body language ,and make some contribution to the development of the domestic arts.

Book review: Dena Davida (ed.), Fields in Motion. Ethnography in the World of Dance

Book review: Dena Davida (ed.), <i>Fields in Motion. Ethnography in the World of Dance</i>