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Naomi Diouf highlights the inadequacies of the vocabulary many North American and European dance critics use in reviewing African dance works by introducing a set of stylistic descriptors to help critics and choreographers alike in discussing African dance performances in an intellectually sound manner. Additionally, Diouf explores the philosophical underpinnings of African dance forms, juxtaposing them against those outside of Africa. She then artfully links that philosophical discussion to the physical demands of African dance traditions, describing African movements as demonstrative of daily traditional life. To further address this linkage of philosophy and physicality, Diouf analyzes a choreographed production, JUSAT, which portrays commonly shared community events, such as birth, initiatory rituals, warfare, and death, in an African context.

There is much evidence of La Meri’s lifelong commitment to writing, which seems to have been as central to her life as dance. Fortunately, her thoughts, feelings, and insights survive not only in her published poetry, articles, and books but also in the hundreds of notes and notebooks, dance descriptions, letters, and other materials in her archives. At an early age, La Meri began publishing her poetry, and, later, works about her own life experiences and about dance and its many manifestations. After some discussion of La Meri’s poetry and the books of poems that she published, this chapter focuses mostly on the six books that deal with dance. These books include her autobiography (a memoir of her professional life) and five works that provide information and discussion about dance as an art form: including Spanish dance, Indian dance, choreography, and “ethnic dance,” a term she claimed to have coined. In her dance writings she also sets forth her theoretical, aesthetic and pedagogical conceptions and ideas.

Please Provide (as in Journal Copy) It was customary in the seventeenth century to assimilate court ballet with drama, as both art forms were seen to strive for a common aim: the imitation or representation of nature. However, critics were also keen to point out their essential differences, for, unlike tragedy, ballet disregarded the rules of new-classical aesthetics and its only concern seemed to be to please and to entertain. This was particularly evident in the court ballets written by Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin between 1639 and 1641. Unsurprisingly, they were singled out for special criticism by theorists of the ballet, who highlighted their dramatic shortcomings, and failed to see that they constituted another form of dramatic aesthetics, which was conspicuous precisely because of its emancipation from the structures of Aristotelian theory. It could be said that the ballets of Desmarets had all the hallmarks of contemporary tragicomedy: irregularity of construction, diversity of action, disregard for the unity of tone, etc., but in adapting the principles of this new aesthetics to the ballet, Desmarets ran the risk of transgressing the boundaries of tragicomedy and even of drama, approaching a genre which was no longer dramatic but narratice, i.e. epic poetry.

Salome was a source of fascination for the poet and playwright W. B. Yeats, appearing in his poetry, letters, memoirs, and plays. Examining Wilde’s often underplayed influence on Yeats, this chapter considers Yeats’s subtle yet persistent engagement with the image of Salome’s dance as a constitutive element of his broader ambition to incorporate choreography into his theatrical projects, otherwise known as his ‘plays for dancers’. This chapter explores how Yeats’s revisions of the Salomean figure in the plays At the Hawk’s Well (1916), The King of the Great Clock Tower (1934) and The Death of Cuchulain (1939) shaped his approach to stage space, modernist dramaturgy, Symbolist themes, stage pictures, and the depersonalisation of the performer, shaped by his collaborations with the practitioners Edward Gordon Craig, Michio Ito, and Ninette de Valois.

This final chapter asks what became of the veiled woman-in-movement as Salome’s popularity waned and the period of canonical modernism drew to a close. Briefly discussing Salome’s mid-twentieth-century afterlives in Martha Graham’s Herodiade (1944) and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), this epilogue primarily traces references to Salome across the work of Samuel Beckett. Scattered and disparate though they may be, these traces point to Beckett’s deeper absorption of this paradigmatic modernist dance as a ‘metamorphic phantom’ that he would harness to the demands of his own theatre. If his late nineteenth and early twentieth-century precursors imagined the dancer to be ‘invisible’ beneath her veils, Beckett at once deconstructed and paradoxically re-embodied this dancer in his abstract stage choreographies, organising his works around dramatically reduced gestures and forms of movement. Beckett’s work provides us with one way of recovering the often-underplayed continuities between late nineteenth-century Symbolism and modernist theatre at its most abstract, showing how the forms associated with Salome’s dance were adopted and transformed in the second half of the twentieth century.

To think of choreography as a theorization of identity allows for a conception of movement in which bodies are more than the object of theory; bodies become the active subject, the Merleau-Pontian point of view in the world in which they move. Bechdel choreographs memory structurally through the complex relationship between chapter title panels and the chapter contents. Another way in which Fun Home embodies the act of remembering is through the myriad interactions Bechdel the creator has with Alison the character in the text. Multimodal narrative makes this type of interaction visible to the reader. “Dancing with memory” in Fun Home means traversing narrative lines where much of the meaningful dialogue between past and present becomes visible only through the relationship between text and image. Multimodal narrative allows for creators and audiences alike to witness from the outside in more explicitly the implicit affective responses to the very act of remembering through storytelling. Some of the most potent instances of embodied reading in Fun Home are those in which we see Bechdel the creator in dialogue with Alison the character. Excavating past selves to follow the trajectory of past movement is part of the work of autobiography and artistic expression of memory. The textual and visual choreography operates on multiple temporal levels, and through multiple modes of communication. Reading a graphic memoir is an embodied performative act. Considering the ephemeral nature of performance alongside the ephemeral nature of memory in Fun Home illuminates new ways of understanding both.

Like Claddings (above), this chapter places the discourse of The Meeting Place in the context of other related work. The performative space constitutive of an encounter that will furnish a durable and just common place is defined in relation to Homi Bhabha and Edward Soja’s theorizing of the third space or the in-between. The identity of self-becoming with the performance of the in-between is illustrated by reference to the Vezo people of Mozambique. It is the emphasis on the historicity of performance that distinguishes our approach.

The three previous chapters constitute the introduction to The Meeting Place. Illustrating the description of the book in the previous chapter, this chapter plunges the reader into the midst of an erotic situation and a first person narrative: a man waiting for his lover to arrive. As she fails to arrive on time, the distinction between a chance encounter and a scheduled meeting emerges.

Chapter 3 assembles data and renders visible gender hierarchies among choreographers in concert dance in the United States today. Recent statistics in the field are explored to establish a baseline for understanding gender in dance on a broader scale. An analysis of gender representation among choreographers is presented through an examination of the 2012, 2013, and 2014 performance seasons at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the American Dance Festival, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The stratified programming of each venue provides a multi-case study for understanding how female choreographers fare within the various levels of public recognition in the dance field, creating a foundation for further discussion of gender in dance. The author’s primary questions ask whether men and women are represented in numbers that reflect their respective populations in the field of dance, and how the production of dance illuminates or undermines gender disparity among dance creators.

Regendered movement refers to a process where choreographic material is created or adapted with the intention that it may be performed by either male or female dancers with little or no change to the original steps. This practice-led research project investigated the choreographer’s creative process for regendering contemporary ballet choreography and the dancers’ experiences of the rehearsal process and performance, and audience perception of meaning in the ballets. The research project sought to investigate the “in-born” and “natural” gender binaries of classical ballet by applying gender theory (Butler 1990, 2004; Polhemus 1993; Wulff 2008) and feminist critique of classical ballet (Daly 1987; Copeland 1993; Anderson 1997; Banes 1998). A mixed method, studio-based action research methodology was employed. Recent critical debate on gender in dance (Macaulay 2010, 2013; Jennings 2013, 2014), existing contemporary ballet, and its impact on the creative process of the choreographer are discussed.

The question of the status of Giacometti’s work is raised: does an aesthetic achievement like his have any historical value? Does it have an implications for a better practice of meeting. Examples of ‘first contact’ negotiations (from Magellan’s voyage and from early Australian accounts of ‘corroborees’) are given to show that in non-western societies, the mimetic techniques used to broker contact are not purely theatrical: they are historical performances.

We go back to the figure of Eros the Demiurge (announced above in Hollowed Out). A revivified public space depends on revitalizing the gods who preside over them Pallas Athene, for example, associated with the democratic agora of ancient Athens has to be mobilized, given back her power to move. As mistress of the lance, she is the weaver of all the curvilinear paths that form the patterns of sociability. Again, following ‘Thirdings’, non-western examples of spear mastery are described, as these underline the point that the management of movement is essentially historical and political.

This chapter draws together the threads of the previous chapters and places the encounter between northern (Eurocentric) and southern (Australian Indigenous and colonial) ideas of sociability in a historical context. The aestheticisation of performative cultures in the writings of Paul Valery is discussed because Valery puts forward a theory of poetry that is, in fact, very like the four-fold performances characteristic of Indigenous Australia: recognition of this enables us to reconnect Modernist poetics to the politics of giving and taking ground.

In this chapter we start to investigate the mechanics of encounter, the gestural and choreographic techniques used to mediate communication where no language exists in common. Australian illustrations are given of the foundational role of mimicry. Then, mimicking the structure of the previous chapter is explained, these historical performances are shown to communicate their meaning in the same way that Valery says the Symbolists (and Mallarme in particular) create a poetic event. Finally, the recent discovery of ‘mirror neurons’ suggests a neurological mechanism for mimicry which collapses the aesthetic/historical, reflective/non-reflective distinction.

A new theme is introduced: the question of the motivation of meeting. Historically, meeting is precipitated by the migrant, the exile, the one who comes from another place. Therefore, meeting is always a triangulation between those who meet and the historical (exceptional) circumstance in which they meet. Meeting is always shadowed by ambiguity, by a desire of avoidance at the heart of the approach. Writers like Levinas, Agamben, Nancy and others are discussed for their views about the politics and ethics of encounter: none of them considers the ontological significance of the dance as such.

The point has been made that ‘meeting’ is never between two people: it is always shadowed by the desire of encounter. This shadow can be the physical setting, the historical circumstance and the mimetic nature of social behavior as such. In this chapter a new shadow/shade is introduced, that of the ancestors, whose death underwrites our plunge into the realm of change. A remarkable instance of this from colonial Australia is given, where the relationship between stepping out of oneself towards the other and dying is illustrated. Picking upon the migrant theme of the previous chapter, this insight is also attributed to the Australian-Iranian sculptor Hossein Valamanesh.

A discussion of the philosophical significance of thinking dyadically, in terms of a fundamental relation across difference. (Meeting cannot be thought from one side or point of view.) Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the chiasm attempts to deal with this inhibition of western metaphysics. In societies that are organized into moieties (Australian Aboriginal societies, but also the Amazonian Bororo), thinking the self doubly, as a social relation, is unproblematic. In trying to bring these insights into a place-making practice the experiments of Arakawa and Gins are exemplary. In any case the difficulty of defining meeting suggests a ‘chi complex’, a philosophical aporia focused on the place where lines cross and instead of fusing cancel out.

Even in meeting places very few people meet: most pass by. In Aboriginal Australia, the choreography of non-meeting is institutionalized. There follows a discussion of a famous episodein the anthropological literature – a meeting between two clans outside Alice Springs reported by Spencer and Gillen. In his critique of their account, T.G.H. Strehlow makes it clear that this was an exceptional performance ‘put on’ for a third person (Gillen). The ceremonies performed at that time and place aimed to maintain existing boundaries and minimize illicit contact.

Here some problems of nomenclature addressed. Implicit in our thesis the possibility of a ‘fit’ between people and place: sociability is always a social performance, a matter of timing and spacing. The Greek term hedra, referring to the natural fit of things, is revived and compared with the Arrernte term utyerre, tie or string. The ‘crowd’ that inhabits these places is not the one conjured up by Canetti and le Bon but self-organising, pluralist and relational.