Search Results

In this essay, Yvonne Daniel highlights the necessity of employing appropriate terminology when discussing African dance forms - terminology that distinguishes dance forms based on geographical, social, and stylistic histories. Daniel provides an analysis of Afro-Cuban dance categories while bridging to similar dance traditions found throughout the Caribbean and Afro-Latin America. Daniel offers a pluralistic typography of African and Diaspora dance forms and allows a more precise legacy representation. She concludes with a set of recommendations for the mentoring of African Dance performers, researchers, and Performing Arts communities.

This chapter explores the American performances of dancers Bessie Clayton and Adeline Genée, specifically Clayton’s Dances of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, and Genée’s La Danse. Both of these pieces constructed and represented dance histories: Clayton traced the history of popular dance styles in a series of episodes, while Genée charted the evolution of ballet technique through danced portraits of a various ballerinas. Both of these dances, this chapter argues, integrated the representational strategies and aesthetics associated with the mediums of photography and early moving pictures. Onstage, Clayton and Genée’s bodies became “cameras” of sorts, creating, recording, and displaying the past while simultaneously bringing it to life. In doing so, both women interrogated the performative possibilities and pitfalls of these new technologies and practices of representation. Considering the performances in this way adds a new dimension to existing scholarship on dance films.

The history of jazz dance is intimately tied to the history of jazz music. Collectively, as jazz expression with common histories and shared aesthetic characteristics, their entwined history from emancipation to the 1970s is complex. Their parallel histories reveal a multiplicity of aesthetic approaches and interactions, and a fluidity of cultural, musical, and dance identities. Thus, jazz history is a landscape of evolving meanings, values, ideas, sounds, movements, contestations, contradictions, pluralities, and multiple constructions of “what is jazz.” In this chapter, the historical discussion of jazz and its West African roots is framed through an examination of relevant jazz dance and music history literature, as well as oral history interviews. This discussion and analysis offers a broad historical overview intended to introduce the sweep of jazz dance and music history.

The nineteenth-century imagination of the Middle Ages—specifically the St. John’s Day dances that intensified in the wake of the bubonic plague, or ‘Black Death’—emphasized bacchanalian raucousness. Yet the medicalization of post-plague dances overlooks an important history of pilgrimage, processions, and pre-Christian festivities. This chapter examines the recuperation of medieval histories of dance—barely legible in Latin chronicles and annals—into a history of epidemic madness. This contributes to rewriting Foucault’s history of madness by emphasizing collective exuberance and the emergence of choreomania in the nineteenth century as a figure of ecological reverberation, benignly excessive inarticulacy, and passage, rather than confinement, difference, or danger. Further reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s recuperation of the St. John’s and St. Vitus’s dances into a critique of asceticism, the chapter suggests that the ‘genealogy’ of choreomania is found in the fantasy of a dark and orgiastic medievalism.

Esailama Diouf delves deep into history and genealogy to detail the significant politico-cultural figures, dance artists, institutions, and cultural nationalist positions that allowed for a reclaimed connection between African diasporic dance forms and spirit knowing. Dismantling still lingering European and North American notions of Africa and African dance and drumming, which permeate the early history of dance in the Americas, Diouf points to restoring notions of genetic birthrights and culture transmission for African Americans through a renaissance of West African dance and music on the West Coast, specifically in California. Her findings give dancers more awareness and understanding and thereby, the chance to embody their claim to spirit through communal African dance and music

This chapter looks at how performers constructed senses of gender—including boundaries of femaleness and maleness—as they established what comprised tradition through their senses of history. It emphasizes that the ways performers connected femaleness, the female style dance Beskalan Putri, the past, spiritual power, and Malang indicates ways of thinking that in effect maintain cultural space for the magnetic power of femaleness and connect female power to Malangan identity. The senses of femaleness and its power that performers associated with Beskalan Putri were so strong that they shaped the ways performers understood and talked about the histories of other dances discussed in this chapter, including Ngremo Lanang, Ngremo Putri, and Beskalan Lanang, as well as the expression of gender in these dances. These perceptions also provide deeper insight into what has concerned performers about the performance of Ngremo Tayub and Ngremo Putri since the 1990s.

This chapter considers the controversy surrounding dance reconstruction. It begins by defining terms such as reconstruction, revival, and restaging. The method used in reconstructing Funeral March is explained, as are issues such as the myth of the original, maintaining the authenticity of dances from other eras, and the ethereal nature of all dances, whether remaining in the repertory or lost. Dance reconstruction, when correctly approached, is a vital part of dance history.

Halifu Osumare presents a regional history of African dance in the United States, focusing on the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area from the 1960s to the present. Beginning with the first cohort of local Dunham-trained dance instructors in the 1950s and 1960s to more contemporary instructors hailing directly from the African continent. She analyzes how African and African diasporic dance traditions became important fixtures in the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area, becoming powerful tools in teaching social justice through various community programs and dance companies that extended from Ghana, the Congo, Senegal, and Liberia into that region. Osumare’s research traces the formation of artistic lineages, while offering insights about the local impact of African dance instruction as a narrative history of how the Bay Area became a regional powerhouse in the African dance field.

Hanya Holm arrived in the United States in September 1931 to open the New York Wigman School, created under the patronage of impresario Sol Hurok. On the heels of Mary Wigman's first, highly acclaimed U.S. tour from 1930 to 1931, interest in the Wigman method was high among American dancers, and a small staff from the Wigman Central Institute in Dresden, led by Holm, were sent to New York to capitalize on it. This chapter counters the standard narrative of Holm's assimilation and Americanization. Focusing on Holm's writings during her early years in the United States, it demonstrates how she saw her New World milieu through an Old World lens, conceptualizing the United States as a fragmented society (Gesellschaft) in need of a community that integrated its members and that dance could provide (Tanzgemeinschaft).

Looking at the history of dance in the modern West, and especially in Europe, where aesthetic modernism began around 1900, there are two characteristics of dance. Whether it is so-called popular dance or a more artistic form, from a sociological perspective, the history of dance is the history of globalization and transnationalism. It is also the record of how urban experiences have been expressed physically. This chapter addresses tango as a specific example of urban transnationalism in dance. In particular, it explores the relevance of a theory of cultural translation for the analysis and historiography of dance and shows how such a theory can arise from the embodied practice of tango.

This chapter recounts the effect and influence that Sleeping Beauty would create during its production in 1890, and then reviews how its revival in 1999 was received by the ballet public, particularly the St. Petersburg ballet public that loved to reminiscence about 1890. This reproduction occupied a strange place, however, as it was neither very radical nor was it really a conservative gesture. One thing was for sure, though, Sleeping Beauty would remain at the heart of an enormous amount of mythmaking, proving that the work itself carries an unusual vitality. The previous chapters of the book have looked at the stories that surrounded Sleeping Beauty: the myths deep in its heart, the legends it has generated, and the tales that Soviet dance history surrounded it with. Thus this chapter takes a look now at Sleeping Beauty's revival and the inherent significance of this production in the art of ballet.

Rudolf Laban was one of the leaders of Ausdruckstanz, and he has been studied as a thoughtful writer and theoretician, a talented choreographer, an inspired teacher, and a tireless organizer of schools, associations, and festivals. Less known are his mostly unrealized film projects, conceptualized for different purposes on different occasions. This chapter considers how film offered Laban yet another arena within which to promote his distinctive vision of dance. Laban was interested in using cinema as a tool to disseminate his ideas and to expand the potential audience for modern dance, ensuring its position as a respectable social practice, as a form of high art, and as a professional field. He understood the great economic potential that cinema, as a popular medium, could give to dance in supporting his enterprises. The chapter also wonders whether Laban's apparent turn away from film in the mid-1930s reflected his engagement with the National Socialist cultural bureaucracy and the opportunities it offered for his vision of mass dance.

This chapter details American efforts to visit England in search of folk dance roots. These people encountered an exciting movement, but they were sometimes unwittingly the subject of disputes and sometimes appeared deliberately to aggravate the conflict. The most profound and earliest dispute involved the two people who took the lead in the revival in England, Mary Neal and Cecil Sharp. The English folk dance revival may properly be said to have begun with Mary Neal, a woman every bit as imposing and outspoken as Sharp. It was Neal's success with folk dance that reawakened his interest in dance in 1905. However, Neal's and Sharp's differences had a bearing on the history of the dance movement, most especially in the style and spirit of the dance. In both cases, Sharp would eventually proceed as the dance patriarch.

C. Kemal Nance has captured the legendary perspective of Baba Chuck in a 2016 interview regarding the seminal words Davis spoke, the history he preached of African descendants in the African diaspora, and Davis’ vision of the state of African heritage traditions in the Americas today. Discussions include the history, business practices, and dancer management style Baba Chuck employed within the Chuck Davis Dance Company; they also reveal Baba Chuck’s pathway from New York to North Carolina, his connections to African dance contemporaries, such as Kariamu Welsh, and his understandings of what the future holds for his dancers and his company. This interview has become even more poignant since Baba Chuck’s recent death. When asked how he would want his legacy to be remembered, Baba Chuck answered simply, “He danced,” but the legacy he left will have him remembered for so much more and for many decades to come.

This chapter introduces the topic of the book, explaining how the nature of dances presents a number of philosophical puzzles. Connections and distinctions between the concepts invoked by the count nouns “dance,” “dance work,” and “choreographic work” are identified, and Part 1’s argument about the historical emergence of the work-concept in Western theatre dance is outlined. The resistance within some dance discourse and practice to conceptualising dance in terms of work-objects or things is acknowledged, along with recent challenges to the idea of the dance work. The chapter also describes the analytic philosophical resources (on dance, music, and art) on which the book’s approach draws and explains key metaphysical issues raised by dance works. It situates the arguments in relation to current methodological debates about the relation between art ontological enquiry and arts practice, particularly with regard to this book’s concern with dance historical change.