Dance scholarship as practiced in the United States in the twentieth century has witnessed significant growth and development. Much of the early scholarship in dance focused on major Western theatrical dance forms and selected dance traditions from around the world. As the century progressed, an ever widening interest in dance as it was defined and redefined by artists and scholars in related fields of study such as anthropology, philosophy, history, somatic methods, dance science and music broadened the field in new and interesting ways. What constituted the subject of dance as well as how it would be viewed, interpreted, understood and evaluated was being questioned, explored and interrogated. Dance scholars employed varied modes of inquiry and research methodologies to their work. For many, scholarly outlets were limited to conferences and journals in related fields of study. While they often received encouragement from their colleagues in these disciplines, their scholarship was just as likely to be viewed as curious, interesting but marginal.

Beginning in the 1960s, some of these dance scholars recognized the need to form their own scholarly organizations that would support conferences, research and publications in the field of Dance Studies. CORD and SDHS were two such organizations that were formed to address these issues. Initially, they modeled themselves on their sister organizations in related fields like anthropology, musicology, history and theatre. They provided the necessary leadership to encourage succeeding generations of dance scholars to create a breadth and depth in the field of Dance Studies that continues to provide a strong intellectual body of work in this field of study.

Within the past fifty years, the image of the individual dance scholar struggling and working on his or her own in a related field has given way to a community of dance scholars who meet on a regular basis to share, critique and foster new work in this now established and recognized field of study. Consequently, there has been a significant growth in dance scholarship.

However, new and emerging technologies are creating challenges and opportunities for how dance research is conducted and how it is evaluated and disseminated to its readership and its audience. The combined impact of internationalizing graduate and undergraduate curriculum in most of our major universities and colleges along with the effects of globalization in how we understand and define our field of study have created a “moment of crisis” for how dance scholars organize themselves in terms of professional organizations like CORD, SDHS and others.

This lecture/demonstration, with a participatory component, focuses on how refugee and immigrant women and girls living in the United States promote social networking to negotiate and empower their respective communities. Specifically, the session considers the place of movement and dance as strategies for survival, adaptation, and redefinition of female roles in changing cultural contexts. The women featured, originally from Afghanistan, Burundi, and China, have taken strong leadership positions and became advocates for human rights. Their stories form the core of the session, which will include performances and/or video of their respective work with movement and dance. The session will conclude with a participatory session led by the team of presenters. In this section individual histories and stories of the workshop participants will be explored through a series of movement/text exercises as designed by the team. The emphasis will be on embodying certain of the strategies outlined in the presentation.

In “Dance Narratives and Fantasies” Agnes Mc Robbie writes that for generations of women dance has represented “an arena for self expression…away from the difficulties of everyday life…. a symbolic escape route from the more normative expectations of young women …” “I dance because it ...makes me feel free,” writes Ms Mae, one of twenty seniors who participated in Work It On Out, a community dance project which brought elders together with dance majors at Northwest Vista College. Sharing dances and stories about dance, we would form a unique intergenerational community to celebrate a woman’s ongoing love affair with dance. Though dance is not something that old and young typically share, the exuberance in the simple acts of moving together created instant rapport. With Aretha crooning “freedom…” in the background, looking good and shaking our shoulders and hips was a “fem-positive “message of grace, dignity and strength over circumstance, signified by the freedom of the body.

This paper addresses two media-choreographies that are scaled to opposite durational and proportional extremes: David Michalek’s Slow Dancing, which elongates five-second choreographies into ten minute films projected onto screens as much as 50 feet tall, and Simon Ellis and David Corbet’s Microflicks, which are two-second video dances for iPods and other small screens. I argue that both Slow Dancing and Microflicks foreground the experience of visual perception in their explorations of size and duration. In line with some postmodern, feminist, and postcolonial film techniques that interrupt visuality with blurred or asynchronous imagery, Microflicks and Slow Dancing articulate alternate modes of perception and attention through which they bring viewers into the dance.

YouTube.com, a website established in 2005, is one of the most popular Internet video-sharing sites. YouTube users are either posters or viewers, or both, who upload and/or watch videos on this site. Serving as a free resource in various countries and languages, YouTube contains numerous dance videos, many widely unknown, commercially unavailable, or regionally restricted. In addition to the volume of video postings and the convenience of instant viewing, YouTube also provides space under the viewing window of each video for commentary. With its considerable capacity to host videos and facilitate discussions, YouTube serves as a great resource for gaining exposure to and receiving information about dance. However, impressive features may in fact be flawed. For example, dance videos posted on the site may contain false demonstrations and comments, followed by misleading messages. This paper presentation studies the roles that YouTube and its videos play with regard to dance advocacy.

Can the female body be a site of artistic protest? Looking closely at female artists of color such as Coco Fusco, Regina Galindo, and Rebecca Belmore I examine the racialized, gendered body addressing head on marginalized/oppressed status of a minority voice. By examining the movement involved, I suggest how their marginalized bodies disrupt or at least make visible their marginal status. The argument addresses the body as a signifier of double marginality, disrupting public spaces in order to create awareness and change. These female artists use situational based movement to represent political action. The use of movement verses words creates a larger impact and plays a larger role in the outcome of visibility and change.

This paper does a close reading of two choreographies, Pat Graney's "Faith" and Ananya Chatterjea's "Daak". Using performance reviews to underscore previous interpretations of "Faith", I examine how the trope of the female model embedded in the piece specatularizes and makes hyper-visible the heterosexual gaze, while marginalizing the queer intimacy which manifests in the hyperphysical female-female partnering. I use a performance review on "Daak" to illuminate multiple interpretations of the piece, underlining the double marginalization of a lesbian reading of the piece; performances of different female intimacies are often overlooked in Chatterjea's work due to the complexities that race brings to readings on the concert dance stage. Both readings give space to a lens which disrupts the heteronormative discourse surrounding dance scholarship.

How is spontaneity staged? In my paper, I examine how jazz producer Mura Dehn staged/produced her Traditional Jazz Dance Company from 1932 to the 1970's. I am interested in how her multiple positionalities as immigrant, woman, and member of the African American dance community in which she was immersed affected her role as producer. I particularly examine the consequences of Mura Dehn's essentialist ideas about the black dancing body, and how her writings posit "black" jazz dance as the performance of natural spontaneity while also crediting dancers as artists. I investigate how her role allowed for the creation of both subversive and counter-subversive performances to occur simultaneously. I will also investigate how Dehn's positionality caused her erasure from the jazz dance genealogy, and state that while her writings and ideas are at times problematic, they are also critical to consider in discourse on dance.

A study and comparison of works by two creators of ritual performance—Anna Halprin and Lin Lee-Chen—provide insight into Richard Schechner's efficacy-entertainment continuum as well as how ritual manifests in contemporary performance. Through a close reading of the structure and performance quality of Lin's Miroirs de Vie (Jiao) and Halprin's Circle the Earth "Dancing with Life on the Line," I look at both artist's efforts and results in creating ritual performance and illustrate what I believe to be their distinctive features. Contextualization of the work and the artists' intentions shed light on the possibility or scope of change effected by their creations. While Lin's highly stylized large-scale dance-dramas in many senses cannot be compared to Halprin's nature-oriented participatory community rituals, commonalities in these two works show a strong emphasis on bodily experience, indicating embodiment as fundamental in creating transformative performance.

Bharatanatyam’s typical introduction lauds the dance as “pure” and “ancient,” with 2000 year-old roots. Such mantras help sublimate sexual undertones and imported elements within a classicized form. But as this south Indian dance globalizes, the gravitas of “unbroken tradition” is stymieing innovation. To characterize the nature of “tradition” in contemporary Bharatanatyam practice, questionnaires integrating scientific methodology with artistic nuance were administered to 212 practitioners around India. Statistical analysis revealed extensive diversity. Even body positioning and values lacked uniformity and predictability. In areas with predictable variation, such as knowledge and pedagogy, drivers of differences included: location; other dance training; familiarity with native texts/figures/current writings; and comfort altering movements/choreography. Among teachers, 85% of questions showed no strong majority response. This hybrid research approach reveals Bharatanatyam’s complexity and probable lack of any singular tradition. Understanding the drivers of this complexity could expand Bharatanatyam’s scope and depth as it travels across generations and geographies.

Eiko & Koma's 2006 piece Cambodian Stories: An Offering of Painting and Dance offers an opportunity to analyze the ways gender, the nation, and the global are choreographed and represented on an American stage. Gender is thoroughly implicated in each of the main themes raised by the piece: history (both personal and geo-political), Asian identity, and the relationship between visual art and the performing body. In what ways does this intercultural, intergenerational, and multidisciplinary work complicate our understanding of gender and the nation in the age of globalization? How can a performance such as Cambodian Stories be viewed as a site of (non-western) feminist knowledge production? Might the movements of Eiko & Koma alongside nine young Cambodian painters be evidence of an agency not visible through the gaze of western feminist theory?

This paper examines the feminist tactics of African choreographers Germaine Acogny (Senegal) and Faustin Linyekula (DR Congo). Acogny situates her school, Ecole des Sables (also home to her company, Jant-Bi) on the coastal outskirts of Dakar; Linyekula founds his Studios Kabako in urban Kisangani. Invoking feminist notions of spatiality and motility, anthropological treatments of African modernity and witchcraft, and research on community-based art practice coming out of performance studies, I address Acogny and Linyekula's differing relationships to African urbanization. While Acogny sends her dancers on survival expeditions only for them to return to the relative stability of Ecole des Sables, Linyekula and his dancers have developed a network of community arts centers across Kisangani in the aftermath of DR Congo's upheaval. Acogny's feminism operates on a phenomenological and psychological level, while Linyekula engages in feminist community-based art practices predicated on spatiality and the social.

In this paper, I will historicize the concept of ginga, the syncopated swing of the hips, present in Afro-Brazilian circular social dances such as samba-de-roda. Contrary to street processions and parades such as congadas (black king pageants) and folias (carnaval celebrations), samba-de-roda has been cultivated within private environments such as slave headquarters (colonial era), and in-doors events at the so-called “Auntie houses.” Starting at the end XIX century, samba-de-roda, becomes a common practice within Afro-Brazilian community (eating) parties organized in urban centers such as Rio de Janeiro by matrons at their backyards. In these social dancing circles, participants would improvise rhythms and lyrics with percussion instruments (including kitchen utensils, while a (pair of) dancer(s) would improvise a solo (or a duet) at the center. Despite the spontaneous atmosphere of these performances, samba-de-roda is codified with a specific set of (unspoken) rules and principles (i.e. repertoire of movements and rhythms, norms for entering and existing the circle, expected behavior, etc). My analysis will unpack the functions and meanings of the corporeal orature samba dancing bodies perform, and the tangible traces they produce within the audience/community. This paper will focus on the choreographies of (female) gender instantiated by the dancing bodies and supported by the spatial organization in which they are performed. Finally, I will address the transformations set in motion by the radio and the recording industries (20s-30s), which projected the samba music into the national scenario, erasing the (black) dancing body from its central position. (Floating) representations of blackness would (re)emerge in the latter decades, through iconic samba dancing bodies.

An investigation of the flip flop and its role in Brazilian culture as shoe, object of Carnaval, class marker, musical instrument, and cultural export, BORRACHA/BOUNCE through a juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary dance invites the audience into an awareness of the bizarre reality of global trade and fads. The show is written and choreographed using a big dose of humor, following tightly the conventions of a paper or powerpoint presentation, without the paper or powerpoint. Instead, I dance while talking and play with various rubber objects, situating the flip-flop as a lived thing and process. Ritsu Katsumata’s score underlines the movement and text by playing with concepts of High and Low Art--something challenged by the adoption of the flip flop as haute couture. What becomes apparent is the import of gendered, raced, and classed gestures in branding an object as a representation of cultural cohesion.

This panel discusses possibilities for re-imagining the American academic landscape as dance scholars from diverse global locations and backgrounds explore new terrain (virtual and real) for presenting research to communities beyond the traditionally-defined scholarly audience. Further, the ever-changing world of digital technology is considered as it shapes and re-shapes static academic spaces and possibilities for the format of the doctoral dissertation. Questions about what form this re-shaping might take in terms of the individual needs of each scholar will direct the panel.

As members of society, artists have historically served a dualistic purpose – to reflect the ideologies of the world in which they live, and to challenge those ideologies. By challenging ideologies, artists may enter into a world of social and political activism. However, can art be an effective form of protest? Furthermore, can dance serve to convey messages of social and political activism, and should it? This paper seeks to answer these questions by examining a brief history of social and political protest from a women-centered standpoint. I will look at the gender roles and social structure of the United States to determine how and whether it is possible for women to enter the arena of social and political activism, then direct my focus towards understanding how dance may function in this arena. Through this investigation, I hope to generate a better understanding of how female dancing bodies can be legitimized as sites of political activism.

This paper will explore the work of Katherine Dunham, the late pioneer dancer/ anthropologist who conducted dance research in the Caribbean and brought this dance knowledge to African American communities in the USA (see Dunham, 1969; Redmond, 1978; Rose, 1990; Ashenbrenner, 2002), the American concert stage and film industry. She recorded her findings through ethnographic field notes and by learning dance: the techniques and cultural context; and disseminated the information through articles and books but also applied it to her pedagogy and choreography. Ashenbrenner (2002), Clark (1994), Cruz Banks (2008), Forsch (1999), Perperner (1999) and Ramsey (2000) all discuss how Dunham used her skills as a dancer to challenge objective criteria of anthropological research. Clark (1994) called Dunham’s system “the research to performance method”. Ramsey (2000) argues Dunham forged an African diasporic anthropology that emphasized participation and engagement. Following Ramsey’s lead, this paper seeks to further the discussion with a postcolonial theoretical lens and considers the way Dunham redefined ethnographic approaches, not by dismissing western scholarship but through identifying its limits and asserting different tenets for understanding humanity. This approach is later conceptualized and echoed in the work of contemporary qualitative researchers such as Daniels (2004), Denzin & Lincoln (2003), Pillow (2003) Tyson (2003). Using memoirs from two Dunham technique seminars, and a literature review, I will explore how Dunham’s seminal dance research instigates a critical methodological conversation about issues of epistemology, racism and methodology. Her dance anthropology directly challenged the colonial consequences that have underpinned western epistemologies of research.

A central concern of recent feminist musicology has been the relationship between music and the body. This resists centuries of Western musical thought, which constructs music as a product of the mind, erasing its effects on and origins in the body. Classical ballet performance if anything affirms this mind-body split, concealing the laboring bodies that produce musical sound, and projecting that sound onto idealized bodies on stage. Furthermore, ballet scholarship has, at times, its own “mind/body problem,” making dancers’ bodies seem almost as incidental as those of the orchestra players. This paper brings both sets of bodies back into the equation, through analysis of Stravinsky and Nijinska’s Les Noces (1923). Stravinsky’s music and his often idiosyncratic notation of rhythm, constrain and even choreograph the movements of musicians. Through choreography that ranges from slavish imitation of the music to total detachment, Nijinska simultaneously reflects and resists Stravinsky’s musical constructions of gender.

In this paper, I attempt to show how historically determined social, political and cultural forces gave rise to discourses along the lines of bourgeois and revolutionary ideologies and how these discourses constituted shifting feminist subjectivities preceding the feminist movement of the late 1960’s and 1970’s in the U.S. I will expose some of these processes by tracing aspects of Anna Sokolow’s choreographic practice in New York City during the 1930’s and during her travels to Russia and Mexico where she “founded” modern dance in 1940. Circulation in these three different contexts constituted Ana Sokolow as a feminist of seeming contradictions; she engaged in what some considered bourgeois dance as a dancer for Marta Graham and then in revolutionary dance as a choreographer for the New Dance Group. The case of Anna Sokolow illustrates how these seeming contradictions represent the complexity with which historically determined forces constitute shifting feminist subjectivities.

While capoeira angola often embraces the feminine category “dance” when it is necessary to find a parallel within hegemonic classifications of movement, capoeira regional has fully adopted the masculinist “martial arts” label. However, perhaps because of the fact that both capoeiras include movement and music—a combination dangerously close to dance—capoeira regional often adds further clarification on the matter to the martial arts appellation: it is a fight disguised as dance. This paper explores how these gendered categories, dance and martial art, express a deeper perception of these two styles of capoeira as feminine and masculine. I explore the ways in which specific movement choices produce this gendered understanding of capoeira, contrasting capoeira angola’s contained, understated movement repertoire with capoeira regional’s explosive movement choices. Borrowing Iris Marion Young’s categories of gendered body comportment, I argue that the capoeira angola game allows women to rehearse subjectivity and transcendence through the sheer full-bodied physicality of the game, while situating this movement in a familiarly feminine movement environment, where immanence—"incomplete" movements that stop short of their full potential—becomes valorized rather than considered something to overcome.

Dance in most African countries, more so in the western part of the continent is the responsibility of a particular class of the society. The main issue for performers or choreographers trained on modern standards is the transfer of information to dance professionals who are illiterate, and we’re talking about 75% of non educated people on the continent. The majority are women. It is an oral tradition too. So diversity, globalization, feminism mean nothing to them. The socio-political situation of the entire continent is a good example of the consequences of the colonization that, besides being a historical big mistake, was also a disaster because it did not respect the structure of societies, and today’s globalization of the world draws the continent down because it cannot consider its specific needs. To me, dance cannot be globalized because of creativity, identity, social specific values that would die.

In tourism, dance is popularly used as a medium that attracts outsiders’ attention and curiosity. One of the most prevalent images in Korean tourist advertisements and films is a female dancer in a colorful costume, welcoming foreigner tourists with a big smile. In this paper, through the critical analysis of the stereotypes and gender differences in dance depicted in Korean tourism commercials and shows, I examine how Korean dance has been commodified in the politics of tourism. Also I explore how tourism constitutes a “fantasy” of a culture in correspondence with Korea’s globalization and localization process, whether in the presence or the absence of actualities.

United & Severed is a media installation based on the corporeal experiences of three women living with traumatic injuries. Using video, audio, dance, sculpture and narrative, the artists create a multi-layered sensorial environment to convey the perceptions of people living in extraordinary circumstances as they traverse a challenging world. The work embraces feminist values, such as collectivity, collaboration, and subjectivity, as central to the process of research and art-making. To translate kinesthetic and sensorial experience, the artists created a space for the participants to share their physical realities, stories and creative actions in their own voices and actions. By creating an immersive environment, the artists mobilize audio and visual images to forward an intersubjective understanding of perception and kinesthetic awareness. This paper will investigate these strategies of art-making and ways that work enables empathetic responses.

Although much attention has been given to the “male gaze”, in this investigation, the focus is pulled away from this definition of gaze as purely voyeuristic. Instead, this work seeks to direct attention primarily to the gaze of the performer, thereby constituting an investigation of not only the audience-focused gaze but also the “female gaze”. Utilizing a case study in a Presbyterian congregation, the research uses fieldwork, historical research into the theology of the body, and a survey of dance manuals to explore the role of the female body in Christian worship. The gaze of the performer is explored as a source of her power; her gaze communicates her intent, it solidifies her role, and establishes her boundaries and her audience, allowing her to re-insert the body into the Christian sacred tradition.

This Interactive Roundtable presents the findings of the Dance Heritage Coalition’s “fair use” project, whose outcomes will make dance-related materials at libraries, museums, and archives more readily accessible to researchers, students, and the public. Strict copyright observance affects the breadth of materials available for scholarly study, public programming, and classroom use. Thus, copyrights adversely skew the dialogue in historical and cultural studies of dance. The panelists from the archival, scholarly, and legal fields will illustrate the copyright problem and the ‘fair use” solution by offering several case scenarios (including curatorial problems in the DHC traveling “Dance Treasures” exhibition). The DHC’s initiative is modeled on the documentary filmmakers' project on “fair use.” Through individual interviews and focus groups of librarians/archivists, tech staff who work with librarians, and scholars/educators, the DHC developed a set of scenarios where copyrights conflict with the programs and missions of dance-related cultural institutions. Findings and agreements will be collected and shared, including a draft of a “Statement of Best Practices of Fair Use.” Q&A to follow.

This session of papers offer strategies for movement research and practice— from ethnography in the field to the classroom at “home.” We ask: how can research on the performing body inform us about embodied cultural knowledge, identity, teaching, and history? This session offers different examples of the ways researchers approach the body in performance to reveal insights into culture, as well as the relationship between our selves and our work. The area studies covered in the session are diverse, ranging from Australian Aboriginal dance, Japanese dance, Central African BaAka dance, as well as the university classrooms we teach in. These contrasting contexts showcase how the body in performance calls for diverse methodologies of investigation, analysis, as well as approaches for “performing ethnography.”

I propose that the awareness and notation of movement sensibilities during fieldwork is an essential contribution of dance research to other disciplinary fields for the examination of movement expressivity. During fieldwork I learned a simple style of notating Japanese dance that would forever change how I would conceptualize and analyze movement. How and why a dance community notates movement reveals a great deal about that culture’s concept of the body. In this presentation I will provide examples of this notation and how it is incorporated in dancers’ lives. I will not be discussing the theoretical tangle in dance scholarship regarding how and why dance should be notated. I also will not challenge respected, well-established notation techniques. Instead, I am interested in demonstrating an “on the fly” notation practice that I believe can reveal a great deal about physical human expression within a continuum from dance to everyday activities.

Ethnographic work in dance and music has for several decades engaged with the discourse regarding reflexivity and embodied writing circulating within cultural anthropology, ethnomusicology, and feminist studies. Yet personal, experiential, interactive, and embodied perspectives remain marginal in ethnographic research and writing. This is in part because of lingering academic biases against the body, envisioned within binary thinking as a threat to the mind, and negatively associated with that which is feminized, personal, and partial. Fields including dance studies and ethnomusicology still must counteract anti-body (and anti “arts”) biases while making inroads within larger related fields. This paper addresses why inclusion of embodied and reflexive insight is crucial at this juncture, offering three miniature case studies. Two contrasting research contexts in Africa and one pedagogical case study in the U.S. will frame current issues in performance research and writing (including ethnographically informed performances), forwarding the evolving project of embodied performance ethnography.

This paper seeks to explore the intersections of feminist ethnography and dance ethnography in a study of urban space and ethnic identity. . I am working on a book-length project having to do with how cities in the Chinese diaspora – Hong Kong, Taipei, and New York – move and how their distinct motion is reflective and productive of each of these cities’ very fraught relationships to a notion of Chineseness. My concern, however, has been how do we perceive the collective movement of an entire city? The field of feminist ethnography has long argued for the value of the autobiographical in cultural research. This paper will draw on work in feminist ethnography in order to argue for a kind of personally-centered kinesthetic methodology as a way to apprehend city space. In so doing this paper seeks to make mutual contributions to the two larger fields of feminist ethnography and dance ethnography.

Fan vids (music videos that use re-edited footage from mass media such as TV shows and films) are part of a largely underground historically female fan culture that negotiates hegemonic capitalist mass media in ways markedly different from the popular perception of a passive, complicit audience. The body of the actor, whether a fictional or a publicity-cultivated character, is subverted to rewrite the 'official' media narrative with multiple and contradictory texts of movement that complicate the originally intended sexual, social, political, racial and gendered lenses. Close readings of sources from popular culture media including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 300, and Britney Spears' footage are situated within the online community discourse(s) surrounding each vid to examine how the idea of a female gaze has been constructed as a communal and self-aware one—both vid creator and viewers functioning on a shared level of assumptions, leading to a layered, collaborative reading that rewards insider knowledge.

There have always been women tap dancers, even though tap dance has always been considered "a man’s game." Many of these women hoofers have donned suit jacket, trousers and low-heeled shoes, some as male impersonators, some in feminized suits cut to show womanly form, and some wore male suits to command respect and indicate that they were serious rhythm tap dancers--jazz musicians with their feet. A 1945 film clip of Juanita Pitts shows an African American, woman, rhythm tap dancer wearing a men’s suit and low-heeled shoes. An analysis of this clip, and images and footage of tap dancing women in suits from the 1920s to present--including Alberta Whitman, Jeni LeGon, Eleanor Powell, and Brenda Bufalino--reveals what the iconography of the suit can tell us about gender, race, and the struggle over authenticity in tap dance.

In the field of dance studies much discourse surrounds notions of gender identity and women’s rights within Western dance traditions. One group of scholars asserts that early modern dance practice successfully resisted patriarchal notions. Another contends that early modern dance perpetuated traditional assumptions. A third perspective proposes that early modern dance realized a simultaneous reiteration and subversion of traditional gender roles.

In similar fashion, this presentation delineates the parameters of a growing subset in contemporary dance and religious practice, the field of contemporary professional Christian dance, and explores the ways in which these groups reify traditional gender roles through choreographed depictions of rigid gender binaries while simultaneously subverting them through the introduction of the female body and the female voice to the traditionally male-dominated Protestant worship space. In terms of its relevance to global feminisms, contemporary professional Christian dancers reify and subvert traditional gender roles on a global scale through international touring and arts-based missionary outreach programs.

The paper investigates Martha Graham’s complex positioning to feminist agendas. Her relationship to feminism is not only intricate because definitions of feminism are not unified but also because Graham had an ambivalent positioning to it. On the one hand, through her work, Graham can be considered an incredibly powerful feminist consciousness. Alternatively and simultaneously, she explicitly disavowed any connection to feminism, especially in her autobiography Blood Memory (1991). This discrepancy suggests an intricacy to Graham’s affiliation with gendered power dynamics. To consider this divergence I specifically theorise the historicized effects of Graham’s embodied sense of gender identity; how it influenced her politics, stage representations and ultimately her positioning to the political agendas of feminism.

A recurring issue in dance studies has been the question, “what is ‘Black Dance?’ Famously raised by Zita Allen and others, this question has never lead to easy answers or widely agreed upon responses. The paper seeks to examine the historical use and application of the term “Black Dance” and put forth a critical argument concerning its relevance and in support of its continued use. The paper will draw on the work of Richard A. Long, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Thomas DeFrantz, bell hooks and other feminist critiques of post-modernism in order to provide the necessary theoretical frameworks to engage this issue.

This paper has several purposes. First it provides an historical meta-analysis of select dance theory scholarship providing a taxonomic picture of the gendered divide that it resides in. The argument is that dance has borrowed theoretical constructs from other fields, with the exclusion of notation, to explain and describe itself, and unwittingly has set up a feminine and masculine construction of producing and accepting new knowledge. What this paper suggests is that dance in all its manifestations in the scholarly world can be used by academic disciplines in the globalized movement of information, and moreover, I argue for and demonstrate an “applied dance theory” contributory niche. In particular, how can dance be used to study consumption behavior? This paper therefore has three objectives. First to look at the implicit gendering of dance theory; second, to provide a taxonomy of selected theories of dance; and third, to provide a framework to apply dance theory to consumption behavior.

Questions on feminism are integral to the debates about representations that emerged from the subaltern historiographies of India. Postcolonial theory showed us how we can turn to the colonial archive to recover the erased subaltern within the colonial and national history of India. Through textual strategies we learned to read the silences and the gaps, which (ironically) are the traces left behind by the marginalized subjects of history. But what about the sensuous and emotional palpability of the subaltern dancing subject? What is her archive? How can we retrieve the history of the senses that informs her body? These marginalized subjects of Indian national history are no longer cut-off from lines of social mobility under global capitalism. In fact, now they often perform on the global stage. This paper will examine some of these questions by looking at the fundamental perceptual changes caused by technology, mass media and global capital in India.

This paper critically explores how the world-renowned Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan’s Cursive trilogy is received and interpreted in the transnational circuits of production and consumption. The trilogy appropriates both Tai-Chi aesthetics and modern dance techniques, and provokes the re-conceptualization of Taiwanese body and identity in the age of globalization. This paper outlines the strategies of self-representation of the Oriental bodies, and investigates how the trilogy challenges the assumptions of Chinese-ness, nationhood, gender and identity.

This lecture-demonstration will provide a framework for interpretation of the female presence in Afro-Cuban Orisha dancing through the three most prevalent female archetypes; Oshun, Yemaya, and Oya. The workshop will accomplish this goal through building an understanding of Orisha Dance as a form of movement, examining the roles of the above mentioned female archetypes and exploring their characteristic gestures, their development and stories, through movement.

Participants will come away with a concrete understanding of the importance and basic history of Orisha dancing and the ability to dissect the three common Female Archetypes. In addition, participants will be able to appreciate the relevance of Orisha dance in the general Latin and Caribbean culture and understand how this movement type influences many other dance forms.

This paper explores the unique terrain that unfolded when a sophisticated, interactive system, SMALLab (Situated Multimedia Arts Learning Laboratory) was placed in an urban, inner-city elementary school to facilitate the instruction of a dance composition curriculum. Additionally, this paper seeks to understand what it means to work at an intersection of male and female paradigms and how, from this perspective, to think about the bridge between technology and humanity. The project explored the efficacy and potential for educational and creative enhancement of SMALLab, a fifteen square foot interactive space that allows students to generate changes in sonic and visual media through gesture and full body movement.

This paper explores the role and influence of dance education in Jane Addams’s Hull House from its opening in 1889 through roughly 1900. I contend that the ideology of middle and upper class women of the Progressive Era, asserted through channels like Hull House, privileged particular forms of dance over others. In effect, they denied the validity of American vernacular dance as a legitimate movement vocabulary. To illuminate these Progressive postures, I investigate the trajectory of American dance education in relation to Jane Addams’s attitudes towards diversity, the role of art and the value of dance at Hull House. I draw from women’s, race and cultural studies for this project and employ historiographic analysis. By contextualizing the elements above, I suggest that as a site of socialization and education Hull House assisted in maintaining the separation of “acceptable” and “unacceptable” dance in the United States.

American avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren is highly acclaimed as one of the pioneers of film dance, but her final film The Very Eye of Night (1952-55, released 1959) is largely neglected in the dance field. In that silenced, marginalized cases shed light on the discursive contour of the field, I examine not only Deren's intention of the film but also assumptions and rationales upon which dance scholars and critics ignored the film. I argue that the medium-specific and modernist concept of dance film, which Deren herself initially introduced into the field, contributes to the film's ignorance in dance scholarship. Also, the use of ballet is another impeding factor as its anti-gravitational quality and classical implication do not befit textual and sociocultural expectations of dance scholars for Deren's dance film.

Many people believe that “breakdancing” was a fad of the past, however breaking/b-boy culture has evolved and flourished all over the US and around the world. It now has so many participants that a critical mass of interest demands that the history and other cultural aspects of this dance be discussed and explored. “Dance Like a Girl: An oral history of b-girls in NYC in the 1990s,” attempts to complicate the current hip hop historical narrative by listening to the experience of women participants. As a practicing b-girl herself, Park discusses how academic oral history methodology allowed her to maintain her relationships with her subjects, while also allowing them to be active participants in shaping their personal histories. She also presents how OH methodology serves as a post-colonial, post-modern way to research social history and cultural practices.

On July 17, 2007, Byron Garcia, Cebu provincial security consultant uploaded the CPDRC: Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center inmates’ performance of Michael Jackson’s iconic, record-breaking music video “Thriller”. Gaining enough widespread popularity to be ranked YouTube #4 Top Favorites (All Time) video, I ask how 1,500 Cebuano prisoners performing “Thriller” hold the global gaze so captive? Also, how do issues of sexual, racial, and cultural desire and anxiety inform “Thriller” in both content and reception? I analyze the filmed “Thriller” dance in Cebu in order to open up its ambivalent success as explicated through issues of mimicry, choreography, and reception. I argue that “Thriller” takes part in a century-long conversation on Philippine representation, discipline, and imperial meanings. What subjects are formed through this experiment designed to literally choreograph discipline onto “deviant” bodies? Finally, when situating this user-generated spectacle in the contexts of Filipino diaspora, post-colonialism, and bakla performance, what epistemological shifts do we make from the gaze-spectacle binary?

My investigation into the performances of Cuban hip-hop trio Las Krudas looks at the ways in which this group has entered into the public sphere and how they conceive of their music and performance as a mode for making space for themselves in a culture where their intersecting identities have been written out. I discuss the ways Las Krudas use the choreography of their bodies in their concert performances and in their music videos to create an aesthetic of intersecting identities: black, queer, fat, Cuban, female. My investigation assumes the body is a producer of media and interrogates the ways in which their particular choreographies dialogue with their lyrics. Finally, I address the increasing presence of women in the Hip Hop scene in Cuba and the ways in which this collective of bodies performs social change and use their performances to demand and command space.

The “fulcrum” definitions offer a fitting metaphor for Joan Myers Brown’s status in the dance field, with her stature originating in Philadelphia and reaching far beyond. In a professional career of fifty-plus years, her perspective and vision have influenced generations of dancers and dance makers. Arguably, Brown’s Philadelphia School of Dance Arts and Philadelphia Dance Company are responsible for a style of dance that can be called the “Philadelphia School.” I shall use Brown’s career as the fulcrum to leverage an investigation of the interface between performance, cultural formation, and race politics as evidenced by the development of a dance community in black Philadelphia and the rise and spread of its influence beyond the black community and regional borders to national and international distinction. Philadelphia’s dance history outstrips regional specificity and can be interrogated in terms of broader issues in American life—issues of identity, social change, and cultural comfort levels—allowing us to understand that dance is, indeed, a measure of culture and a barometer of society.

In this paper I look at the product and process of Playful Warriors, an Afro-modern choreography by Ojeya Cruz Banks. I examine how, through these movement aesthetics and/or this choreography, healing is activated and/or potentialized for individual dancers, the dancers as a group, and/or audience members. Moving from a wide angle (global) lens of Afro-Diasporic cultural travel and the historically significant and persistent contemporary cultural residues, I unearth aspects of how Afro-Diasporic dance practices dialogue with the cultural, political, economic, and spiritual soil of the dancers in this piece. Through telling stories of their own experiences, how do individual dancers and community members narrate and thus map the borders of their own identities through dance? In addition, how do these expressions and experiences of Africanist aesthetics mark and map the imaginary of what Afro-Diasporic dance is and how it is situated as a contemporary US American concept today? I hope to show how, in various sites of practice and spectatorship, moments of utopic potential can be illumined to activate individual and social healing through dance.

We will be conducting a Lecture-Demonstration/Workshop on the ongoing, collaborative creation of Fierce/Pink/House, a multi-media, dance-theatre exploration of women's body stories. We will give a 30-45 minute introduction to the workshop activities that are creating the piece. We plan to show a short video clip of the work-in-progress and then spend 45 minutes conducting a workshop in which participants will begin the process of writing body stories, creating images and exploring what it means to be a body in process. The workshop will mirror the workshops that are being conducted in the creation of Fierce/Pink/House, and could serve as source material or inspiration for the performance in the winter of 2009 at the University of California at Davis. This lecture/demo/workshop is a collaboration between a dance practitioner and a dance scholar, so within the structure of the session, we will be exploring the relationship between practice and scholarship through the overarching theme of feminism in dance.

In 1919, Florence Fleming Noyes founded an annual summer camp in Cobalt, CT, creating a space for a community of women to explore a danced somatic practice influenced by the Delsarte tradition, Charles Wesley Emerson's theory of creativity, and the popular notion of rhythmic expression. Among the camp traditions that have been preserved for nearly ninety years is "Saturday Night," an evening of impromptu, vaudeville-style performance in an all-female, non-public context. This paper utilizes a queer theoretical perspective to explore the function of "Saturday Night" as a community building practice within the tradition of the summer camp culture.

At the heart of this study is an intertwining of commercialization with bodily performances of racial identity. In my paper I suggest that ragtime dancing was transformed into “modern dance” by social dance professionals during the 1910s to create a commercial dance product that could more easily be mass marketed to the white upper classes. Period social dance professionals called their transformation of ragtime a “refinement” and justified it through discourses of artistry and morality which referenced socioeconomic mobility. The changes they made to the dances, however, indicate that removing the black associations of ragtime dancing was a goal as well, or at least an effect of their labors. Thus, the creation and mass marketing of modern dance, which launched an American ballroom dance industry, were deeply rooted in powerful period racial tensions.

Based on oral history interviews, ethnographic research and close movement analysis, this paper will compare the role of female professional dancers in the 1950s mambo craze and the contemporary salsa craze. I will reveal differences in the feminine aesthetic in each form and consider how this shift is representative of a broader cultural transformation in representation of female sexuality. I will also explore similarities in the experiences of female Latin dancers in these two eras and propose possible interpretations for the seeming persistence of sexism in professional Latin dance over the past sixty years. Finally, I will consider how race and racial barriers are experienced differently by men and women in the Latin dance profession.

Surely the most indelible image of the female tap dancer in the twentieth century has been the woman in the high-heeled shoe, and so has it been the most controversial. For the high-heeled shoe, which brings the dancer onto the balls of the feet to enhance the line and shape of the leg, is emblematic of the chorusline dancer who performed audibly-clear but simple steps, and was incapable of the rhythm-tapping virtuosity of her male peers. The high-heeled shoe is what women in the 1970s flatly rejected in favor of the low-heeled men’s oxford shoe, as it enabled them to perform the piston-driven steps of rhythm tap and earned them the most superlative of complements: “You dance like a man.” The high-heeled shoe is what women in the millennium have reclaimed by demonstrating their ability to execute all of the steps of the male dancer, only in high-heeled shoes, and thus dancing “as a woman.” I will examine the shifting politics of high- and low-heel controversy, the shifting strategies of “showing leg” (cutaway tuxedo) and “erasing leg” (full suit), of rising onto the balls of the feet and dropping the heels; and interrogate the notion of the “feminine” in tap dancing.

In the cosmopolitan Greco-Roman world of the second and third centuries CE, the terms magodos, malakos, and kinaidos/cinaedus identified a category of performer usually described (inadequately) as the "effeminate dancer." This paper investigates the nature of the "effeminate dancer's" performance and his function in the various societies in which such entertainment is attested, ranging from the dance-negative environs of urban Rome to the diverse cultures of the Middle East and Asia Minor, in which there was arguably a longstanding tradition of such performers associated with religious cult. In a world where men typically played women's roles in mainstream drama and dance, the "effeminate dancer's" performance consciously broke these accepted conventions of theatrical illusion to create a space in which culturally vital distinctions of gender were challenged and moral ambiguities specifically enacted.

This paper contrasts the iconic embodiments of empowered femininity characteristic of Martha Graham’s choreographic work, and the gender ambiguity found in Mary Wigman’s early solo concerts. These modern dance pioneers both emancipated the female body from dominant Western culture’s insistence on binary gender definitions. However, their differing approaches to how a liberated female body looks, moves, and dresses, provides an opportunity to examine modern dance as a forum for diverse shifts in gender representation. This research draws on my personal experience dancing with the Martha Graham Dance Company and historic research investigating Wigman’s early solo concerts in Germany from 1917-1919. This paper makes the claim that modern dance, as a conscious fusion of the body and mind, can embrace the fluid complexity of personal identity and encourage both conceptual and embodied transcendence of hegemonic male/female paradigms.

Relatively recently, jazz dance has become recognized as an artistic medium equal to other genres of concert dance, such as ballet, modern, and post-modern. Throughout the twentieth century, a path was forged by a few jazz dance pioneers who developed and codified their movement methodology and inscribed their styles on dancers. Teacher/Choreographer Gus Giordano is considered a ground-breaking figure in helping to elevate jazz dance as a serious art form by systematizing a technical training program and establishing a concert jazz dance company in Evanston, Illinois. His "American" dance style borrows from traditional sources like ballet and modern, with a close connection to components of the African aesthetic, which imprint on it markers of authority, presence, strength, connection to the ground, directness, speed, sensuality and vitality. A close reading of key elements of his technique will show how Giordano participated in a dynamic and empowering rewriting of the female dancer's body, giving concert dance a sense of gender balance within an aesthetic that includes gender difference.

Can women in a male-dominated society gain equal footing? Society is based on a belief system. To alter those beliefs or to release them completely requires the ability to perceive beyond commonly-held assumptions and provide a foundation that ensures society’s basic needs. HIStory runs rife with wars, new countries, conglomerates continuously arising. Exercising feminine traits of nurturing and empathy women can cross cultural boundaries with abilities to connect, building a new system on a large scale. And they can do it through their art. Women have been raised to support power not to exercise it. Now they must be taught to assume power and exert it with care. Once she has been taught to handle power and think out-of-the-box, the female dance artist can begin to use her art to promote and market a new paradigm. She becomes a leader that can connect with large audiences to influence a different mind-set.

In many ways “Dance Studies” has in recent years become synonymous with a kind of theoretical writing that is heavy on post-structuralist philosophy, but often curiously disconnected with the intentions and everyday practices of dancers and choreographers. In this presentation, I intend to examine this issue by investigating and analyzing the essays that make up the book, Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory (edited by Andre Lepecki), through the lens of a course I am teaching that steeps second-year MFA dance students in the world of dance theory. What is the role of “dance” in these essays? Is there a clear demarcation between feminine and masculine approaches to the theorized space of dance writing? In what ways does dance theory perform its own authority? How can the values of practitioners inform the scholarship of theorists? If there is a voice of dance theory, to whom is it speaking, and on whose behalf?

The presentation conducts a close reading of two recent feminist dance works – Yippee!!! (2006) by British choreographer Lea Anderson and Mission/K (2002) by the Japanese collective KATHY – in order to fathom their arguments about how gender is experienced in contemporary first-world societies. Using these dances as hypotheses about the social, I argue that gender has become a repertoire of images and movements, uploaded into a transnationally circulating repository available to accessorize any body. By comparing the two works, their similar choreographic strategies and distinctive political arguments, I hope to suggest how a transnational feminism in dance scholarship could begin to choreograph itself.

Given the ephemeral nature of digital technology, alternative methods of recording hip-hop history must be developed. While I do not agree with dismantling the inter-generational oral tradition altogether, and would advocate for a reawakening of this historical convention as well, archiving hip-hop digital media, in both institutional Archives, museums and libraries as well as in alternative print, Internet and video mediums, could be its own form of preservation and power in the hip-hop community. It would preserve a legacy of inter-generational cultural and historical inheritance that is currently threatened. It could also add institutional legitimacy and economic independence. Finally, it could promote education and artistic development.

My lecture-demonstration will feature an 18min. filmed interview with break-dancer, Rokafella as well as a presentation of the larger project, set against the backdrop of a videotaped, commissioned, solo dance performance with Rokafella as well.

This paper argues for the possibility of queer spectatorship in renowned taiko player Tiffany Tamaribuchi’s performances. Taiko is an athletic and spectacular form of ensemble drumming with roots in Japanese culture. An award-winning taiko player who has trained and performed in the U.S. and Japan, Tiffany Tamaribuchi also founded the Sacramento Taiko Dan and Jodaiko, an all-women’s taiko group comprised of members from throughout North America. Despite working within a conservative performance framework and within a form that is often framed as “multicultural” performance, Tamaribuchi’s performances with the all-women’s group Jodaiko can be seen as queer. Using performance analysis and a close reading of Tamaribuchi’s performance of a solo called “Odaiko” in a 2006 concert, I argue that Tamaribuchi’s taiko performances invite queer spectatorship both through Tamaribuchi’s queer gender performance, and through the affective, kinesthetic relationship taiko drumming can produce between the audience and spectator.

The Many Deaths of John Wayne: Toward A Butch-Femme Aesthetic of Democracy

This essay looks at the negotiation of a lesbian feminist subject position within the choreographic production of cowboyness. I argue here that queering the cowboy image and destabilizing the cowboy's presumption to masculine authority offers an alternative model of democracy that is particularly potent in the contemporary United States given the cowboy's symbolic hold on the U.S. imaginary. To do this I develop Theater scholar Sue-Ellen Case's influential article "Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic" (1988) using the choreography titled Making a Disaster: The Many Deaths of John Wayne (Part II) (2006) by Marianne Kim and Lee Anne Schmitt as a case study.

In May 1931, the ballet Sahdji premiered at the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, New York: with a libretto by Harlem Renaissance's Alain Locke and Richard Nugent, music by composer William Grant Still, dedicated to the Eastman School's Howard Hanson, with the ballet by Thelma Biracree, the work set in Africa was performed by dancers in blackface. In 1934 the work was performed with an all-black cast in Chicago, and revived in Rochester until 1950. Sahdji demonstrates that the participants shared two tenets: the desire to create high art, and the belief in African forms to achieve artistic aims. Locke and Nugent had a small shared world that included Lincoln Kirstein. Locke wrote about The Rite of Spring and Sahdji became Locke's African answer to Spring. Sahdji begs for a reinvigoration of dance history that credits philosophical underpinnings of the American ballet to the Harlem Renaissance and its queer connections.

An analysis of dancing within a specific culture yields insight and knowledge into the evolving politics, economics, religion, science, intellectual life, and art of that culture; dance is a reflection of the culture. Historically, China has used media mega events such as the 50th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China in 1999 to stage cultural performances in which national ideology is expressed through dance. Since 2001 dance has played an important role in the buildup of the Olympic Games that will culminate in the opening ceremonies and the subsequent cultural festival. The purpose of this research is to investigate the role dance plays in the nature of Chinese national image management on the international stage. This project will assess the degree to which the opening ceremonies of the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing conform to or deviate from China’s previous uses of dance as a tool of state.

From her larger research project on Bodabil (from the Filipino pronunciation of vaudeville), Carolina San Juan analyzes an excerpt from the popular movie Stariray (1979), which features Philippine Bodabil star, Dolphy. While Dolphy’s performance questions Filipino perceptions of bakla which includes cross-dressing behavior it also inserts the Philippines into the global mediascape with its inclusion of a Filipino folkdance among other western cosmopolitan dances. Additionally, through a close analysis of this scene, San Juan argues that while it appears that Dolphy is deploying the signifiers of femininity against the hegemonic, masculinist empire further investigation reveals that Dolphy’s dance in fact reinforces dominant constructions of gender in his parody of a cross-dressing man.

My work began with a specific look into the lives of British suffragettes and modern dancers in the early twentieth century. By looking critically and empathetically at these women, I discovered deeper questions about my relationship to history and time. Although considering how these women struggled to carve out spaces for themselves in a patriarchal world was important, my creative work began to uncover a more personal sense of struggle. Through these women’s stories, I discovered that my own body struggles against my fears of losing time and expresses itself by making personal meaning out of history. This project became about the struggle of not knowing the full story of both a distant and a more immediate, personal sense of history. The lived experiences of dance, writing and the creative process were ways to access this knowledge. The female body, finite, articulate and powerful was essential to this meaning making.

This paper offers a dancer’s perspective on working and performing with Ananya Dance Theatre, a women-of-color dance company based in Minneapolis. I reflect on the ways in which the transgressive and resistive space and works of ADT have allowed me to bear witness to traumas and struggles of women from diverse communities in the Global South and to interrogate and transform my own identities as a an immigrant, an Asian American, a woman of color, and an activist-artist. ADT’s collective journey attests to embodied performance’s power to witness, to transform, to build community, and to evoke hope.

Traditionally, dance learning has involved two modes of delivery: verbal and visual instruction. A teacher explains and corrects, demonstrates and gives tactile feedback to teach students about ideas through movement. She may find it difficult to contextualize concepts through verbal explanation alone, and could spend hours searching for appropriate supplements. Even then, students unfamiliar with dance vocabulary and uncomfortable with abstract movement could run into frustration through this limited approach. Education requires a variety of stimuli, and dance education in particular can benefit greatly from the advantages of online learning tools. This presentation will show how dance instructors can easily incorporate 21st century technologies into their classrooms, thereby enhancing students' comprehension of theories such as feminism.

Gwoka is an African-derived dance from Guadeloupe performed during night-long events called swaré léwoz. It is a drum-dance challenge in which the dancer tries to catch the drummer off guard by constantly changing the pace of her or his moves. Men and women assume different roles in gwoka: Most gwoka dancers are women. Men play the drums and sing the lead. Some women sing the chorus, but do not drum. In July 2006, women from all over Guadeloupe gathered together in order to organize a special night for women only. Women would drum, sing, and dance as well. Taking the women’s léwoz where traditional notions of masculinity and femininity were challenged and re-visited as a starting point, I look at the interactions between dancer and drummer during a performance. My paper aims at highlighting some of the ways in which gendered identity are expressed and constructed in Gwoka performance.

This paper explores innovations in classical bharatanatyam (from Tamil Nadu, India) and parameters of change within “tradition”. Who is making change, and how does change work both in classical bharatanatyam and in Contemporary Indian Dance? I discuss the creative choreography of two major Contemporary Indian Dancers, Anita Ratnam and Astad Deboo with over thirty year professional dance careers. Their dance innovations travel transnationally, South to South, and South to North. Ratnam’s signature style, evoking the “female transcendental,” is rooted in Indian aesthetic along with a pan-Asian scope. Deboo draws from classical Indian dance styles, Kathak and Kathakali, as well as modern dance, and Indian martial arts. Deboo choreographs unique work with deaf dancers in India and in Washington D.C. Ratnam’s and Deboo’s creative choreography serves as models for second-generation Contemporary Indian dancers in the diaspora such as Los Angeles-based Post-Natyam Collective’s movement explorations among other dancers based in the diaspora.

The Chinese tradition of female foot binding dates back thousands of years and has had a profound impact on the status and expectations of Chinese women well into the 20th century. This paper explores the cross-cultural collaboration between a male Chinese choreographer, a female American dancer and the intersection of metaphoric movement with female identity in Er-Dong Hu’s choreographic work, 3” Golden Lotus (2007). Addressing a personal and cultural history, Mr. Hu offers a gallery of kinesthetic images that portray the imposed practice of foot binding. What is revealed is one dancer’s psychological journey as she follows in the tiny and excruciating footsteps of her female ancestors. Lotus serves as a choreographic springboard for investigating not only the Chinese tradition of bound feet, but also its counterparts in other times and cultures, all of which represent a global subjugation of the woman’s body.

The three scholars on this panel have begun to develop frameworks to imagine the neglected spaces of queer femininity in order to address how women, strange and unwieldy, have created and performed alternatives to hegemonic orderings of racialized gender. We consider historically what has not been documented, methodologically what has not been articulated, and choreographically what has not been allowed. The three presentations explore how dancers play with and undermine received choreographies of womanness, moving against the current of dominant imaginations of femininity: un-prettying poses in flamenco, de-heterosexualizing partnering in salsa clubs, and dirtying dances in backyard birthday parties. The consequences for these queer performances vary from arm-poking to harassment to colonial police intervention; but enactments of hegemonic femininities, which risk strangulating these queerly racialized, sexualized, and classed subjects, threaten differently violent consequences that dancers refuse to accept. What, these papers ask, creates the conditions for such unwieldy femininities to emerge and persist? What are the uneasy negotiations that take place between leaders and followers, partiers and police, performers and audiences that make these queer presentations possible and provocative? How does reading for female performers’ strategies of roughness—their enactments of queerness, disruption, coarseness, conflict—counteract the flattening effects of discourses of global culture?

This paper considers the performances of queer Latina-ness in Los Angeles dance clubs. While many salseras in Los Angeles heterosexual nightclub hierarchies infuse their performances with standardized speedy spins, stylized arm gestures, and sequins to create themselves as desirable dance partners, other women practice alternative femininities. At a club with a primarily immigrant clientele from Mexico and Central America, I will consider the parallels between two women who dance together without inviting men to join them and another who practices participant observation that focuses on women. What emerges is the importance of being armed with a racialized queer methodology in order to counteract the pressures of the club’s heterosexual choreography that continuously derails the ethnographic project and interrupts encounters among women.

An analysis of performances by three different bailaoras, Belén Maya, Pastora Galván and Rocío Molina demonstrates the ways in which contemporary female flamenco dancers negotiate the exotic stereotype of Mérimée’s Carmen as well as the idealized image of Spanish femininity and beauty that pervades “traditional” flamenco. These choreographic readings are situated between comments shared by the artists in interviews and the critical response to their work. The dialogue reveals the ways in which contemporary flamencas speak very pointedly to the representations of their exoticism, as well as their struggles to use flamenco as a language to achieve an intelligibility beyond a heteronormative construction of appropriate femininity. Their experimental steps carve out a space for “authority” in the narratives—choreographic, written and spoken—that threaten to contain or constrain their performance.

Through dance, Caribbean theorists argue, enslaved Afro-Caribbeans enacted complex, supple, dislocated, and reassembled anti-colonial worldviews, recorded and carried in their bodies. But—focused on performances of racial hybridity—critics rarely engage how gender is queerly dislocated and reassembled in these same movements. This paper revises these neglected imaginations by asking how the danced rituals of Surinamese women who love women reinvent the Caribbean racialized, gendered, and sexualized body, and how their movement vocabulary reflects and contests regional imaginations of femininity. Specifically, I focus on literal and figurative uses of the flower fayalobi (fire love) in the danced exchanges of Surinamese women who love women at the community celebration of the birthday party, where women enter dancing, singing, and carrying bouquets for female lovers. I read these performances as active theorizing of Caribbean women’s sexuality as a site of Creolization: that is, a queer or eccentric site that moves, dances, plays in dialogue with multiple regional histories.

Choreographer George Balanchine and the ballets he created have much to say about the idea of femininity in American dance. A legion of dance scholars have read Balanchine’s ballets through a feminist lens, frequently understanding the work as severely limiting the possibilities for representations of women onstage, particularly when the ballet centers around a pas de deux. But what happens if we look beyond the male/female duel center stage and see the women surrounding the primary couple? This paper argues that the women of Balanchine’s corps present a more diverse picture of what counts as woman in American ballet, focusing on a milestone in New York City Ballet history that foregrounded the performance of identity, the company’s 1962 U.S. State Department sponsored tour of the Soviet Union. Personal interviews with corps dancers who traveled on the tour will illustrate how the corps’ perception of gender affected their work onstage and off.

This essay uses ballet as an example of how, within the context of globalization, dance can be rooted in a discourse of difference that women must learn to overcome. Contributing to the growing research on ballet produced by Jennifer Fisher (and others), this article explores the practice of ballet from the perspective of three students enrolled at a university level intermediate ballet classroom. Based on ethnographic material, that was brought together by observing the body practices in the ballet classroom, and interviewing the ballerinas about their experience with ballet, I explore the intersection between ballet and the lives of the female participants. In describing how the students understand their bodies in relation to the rigid structures of ballet, I show that it is precisely those structures that imbue the students with a sense of agency and self expression. I also reveal that by conforming to the structures of ballet, the students are also striving to reconcile their sense of a mind/body dualism.

Utube, Beyonceworld, and Second Life: do girls still ‘go to ballet’? presents updates from my ongoing ethnographic study into the lived experience and worldviews of 8 -11 year old girls in the UK, and responds to my 1999 Selma Jeanne Cohen award winning paper, Respect, Antipathy, and Tenderness: why do girls ‘go to ballet’? History has moved very fast: technologies have transformed the daily lived experience of children, now supersaturated with images and with access to communities far beyond their physical and cultural environment. The paper reports how girls in 2008 assess such experience, and considers whether the girls’ bodies are being rechoreographed by an unprecedented excess of images of bodies and ways of moving, very different from and potentially more powerful than those they encounter in their own cultural setting.

This paper presentation is an analysis of the bodily politics and feminist discourses represented in the choreography of three prominent 20th century modern dancers. In looking at the choreography and lives of Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and Yvonne Rainer, (and thus three different generations/iterations of modern dance), through a socio-historical lens, I investigate the unique feminist and political choices that were made in how they presented themselves publicly and through their dance works (though they may not have necessarily labeled themselves as feminists). I analyze how these three women negotiated and navigated the terrain of a male-dominated world and a marginalized form of art, and through their gesturing bodies, produced latitudinal changes in how dance and women were perceived. My initial research includes an exegesis of texts from the areas of dance history, feminist history, and social history, looking critically at the larger (or global) artistic, social and political climate of the environments and respective time periods that they were actively creating work/performing in. Then, by looking specifically at the corporeal presence in their choreography, I endeavor to locate how the gestures themselves activated a shift in perception of what was considered “female” in that time period, and what was considered “dance” - signifiers that traversed a fine line between radical polarity and acceptance. Rather than extracting these women from their context of existence to look microscopically at just their choreography from a current frame of reference, I have attempted to weave them into the fabric of American history, measuring and assessing their work/ideologies in reference to these findings. Much of this research investigates the notion of body politics, specifically of the dancing female body, how these representations have necessarily changed over time, the larger social repercussions, and the resulting aesthetic affect in regards to modern dance.

Cognitive neuroscience is an area which helps us to enlarge our knowledge of how movement is perceived and how we can understand the process of kinaesthetic empathy. In my presentation, I will analyse the connections between the visual/auditive input while watching a dance performance; the stored knowledge on the sensation of movement; motor responses; and emotional experiences. Experiments done on monkeys by Rizzolatti et al. gave insight in the working of the brain, while watching movement. He discovered activity of neurons, which he called mirror neurons. Many experiments followed, by neuroscientists and psychologists like Keyzers, Bekkering, Decety and Glaser.

In my presentation, I will use research results from neuroscience, as well as results from my own empirical studies. Those results give us more insight in the mechanisms active in the process of kinaesthetic empathy, which can be helpful for choreographers interested in involvement strategies on a movement level.

This paper applies a choreographic lens to Costa Rican-American performance artist Elia Arce’s Fifth Commandment, an interdisciplinary evening-length work that foregrounds the centrality of gendering to national ideals of citizen corporeality. By employing a globalized understanding of choreography as the motion of bodies in time and space, I read the manner in which Arce’s piece traces the transnational motion of an anonymous, female immigrant who traversing past and present, from Central America to the U.S., as a politically uncanny body—the unacknowledged specter that haunts national imaginaries.

The exploration of hula and Chinese dance in Hawai’i illuminates the ways in which the authentic is a slippery category that has, in some cases, produced various points of tension and resistance. These points of tension and resistance are within a geopolitical space where struggles between colonized and colonizer, indigenous and settler, are politicized that subsumes validation of one’s identity. Identity, as a project of the nation-state, then sets up dance as representative/representation of an authentic body. In this exploration, I posit an agency for more voices via dance writings and dancing bodies to investigate various power relations that move through the body to obscure preconceived notions of an authentic that are within institutions of hierarchy and, systems of privilege and inequality.

Inspired by an illustration entitled “Traditional Japanese Physique” in an American text on Butoh dance, this paper probes the conception of and relationship to such a body within American Butoh dance. What is this notion of a “Japanese body” and what are the ethics of appropriating it? How do we talk about the body in a dance form that grew from a specific cultural context but is now considered a global form? I address these questions with reference to “Orientalization” in early American Modern Dance and related practices in contemporary American Butoh. Applying Edward T. Hall’s model of cross-cultural communication to dance studies, I discuss ways in which American dancers and dance scholars might approach the Butoh body in non-essentializing terms. This paper is intended to open up conversation about cultural appropriation in artwork and the complexities of Butoh dance as a global practice.

This panel, Localized Feminisms/Globalized Spaces, explores contemporary feminist interventions in four disparate sites of dance: Western Post-Modern Concert Dance, Los Angeles Club Culture, Bharata Natyam in Sri Lanka, and Butoh Ritual Mexicano. Unified by a feminist analysis of bodies and locations, these papers present distinct approaches to writing feminism into dance sites and situations historically written out of the feminist project. Our interest in coming together is to have a conversation across forms and locations in order to consider strategies as to how dance scholarship can approach feminisms, and vice-a-versa. While the act of researching and writing these critiques is an element of this feminist praxis, we are also motivated to uncover the potential feminisms and agentive acts inherent or injected into these projects, and enacted by their practitioners. Taken together, these four presentations demonstrate the possibilities of dance to complicate feminist scholarship, while also encouraging further analysis of gender and power grounded in particular dance practices.

In this presentation, I will be looking at how shifts in popular culture, changes in what is considered accepted behavior, sexuality, and presentation of femininity, have resulted in distinctive re-packaging of the iconic ‘club girl’ aesthetic. In my studies of The Vanguard (an exclusive Los Angeles dance club) from 2003- 2008, the rough-and-tumble, sneaker and baggy pants-wearing raver girl has receded in favor of a hyper-sexualized vixen, complete with stiletto heels and low cut blouses. I will be exploring how a change in footwear, from functional soles to 4-inch heels, has had a profound impact on how feminine sexuality is displayed and agency sought.

In 2005, contemporary postmodern dance artist Jennifer Lacey began performing Two Discussions of An Anterior Event, a re-imagining of her provocative 1997 solo, Skin Mitten. Rather than revise or reconstruct the original choreography in this second incarnation, the re-worked version plays with her shifting and evolving relationship to this earlier work. In approaching this material again, I argue, Lacey layers her representations further by including (sometimes discordant) performances of subjectivity located in the intervening years. Reading this choreographic composition with the lens of contemporary feminist autobiography, I suggest, she exposes the multiple selves entrenched in the autobiographical “I” and re-imagines the autobiographical project.

In the summer of 2006, two separate weeklong workshops were offered at the Butoh Ritual Mexicano Dance Center in Tlalpujahua, Michoacán. The first was held for Diego Piñón’s Mexican students, the second for students traveling internationally. Both workshops shared the same themes, yet Piñón introduced an additional element for the second group of mostly American students: Sacrifice of the Woman’s Heart. This paper examines Piñón’s motivations for including this thematic element in the foreign student group, documents the conflicting responses to the gendering of the workshop environment, and theorizes the various implications such a scenario presents to the study of gender and power in transborder ritual.

This paper investigates women-led spaces and the predominance of female head of households within the Bharata Natyam dance teaching community of Colombo, Sri Lanka. I focus on a dance community of older women, mostly widows in Colombo. Although living and practicing outside of the official battle zones of the ethnic war, these women remain head of households or live alone in the major city, with immediate family living abroad in order to escape ethnic hostilities and a stagnant war economy. This community of women came to the Bharata Natyam practice because of its link with a national, particularly, Tamil ethnic identity. However, the negotiations that they continue to make in their dance practice reveal an inherently feminist approach that works against frameworks of nationalism and sexism.

Bellydancing is largely misunderstood and stereotyped. Few realize that it is an expressive, ancient, and woman-centered genre of movement, rooted in Middle/Near Eastern folk tradition and culture. Not surprisingly, it has received scant scholarship despite its increasing popularity throughout the world. This paper offers a feminist critique of hegemonic understandings of bellydance, based upon ethnographic research on American women’s experiences. Findings are organized along five themes: discovery (of the dance and of self); healing (repair and respite from illness, injury and victimization); spirituality (connectivity to each other, a higher power, and divine femininity); sisterhood (community, specifically woman-space); and empowerment (omnipresent sense of pride and self-confidence). I argue that bellydance is too easily dismissed as a means through which women are objectified via patriarchal views of beauty, sexuality and performativity. These may be understood as byproducts of Western Orientalist renderings of the Middle/Near East, and contextualized within our contemporary anti-feminist society.

“Vai Sambar! American Meaning Making in Afro-Brazilian Dance” describes the interaction between an American community of dancers and the wave of Afro-Brazilian influence that entered that community. Through personal experience, academic research, community observation, and conversations, the author examines the role of samba and the religious dances of the orixás within a suburban white community, highlighting how meaning is changed and constructed based on cultural context. The author emphasizes how women in this community responded to the political, social, and sexual implications of a non-native dance form, and how their resulting self-identification as a community was transformed. The essay questions how Americans can locate themselves within the greater cultural context of samba and other Afro-Brazilian dance forms, not simply as cultural outsiders, but as women deeply connected to the unique American reality of these practices.

The Dutch dancer Mata Hari (alias Margaretha Geertruida Zelle) has achieved an iconic status within 20th-century dance history, partly due to her execution as a German spy in 1917. Although she lacked significant dance training, she successfully performed her works, primarily in eclectic oriental styles, before European audiences. My discussion considers Mata Hari’s contributions against the backdrop of the pre-WWI European dance scene, filling obvious gaps in existing research. It specifically explores the ideological and aesthetic framework within which she was embedded as a female artist, in the context of related concurrent dance trends such as Ruth St Denis’s work, Loïe Fuller’s veil dances and nudist dance. Drawing on feminist theories such as Sylvia Bovenschen’s imagery of the female, orientalism and post-colonialism (Edward Said) together with dance analyses, the paper examines how Mata Hari’s on- and off-stage personae conformed to certain stereotyped images of women whilst also subverting social conventions.

This presentation deals with the current status of dance studies in Germany, focusing particularly on the situation in Baden-Württemberg, the home state of the internationally renowned Stuttgart Ballet. Whereas German dance companies enjoy some of the highest subsidies in the world, and free-lance dancers in Germany benefit from privileges in the German social system, dance is not an independent subject of study at any level of the German educational system.

The strong discrepancies in educational, cultural and social policy on dance are indicative of the limits of and disagreements within symbolic meaning ascribed to dance.

The relevant areas of policy will be presented, as well as the historical factors in the development of these discrepancies. A discussion of the role of gendering in the ascription of symbolic meanings to dance follows, especially considering current developments regarding community building and social justice.

Hortense Lieberthal Zera choreographed Never Sign a Letter Mrs. in the summer of 1939 at The Bennington School of the Dance held at Mills College where Zera was assisting Martha Hill and Bessie Schönberg. Zera’s dance was filmed as part of a “movie short,” designed to precede a feature film. The dance examines the restrictions of etiquette rules, specifically the rule that a woman should use only her husband’s first name after the title Mrs., i.e. Mrs. John Brown, not Mrs. Mary Brown. Zera choreographed the dance nineteen years after the passage of the women’s right to vote, at a time when women were questioning society’s rules for their roles but before the outright rebellions of the 1960s. Through her choreography, Zera expressed personal feelings about marriage and societal expectations, with the movements indicating both acceptance and defiance.

In 1943–45, after her collaborator and performing partner Bentley Stone was drafted into the armed forces, Ruth Page created a solo dance program with a novel twist: in Dances with Words and Music, she performed poems, speaking as she danced. Under the aegis of the National Concerts and Artists Corporation, Ruth Page toured the Midwest and Deep South with a parade of wistful, antic, nostalgic, and parodic personae, based on poems by Dorothy Parker, Archibald MacLeish, Ogden Nash, e. e. cummings, Carl Sandburg, and Langston Hughes. Her dancing embodied her voice, both figuratively and literally, in ways that aligned her practical sort of feminism with creativity, cultural roots, wit and satire. She made a victory garden of sorts, modeling self-reliance and ingenuity with a patriotic streak. In this paper, I juxtapose excerpts of poetic texts, photographic images, and analysis of programs and critical reviews to illuminate Page’s danced poems and to discover the ways in which one woman celebrated imagination and meaningfulness in a time of war.