Pub Date : 2024-05-08DOI: 10.1017/s0149767723000311
David Kaminsky
In the 1840s, the polka craze established lead/follow partner dancing as the normative social dance structure in the Atlantic world. In the process, it imposed a choreographed performance of bourgeois heteropatriarchy (originally developed with the waltz) on Europe's colonies and post-colonies. However, a central mechanism of the lead/follow system in social partner dance is the woman's body attitude, and as the nature of that attitude changes, so do the associated dances. In the Americas, women acculturated to African-rooted principles of polycentricity disrupted the equilibrium of the lead/follow dynamic, catalyzing the creation of new partner dance forms and techniques. On the one hand, this resulted in an intensification of the lead/follow system such that men could now control and shape the dissociated parts of their partners’ bodies. On the other hand, it also seeded the fissioning and eventual dissolution of the dance partnership itself.
{"title":"Leading the Other: Gender and Colonialism in Partner Dancing's Long Century","authors":"David Kaminsky","doi":"10.1017/s0149767723000311","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0149767723000311","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In the 1840s, the polka craze established lead/follow partner dancing as the normative social dance structure in the Atlantic world. In the process, it imposed a choreographed performance of bourgeois heteropatriarchy (originally developed with the waltz) on Europe's colonies and post-colonies. However, a central mechanism of the lead/follow system in social partner dance is the woman's body attitude, and as the nature of that attitude changes, so do the associated dances. In the Americas, women acculturated to African-rooted principles of polycentricity disrupted the equilibrium of the lead/follow dynamic, catalyzing the creation of new partner dance forms and techniques. On the one hand, this resulted in an intensification of the lead/follow system such that men could now control and shape the dissociated parts of their partners’ bodies. On the other hand, it also seeded the fissioning and eventual dissolution of the dance partnership itself.</p>","PeriodicalId":44926,"journal":{"name":"DANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140890457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-08DOI: 10.1017/s0149767723000359
Tia-Monique Uzor
This article foregrounds imagination to consider how African diasporic conditions converge with choreographic expression. The analysis “un/maps” dominant understandings of the choreographic process of mid-twentieth-century African American choreographer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham by expanding Kamau E. Brathwaite's (1993) concept of Tidalectics beyond the Caribbean to the wider African diaspora and a distinctly Caribbean comprehension of diasporic imagination. Utilizing datasets and visualizations created by the project, Dunham's Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry, this article traces how the concept of Brazil is imagined and reimagined within Dunham's archive from 1937 to 1962. In doing so, it considers the complex positionality of Dunham as both a pioneering minoritized woman navigating the politics of race, gender, and financial precarity, and someone who yielded their imperial privilege as a US citizen through their career to bring nuance to Dunham's narrative as a canonical dance figure.
{"title":"Tidalectic Un/mapping and the Performance of African Diasporic Imagination in the Repertory of Katherine Dunham","authors":"Tia-Monique Uzor","doi":"10.1017/s0149767723000359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0149767723000359","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article foregrounds imagination to consider how African diasporic conditions converge with choreographic expression. The analysis “un/maps” dominant understandings of the choreographic process of mid-twentieth-century African American choreographer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham by expanding Kamau E. Brathwaite's (1993) concept of Tidalectics beyond the Caribbean to the wider African diaspora and a distinctly Caribbean comprehension of diasporic imagination. Utilizing datasets and visualizations created by the project, Dunham's Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry, this article traces how the concept of Brazil is imagined and reimagined within Dunham's archive from 1937 to 1962. In doing so, it considers the complex positionality of Dunham as both a pioneering minoritized woman navigating the politics of race, gender, and financial precarity, and someone who yielded their imperial privilege as a US citizen through their career to bring nuance to Dunham's narrative as a canonical dance figure.</p>","PeriodicalId":44926,"journal":{"name":"DANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140890418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-08DOI: 10.1017/s0149767723000372
Mercedes Alvarez San Román
The dancer Mademoiselle Mercédès performed in the most important music halls of the Parisian Belle Époque, such as the Folies-Bergère and the Olympia. Her exotic pseudonym reflects the Hispanophilia of this period in France, but she was neither a Spanish dancer nor a native imitator. On the contrary, she displayed great versatility as a dancer and actively participated in the transition to modernity with the dancer Loïe Fuller and the choreographer Madame Mariquita. However, who is behind this artist's name? This research reveals that at least three women used this nickname and only one of them has been previously identified: Julienne Mathieu (1874–1943), who, after her stage career, became one of the most prolific actresses in early cinema. This case study explores the implications of using a pseudonym by a secondary figure in the dance world in fin-de-siècle Paris.
{"title":"Is Mademoiselle Mercédès Always Julienne Mathieu? The Challenges of Using a Stage Name to Reconstruct the Career of a Parisian Belle Époque Music Hall Dancer","authors":"Mercedes Alvarez San Román","doi":"10.1017/s0149767723000372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0149767723000372","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The dancer Mademoiselle Mercédès performed in the most important music halls of the Parisian Belle Époque, such as the Folies-Bergère and the Olympia. Her exotic pseudonym reflects the Hispanophilia of this period in France, but she was neither a Spanish dancer nor a native imitator. On the contrary, she displayed great versatility as a dancer and actively participated in the transition to modernity with the dancer Loïe Fuller and the choreographer Madame Mariquita. However, who is behind this artist's name? This research reveals that at least three women used this nickname and only one of them has been previously identified: Julienne Mathieu (1874–1943), who, after her stage career, became one of the most prolific actresses in early cinema. This case study explores the implications of using a pseudonym by a secondary figure in the dance world in fin-de-siècle Paris.</p>","PeriodicalId":44926,"journal":{"name":"DANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140890430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-01-30DOI: 10.1017/s0149767723000360
Sean Mulcahy, Kate Seear
Human rights scrutiny processes in some Australian parliaments require consideration of whether rights-limiting legislation is reasonable, justifiable, and proportionate. The Queensland Human Rights commissioner has raised concerns of this becoming a “perfunctory ‘tick and flick’ exercise” in which decision-makers perform the “dance steps to [rights] derogation”—a concern emulated by others. Taking this notion of “tick and flick” and “dance steps” literally, this article explores movement and form in the composition of parliamentary human rights scrutiny reports. Drawing from Marie Jacob and Anna Macdonald's notion of legal documents as material, somatic, and metaphorical forms, this article analyzes the choreographic and calligraphic forms in these reports. Through exploring the forms themselves alongside interview data about parliamentary human rights scrutiny practices, this article speculates on whether form has bearing on the process of parliamentary human rights scrutiny, and how form shapes the substance of both the reports and human rights themselves.
{"title":"A “Tick and Flick” Exercise: Movement and Form in Australian Parliamentary Human Rights Scrutiny","authors":"Sean Mulcahy, Kate Seear","doi":"10.1017/s0149767723000360","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0149767723000360","url":null,"abstract":"Human rights scrutiny processes in some Australian parliaments require consideration of whether rights-limiting legislation is reasonable, justifiable, and proportionate. The Queensland Human Rights commissioner has raised concerns of this becoming a “perfunctory ‘tick and flick’ exercise” in which decision-makers perform the “dance steps to [rights] derogation”—a concern emulated by others. Taking this notion of “tick and flick” and “dance steps” literally, this article explores movement and form in the composition of parliamentary human rights scrutiny reports. Drawing from Marie Jacob and Anna Macdonald's notion of legal documents as material, somatic, and metaphorical forms, this article analyzes the choreographic and calligraphic forms in these reports. Through exploring the forms themselves alongside interview data about parliamentary human rights scrutiny practices, this article speculates on whether form has bearing on the process of parliamentary human rights scrutiny, and how form shapes the substance of both the reports and human rights themselves.","PeriodicalId":44926,"journal":{"name":"DANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139644183","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1017/s014976772300030x
Caroline Sutton Clark
Through curtain calls in Eurocentric theatrical dance forms, dance artists, audience members, and staff coordinate how dance concerts end and participants disperse. Nevertheless, despite the widespread use of such practices, the rituals of bows and applause have largely eluded critical inquiry. This article offers dance practitioners choices toward thoughtfully negotiating the processes of engagement and disengagement in groups contingently assembled for dance events. A brief historical inquiry introduces how such behaviors may enact deeply embedded, power-laden agendas of relationship. Then, curtain calls are revealed as complex spaces of intersubjective negotiations, iterative of numerous possible functions at work.
{"title":"Curtain Calls in Dance: Negotiating the Terms of Disengagement","authors":"Caroline Sutton Clark","doi":"10.1017/s014976772300030x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s014976772300030x","url":null,"abstract":"Through curtain calls in Eurocentric theatrical dance forms, dance artists, audience members, and staff coordinate how dance concerts end and participants disperse. Nevertheless, despite the widespread use of such practices, the rituals of bows and applause have largely eluded critical inquiry. This article offers dance practitioners choices toward thoughtfully negotiating the processes of engagement and disengagement in groups contingently assembled for dance events. A brief historical inquiry introduces how such behaviors may enact deeply embedded, power-laden agendas of relationship. Then, curtain calls are revealed as complex spaces of intersubjective negotiations, iterative of numerous possible functions at work.","PeriodicalId":44926,"journal":{"name":"DANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138475748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1017/s0149767723000268
yaTande Whitney V. Hunter
This article explores the Ring Shout as a corporeal conjuring of Black-togetherness. Theoretically, I embrace the notion of assembly in ways that offer new comprehension around both implicit and explicit modes of embodiment in constant play within Black cultural modes. I turn to the research of Katrina Hazzard-Donald, Dr. Yvonne Daniel, and M. Jacqui Alexander for theoretical grounding regarding diasporic Afro-spiritualities, while artists such as Talley Beatty, Reggie Wilson, and Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott) provide landmarks for the artistic and aesthetic discourse of the text. I introduce a concept, AfrOist, as a navigation through and toward a recontextualization of centralized Africanist tendencies. With this shift, cultural inheritances are remembered and claimed.
{"title":"The “Ring Shout”: A Corporeal Conjuring of Black-Togetherness","authors":"yaTande Whitney V. Hunter","doi":"10.1017/s0149767723000268","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0149767723000268","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the Ring Shout as a corporeal conjuring of Black-togetherness. Theoretically, I embrace the notion of assembly in ways that offer new comprehension around both implicit and explicit modes of embodiment in constant play within Black cultural modes. I turn to the research of Katrina Hazzard-Donald, Dr. Yvonne Daniel, and M. Jacqui Alexander for theoretical grounding regarding diasporic Afro-spiritualities, while artists such as Talley Beatty, Reggie Wilson, and Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott) provide landmarks for the artistic and aesthetic discourse of the text. I introduce a concept, AfrOist, as a navigation through and toward a recontextualization of centralized Africanist tendencies. With this shift, cultural inheritances are remembered and claimed.","PeriodicalId":44926,"journal":{"name":"DANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138475749","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1017/s0149767723000244
Sarah Conn
Contemporary interdisciplinary collaboration practices offer visions of new modes of assembly. This article traces a curatorial model of interdisciplinary collaboration, exploring how artists activate curation as a methodology of creation. I refer specifically to the creative practice of the award-winning Queer trans/mogrifying multidisciplinary artist and futurist Sage Ni'Ja Whitson, and their series The Unarrival Experiments. I reflect on Whitson's curatorial practice as a sacred methodology rooted in Yorùbá cosmologies, theatrical jazz aesthetic, and concepts of dark matter, superfluidity, and unarrival. I trace how Whitson's use of curatorial frameworks supports ease in the impossible, builds layers of multiplicity and simultaneity, resists institutional hegemony and power structures, and crafts systems of queer kinship and care for communities, ancestors, and futures. I outline the criteria of coexistence through which they imbue curatorial practices into their collaborations, generating what I describe as a “third space.” For Whitson, this fertile space of sustained difference is a portal to an alternate institution of darkness, interdependent sovereignty, and superfluidity. I conclude by unfolding the possibilities of Whitson's third space as a forward-facing methodology of how to move through the impossible together and envision new collective futures.
{"title":"The Superfluid Curation of Darkness","authors":"Sarah Conn","doi":"10.1017/s0149767723000244","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0149767723000244","url":null,"abstract":"Contemporary interdisciplinary collaboration practices offer visions of new modes of assembly. This article traces a curatorial model of interdisciplinary collaboration, exploring how artists activate curation as a methodology of creation. I refer specifically to the creative practice of the award-winning Queer trans/mogrifying multidisciplinary artist and futurist Sage Ni'Ja Whitson, and their series <jats:italic>The Unarrival Experiments</jats:italic>. I reflect on Whitson's curatorial practice as a sacred methodology rooted in Yorùbá cosmologies, theatrical jazz aesthetic, and concepts of dark matter, superfluidity, and unarrival. I trace how Whitson's use of curatorial frameworks supports ease in the impossible, builds layers of multiplicity and simultaneity, resists institutional hegemony and power structures, and crafts systems of queer kinship and care for communities, ancestors, and futures. I outline the criteria of coexistence through which they imbue curatorial practices into their collaborations, generating what I describe as a “third space.” For Whitson, this fertile space of sustained difference is a portal to an alternate institution of darkness, interdependent sovereignty, and superfluidity. I conclude by unfolding the possibilities of Whitson's third space as a forward-facing methodology of how to move through the impossible together and envision new collective futures.","PeriodicalId":44926,"journal":{"name":"DANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138475747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-14DOI: 10.1017/s0149767723000220
Alana Gerecke
This spatial and contextual approach to the performance of assembly takes Dîner en Blanc, an annual pop-up picnic, as a case study. Ethnographic and choreographic analyses of the 2018 picnic event in Vancouver, Canada, ground a critique of the dynamics of site specificity and host/guest relations that drive this local expression of a global event. Drawing on a range of performance and decolonial theorists, this place-based movement analysis of the event foregrounds the recolonizing implications of staging aesthetically whitewashed culinary choreographies on the unceded and traditional territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.
这种空间和环境的组合方式以一年一度的弹出式野餐活动“ner en Blanc”为例进行了研究。对2018年加拿大温哥华野餐活动的民族志和舞蹈分析,对场地特殊性和主客关系的动态进行了批判,这些动态推动了这种全球活动的本地表达。借鉴一系列表演和非殖民化理论家的观点,这个基于地点的运动分析强调了在Squamish、musquam和Tsleil-Waututh第一民族的未被割让的传统领土上进行美学粉饰的烹饪编排的再殖民化含义。
{"title":"Crowded White Spaces: Dîner en Blanc and the Place-Based Contingencies of Choreography","authors":"Alana Gerecke","doi":"10.1017/s0149767723000220","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0149767723000220","url":null,"abstract":"This spatial and contextual approach to the performance of assembly takes Dîner en Blanc, an annual pop-up picnic, as a case study. Ethnographic and choreographic analyses of the 2018 picnic event in Vancouver, Canada, ground a critique of the dynamics of site specificity and host/guest relations that drive this local expression of a global event. Drawing on a range of performance and decolonial theorists, this place-based movement analysis of the event foregrounds the recolonizing implications of staging aesthetically whitewashed culinary choreographies on the unceded and traditional territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.","PeriodicalId":44926,"journal":{"name":"DANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50167144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-17DOI: 10.1017/s0149767723000219
A. Kimmel
Motivated by Melissa Ziad's balletic protest within Algeria's Hirak demonstrations, this article recuperates a distinction between the right to assembly and the right to free speech, constitutional guarantees blurred under contemporary rhetoric of association. By applying methods of dance studies to legal interpretation, it shifts crowd theory away from an anxiety of touch toward a copresence that allows for constituent power of the people to be reclaimed. Therefore, it intervenes within a broader discourse of the legal humanities that privileges the logocentric over embodied ways of knowing.
{"title":"Crowded Choreographies: From Assembly to Association and Back Again","authors":"A. Kimmel","doi":"10.1017/s0149767723000219","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0149767723000219","url":null,"abstract":"Motivated by Melissa Ziad's balletic protest within Algeria's Hirak demonstrations, this article recuperates a distinction between the right to assembly and the right to free speech, constitutional guarantees blurred under contemporary rhetoric of association. By applying methods of dance studies to legal interpretation, it shifts crowd theory away from an anxiety of touch toward a copresence that allows for constituent power of the people to be reclaimed. Therefore, it intervenes within a broader discourse of the legal humanities that privileges the logocentric over embodied ways of knowing.","PeriodicalId":44926,"journal":{"name":"DANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46132388","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1017/S0149767723000256
Jessica Rajko
{"title":"DUNHAM'S DATA: KATHERINE DUNHAM AND DIGITAL METHODS FOR DANCE HISTORICAL INQUIRY by Kate Elswit, Harmony Bench, Antonio Jimenez-Mavillard, Tia-Monique Uzor, and Takiyah Nur Amin https://www.dunhamsdata.org/","authors":"Jessica Rajko","doi":"10.1017/S0149767723000256","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767723000256","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44926,"journal":{"name":"DANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139352605","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}