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This article introduces the second issue of Dance Chronicle, which focuses on the history of the journal itself. Dance Chronicle was co-founded by Jack Anderson and George Dorris in 1977 and has emphasized historical research in dance. The article includes an interview with George Dorris, who discusses the journal's inception and its early supporters. The article also announces the Dance Chronicle Book Review Award, which aims to recognize the intellectual labor of book review authors in the field of dance studies. Additionally, the article highlights four research articles included in the issue that explore various aspects of dance history and criticism. [Extracted from the article]

The ancient Greek myth of Ariadne provides clues about the vitality of movement—its expression and action—and how it evokes a concept of selfhood that does not venerate arrival. This article analyzes how symbols from Ariadne's myth appear in performances by Martha Graham and Jeanine Durning, which similarly offer examples of dancing as liminal immanence. Ultimately this research shows how a depth psychology perspective, based on Carl Jung's theories, brings unconscious material to consciousness through analysis of image and symbol and might be a generative framework for analyzing dance and choreography as they connect to theories of individuation and anima/animus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing attention to the affordances and challenges of disability dance and choreography, most notably aesthetic ideals which are antithetical to disability knowing, this research seeks to instigate a discussion on how we might radically envisage disability dance through a crip aesthetics. Theorizing my crip choreographic work Colored Shadow, I offer a method of leakiness as a tool to rupture hegemonic aesthetics of dance, which include compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, hierarchies of the stage, and inaccessibility. My proposal of a leaky choreographic method offers insight into the significance of crip theory and crip methodology as paths toward reconsidering and redefining aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thus, the books themselves are works of art. I XOPÓ : The Dance of Adam i and I Elemental Chorology i are essential reading for anyone interested in premodern dance, religious dance, and dance in the visual arts. Isar's sophisticated musings on the relationship between dance and space may also help complicate current research on site-specific dance performance. Dance scholars might find Isar's discussion of Byzantine ekphrasis to be the most interesting part of this chapter. Existing before the advent of Western dance notation in the fifteenth century, ancient and medieval dance in Europe is shrouded in mystery. [Extracted from the article]

Mainland Chinese society heavily stigmatizes nonnormative sexuality, and the government imposes strict censorship on media representations of homosexuality. It seems improbable that choreographer Hu Shenyuan, whose dances do not hide homosexual themes, would be so successful as a performer and artist in the Chinese context, which signifies a tension between state control and audience demand. This article reads Hu's choreography and its reception as queer texts. While queer identities might seem virtually invisible and unspeakable in China, I argue that Hu's choreography makes visible a culturally unrepresentable queerness and incubates collective reflection about nonnormative identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hagan delves into the artistic and creative possibilities that emerge when dance and film converge and explores the various ways in which the physicality of dance can be harnessed and elevated through the cinematic medium. Unlocking the Beauty of Screendance: A Journey through History, Curatorial Practice, and Personal Reflections: Screendance from Film to Festival: Celebration and Curatorial Practice By Cara Hagan. One of the most compelling aspects of this chapter is Hagan's meticulous research and analysis of artists who paved the way for screendance. [Extracted from the article]

Throughout her career the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has created different techniques to engage in an intimate relationship with musical compositions, using these compositions to drive the development of her choreographic oeuvre. I argue that walking can be defined as one of the main choreographic devices used in De Keersmaeker's late works. In analyzing En Atendant (2010) and Cesena (2011), I explore how De Keersmaeker uses walking to inscribe the bodies of the dancers into the music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ballet Orpheus (1948), choreographed by George Balanchine, and the cultural milieu of queerness surrounding the ballet's creation. Although Orpheus is known for helping to formally establish the New York City Ballet, the undercurrents of homosexuality in the ballet's development have received less attention in the historical narrative. Additionally, the dancer Nicholas Magallanes, a gay Mexican American immigrant who starred in the title role, is similarly overlooked. Thus, through choreographic analysis and archival research, I elucidate the collective influence of a constellation of queer men to assert that the significance of Orpheus lies in its queer past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pope.L's art exhibition Trinket (2015) featured an installation of an oversized US flag blown by high-powered wind machines. The artwork generated a choreography among viewers who inadvertently danced with the US flag, reversing fraught dynamics surrounding visibility and spectatorship for work by Black artists. Trinket called upon spectators to feel into sensation, rather than adopt a mode of distanced, disembodied interpretation. Informed by embodied racial justice activist Resmaa Menakem, I argue that Pope.L's Trinket connected viewers with somatic experience, enabling them to grapple with ongoing structural racism in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a professional Western contemporary dance choreographer and practice-based scholar whose research focuses on the expression of post-traumatic states, I have tracked the evolution of my own post-traumatic history's impact on my choreographic work of the past decade and a half in the context of its reception by audiences, larger creative trends in the field, and my own understanding. This article outlines the methodology observed in what I have identified as the three phases of my post-traumatic choreographic course—narrative, somatic, and political—and each of these phases' outcomes in regard to artistic practice and identity reframing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates choreography within topical debates on post-privacy, critically interrogating a trend toward the exposure of intimate life and sexuality in performance. A scene from Pina Bausch's Window Washer (1997), shedding light on domestic violence and the sexualized female body, is related to the feminist assertion that "the personal is political." Michael Parmenter's A Long Undressing (1995), a piece about the artist's identity as a gay man, catalyzes discussions of the closet, individual authenticity, and queer identity politics. I assess the two works' contributions to discourses on the private-public distinction, drawing on a range of contrasting perspectives from philosophical, sociological, and political fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a choreography of intervention into daily life, Mihran Tomasyan's Sen Balık Değilsin Ki (SBDK) allows viewers a moment not only to remember the assassination of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, but also to revisit past and current traumas that need to be reworked by Turkish and Armenian societies. I argue that the choreography of SBDK functions as a memorialization of a history of losses, using images and objects as guiding elements to trace the roots of the truth. Through their choreographic revaluation, the objects used in SBDK exceed their inherent functionality and gain new meanings marked by Tomasyan's subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sex, violence, and visceral elements of similar dramatic tenor feature frequently in ballets by the British choreographer Kenneth MacMillan. Although he publicly acknowledged the decisive impact of John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger on his artistic vision, little detail is known about how his inclination toward unconventional topics was formed. By revisiting primary and secondary sources about MacMillan's life and career, and by considering them within the context of postwar British dance and drama, this article explores how this tendency toward dramatic subject matter progressively took shape during his first years as a choreographer and purposely crystalized in 1960 with his ballet The Invitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heinrich von Kleist's conception of the marionette, as articulated in his renowned essay "The Puppet Theatre," remains provocative today. With the marionette, I argue, Kleist drafts for the actor a theoretical model informed by grace. In Kleist's reconsideration of the process of performing, dance plays a significant part. Dance also leaves significant traces in Kleist's plays, particularly Penthesilea and Katie of Heilbronn, two complementary examples, I posit, in which performatic dramaturgy "choreographs" the marionette's behavior. Working across theater and dance, and mingling theory and practice, Kleist anticipates a contemporary vision of intermedial creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1941 Agnes de Mille created Drums Sound in Hackensack for the Jooss Ballet. There is no film of the work and few photographs, but the work is documented in her choreographic notes, letters to and from de Mille, dancers' recollections, and reviews. From these we can learn why and how de Mille created the work, what it was like, and why it was significant to the Jooss Ballet. With its American theme, historical setting, dream sequence, and a female character at the center of the work, it may be seen as a forgotten stepping stone in de Mille's choreographic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Garba (or clap dance), a folk form from Gujarat, is performed across the world during the nine nights of the goddess festival Navaratri. Building on research by Ann R. David (2007, 2012, 2014),1 this article compares garba from two different time periods (i.e., pre-1990s and post 1990s) to consider its shift in meaning from a religious folk dance to Anthony Shay's concept of ethno-identity dance (2016).2 To note recent choreographic revisions that are influenced by selfies, commercialization, and Bollywoodization, I employ an auto-ethnographic approach from my experience among British South Asian Gujaratis. A consideration of these changes in garba allows us to reflect on the effect of the role of contemporary life on a traditional dance form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the history of the relations between computer science, information technology, and the art of dance. In the early years of computer choreography, scientists envisaged the development of visual displays and software tools to help in choreographic design. They used random number generators to create a variety of spatial displacements and body movements for the dancers—work that suggested that computer programs could be customized to suit the preferences of the individual choreographer. Such projections fell woefully short of what a large number of choreographers, computer scientists, digital artists, and professionals from different fields eventually achieved during the last half-century, not to mention what we might expect in the future. The convergence of dance creation and performance with advances in information science and technology constitutes a privileged ground on which to explore deep philosophical implications of our embodied mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the relative absence of African American ballet dancers and the field's slow integration. It counters scarcity theories—not enough interest, money, or opportunities—demonstrating a demand for ballet in postwar black communities. Further, it argues that postwar funding, private sources from the Ford Foundation and national programs under the National Endowment for the Arts, unintentionally strengthened boundaries between white and black dancers through racialized funding, as evidenced in support patterns for the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Instead of normalizing mixed-race companies or questioning racial limits, funding bolstered old stereotypes regarding "looks" and choreographers' preferences as aesthetic law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I consider how ecosexuality as a contemporary, emergent critical framework prompts readings of Pina Bausch's Rite of Spring that complement and trouble the centralization of normative gender relations and human exceptionalism. Working with the prominent choreographic features instantiated within the dance, I consider how categories such as female and male, nonhuman and human, are both constituted and destabilized. Drawing from queer, feminist, new materialist, and psychoanalytic theories, I suggest that Bausch's Rite of Spring provides ways of thinking sexuality ecologically, oriented toward the intensification of life beyond the survival of the human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the life and work of Canadian choreographer and performer Margie Gillis, identifying her as an integrated artist and considering her work through perspectives from artists, cognitive scientists, Tibetan Buddhists, and individuals in the medical field who have explored the concept of nonlocality. The essay examines Gillis's ability to create strong connections between the audience and herself as performer, and posits that this bond results from Gillis's strongly communicated visual, physical, intellectual, spiritual, and emotional aspects. The artists interviewed and referenced in this paper are Irene Dowd, Risa Steinberg, and, predominantly, Margie Gillis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the possibilities afforded the viewer through the creation of a virtual visual and kinesthetic arts atlas, along the lines of the one conceived by the German art historian Aby Warburg in 1929. Such an atlas provides dance scholars with the tools to enhance their perceptions of dance and other visual art and video works through applying a kaleidoscopic mapping strategy. I describe my creation of a visual and kinesthetic atlas, paying special attention to detecting subtexts that may be read across a range of kinetic metaphors, symbols, and motifs in selected works by Ohad Naharin, Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, Roy Assaf, Noa Zuk, and Ohad Fishof. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over three decades, Italian actor Claudia Contin Arlecchino and theater director Ferruccio Merisi collaborated on tragedia dell'arte, a tanztheater technique based on the works of Austrian Expressionist painter Egon Schiele. Detecting formal relations between painted figure and performatic gesture, and composing such gestures into choreography, Contin Arlecchino and Merisi derived a figural dance from Schiele's visual works. By connecting painting with acting and dance, tragedia dell'arte offers an example of Western contemporary intermedial aesthetic. Ultimately, tragedia dell'arte demonstrates how dance can support acting in its engagement of painting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that Martha Graham consciously created narratives about her 1932 journey to Mexico to position her theatrical dance as a legitimate American art form. Promoted as part of her search for an "American gesture," her trip there manifested her intent to locate her dance firmly within the context of the land-based, nativist currents of modernism in the United States. While the lands and peoples of the Americas may have provided catalysts for her early work, much of the writing about her "Indian" inspirations during this period is called into question by historical documents such as Louis Horst's journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the choreographic practices associated with French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj and his work, Empty Moves (Parts I, II & III), a three-part work informed by artistic hybridity and alterity. Through choreographic examples from Empty Moves, I examine the nascent state of transmodernism in dance, an artistic condition that implies a web of complex connections and interactions among dance histories and choreographic practices. In rethinking postmodern dance histories in the wake of recent theories of transmodernism, I conclude by offering a new framework for a dance paradigm and a reconsideration of selected canons of dance histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Red Detachment of Women is a ballet that was developed under the supervision of the Chinese Communist Party in the period leading up to the Cultural Revolution. It features a distinctive approach to ideological content that draws on martial arts, folk dance, and Beijing Opera traditions, and continues to appeal to contemporary audiences in China. I consider the aesthetics of the weapon advanced by the ballet and the ethical and political implications of the National Ballet of China's continued performances of a ballet that celebrates a time of persecution of ordinary Chinese citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Audience members sometimes make explicit interpretations—“aboutness” statements—of the dance they see. However, in interviews with audience members after performances of choreographer John Jasperse'sCanyon, meaning making also surfaced in their straightforward descriptions of the dance. Each audience member's description was unique, and for all the interviewees, the section or aspect of the dance they chose to describe and the way in which they articulated their descriptions inherently spoke to what the work meant for them. These verbal descriptions reveal the ways that individuals make sense of postmodern dance, and indeed how dance's own language “works.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work and writings of Alys Bentley (1869–1951), an influential educator of dance and music, have been overlooked in dance scholarship. This article seeks to place Bentley in the history of dance in the United States, particularly in the context of early twentieth-century “natural” or expressive movement forms and Dalcrozean eurhythmics. The essay examines Bentley's legacy as a dance educator, her theoretical writings on movement and music education, and her views on dance, technique, and practice as expressed in her work of experimental poetry,The Dance of the Mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Reconstructing,” “remounting,” “restaging,” and “reworking” are terms that are used to describe the process of choreographic transmission. Typically today, dances are transmitted through notated scores, video recordings, and the kinesthetic history of previous cast members. This article illuminates the liminal space between score, screen, and stage by analyzing the process of transmitting William Forsythe'sOne Flat Thing, reproduced(2000) to a group of students at The Juilliard School in 2013. Conclusions drawn from the case study challenge traditional notions of reconstruction and restaging and suggest “re-generation” as an alternative term to describe the process of preserving and transmitting contemporary dance works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This collaboration between a dance scholar and a literary/critical race studies scholar engages cross-disciplinary strategies of reading poetry to complicate contemporary discourses surrounding Southeast Asian American cultural productions. We offer an analysis of Phayvanh Luekhamhan's “Rubber Bands” and Diep Tran's “Schools,” focusing on their incorporation of elements integral to both dance and Southeast Asian diasporic poetry: body, time, and space. Choreographic in form and content, these poems shed light on the embodied repercussions of imperialism, war, and migration, and call forth the moving body as central to both recording and cultivating the formation of communities in diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including dance and literature, choreography, and origins of dance form Kathakali.

Gaga, the movement language developed by Ohad Naharin in conjunction with his work as artistic director of Israel's Batsheva Dance Company, has in the last decade been introduced as a training option for dancers. Examining Gaga's evolution, structure, and characteristics, this article suggests that Gaga's divergence from conventional models of technique allows it to address many needs of dancers working in the twenty-first century. I consider how Gaga fits into contemporary training paradigms and assert that the freedom to explore concrete directives and creative imagery in classes helps dancers develop the link between their physicality and their artistry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benesh Movement Notation (BMN) and Labanotation are practices of movement analysis and written documentation that have evolved over time, shaped by the contexts in which they have been used. To date, no substantive account of the genesis of these systems has been published. This article begins that work by presenting the bones of a historical narrative that moves from the moment of inception to the moment of relative establishment. Drawing on my experiences as a student, teacher, and researcher of both systems, I discover parallel, though contrasting, tracks of development for Labanotation and BMN, as they pertain to my own professional identity as a notator. The new knowledge that this study seeks to unearth lies precisely in the comparative approach to the histories of these systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just below the surface of his 1913 review of Le Sacre du printemps, French literary critic Jacques Rivière issued a manifesto against the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé and his purported corruption of French literature. Mallarmé's late-nineteenth-century writing on the ballet pantomime and Loie Fuller, which positioned dance as a symbolic écriture corporelle, represented an erasure of the linguistic purity that Rivière and his colleagues at the Nouvelle Revue Française prized. Rivière's review challenges Mallarmé's conception of both dance and writing, presenting the jolting clarity of Nijinsky's choreography as a crucial recovery of literary precision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late twentieth century, script has been used as a tool for initiating the creation of dance. Likewise, in their compositional techniques, postmodern choreographers such as William Forsythe often refer to Rudolf Laban's space theory. This article discusses the points at which Laban's ideas about space are linked to postmodern compositional techniques, revisiting his concept of Schrifttanz and examining the spatial concepts that informed Tanzschriften, especially in the period before the development of Kinetographie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on popular-press assessments of New York City Ballet principal dancer Wendy Whelan as a way to consider, first, how gender norms affect dance criticism, specifically in ballet, and, second, what might constitute a feminist approach to ballet criticism. In the reviews selected for analysis, critics return to three themes, all of which circumscribe Whelan's artistic agency: her onstage relationship to male partners, her relationship to choreographers, and her relationship to the iconic figures of femininity in ballet. Drawing upon the specifics of how each theme limits the representation of Whelan's agency, at least in print, I conclude by offering practical guidelines for practicing feminist dance criticism in mainstream publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Importing tuning systems and temporal structures from both ancient and non-Western music into their compositions, West-Coast American composers Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, and Lou Harrison became known as “ultra-modernists.” Mark Morris's choreography to their music reflects not only these audible components but also their external references, displaying a deep understanding of the composers’ work. Like these composers, Morris thrived on self-education that went beyond Western subjects in his childhood and youth. At the same time, Morris makes many references in these works to iconic gestures from the works of the pioneers of American modern dance, suggesting a self-reflexive process that makes his work less ultra-modern and more postmodern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While his contemporaries were moving away from traditional music and toward experimental, Paul Taylor embraced American folk music and baroque composers. Both genres typically have simple meters and lend themselves to choreographically friendly units of eight counts. Taylor creates movement that works through the expected meter and, consequently, the phrasing of the music. Using a choreomusical lens, this essay concentrates on moments inBig Bertha(1970) andEsplanade(1975) to argue that musical and choreographic phrases are often at odds in the dances of Paul Taylor, creating intricate and engaging work that has expanded the scope and significance of American dance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major impediment to greater integration of music and dance scholarship is the lack of common terminology. This paper aims to give music and dance scholars some tools of analysis for exploring how each of these related arts interacts with the other. After presenting analogies between terminology in music theory and movement analysis, the authors demonstrate how these tools can be applied in choreomusical analysis. We discuss two broad categories of choreomusical relationships: amplification and emergence, whose effects can be analyzed, we propose, through three strategies: conformance, isolated dissonance, and reorchestration. [Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Dance Chronicle for the following free supplemental resources: Three video excerpts from Shen Wei's choreography (2003) to Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, performed by Shen Wei Dance Arts at the Park Avenue Armory in New York in 2011.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]