Academic literature on the topic 'Dance – Political aspects'

Purpose: to compare target, style, methodological, historical and socio-political features and determine the possibilities of mutual application of various approaches to the development of dance education in China and Ukraine. Material and methods. The review included articles on the peculiarities of historical development, methodological aspects, the dance influence on health of people of different ages and different social status. The review also included articles on the peculiarities of the social and political aspects of dance art in China and Ukraine. The analysis of literary sources was carried out by working with scientific articles that are presented in the databases "Web of Science", "Scopus", "Pub Med" and others. Results. The features of Chinese dances that can be applied in Ukraine have been identified: 1 - the practice of mass dances on the streets and squares of cities; 2 - the inner orientation of the dance art towards unity with nature, towards the self-expression of people of their feelings, emotions, experiences, towards achieving harmony through movement; 3 - increased attention to the psychological preparation of dancers; 4 - high attention of researchers to the influence of dancing on the mental and cardiological health of people of different ages; 5 - high number of articles, published in rating journals. The features of Ukrainian dances, which can be applied in China, have been determined: 1 - the development of speed-power qualities of dancers; 2 - implementation of an individual approach, which is currently beginning to develop in Ukraine. Conclusions. The combination of Ukrainian speed-power dance and Chinese inner focus on harmony of body and soul, on unity with nature will create a qualitatively new approach to the development of dance art in general and to the process of teaching dance. This study is the first from the point of view of a comparative analysis of the process of teaching dance in China and Ukraine in terms of historical, socio-political, methodological, substantive aspects, as well as the impact of dancing on the body of the practitioners.

A circle dance, a fundamental element of many traditional cultures, exists in many parts of the world. Scholars have been fascinated by historical and contemporary, mythical and cultural, ritual and semantic aspects of circle dances. The article discusses the Yakut circle dance, osuokhai, influenced by ancient practices and religious ideas of Eurasian nomads. The article reflects on the historical transformations and on the semantics of the osuokhai.

There is a tradition of dance artists developing work for the concert stage in order to engage pressing social justice issues and, more specifically, the abuse of human rights. Anna Sokolow's Strange American Funeral (1935), Pearl Primus' Strange Fruit (1945), Katherine Dunham's Southland (1951), Alvin Ailey's Masekela Langage (1969), Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's Womb Wars (1992), William Forsythe's Human Writes (2005), and Douglas Wright's Black Milk (2006) are examples of acclaimed dances that address the manner in which marginalized individuals and social groups have not been granted equal ethical or political consideration. 1 In this essay I consider how dance enacts secular rituals of remembrance for victims of human rights abuses characteristic of a particular community's or nation's historical legacy. This entails discussion of aesthetic strategies used to portray human rights abuse, a consideration of the ethics of memory, and analysis of specific dance work. I discuss my site-adaptive work Poor Mouth (2013) which centers on labor rights issues in the American South during the Great Depression and I argue that dance which presents such issues performs a valuable social function as it encourages audiences to remember the past in a manner that facilitates a historically informed understanding of communal identity. Further, since historical instances of human rights abuse often have contemporary correlates and since remembrance affects the significance of places associated with the history in question, the implications of such work temporally and spatially extend beyond the performance venue and thereby contribute to political discourse in the public sphere. Dance intersects with human rights issues in many ways, but here I focus on dances intended for performance on the concert stage. For the purposes of this essay, the terms ‘dance activism’ and ‘political dance’ refer to dances that intentionally grapple with explicit human rights abuses and that are intended to be performed for a theatre-going audience. Along the way I note what bearing my points have for other forms such as popular dance, dance used in acts of public political protest, site-specific dance, and dance therapy, but I should emphasize that it is beyond the scope of this essay to consider the many ways that dance intersects with human rights and with political activism more generally. Lastly, I should say that my approach to this topic is informed by the personal experience of collaboratively creating and performing dance work in a particular community and that it is interdisciplinary in nature since its draw on aspects of philosophical ethics in order to reflect on that experience.

Abstract The fourteen papers delivered at a conference on Roman dance in June 2019 set about correcting the widespread idea that dance was marginal and held in low esteem in Rome. They elucidated different contexts in which dance was central, especially religion, the theatre, and private entertainments, and further topics included cultural interactions on the Italian peninsula, the diversity of practitioners, the political role of dance, and dance images in poetry. The conference showed not only that further study of Roman dance is necessary, but also that dance is a valuable tool that allows us to think about what we mean when we talk about ‘Roman’ culture.

AbstractThe mando is a secular song-and-dance genre of Goa whose archival attestations began in the 1860s. It is still danced today, in staged rather than social settings. Its lyrics are in Konkani, their musical accompaniment combine European and local instruments, and its dancing follows the principles of the nineteenth-century European group dances known as quadrilles, which proliferated in extra-European settings to yield various creolized forms. Using theories of creolization, archival and field research in Goa, and an understanding of quadrille dancing as a social and memorial act, this article presents the mando as a peninsular, Indic, creolized quadrille. It thus offers the first systematic examination of the mando as a nineteenth-century social dance created through processes of creolization that linked the cultural worlds of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans—a manifestation of what early twentieth-century Goan composer Carlos Eugénio Ferreira called a ‘rapsodia Ibero-Indiana’ (‘Ibero-Indian rhapsody’). I investigate the mando's kinetic, performative, musical, and linguistic aspects, its emergence from a creolization of mentalités that commenced with the advent of Christianity in Goa, its relationship to other dances in Goa and across the Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds, as well as the memory of inter-imperial cultural encounters it performs. I thereby argue for a new understanding of Goa through the processes of transoceanic creolization and their reverberation in the postcolonial present. While demonstrating the heuristic benefit of theories of creolization to the study of peninsular Indic culture, I bring those theories to peninsular India to develop further their standard applications.

In Sumatra's Angkola Batak culture, rituals celebrating major kinship-related events such as marriage have many layers of social and symbolic meaning; they have political, kinship, musical, mythic, and philosophical dimensions as lengthy, oratory-filled ceremonies that unite wife-giving lineages with wife-receivers. This article examines several ways that the interpretive approach that is discussed in the introduction can help students of Indonesian ritual grasp diverse aspects of Batak marriage rituals such as their hidden symbolic organization and their practical political implications. The article deals with a short sequence of adat dance staged for anthropological research purposes. (Adat, once translated as customary law, roughly means Angkola ceremonial life, kinship norms, and political thought; adat is eminently flexible, redefined by each Batak generation.) The choreography of the dance (wife-receivers dancing with wife-givers), songs, clothing, the political biographies of the participants, and the fact that the event was staged render the ceremony open to both structural and social contextual inquiry.

This research explores current controversies within country dance communities and the implications of cultural and ethical issues related to representation of gender and race in a KOS for an ICH, while investigating the importance of context and the applicability of semantic approaches in the implementation of synonym rings. During development of a controlled vocabulary to represent dance concepts for country dance choreography, this study encountered and considered the importance of history and culture regarding synonymous and near-synonymous terms used to describe dance roles and choreographic elements. A subset of names for the same choreographic concepts across four subdomains of country dance (English country dance, Scottish country dance, contra dance, and modern western square dance) were used as a case study. These concepts included traditionally gendered dance roles and choreographic terms with a racially pejorative history. Through the lens of existing research on ethical knowl­edge organization, this study focused on principles and methods of transparency, multivocality, cultural warrant, cultural hospitality, and intersectionality to conduct a domain analysis of country dance resources. The analysis revealed differing levels of engagement and distinction among dance practitioners and communities for their preferences to use different terms for the same concept. Various lexical, grammatical, affective, social, political, and cultural aspects also emerged as important contextual factors for the use and assignment of terms. As a result, this study proposes the use of semantic annotation to represent those contextual factors and to allow mechanisms of user choice in the design of a country dance knowl­edge organization system. Future research arising from this study would focus on expanding examination to other country dance genres and continued exploration of the use of semantic approaches to represent contextual factors in controlled vocabulary development.

Listening to the work presented at the 2001 meeting of the Congress on Research in Dance, “Transmigratory Moves,” one could not help noticing that both established and emerging dance scholars were in the process of attempting to find a fuller and more accurate way of understanding the relationship between global political and economic forces and movement praxis. The following articles (all extended versions of work presented at the conference) exemplify different aspects of these new initiatives in our field. As Shanti Pillai points out in her piece, the term “globalization” has tended to provoke two kinds of responses: either panic over the global imposition of American corporate culture, or else celebration of cultural hybridity and the resilience of indigenous forms. Both of these responses can often present a reductive view of what are, in fact, highly complex phenomena. All three of the articles presented here attempt a more nuanced narrative of the effects of traveling choreographic and movement practices.

This study explores aspects of cultural identity of two Bulgarian immigrants, as these are reflected in their dance preferences in contemporary Athens. Using methodological tools of anthropological critique and the “new” reflexive anthropology, the study highlights the internal-personal and external (social, political, economic) factors that mold cultural identity over time, whereby the past becomes a key factor influencing the actions of people in the “present” context. The study draws on Timothy Rice's (1994) work—the comparison with the “protagonists” of his ethnography (Kostandin Varimezov and his wife Todora Varimezova) is inevitable—and discusses the meaning of music and dance for a couple of Bulgarian immigrants living in Athens while struggling—once more—with an economic crisis.

This article explores the values that bridge democracy and community dance. Policymakers show an interest in promoting democracy, including the very values shared between community dance and democracy. Observing this, we propose that policy may benefit from examining the pedagogy and practices of community dance, and incorporate relevant aspects of community dance’s ability to teach democratic values, into education policy. Through personal accounts and references, it highlights the ways in which community dance could have democratizing effects on its participants, encouraging people to actively create inclusive, participatory, and empowering spaces. Democracy takes practice, and recent, ongoing violent events show us the need for greater civic education in society: education that disseminates the values of democracy, as well as the everyday work of practicing, supporting, and existing in a democracy. As community dancers, we are compelled to explore the ways in which our discipline might intersect with policy, and wider social and political issues. We approach this exploration by raising the question, how might community dance play a role in education policy, as a means of fostering democracy within our world? To address this question, we delve into our mutually held values of inclusion, participation, and empowerment, to further understand the ways they are apparent within the community dance field and the ways they are apparent in defining democracy. Serving as a starting point to larger discussions, we illustrate that democracy and community dance share certain values, that community dance has the potential to teach people how to embody these values, and that these values are conducive to education policy.

This mini thesis proposes that the Dance Factory in Ne'Ntown, Johannesburg, is a site of resistance. Its source and motivation are the personal, artistic and socio-poIiticaI sites ofresistance to mainstream forms of dance with nationalistic tendencies and to dominant ideological hegemonies that enforced apartheid or nationalism. Therefore, these sites or resistance are examined prior to and after the democratisation of South African culture. An analysis of the dances choreographed in this period of transition and changing hegemonies reveal shifts of resistance. These are traced within the development of the Dance Factory. Chapter one explores the notion of resistance as a form of power and the notion of site, where the operations of power evoke resistance. Three sites of resistance within South African dance culture are identified and examined. These are the Dance Factory, the artistic site of dance and the site of the dancing body. The chapter reveals the development of these sites in a changed culture and notes a re-orientation of resistance within dance, namely Afro-fusion, and the subsequent development and emergence of 'alternative' sites of resistance. These reveal new expressionistic tendencies, body politics and the feminist strategies of 'new poetics' and 'ecriture feminine'. The codified mainstream forms of dance, subject to nationalistic strategies of dassicism and its inherent Iogocentricity are challenged and destabilised by the emergence of these altemative resistant forms of dance. Chapter two examines the artistic policies of the Nationalist Govemment, the African National Congress and the Dance Factory from 1983-1997. It notes the effects of the changes in the artistic policies on sites of resistance in dance, performed at the Dance Factory. The chapter desaibes the development of the Dance Factory, its policies of diversification as a strategy of resistance, its promotion of praxis, its resistance to nationalism and the ramifications thereof. It also explores the effects of a governmentalisation of culture and the role of the organic intellectual within the Dance Factory. An analysis of the alternative dance work 'Torso-Tongue" in chapter three furthers the argument that the Dance Factory maintains and encourages the changing sites of resistance in dance. This analysis demonstrates the resistant aspects of dance as discussed in chapter one and thereby confirms the aims and missions of the Dance Factory. The thesis examines the role of the Dance Factory as it develops, nurtures and responds to the shifts in resistance and changes in culture and dance. Most importantly the thesis exposes the resistance to and the effects of an imposition of a nationalistic ideology on dance. The resultant resistance to this form of domination is explored in dance within the site of the Dance Factory, thus supporting the premise that the Dance Factory is a site of resistance.

This thesis explores, from a feminist perspective, some implications on the status of women in selected dance forms, and addresses the perceptions of women as 'inferior' and 'subordinate'. One of the intentions behind the work was, indeed, to challenge prevailing perceptions and create an awareness of sexism, capitalism and patriarchy, especially for the uncritical and uninformed who have become its victims. Part 1 offers an analysis of the premises upon which social, political and economic inequality are founded and consolidated, with specific reference to sexual inequality and sexual prejudice. Utilising a Marxist-feminist and semiotic approach, the machinations of the traditional mass media are linked to negative imaging of the female body in support of the sexist, patriarchal, capitalist male manipulator, who benefits from women's subordinate social status. Part 2 addresses the issue of sexual politics, and the implications for dance research and performance. The researcher offers a descriptive analysis of four specific dance forms, which serve to highlight the socialisation and educational processes that shape our perceptions and instruct our lives. A set of questionnaires was sent to fourteen autonomous dance institutions, including those attached to national performing arts councils. The thesis concludes with a summary of the results of the questionnaires that were distributed amongst female dancers, dance students and choreographers. The researcher questions our culture's preoccupation with the female body image, and posits the urgent need for an assessment of this situation, and an education which will create a better understanding and a more harmonious climate for development.

This thesis explores a network of participants, dance students and teachers, who travel between New York City and Dakar, Senegal, around the practice of West African dance forms. Focusing on the Senegalese dance-rhythms Sabar, I joined this movement and my fieldwork methodology included apprenticeship as a student. I explored different learning environments of Sabar in New York and Dakar: the understandings involved, how this movement is maintained and how it affects dance forms. The methodological move enabled a comparative approach to research questions of learning and performing, local aesthetics and notions of being. This thesis discusses the role of the imagination in mobilizing students and teachers to travel within this network. I explore how participants navigate through the political geography of this movement, sustain the network, and how in turn the cultural flow of Sabar is ‘punctuated’ by socio-economic relationships. Secondly, I explore the understandings involved in each learning context, how these are negotiated and contested on the dance floor and how they relate to broader socio-cultural discourses and relationships that they reinforce or subvert. I argue that while different Sabar settings cannot be understood as ‘bounded’ in as much as people and ideas circulate through them, they are also distinct in that they produce different forms of Sabar. The learning contexts provide the meeting grounds for alternative conceptions of ‘dance’ and pedagogy. I explore how these notions are negotiated in relation to the specific socio-cultural and economic environments in which they are located. Specifically I analyse some common problems New York students face in learning and performing Sabar and explore the reasons behind them: the complex connection between movement and rhythm and the achievement of a specific kinaesthetic in movement. I delineate the relationship between movement and rhythm in Sabar and the importance of the aesthetic of improvisation. I argue that the prevalence of certain paradigms of learning and ‘dance’ over others is related to the specific socio-economic relationships of the participants. Specifically, an over-emphasis on movement distracts from other important aspects in the performance of Sabar and I argue that skills need to be understood as environed processes, malleable and shifting in relation to the broader socio-economic settings that link the participants together.

Quelles sont les conditions d’une politisation de la danse dans le contexte contemporain de défiance vis-à-vis du politique ? Dans quelle mesure la danse peut-elle contribuer aujourd’hui à enrichir la pensée politique, voire œuvrer à transformer les conditions de l’expérience collective ? C’est à ces questions que nous tentons de répondre en prenant pour objet de recherche la danse contemporaine française et en privilégiant une approche esthético-politique fondée sur l’analyse de spectacles. Après avoir analysé deux expériences importantes de politisation de la danse ayant marqué le XXᵉ siècle – la danse radicale et la post-modern dance américaines –, nous revenons sur l’histoire de la danse contemporaine française telle qu’elle s’est écrite depuis le début des années 1970. Bien que portée par des valeurs d’émancipation, celle-ci fait face, au cours des années 1980, aux effets de son institutionnalisation, cette normalisation donnant naissance, au cours des années 1990, à une avant-garde chorégraphique contestataire qui dénonce une standardisation des formes et se tourne vers le modèle de la performance réputée politique, imposant une doxa anti-fiction et un décloisonnement entre les arts et les pratiques – deux tendances qui s’imposent aujourd’hui comme de nouvelles normes sur les scènes contemporaines. À la lumière de ces évolutions récentes, nous faisons l’hypothèse que, pour se politiser, la danse contemporaine gagne plutôt à prendre ses distances avec la performance pour expérimenter d’autres formes d’hybridations (avec le théâtre, le cinéma, les arts plastiques) ; qu’elle gagne en particulier à se théâtraliser. Nous confrontons cette hypothèse à dix œuvres récentes des chorégraphes Alain Buffard, Héla Fattoumi, Éric Lamoureux et Maguy Marin, créées entre 2004 et 2013. Après avoir étudié les intentions des artistes à travers leurs discours et leurs pratiques, nous analysons les œuvres en tentant de montrer en quoi leur forme originale constitue la mise en œuvre d’une politique de l’esthétique, raison pour laquelle leur hybridité constitutive, expérimentale et critique, se distingue de la mixis scénique formaliste qui fait florès sur les scènes contemporaines
What are the conditions of a politicization of dance in this contemporary context of mistrust regarding politics ? To what extent can dance contribute today to enrich political thinking, or even help transform the conditions of collective experience ? We'll try to answer these questions through researches on French contemporary dance giving greater importance to a political esthetics approach based on the analysis of performances. After having analysed two important experiments of politicization in dance which had a great impact on the XXth century – radical dance and post-modern American dance –, we'll come back to the history of French contemporary dance, as it has been written since the beginning of the 70's. Although it was inspired by values of emancipation, contemporary dance faced the effects of its institutionalization during the 80's. During the 90's, this normalization gave birth to an “avant-garde” of protesting choreographers who denounced a “standardization” of forms and decided to turn to the model of performance art, known as being political. Thus, they imposed an anti-fiction doxa and a de-compartmentalization between arts and practices – two trends which are today imposing themselves as new norms on the contemporary stages. In the lights of these recent evolutions, I make the hypothesis that, to politicize itself, contemporary dance rather gains in taking its distance with performance art to experiment new forms of hybridizations (with theater, cinema and plastic arts); that it gains in particular in “theatralisizing itself”. I will confront this hypothesis to ten recent works from choreographers Alain Buffard, Héla Fattoumi, Éric Lamoureux and Maguy Marin, created between 2004 and 2013. After having studied the artists' intentions through their speeches and practices, I will analyse their works and try to show in what terms their original form constitutes the setting and production of a politics of esthetics, which is the reason why their constitutive, experimental and critical hybridization stands out from the formalist mixis which is so successful on contemporary stages

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Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico
In the last ten years, actions developed in dance, live and in the media, left the focus in Rio-São Paulo. Spread through several places in the country had taken a new geography of ideas that understand dance as a communication process of the body, organized as a thought that questions power structures, artistic procedures and boundaries between languages. This masters essay selects, as investigation corpus, some of these experiences employed in the education, in the circuit (festivals, shows and meetings), and in the research and creation in dance that, as survival strategy, creates decentralized cultural polar regions. The intend is to demonstrate that these experiences have propose new communication actions to dance. They push punctual changes in the dance market and in the development of public politics of cultural motivation and reconfigure, not only the esthetic system in which they are in, but the whole cultural system, contributing, in this way, for the dance survival and your effective insertion in the social fabric. As methodology, it was used a data analysis in a systematic way, that being, understanding the articulations between the investigated elements, based in the evolution theories proposed by the evolutionist scientist Richard Dawkins (2000-2001), in the concept of body and media proposed by the researchers Helena Katz and Christine Greiner (2000, 2001, 2003 and 2005) and in the cultural and political studies such as the ones developed by Bauman (1999), Agamben (2002), Bhabha (1998) and Foucault (1979 and 1996). Both, the bibliographic research and the field investigation (interviews and case studies) show that the strategies have been developed to recommend new ways of understanding and event organization, information flow and company conception and educational projects in dance. Actions that exist in the relation body and environment, in a contaminator flow, co evolutional, and non-determinist.
Nos últimos dez anos, ações desenvolvidas no campo da dança, em contextos presenciais e na mídia, deixaram de se concentrar no eixo Rio-São Paulo. Espraiadas por diversas regiões do país, têm desenhado uma nova geografia de idéias que entende a dança como um processo comunicacional do corpo, organizado como um pensamento que questiona estruturas de poder, procedimentos artísticos e as fronteiras entre as linguagens. Esta Dissertação de Mestrado foca, como corpus de investigação algumas destas experiências empreendidas na área de educação, de circulação (festivais, mostras e encontros) e de pesquisa e criação em dança que, como estratégia de sobrevivência, criam pólos culturais descentralizados. O objetivo é demonstrar que essas experiências têm proposto novas ações comunicativas para a dança. Impulsionam transformações pontuais no mercado da dança e no desenvolvimento de políticas públicas de incentivo à cultura e reconfiguram não apenas o sistema estético em que estão inseridas, mas todo o sistema cultural contribuindo, dessa maneira, para a sobrevivência da dança e sua efetiva inserção no tecido social. Como metodologia, trabalhamos a análise dos dados de maneira sistêmica, ou seja, entendendo as articulações entre os elementos investigados, a partir das teorias evolutivas propostas pelo cientista evolucionista Richard Dawkins (2000, 2001), do conceito de corpomídia proposto pelas pesquisadoras Helena Katz e Christine Greiner (2000, 2001, 2003, 2005) e dos estudos culturais e políticos tais como os desenvolvidos por Bauman (1999), Agamben (2002), Bhabha (1998) e Foucault (1979, 1996). Tanto a pesquisa bibliográfica, quanto a investigação de campo (entrevistas e estudos de casos) evidenciaram que estratégias vêm sendo desenvolvida para propor novos modos de entendimento e organização de eventos, circulação de informação e concepção de companhias e projetos educativos em dança. Ações que se dão na relação corpo e ambiente, num fluxo contaminatório, coevolutivo e não determinista

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Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior
When operated in the field of Culture, the processes of communication demand a political understanding of its actuation. Cultural actions promote forms of communication among the several types of population, which integrate a municipality, between a city and its outskirts, and show that these changes occurring to the city modify its outskirts, thus altering the relationship between both of them. The nature of these actions is exactly what depicts the profile of what they communicate, so the importance of each one of them. Because of this, it is indispensable to learn how to identify the existing link of each cultural action and the society in which it operates. By understanding the cultural policies to the dance carried out in the city Araraquara, SP, during 2001-2008, as a process of communication, the thesis states the hypothesis that the set of cultural actions carried out made the city different from the other Brazilian cities of similar size and geographical situation and connected, linked it with another sort of circuit. The dance is used as an outline that explains and clarifies the hypothesis. The two projects here researched, objects of study of the current thesis - the Municipal School of Dance Iracema Nogueira, founded in 2002, and the Araraquara Dance Festival, created in 2001 were born from a distinct point of view of what had been traditionally done in the city. Its introduction aroused resistance and demanded strategies of communication capable of bringing about its adaptation to the Araraquarense society. In order to research the strategies that performed such transformation, it was used the bibliography on communication theories with a political view (BARBERO, MATTELART, SODRÉ) examined under the light of NEGRI & HARDT, BAUMAN and VIRNO. By using these authors, it was possible to develop the argument that the consolidation of projects, like both above described, by involving the city in singular and unusual forms, ended up by getting some strength that will possibly ensure its continuity facing and confronting the Brazilian tradition of interruption and discontinuity of cultural projects, even the successful ones, very election, when the political parties change places and come to power. To know the historical record of the forms of communication of dance in Araraquara in this period allows us to evaluate with more acuity and sharpness the transformation performed by both projects, which were born and introduced facing and transforming the centers of resistance that could be foreseen, since they dismissed the concept of dance which, up to the time, was used in the city. When substituting the championships and contests among the several private dance schools that took place under the name of Dance Festival , by collaborative forms among dance professionals, the Araraquara Dance Festival has interrupted the communication between Araraquara and the other cities where this type of competitive contests happened and has enrolled it in another circuit, the one of the professional, non-competitive festivals. Evidently, this act has harmed the local interests which united the private dance schools and some years were necessary so that the environment could be reconciled and harmonized again. The opening of the Municipal Dance School Iracema Nogueira, with a very diverse core curriculum, thus different from those applied in the other schools, opened another crack in the hegemony formerly practiced, making the dance environment in Araraquara much more plural and complex. The main purpose is to contribute to the advancing of discussions concerning the binomial communication-culture in a political perspective, using the cultural policies to the dance as the focus of this deliberation
Quando operam no campo da cultura, os processos de comunicação demandam uma leitura política da sua atuação. Ações culturais promovem formas de comunicação entre as várias camadas das populações que compõem uma cidade, entre uma cidade e seu entorno, modificam a cidade, modificam o entorno e modificam a relação entre ambos. A natureza dessas ações é que traça o perfil daquilo que comunicam, daí a importância de cada uma delas. Justamente por isso, torna-se indispensável aprender a identificar cada ação cultural como um processo de comunicação com a sociedade na qual opera. Entendendo a política cultural para a dança realizada na cidade de Araraquara-SP, entre 2001-2008, como um processo de comunicação, a tese parte da hipótese de que o conjunto de ações culturais realizadas a diferenciou de outras cidades brasileiras de porte e situação geográfica semelhante e a conectou com um outro tipo de circuito. A dança é empregada como o recorte que explicita a hipótese. Os dois projetos aqui pesquisados, objetos de estudo da presente tese - a Escola Municipal de Dança Iracema Nogueira, fundada em 2002, e o Festival de Dança de Araraquara, criado em 2001-, nasceram a partir de entendimentos distintos dos até então hegemônicos na cidade. Sua implantação suscitou resistência e demandou estratégias de comunicação capazes de promover a sua adaptação à sociedade araraquarense. Para pesquisar as estratégias que operaram tal transformação, aqui se empregou a bibliografia das teorias da comunicação de viés político (BARBERO, MATTELART, SODRÉ), lidas à luz de NEGRI & HARDT, BAUMAN e VIRNO. Com esses autores foi possível desenvolver o argumento de que a consolidação de projetos como os dois acima descritos, ao envolverem a cidade de formas inusitadas e singulares, acabaram ganhando uma força que, possivelmente, assegurará a sua continuidade - afrontando a tradição brasileira de interrupção e descontinuidade de projetos culturais, mesmo os bem sucedidos, a cada eleição, quando se alteram os partidos no poder. Conhecer o histórico das formas de comunicação da dança em Araraquara nesse período permite avaliar com mais acuidade a transformação operada pelos dois projetos, que nasceram e se implantaram enfrentando e transformando os focos de resistência que podiam ser antevistos, uma vez que destituíam o conceito de dança que, até então, se praticava na cidade. Ao substituir os campeonatos ou concursos entre escolas particulares que aconteciam debaixo da nomenclatura Festival de Dança", por formas colaborativas entre profissionais da área, o Festival de Dança de Araraquara desarticulou a comunicação entre Araraquara e as cidades onde funcionam estes festivais competitivos e inscreveu-a em outro circuito, o dos festivais profissionais e não-competitivos. Evidentemente, essa ação feriu os interesses locais que uniam as escolas privadas da cidade e foram necessários alguns anos para que o ambiente se harmonizasse. A inauguração da Escola Municipal de Dança Iracema Nogueira, pautada por uma proposta de currículo inteiramente distinta do modelo praticado por essas mesmas escolas, abriu outra fissura na hegemonia anterior, tornando o ambiente da dança em Araraquara mais plural e complexo. O objetivo central é o de contribuir com o avanço das discussões a respeito do binômio comunicação-cultura dentro de uma perspectiva política, usando a política cultural para a dança como o foco dessa reflexão

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The creation of a public for contemporary art has been a recurring theme in different forums of debate in Brazil as well as abroad. This has led to discussions related to cultural journalism, to changes in the criteria of curatorship and the production of culture, as well as to the study of new bibliographies to evaluate art, culture and power. The hypothesis of this dissertation for a Master s Degree is that, in this context, there is a fundamental problem of communication. This does not apply exclusively to the relationship between the artist and the public, but involves a complex system of power and the means of transmitting information. To study it and propose strategies for dealing with some of the main difficulties which have been barriers to the development of broad projects, it is necessary to discuss the role of the media, some laws during the last decade to encourage culture, and the action of some public and private institutions in this context. As a case study, we selected dance in Brazil, drawing a diagnosis of the problems of communication that have overrun this field of knowledge since the arrival of ballet in the country, in 1927, and which have continued doing so until today. This is because there are standards that are fixtures. The scenario of theoretical research includes reflections on the bodymedia theory of Christine Greiner e Helena Katz, the studies on translation of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (important to understanding how dance was presented to the public as a mechanism of power), the concept of mimesis developed by Homi Bhabha, the concept of inclusion as a means of exclusion studied by Giorgio Agamben and the discussions on the term Cultural Journalism as raised by Daniel Piza and as yet to be answered for the institutions that work on questions related to cultural media. Through this work, we hope to detect the sounds of communication that exist in this system which aims at forming a public, by showing the path of the relationship between the public, the artist and the accompanying processes (media, politics, power) and, insofar as this is possible, suggesting new strategies to achieve this
A formação de público para arte contemporânea tem sido um tema reincidente em diversos fóruns de debate, no Brasil e no exterior. Implica em discussões relativas ao jornalismo cultural, a mudanças de critério no âmbito curatorial e da produção cultural, assim como no estudo de novas bibliografias para conceituar arte, cultura e poder. A hipótese desta dissertação de mestrado é a de que, neste contexto, há, fundamentalmente, um problema de comunicação. Este não diz respeito exclusivamente à relação entre público e artista, mas envolve um sistema complexo de poder e veiculação de informação. Para estudá-lo e propor estratégias para lidar com algumas das principais dificuldades que têm impedido projetos de amplo escopo, é preciso discutir o papel das mídias, algumas leis de fomento à cultura criadas nos últimos dez anos e a ação de algumas instituições públicas e privadas neste contexto. Selecionamos, como estudo de caso, a dança no Brasil, traçando um diagnóstico dos problemas de comunicação que assolam este campo de conhecimento desde a chegada do balé ao país, em 1927 e que tem se desdobrado até hoje. Isso porque existem padrões que se mantêm. O quadro teórico da pesquisa inclui a reflexão sobre o corpomidia de Christine Greiner e Helena Katz, os estudos sobre tradução de Boaventura Sousa Santos ( importante para se compreender como a dança foi apresentada ao público como um mecanismo de poder), o conceito de mimese trabalhado por Homi Bhabha, a inclusão como modo de exclusão estudada por Giorgio Agamben e as discussões em torno do Jornalismo Cultural termo questionado por Daniel Piza e ainda sem alternativas para as instituições que trabalham questões relativas à mídia cultural. Esperamos com este trabalho, detectar os ruídos de comunicação existentes neste sistema que é a formação de público, mapeando a trajetória da relação entre público, artista e demais processos (mídia, política, poder) e, dentro do possível, sugerir novas estratégias de atuação

The main objective of this mini–dissertation is to investigate the basic form and content of moral education as it manifests itself in the mamtiseni and nkciyo female initiation rituals of the Mount Frere region of the Eastern Cape Province of the Republic of South Africa. The main theoretical position taken is the reemergent African Renaissance coupled with African indigenous knowledge systems, first revived by (former) President Thabo Mbeki. Accordingly the main purpose of this study is to address the transmission of moral aspects of female Bhaca initiation inherent in behavioural/cultural educational enculturation. The main findings of the mini–dissertation constitute the following: 1. Mamtiseni and nkciyo rituals play a major role in the enculturation of young Bhaca girls. 2. The song texts carry strong messages of how to go about achieving a healthy and surviving society. There are further opportunities for research in the following aspects: 1. Nkciyo initiation schools are very exclusive, involving many secret codes. The fact that I am a male put me at a disadvantage. 2. There are many more points of difference between the two rituals than meets the eye.
Thesis (M.Mus.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.

This dissertation analyzes the intellectual and political contributions of choreographer Katherine Dunham (1909-2006). As an African American woman, Dunham broke several barriers of race and gender, first as an anthropologist conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the Caribbean in the 1930s, and second as the artistic director of a major dance company that toured the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Australia from the 1930s through the 1960s. She also wrote several scholarly books and articles, opened multiple schools, and served on the boards of numerous arts organizations. Although Dunham's contributions to anthropology and dance are vitally important, "Choreographing a New World" emphasizes her political engagement. Through actions both onstage and off, she helped strengthen the transnational ties of black social movements from the New Negro Movement to the Black Power Movement. In particular, the dissertation contends that Dunham made dance one of the primary forces in the creation and perpetuation of the African diaspora. She herself attempted to live diaspora by forging personal connections across racial, linguistic, national, class, and cultural borders. In order to shift the focus to Dunham's intellectual and political engagement, "Choreographing a New World" turns to previously untapped archival sources. This dissertation is the first scholarly work on Dunham to examine archives from the U.S. State Department, Office of Economic Opportunity, Bernard Berenson Papers, Rockefeller Foundation Records, Langston Hughes Papers, and Rosenwald Foundation Papers, among other archives. It combines insights from these archives with choreographic analysis, interviews with Dunham's former dancers and students, and embodied participant-observation research at the annual International Katherine Dunham Technique Seminars from 2010 to 2013. Overall, "Choreographing a New World" not only provides a new perspective on Dunham, but also raises important questions about dance as an intellectual and political activity, especially within an African diasporic context.

This study distils some of the principal political and sociological lines of enquiry that Neville Alexander embarked upon in his published writings. It initially sets out to sketch the political, economic and intellectual milieu that he encountered after his release from Robben Island in 1974, and then it addresses the language question, as a part of the national question, in South Africa. The researcher argues that Alexander’s “dance” in the world of political and educational interventions has at times been solitary but that his discourse is substantively girded by the writings and experiences of established practitioners in the fields of sociolinguistics, political economy and cultural activities. The study concludes that his policy proposals on language in particular, in spite of the fact that the constitutional and institutional infrastructure exists for their implementation, have been put on the back burner because the dominant linguistic interests of the post-apartheid government correspond with the communication interests of market-driven institutions in the country, and not with the interests of the linguistic majorities who populate the nation.
Neville Alexander's thoughts on the language question in South Africa
Language question in South Africa
Educational Studies
M.Ed. (Philosophy of Education)

This chapter focuses on Duncan’s and Craig’s experiments in movement and manifestos for The Dance and The Theatre of the Future, and the ways they engage notions of Hellenism, especially in its utopian aspects. It reads their projects in tandem (the dancer and the marionette), underlining the emphasis on the performer and introducing the concept of embodied ekphrasis. Both Duncan and Craig’s experiments were not based on readings of Greek plays, and gestured towards a form of Hellenism echoed in the modernist concept of total theatre. Theorising and expressing performance through the double figures of the puppet and the dancer is given a classical genealogy through the introduction of Plato’s ideas on the subject, also quoted by Craig, again stressing the ways these modernist debates rehearse the ancient quarrel about the political and aesthetic efficacy of performance.

Chapter 3 theorizes the flexibility of migrant South Asian dancers in Britain in relation to neoliberal demands for the transnational mobility of labor, on the one hand, and restrictive British immigration and citizenship policies, on the other. The artistic contributions of migrant South Asian dancers have been integral to the aesthetic development of British South Asian dance but have gone largely unacknowledged. This chapter tracks the various legal, economic, cultural, and political factors that both facilitated and hindered the mobility of transnational dance labor from India and the Indian diaspora to Britain between the 1990s and 2010s. In particular, it examines how immigration policies have choreographed the movement of transnational dance labor across borders, both speeding it up and slowing it down and, sometimes, stopping it altogether. Keeping the lives of transnational South Asian dancers and their experiences of migration at the forefront, the chapter takes an intimate look at how dancers negotiated volatile economic and political conditions. It argues that transnational dancers present a unique case in the study of flexibility insofar as they are hyperflexible: versatile (across dance forms), but also agile (across borders) and adaptable (across cultures). Focusing on these three aspects of flexibility, the chapter explores how hyperflexibility was demanded of and cultivated by migrant dancers to various ends and effects, and with varying degrees of stretch-ability.

This case study looks at a much overlooked and ignored filmmaker from Morocco, Izza Génini: the first woman to be truly dedicated to making documentaries in a country where documentaries were actively discouraged. Morocco’s political, economic, cultural and social devastation during the Years of Lead in the eighties determined censorship and prevented any sort of filmmaking for a long time. People were disappeared or killed by government spies, and production was at an all time low. It was moreover determined by an exceptionally strict censorship board. Nevertheless, as producer and director, since the eighties Génini has managed to make pertinent observations of celebratory aspects of her mixed culture. Her family is Jewish, and it is a hidden aspect of Moroccan society that a large contingency of Jewish people used to live peacefully side by side with the Moroccan Arabs. Through depictions of traditional music and dance, celebrating hidden customs, her films defy national timidity and homogeneity. She was the first woman to make documentaries in Morocco that were not sponsored by the state, and remained so until well into the nineties.

In early modern Spain, raza (race) signified the stain of Blackness, while casta (chaste, caste) signified purity of blood—Whiteness. But with its empire in decline, eighteenth-century Spain enacted its dreams of sovereignty and autonomy by impersonating a dark Other, whose Semitic and south-Saharan African antecedents were now wrapped within an imaginary Gitano. Majismo, emulating the fashions of the urban underclass, adopted the fandango, an American dance of slaves and outlaws, as an emblem of pure-blooded Spanishness. Adopting fandango dances such as the profane Mexican panaderos, an Africanist belly-to-belly dance incorporated into the bolero school repertoire, majismo figured the deeply political dissonance between the determinism of Christian blood purity and the possibility of redemption implicit in the bobo’s equivocal confusion. Ironically, the fandango was adopted throughout the Western world as a symbol of freedom and class mobility, a metaphor that soon inflected every aspect of the world’s perception of Spain.

The Introduction provides an overview of the theoretical approach taken in the book, namely to consider movement in general and training regimens for dancers in particular as forms of cultural production that disseminate both an aesthetics and a politics. It discusses methodologies, including ethnographic and choreographic analysis, oral history, and critical contemplation of the author’s own extensive experience with Somatics regimens. The author argues, in part based on their personal experience, that through the invocation of metaphors such as the “natural body,” Somatics had the effect of both excluding and repressing some aspects of identity while liberating others.

Stavělová (Czech Republic) discusses how the Polka was established as a Czech national symbol during the middle of the nineteenth century. She analyses a large number of sources that discuss the Polka, tracing the dance from its appearance in Czech national circles in the 1830s to its success in Paris in the 1840s. She discusses its consolidation as a Czech symbol through the work of music composers such as Bedřich Smetana in the second part of the century, arguing that it was first and foremost the name of the dance that carried political meaning: Polka as a cultural product fulfilled this goal to a lesser extent. In this way, Stavělová offers a detailed discussion of how the myth of the Polka became a significant aspect of Czech national culture.

In July of 1969 the Apollo 11 spacecraft emerged from the dark side of the moon and the on-board camera panned through the vast emptiness of outer space. Against the backdrop of interstellar night hung the great ball of earth, with the intense blue of its oceans and the delicate ochres of its landmasses shimmering beneath the vibrant and translucent layer of its atmosphere. In the shock of this visual moment, distances between us contracted; boundaries and borders ceased to exist. But the impression that sent the adrenaline flowing through my veins was that the teeming billions of organisms writhing about under the protective layer of the atmosphere were not separate—they were interdependent, fluid, and interactive aspects of the one organic dance of the planet’s life. The preceding paragraph, an entry form my diary written a few days after images of the whole earth first appeared on television, cannot be classed as scientific analysis. But it is entirely consistent with what the new story of science has revealed about the relationship between human and environmental systems in biological reality. The large problem here is that the political and economic narratives that now serve as the basis for coordinating global human activities are premised on scientifically outmoded assumptions about this relationship in the old story of classical physics. And this problem is further complicated by the fact that the view of this relationship that is still widely viewed as scientific in Darwin’s theory of evolution is also premised on these scientifically outmoded assumptions. Darwin went public with his theory for the first time in a paper presented to the Linnean Society in 1848. This paper begins with the following sentence: “All nature is at war, one organism with another, or with external nature.” In The Origins of Species , Darwin is more specific about the character of this war: “There must be in every case a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.”

Abstract This chapter offers an introduction to the Handbook by providing an overview of the critical approach taken. It explores how the academic study of the film musical began with film studies and how musicology has been slow to engage with the screen musical despite the proliferation of musicological literature on the Broadway musical. In addition, the chapter offers a summary of the book’s contents into its thematic parts, such as the politics of breaking into song and dance, the musical’s othering impulse, aspects of stardom, production histories, the decline of the genre in the 1970s, and its renaissance in the twenty-first century.

This chapter aims to redirect an opera that is too often dislocated from that scene back within its boundaries. It explores the interpretive practices that have installed this certainty within critical approaches to such a semiotically complex work as Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. Early productions proudly exhibited its Japanese qualities: the putatively authentic sword and costumes onstage; the Japanese women recruited to teach the British actors how to dance; the “Miya Sama” theme, incorporated almost without amendment from a Japanese source. It was not until the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, when the Japanese Empire confronted British audiences and critics with a newly threatening aspect, that critics collectively decided, never to recant, that the opera did not contain “a single joke against Japan,” as G. K. Chesterton put it, but was rather wholly designed to satirize and caricature British political culture. As such the affinities between The Mikado and a particular aspect of late-Victorian Orientalism have been obscured, and the semiotic problem Japanese culture posed to Victorians has been oversimplified.