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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the cosmopolitan Greco-Roman world of the second and third centuries CE, the terms magodos, malakos, and kinaidos/cinaedus identified a category of performer usually described (inadequately) as the “effeminate dancer.” This paper investigates the nature of the “effeminate dancer's” performance and his function in the various societies in which such entertainment is attested, focusing on Roman Egypt. In a world where men typically played women's roles in mainstream drama and dance, the “effeminate dancer's” performance eluded these accepted conventions of theatrical illusion. Raising the specter of distorted masculinities such as the passive homosexual and the eunuch, and evoking the ecstatic cults that were a mainstay of feminine religious experience in the ancient Mediterranean, the “Effeminate dancer” stirred up anxieties about social and sexual transgression and simultaneously allayed them through elegant performance.

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

Dance in most African countries, especially in West Africa, is the responsibility of a particular class of the society. The main issue for performers or choreographers trained in modern standards is the transfer of information to dance professionals who are illiterate, approximately 75 percent of noneducated people on the continent. The majority are women. It is an oral tradition too, so diversity, globalization, and feminism mean nothing to them. The sociopolitical situation of the entire continent is a good example of the consequences of colonization that, besides being a historical big mistake, was also a disaster because it did not respect the structure of societies. Today's globalization of the world draws the continent down because it cannot consider Africa's specific needs. To me, dance cannot be globalized because of the creativity, identity, and social-specific values that would die.

As members of society, artists have historically served a dualistic purpose—to reflect the ideologies of the world in which they live, and to challenge those ideologies. By challenging ideologies, artists may enter into a world of social and political activism. However, can art be an effective form of protest? In this paper I explore the characteristics that allow dance to function as a form of social and political activism. Furthermore, I explore the potential implications of the female dancing body as it pertains to dance as an activist art form.

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

Given the ephemeral nature of digital technology, alternative methods of recording hip-hop history must be developed. While I do not agree with dismantling the intergenerational oral tradition altogether, and would advocate for a reawakening of this historical convention as well, archiving hip-hop digital media, in both institutional archives, museums, and libraries as well as in alternative print, Internet, and video mediums, could be its own form of preservation and power in the hip-hop community. It would preserve a legacy of intergenerational cultural and historical inheritance that is currently threatened. It could also add institutional legitimacy and economic independence. Finally, it could promote education and artistic development. My lecture-demonstration featured an eighteen-minute filmed interview with breakdancer Rokafella, as well as a presentation of the larger project, set against the backdrop of a videotaped, commissioned, solo dance performance with Rokafella as well.

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

In tourism, dance is popularly used as a medium that attracts outsiders'attention and curiosity because dance effectively advertises the characteristics of a culture. One of the most prevalent images in Korean tourist broachers and films is a female dancer in a colorful costume, welcoming foreigner tourists with big smile. In this paper, through the examination of the stereotypes and gender differences in dance depicted in Korean tourism commercials, I focus on how Korean dance has been commodified in the politics of tourism. I also explore how tourism constitutes a “fantasy” of a culture in correspondence with Korea's globalization and localization process.

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

This essay explores innovations in contemporary Indian dance based in classical Indian dance, martial arts and Western dance vocabularies. Who is making change and how does change work? I delineate the parameters of contemporary Indian dance as a genre (since the 1980s) and distinguish it from Bollywood style “free” dance. I analyze the creative choreography of one prominent contemporary Indian dancer, Chennai (India) based Anita Ratnam. Ratnam's signature style, evoking the “feminine transcendental,” is rooted in Indian aesthetic along with a pan-Asian scope. Ratnam's over twenty-year dance career of solo, group, and collaborative work, along with pioneering artist, Astad Deboo, serve as role models for second-generation contemporary Indian dancers such as Los Angeles–based Post-Natyam Collective's movement explorations, among other dancers based in the diaspora.