bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Modern Dance Before Bennington: Sorting It All Out
Authors: Siegel Marcia B. 
Published: May 2006

The young people who began to assemble in the New York dance studios early in the 1930s were seized by reformist zeal. They believed they were building a better world, and their idealism served them well, both as incentive when there were few other rewards, and as a sign to the world that they were to be taken seriously. For indeed, they wished to be taken seriously, and in those very first days, their legitimacy in the world of American art seemed certain.As Doris Humphrey began to think more formally about the group that was to realize her works, she set forth her aims in a long letter to prospective members. She was enlisting them in a crusade. With the extraordinary mixture of crystalline practicality and inspirational ardor that she kept all her life, she foresaw a journey that would be all the more glorious for the obstacles they would surmount together. “I am first a creative artist, thirsting to see my conceptions made visible; after that I am also interested in developing individual talent in others, in performing for audiences, educating audiences, promoting the cause of Dance, making money, and establishing a Dance Theatre in America.” The order in which she set down these goals was not accidental. She wanted her dancers to understand that Humphrey-Weidman could pay virtually nothing — $10 a performance — and she frowned on the commercial theater as a supplementary source of income. “All group dancing in musical comedy or opera or motion picture houses” she placed in a “different class” — by implication an inferior one.
Black Faces, Garlands, and Coconuts: Exotic Dances on Street and Stage
Authors: Buckland Theresa Jill 
Published: May 2006

During the late 1920s, representatives from the English Folk Dance Society came across an unusual custom in a narrow valley in the northwest of England. Every Easter a small group of men would dance through the local streets, accompanied by a silver band and led by a whip-carrier who cleared a space in which they could perform.On the face of it such ceremonial activity was similar to the annual practices of English morris and sword dancers whose repertoires and customs Cecil Sharp had rescued from oblivion in the early years of the century. Certainly, in broad terms, the custom conformed to Sharp's definition of the morris as a ceremonial performance by men only, in special dress, and at a particular time in the local calendar (1909: 10–12).
Terra Incognita: Mapping New Territory in Dance and “Cultural Studies”
Authors: Desmond Jane 
Published: May 2006

In this essay I propose new initiatives I hope to see in U.S. dance studies in the next decade. Rather than attempting a comprehensive literature survey, or citing all possible relevant material, I want to identify what appears to me to be terrae incognitae—unmapped and un- or under-explored realms of dance research—and to suggest that we collectively consider what the effects might be if they were brought into focus. While there are many such terrae incognitae, I want to concentrate here on issues relating to ethnography, suggesting that we expand our methods of analysis to include more ethnographies of institutions and audiences. While some work in these areas is already part of “dance studies,” it does not predominate and has been overshadowed by work on the history or representational practices of concert dance, especially modern dance and ballet.I suggest that we use the potential of fieldwork—that is, the sustained participation in and observation of communities, institutions, and practices—and apply this widely to a variety of sectors in the U.S., including modern dance and ballet companies, dance institutions such as archives, training schools, community dance centers, and even our own scholarly organizations. While I hope there will be more ethnographies of dancing communities, like the contact improvisers Cynthia Cohen Bull analyzes, or the dancers of the Philippine ritual dance form sinulog that Sally Ness engages, there has already been some movement in this direction and those books provide excellent models. I want to emphasize here, instead, the important potential of critical ethnographic examination of institutions and organizations. These investigations will parallel new initiatives in anthropology, where scholars such as Richard Handler and Eric Gable have taken as the subject of their analyses The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and historical site, and Sharon Traweek, who has made a point of studying physics labs (1).
Consciousness Matters
Authors: Fraleigh Sondra 
Published: May 2006

Phenomenology is a method for studying experience. I employ this method in my research because it provides a first-person voice for the dancer, the choreographer, and the teacher/therapist in me. Oddly enough, the critic in all of us already uses a first-person voice when describing and interpreting the dance from our immediate experience of it, and telling others what we think about it. Written criticism formalizes the critic's sensate proximity to the dance. But what about the voice of the dancer in valuing the experience of dance, and the consciousness of the choreographer in making the dance? Where are they accounted for in the formulas for dance research and writing? The objective third-person voice necessary to a particular historical or social angle is more common. Phenomenology has given me a method for intuitive and theoretical reflections on dance from multiple perspectives. Eventually, I contextualize these within the larger framework of phenomenology as a branch of modern philosophy.I began to write using the tools of phenomenology in 1970 when I became aware that aesthetic discourse on dance was distanced from the actual experience, and that the writers in dance aesthetics, with the notable exception of Susanne Langer, were mostly men. I wanted to use an embodied voice and to see if a woman in dance might add to the field of phenomenology. My interests eventually led me to developmental psychology, a field that has much in common with phenomenology (2). Maxine Sheets-Johnstone had already broken the ice in The Phenomenology of Dance, but she had written more analytically than descriptively, clarifying the formative (creative) basis of dance with values intrinsically located in the moving self (3). I built upon this, but I wanted to weave the intuitive voice of the dancer into a descriptive aesthetics, slipping from the first-person experiential voice to analytical third-person theory, as phenomenology does. These were the goals of my descriptive aesthetics: Dance and the Lived Body (1987) (4). Later I began to explain phenomenology as a research method for dance in my article for Dance Research Journal, “A Vulnerable Glance: Seeing Dance Through Phenomenology” (1991); and in “Witnessing the Frog Pond” (1999), I developed this more explicitly (5).
Qualitative Change in Performances of Two Generations of Korean Dancers
Authors: Loken-Kim Christine , Crump Juliette T. 
Published: May 2006

In the twentieth century, dance performances in the Republic of Korea have undergone a number of changes in terms of settings, audiences, and performers. Since the 1970s dance activity has blossomed under the auspices of university dance and physical education departments; there has been a steady increase in the number of professors of dance and also in the number of students majoring in dance. With the regular academic calendar, a concert season has developed and professor-choreographers have been pushed to provide new dance pieces for these concerts. Many of the new works freely blend vocabulary from various styles of Korean dance, such as court, professional female entertainer (kisaeng) (I), mask, and farmers' dances, with spatial arrangements suited for a proscenium stage.While this creative activity is indicative of the growth taking place in all areas of Korean society, older specialists in Korean culture and arts have noted that recent efforts involve changes in the movement qualities and moods created by dancers. As these specialists watch younger dancers perform the traditional dances they often lament that “something” is being lost (Lee, Du-hyon 1984).
II. On Dance Ethnography
Authors: Sklar Deidre 
Published: May 2006

The strength of ethnography and ethnographic criticism is their focus on detail, their enduring respect for context in the making of any generalization, and their full recognition of persistent ambiguity and multiple possibilities in any situation. (Marcus and Fischer 1986:159)Movement as Cultural Knowledge: The term “ethnography” literally means “portrait of a people.” Perhaps “portrait” is too thin and two-dimensional a metaphor to represent the goal of ethnography, for an ethnographer seeks not only to describe but to understand what constitutes a people's cultural knowledge. Cultural knowledge includes, in anthropologist Clifford Geertz's words, “a people's ethos—the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood—and their world view—the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order” (1973:89). The ethnographer wants to know nothing less than how a given group of people find or, more accurately, make meaning.To examine dance from an ethnographic perspective, then, is to focus on dance as a kind of cultural knowledge. Dance ethnography depends upon the postulate that cultural knowledge is embodied in movement, especially the highly stylized and codified movement we call dance. This statement implies that the knowledge involved in dancing is not just somatic, but mental and emotional as well, encompassing cultural history, beliefs, values, and feelings. If movement encodes cultural knowledge then, for example, ballet can be examined for the messages it embodies about enduring gender conventions derived from the court society of Renaissance Europe and performance art can be examined as a response to the demands of survival in urban America.
III. A Vulnerable Glance: Seeing Dance through Phenomenology
Authors: Fraleigh Sondra 
Published: May 2006

When phenomenology is true to its intent, it never knows where it is going. This is because it is present-centered in its descriptive aims, accounts for temporal change, and does not have appropriate and inappropriate topics. It might move from Zen to dance to baseball to washing dishes, and even isolate a purity of attention that under certain circumstances connects them all. Phenomenology develops unpredictably, according to the contents of consciousness. This is its first level of method. Its second level develops philosophical perspectives from the seed of consciousness. It holds that “philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being”. Here I will discuss phenomenology as a way of describing and defining dance, shifting between the experience of the dancer and that of the audience.Experiential Truth: Phenomenology depends on immediate experience, but includes more. It hopes to arrive at meaning, perspectives on the phenomena of experience (dance in this case) which can be communicated. It is not devoid of past and future, since both are lived as part of the present. Present time takes its meaning in part from past and future. Heidegger described time as belonging to the totality of being, as “the horizon of being.” He chose the vulnerable image of falling to describe the lived dimension of present time. Falling is both a movement and a symbol of our existential mode of being-in-the-world.
A Question of Fun: Adolescent Engagement in Dance Education
Authors: Stinson Susan W. 
Published: May 2006

Ever since the publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), educational literature and the popular press have been filled with concern over low achievement levels among students in this country. One of the more recent responses has been the development of rigorous national standards, including standards in all the arts (National Standards for Arts Education, 1994). At the same time, there is recognition that far too many students are not motivated to meet even existing standards. The September 1995 issue of Educational Leadership, a publication whose themes reflect issues of current significance to public school administrators, was devoted to strengthening student engagement. Editor Ron Brandt opened the issue with a description that is familiar to almost anyone who walks into a typical high school class in any community:Some [students] see no connection whatever between their priorities and what teachers expect of them, so they refuse lessons and even refuse to try. Others realize they must play the game, but go through the motions with minimal attachment to what they are supposedly learning. Teachers, thwarted by resistance or passivity, complain that students are unmotivated, and either search valiantly for novel approaches or resign themselves to routines they no longer expect to be productive. (1995, 7)Certainly this dismal picture does not apply to young children, who arrive so eager to learn in kindergarten. It is reasonable to ask what happens to children, especially as they move through adolescence, to leave so many so unmotivated and disengaged.
The Effects of Participation in Dance on the Attitudes of French Children as Measured by Domain Discrimination
Authors: Neal Nelson D. , Dineur Jeanne Marie 
Published: May 2006

It is generally agreed that attitudes are composed of elements from the affective, behavioral, and cognitive domains. The affective component has been referred to as a feeling or an emotional response of liking or disliking, a gut reaction, or sympathetic nervous activity. The behavioral component includes overt actions or intentions of action, and verbal statements regarding future behavior. The cognitive component includes knowledge and beliefs of the attitude object that describe its characteristics, and its relationship to other objects (Breckler 1984, Katz 1960, Morris and Stuckhardt 1977).Recent attitude research suggests discriminating between the three psychological domains, either by measuring each or by specifying which one is the focus of concern. Discrimination may be appropriate since the three domains are distinguishable from one another and correlations among them are sometimes moderate (Breckler 1984). Discrimination among attitudinal domains also appears to be necessary since it has been found that directing change at one of the three domains may affect a shift in the other two (Cialdini et al. 1976, Katz 1960), and because differences between groups of subjects may fall within one or two of the domains rather than all three (Quattrone 1985).
The Early Editions of Machiavelli's First Decennale
Authors: Hatch Wilkins Ernest , Jackson William A. , Rouse Richard H. 
Published: May 2006

Machiavelli's first Decennale is an historical poem in terza rima dealing with events that were of concern to the Florentine Republic in the years 1494-1504. Two slightly different forms exist: an earlier one, preserved in the Mediceo-Laurentian MS. Plut. XLIV, 41, which contains a dedication dated 8 November 1504, and a later one first printed in February 1506. At least three early editions of this text were printed, although no copy of one of them, a pirated edition, is known to exist.The Laurentian MS. contains two forms of a dedication addressed to Alamanno Salviati, one in Latin and one in Italian (here printed as Appendix A), neither of which occurs in the printed editions, which have instead a prefatory letter by Agostino Vespucci. The Salviati dedication, in the Latin version, states that the poem had been written at his suggestion and, in both the Latin and Italian versions, that it was written in fifteen days, which, even if the boast were only approximate, would indicate, from the contents of the poem and the date of those dedications, that the poem was written in the autumn of 1504.
Agrippa d'Aubigne and the Apostasy of Henry IV
Authors: Kinser Samuel 
Published: May 2006

Near the end of Agrippa d'Aubigne's poem, Discours par stances avec l'esprit du feu roy Henry quatriesme, die poet describes the knife thrusts of Henry's assassin, Ravaillac: Un bras d'Enfer gravant du haut Ciel la justice
Sur le sein condamne d'un miserable Roy.The murderer appears as an instrument of divine condemnation: the king's death, affirms d'Aubigne, was deserved. Yet this same author concludes a long appendix to his Histoire Universelle with the words: Je n'ai plus qu'a laisser quatre vers pour le renom d'un roi sans pareil; que, si la defaveur de leur autheur les fait refuser au tombeau de Sainct-Denis, ils ne le fcront pas en celui qui est pose et sacre dans le marbre permanent, qui est l'eternelle memoire de la posterite.
Some Unpublished Letters of the Italian Renaissance
Authors: Kennedy W. H. J. 
Published: May 2006

The splendid collection of Italian Renaissance books and manuscripts assembled by Mr. Harold C. Bodman of Santa Barbara, California, destined to find a home in the Honold Library of the Claremont Colleges (which have had the benefit of other benefactions from Mr. Bodman), includes nine autograph letters of the Medici family and other prominent Renaissance figures. Of these letters, eight are published here for the first time. These letters range in time from 1426 to 1521 and thus cover the most important century in Medici history, a crucial period for Florence and for Italy.The first of these letters was written by Palla Strozzi in 1426. It is in the nature of a report from the scene of a sea and land skirmish on the coast near Genoa, between the forces of Florence and Venice and those of Milan and Genoa.
Koli Tengela in Sonko Traditions of Origin: an Example of the Process of Change in Mandinka Oral Tradition
Authors: Wright Donald R. 
Published: May 2006

Traditions of origin of most of the prominent Gambian Mandinka lineages tend to be bodies of myth containing small, but often recognizable, skeletons of historical truth. Members of these lineages typically think of one of several mythical, sometimes composite, figures as their ancestors. These figures are invariably great leaders, if not of western migrations with large followings, then of successful military expeditions in the west for the Mali empire. Usually, these traditions serve a particular purpose. The ancestral figures symbolize the lineages' ties, real or imagined, to the Mandinka homelands and the center of Mandinka culture on the upper Niger River. The stories of their ancestors' early arrival or successful conquests in the western Mandinka region justify historically the positions of political and social prominence these lineages held throughout the last four centuries or more of the pre-colonial period.Two of the three traditionally dominant lineages in the region of the Gambia known as Niumi have traditions of origin that are no exceptions to this rule. Niumi was one of more than a dozen Mandinka states that existed along the banks of the navigable Gambia River from perhaps as early as the fourteenth century until colonial times. Occupying forty miles of the river's north bank at its estuary, Niumi was long a focal point for the exchange of slaves and other commodities among Africans and between Africans and Europeans. By what was likely the early sixteenth century, seven extended families of three larger lineages -- themselves segments of still larger, more widely dispersed groups of lineages having the same patronymics -- emerged to rotate political leadership in Niumi and to dominate social and economic aspects of life in the state.
The Foreign Researcher: Friend or Foe?
Authors: Kashoki Mubanga E. 
Published: May 2006

In returning once again to an old theme and a familiar and much discussed topic one is keenly conscious of the danger of harping on, as one observer has labelled it, a “tired refrain.” The present revisit is predicated on the simple premise that, though no new ground is broken or fundamentally fresh issues raised, the problem is an intractable one, recurrent and pervasive, and consequently, if for no other reason, deserves one more round of attention. There is also the point, as Colson has aptly observed, that “the world is not an easy place” and abounds in social scientists and others who “share in the questioning of purposes and values.” Indeed, while what is raised in this paper might bear a distressing resemblance to arguments we have heard before, it is important to remember that to the communities who bear much of the brunt of the research conducted by foreign scholars, ethical, moral, and related issues surrounding foreigner-dominated research continue to constitute a critical area for concern and therefore a legitimate topic for sustained criticism and inquiry. Many African universities, for instance, have established ‘research affiliate schemes’ as an important, indeed integral, component of their academic functions, but in the course of operating these schemes philosophical and practical issues have arisen, many of which await satisfactory answers.It would, however, be wrong to suggest that these concerns remain the preoccupation of academics alone, because in practical terms what a university does inevitably affects the wider public and in consequence arouses their interest and curiosity. A good example of this interest by the wider public in the affairs of the university, with specific reference to research and foreign scholars, is provided vividly and colorfully by an article written by Peter Mwaura which appeared in The Sunday Post, an East African newspaper.
Oral Traditions: Whose History
Authors: Spear Thomas 
Published: May 2006

Historians rarely pause to reflect on the history and theory of our own discipline, but it is a salutary exercise, particularly when the discipline is as young as African history. Twenty years ago a majority of African peoples emerged from colonial domination and acquired their independence. In that same year their history was also symbolically liberated from domination by the activities of Europeans in Africa through the inauguration of the Journal of African History. And one year later the new African history was given what was to become one of its dominant methodologies with the publication of Jan Vansina's De la tradition Orale.African history was to be the history of Africans, a history that had begun well before the European ‘discovery’ of Africa. The problem was sources. Western historiography was firmly based on written sources which could be arranged in sequence and analyzed to trace incremental changes and establish cause and effect relationships in evolutionary patterns of change. Unlike written documents which were recorded in the past and passed down unchanged into the present, oral traditions had to be remembered and retold through successive generations to reach the present. Their accuracy was thus subject to lapses in memory and falsification in the long chains of transmission from the initial report of the event in the past to the tradition told in the present. To overcome these problems Vansina established an elaborate and meticulous methodology by which traditions should be collected and transcribed, their chains of transmission traced and variants compared, and obvious biases and falsifications stripped off to produce primary documents suitable for writing history within the western genre.