bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Music and Dance in Boccaccio's Time: Part II: Reconstruction of Danze and Balli (including three dances with music and Labanotation)
Authors: Thomas Emma Lewis 
Published: May 2006

W. Thomas Marrocco has shown the types of music and dance that are discussed in Boccaccio's Decameron; I should like to present some examples of these art forms, re-created as accurately as we are able to do so, in the form of an entertainment which might have amused the ladies and gentlemen in that secluded villa on the outskirts of Florence in 1348.In re-creating dances of the past from written documents, two principles must be borne in mind: first, that the records reflect the dance of an earlier period, for the steps and movements must have been tried, learned, and proven successful before a dancing master (or academician) would have deemed them worthy of recording; second, the materials preserved were obviously quite popular in the courts and hence were likely the most “danceable” compositions available. Therefore, it is the task of the reconstructor of these movements to discover the elements that were exciting and appealing to the dancers (and spectators) of the period and to make these elements come to life for contemporary audiences. Besides the obvious necessity of translating verbal instructions for steps and movement patterns and setting these to music, many factors enter into this elusive performance task: the size of the dance area usually employed; the shape, length and weight of clothing worn while dancing; the style and maneuverability of shoes, hats, swords, capes and other accoutrements; body positions generally in vogue as well as attitudes towards the human body, i.e., what was and what was not generally acceptable in terms of the good manners of the day.
Repertoire, Values, and Social Meaning in the Wedding Dances of a Yemenite Jewish Village in Israel
Authors: Staub Shalom 
Published: May 2006

Despite the popularity that the Yemenite Jewish dance has achieved among a general public, through Israeli folk dance and stage adaptation by groups such as the Inbal Dance Theater, scholarly treatment of this dance tradition is still in its early stages. My intent in this paper is to address an area neglected by other researchers: the examination of Yemenite Jewish dance in the context of village life in Israel, and further, the consideration of the social significance of the dancing. I will identify the significant social subsets of the village, examining the similarities and differences of dance repertoire and criteria for aesthetic evaluation among these groups as seen in the course of wedding celebrations. These similarities and differences will introduce the dimension of social meaning the intersection of form and function, symbol and meaning, dance and culture.A moment for definition of basic terms: I use the term culture in its sense as a common conceptual framework, including beliefs, values, and symbols. Culture, as a common conceptual framework, is constantly enacted and re-enacted in actions, events, and symbolic expressions. This formulation is similar to Geertz's definition of culture as “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life.” I approach dance as one such symbolic form. Dance style is not arbitrary. It is a learned and patterned activity. By carefully investigation native attitudes, it is possible to learn how dance operates as symbolic and expressive behavior.
Exploring Dance as Concept: Contributions from Cognitive Science
Authors: Francis Sandra T. 
Published: May 2006

As a doctoral candidate in anthropology preparing for field research among the Navajo, I surveyed the literature of cognitive anthropology (a subdiscipline of cultural anthropology) searching for analytical tools and methods that might suit my research needs. This inquiry led to the development of an experimental project, which is the subject of this article. I will begin with a brief account of my research problems and follow with a description of the experimental project, including a discussion of problems encountered and lessons learned.The subject of my field research is: “The Role of ‘dance’ (alzhish) in Navajo Curing Ceremonials.” Portions of Navajo ceremonials were labeled “dance” by early researchers, presumably because they fit the Western concept—movement accompanied by music (drumming and singing) and performed before an audience. The Navajo call this component alzhish. The meaning of this term has not been investigated. We do not know how the other parts of a ceremony are labeled, and we do not know why this group of actions receives this label and not a different one. I devised three questions for exploring this domain: 1) What is alzhish? 2) What is the ceremonial function of alzhish? 3) How is that function achieved?
The Historiography of European Linked Sword Dancing
Authors: Corrsin Stephen D. 
Published: May 2006

One of the most widespread and dramatic styles of folk dance performance throughout much of Europe over the past six centuries has been sword dancing, specifically the linked styles—often called “hilt and point” or “chain” sword dances—which were first reported in the late Middle Ages and are still practiced in a number of countries. In these dance styles, a group of dancers, normally ranging from four or five up to twenty-odd, moves through various figures, minimally lines and circles but often using very complex and demanding movements. The dancers are connected to one another by swords, or sword-like implements of metal or wood, which they usually hold with the hilt in their right hands and the point of the next dancer's sword in their left. The dancers have traditionally been men or boys, often members of a guild or profession, or in rural areas, the men of a parish or district.The dances are usually presented in the winter, most often during Carnival time or Shrovetide in much of northern and central Europe, or on Boxing Day or Plough Monday in England. But they might also take place on a local patron saint's feast day or other popular holiday. In Spain and Portugal the dances have been performed at Corpus Christi, in the summer. In many countries they have been presented to entertain royalty, wealthy tourists, folklore collectors, or other distinguished audiences. Particular speeches, songs, or short dramas have sometimes been associated with these dances. It has not been uncommon for a piece of mock combat to take place, perhaps with a fencing scene. A dramatic moment in some dances comes when the swords are locked or laid together. They then can be displayed in a star shape to the audience; used as a platform for a performer to stand on; or placed around a performer's neck, for an “execution”, sometimes followed by a “resurrection.” Nonetheless, the emphasis and originality of this style of dancing lies in the linked movements of the dancers, connected by their swords.
Reprise: On Dance Ethnography
Authors: Sklar Deidre 
Published: May 2006

In 1991, when my essay, “On Dance Ethnography,” appeared in this journal, there was a small body of American research in dance that examined movement in cultural context (1). Since then, a radical shift has occurred in American dance scholarship. Cultural critique, with its attention to ethnicity, race, class, and gender, has permeated the academy, and dance historians have turned to sociocultural issues, blurring the boundaries between the sub-fields of dance. We now have a range of theories, methods, and case studies that address the cultural situatedness of dance and movement, a range reflected in the names applied to the subject: “dance ethnology,” “cultural studies in dance,” “ethnochoreology,” “performance studies,” “anthropology of dance,” and “anthropology of human movement.” While long-established paradigms continue to inspire work from structural, symbolic, and functional perspectives, two new trajectories have risen in ethnographic dance studies in this decade.One trajectory is sociopolitical; it draws on the rapidly developing ideas and language of cultural studies. Here we talk about dance in terms of the “socially constructed nature of human movement” (Reed 1998, 503) and of “bodily theories— armatures of relations through which bodies perform individual, gendered, ethnic, or community identities” (Foster 1995, 8). We discuss globalization, transmigration, de- and re-contextualization, invented communities, kinesthetic homes, all of which address the way dance works and is worked upon in the changing contexts of world politics. We specify whether a dance affirms, resists, re-creates, challenges, undermines, or reenforces the status quo, and sometimes whether it does several of these at once, for we agree that dance as social action can be ambiguous (Desmond 1994) (2).
Technique and Theory in the Work of Kapila Vatsyayan
Authors: O'shea Janet 
Published: May 2006

As a scholar and practitioner of Bharatanatyam I would like, foremost, to express my gratitude to Kapila Vatsyayan for her comprehensive, in-depth studies of Indian classical dance forms. Her work includes attention to both distant and recent epochs in the history of Indian dance as well as to current practice. Her analysis of many divergent sources has laid the groundwork for any academic study of classical Indian dance. She not only provides an exhaustive account of Indian dance in the past and present but also interprets the relationship among aesthetic theory texts, historical dance practice, and contemporary, classical Indian choreography in a nuanced and sophisticated manner.Because the strengths of Vatsyayan's research are manifold, I restrict my consideration here to a narrow focus. Specifically, this discussion focuses on her concept of dance technique as an integral part of her analytical framework. This essay also addresses the ramifications of her methodology for current and future work in the field of dance studies. In particular, I consider how Vatsyayan's understanding of the bodily subject offers an important paradigm for current writings within dance scholarship, especially those that interpret dance praxis in relation to social theory (1). Moreover, I limit my attention to two of Vatsyayan's major works: Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts and Indian Classical Dance.
Circling the Square: A Choreographed Approach to the Work of Dr. Kapila Vatsyayan and Western Dance Studies
Authors: Erdman Joan L. 
Published: May 2006

When I first came to the University of Chicago in 1973 to study South Asian anthropology and history, and to write about North India's musicians, I was asked whether I would be studying the ancient texts such asNatyashastraandAbhinayadarpana. “No,” I said. “I am interested in today's arts and artists, and their recent history in the courts of Rajasthan, not in ancient texts.”Eventually I found the writings of Dr. Kapila Vatsyayan, and recognized enduring connections between ancient and modern, great and little traditions, and the importance of all arts for understanding any one of them. This realization arose from her 1968 book on India's performing arts,Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts. In his foreword Rai Krishnadasa, Honorary Director of Bharat Kala Bhavan at Benares, noted that since Indian Independence in 1947, many books dealing with its arts had been published, often “hastily written and often full of errors and even misinformation” (Vatsyayan 1968, xix). Vatsyayan's book, however, was “a breath of fresh air, clear, incisive and invigorating” (xix). She had studied historical and ancient dance texts, researched and analyzed the dance, and long practiced with dance gurus. In doing so, her book merged two traditions of learning: living “repositories of tradition,” and analysis of the “ancestry of dance movement–so integral a part of the evolution of modern dance abroad” (xix). So texts and commentaries, on the one hand, and praxis, on the other, were essential to understanding India's dance and dance traditions, and to reconstructing their history. This combination informs all her publications as well as her significant contributions to the patronage of India's dance culture. For me, it opened the pathway to a merger of text and practice, context and aesthetic process.
Ethical Standards for Experimental Research with Dancers
Authors: Welsh Thomas M. 
Published: May 2006

As experimental research becomes more common in the world of dance, the ethical issues involved in conducting such research increase in importance. While several fields have identified ethical standards to guide researchers in their fields, standards for research with dancers have yet to appear.In the absence of standards tailored for research with dancers, researchers might adapt the standards of related fields or use a personal code that seems appropriate to their situation. However, researcher backgrounds differ and researchers have a particularly strong interest in seeing their projects succeed, so there is no guarantee that every researcher will employ sufficient standards. Specifying an appropriate set of guidelines for research with dancers could be helpful to dance researchers, organizations that sponsor research with dancers, and dancers who participate in research. The purpose of this article is to propose a set of ethical standards for experimental research with dancers.
Athikte's Voice: Listening to the Voice of the Dancer in Paul Valéry's “L'âme et la danse”
Authors: Kozel Susan P. 
Published: May 2006

”Dance, dear body, do not think,” the message attributed to the serpent in Paul Valéry's poem “La jeune parque,” lends biblical connotations to the duality between body and mind, between dance and philosophy. A similar duality between movement and thought is found in Valéry's “L'âme et la danse” (1921), a mock Platonic dialogue in which three Greek philosophers respond to a group of dancers performing in front of them. In “L'âme et la danse” the action unfolds between the eminent philosophical figures of Socrates, Eryximachus and Phaedrus, and Athikte, a young woman dancer. More than a dialogue; it is a drama through which philosophy confronts dance, in which the philosophers, who are men, confront the dancers, who are women, and across the course of which the dancers are voiceless.In this essay, I explore a confrontation between philosophy and dance through the tension between the roles Valéry accords to men and women in philosophical discourse. Women dance, men think. Freeing the dancer from the fetters of philosophical thought is akin to liberating women from the need to bother themselves with intellectual matters. Athikte, as the voice of dance, introduces an entirely different range of philosophical issues from those which, on the surface, animate the dialogue. But, above all, Athikte illustrates how an unproductive tension between philosophy and dance can be intensified through the uncritical preservation of gendered roles within philosophical discourse.
Source Materials for the Study of French Dance (1643–1793)
Authors: Schlundt Christena L. 
Published: May 2006

This paper announces a forthcoming bibliography for dance scholars and details some of the major sources it will list. The publication originated as a bibliography for a course on French music and dance taught at the University of California, Riverside, by Dr. Judith Schwartz, Wendy Hilton (guest artist), and the author. It has since taken on larger dimensions, including the cooperation of another scholar, Dr. Meredith Little of Stanford University. The collaborators sought to develop a definitive bibliography on French dance of the period 1643-1793.The bibliography will be published by Joseph Boonin, Inc., in the series Music Indexes and Bibliographies, George R. Hill, General Editor. The full title is French Court Dance and Dance Music during the Reigns of Louis XIV-Louis XVI: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources. Part I contains printed and manuscript collections of notated chorégraphies, and an index of musical incipits for notated chorégraphies. Part II contains writings about dance and dance notation. Part III contains writings about dance music, with a selective list of composers of dance music in the French manner.
Men as Women: Female Dance Symbolism in Walbiri Men's Rituals
Authors: Wild Stephen A. 
Published: May 2006

Dance in a particular cultural tradition may be analyzed from any of several different perspectives, which may be classified in two categories. In the first, analysis may be structural or stylistic. By structure I mean the set of relationships among discrete movements characteristic of a dance tradition; it is similar to grammar in language (cf. Woodard 1976). Style refers to the general qualities of a dance tradition or classes of the tradition: tempo, energy level, parts of the body used, characteristic number of dancers, smoothness or abruptness of movements, body decorations and objects manipulated in the dance (cf. Lomax 1968:222-273). Although this category is concerned with analysis of dance qua dance, it may justifiably be argued that a kind of meaning inheres in pure structure and style, and therefore that their analysis is an explication of meaning.Other ways of analyzing dance in a cultural tradition approach meaning in a different way. Meaning is sought in the relationship between structure and style on one hand and other aspects of the culture on the other.
Anxiety, Creativity, and Dance Performance
Authors: Manley Mary-Elizabeth , Wilson Vietta Elin 
Published: May 2006

This study proposes to investigate how anxiety is related to the dance experience and to a person's creative behaviour within that experience. A number of assumptions regarding the creation, improvisation, composition, and performance of dance have centered around the relationship of anxiety to the dance experience. These assumptions point to anxiety as being integral in the creative behaviour of dancers and as being a vital ingredient for good performance. Others suggest that the dance experience is a medium of expression which reduces tension or anxiety. (See Barron 1972:96–97 and Leith 1972:246.)This exploratory study looks at the creative potential that an individual brings to a simulated studio composition session. The study also investigates the relationship of this creative potential to dancers' self-reported anxiety and their creativity in performing the composition.
Shakers in Cyberspace: Electronic Resources and the Bibliography of Dance
Authors: Edsall Mary E. 
Published: May 2006

Research in the performing arts to a greater degree than other disciplines relies upon literature that crosses and resides within many other disciplines. Researching dance in particular can become a rather interwoven process. Not only is the literature of dance laid across the landscape of the Library of Congress subject headings, but its very subject scope often evolves within other disciplines. Research in dance is environmental and ephemeral, with much of the valuable information found in primary sources as well as in secondary and tertiary sources. When looking at the bibliography of dance as a research inquiry, the direction of the search cannot be narrow. Often, the scope of such research will evolve, taking the researcher circui-tously, but intellectually, around the course of the various disciplines in the arts and the humanities, and the social and physical sciences as well. Moreover, such research requires locating different formats of information, found within a variety of bibliographic structures and searching environments.By utilizing the bibliographic search techniques developed in the Dance Heritage Coalition's workshop, “Choreographing Your Search” (1) bibliographic research in dance can be more fully explored and its findings more easily displayed than through more traditional library research methodology. The purpose of the workshop “Choreographing Your Search” is to provide a basic and general introduction to available on-line resources that can lead to information sources and materials relevant to dance and dance history.
The Green Table–sources of a classic
Authors: Siegel Marcia B. 
Published: May 2006

The Green Table is unique on our stages. In the late 20th century no one is dancing anything quite like it. This is not only because of its age–many ballets are older but look modern. Dancers almost unconsciously speak in the idiom of their time, steadily and imperceptibly polishing the patina off old artifacts to keep them fresh. I think even in well-preserved ballets there is much that is not prescribed, many expressive choices that aren't even acknowledged. When a dancer learns a role, he or she tries to accomodate to the steps, to own them. Most often, the steps end up accomodating to the dancer. They end up looking contemporary, whatever their origin.The Green Table is an exception. Its production style and its dance idiom are attached to the late-expressionist period, that remote phase of cultural history between the great wars, so earnest in its innocence and anger, its fears and its ironies. Because of his particular method of fitting image to action, Kurt Jooss gave us a document that insists on telling us about its time, even as it reflects into our own.The goal of expressionistic art, literature, and music was to use emotion and memory as a conduit to more universal feelings. Unlike the Romantics, to whom they were related, the expressionists did not view their art solely as a personal outcry. Expressionism nearly always had a spiritual component. This took the direction not of personal uplift or ecstasy, but of a surge toward the cosmos. Expressionists wanted to know and dramatize their connections with nature, with archeological time, with mystery and magic, and with other human beings living in their own time and place. Early expressionism unleashed a chaotic, anarchic freedom that often looked like madness. After the real trauma of World War I, artists began to draw back from those limitless, destabilized, early visions, into the safety of more rational, formal structures.
Technique and Autonomy in the Development of Art: A Case Study in Ballet
Authors: Hammond Sandra N. , Hammond Phillip E. 
Published: May 2006

Comparison is the basis of theory. To know a thing is to know what it is not, and to theorize is therefore to compare a thing with many other things, including the thing itself at earlier stages, if the theorizing is about how the thing develops. The more “abstract” the theory, the greater is the range of things that can be compared—the more phenomena, in other words, the theory embraces.The above paragraph is our way of warning the reader that, while we offer a theoretical perspective on the development of ballet, we spend most of our pages introducing an abstract way of making comparisons–comparisons pertinent not only to the differences between contemporary and earlier ballet but also to the differences between ballet and other artistic endeavors. The publication of this essay in a dance journal is justified by our concluding pages, therefore, but it is our hope that not just dance theorists will profit from (and add to) our analysis, but so also will persons of a theoretical bent interested in any of the arts.One more word of preliminary explanation. A decade ago we published an essay in the Journal of Social History that offered a radically sociological interpretation of the development of ballet. Our article challenged conventional accounts of ballet history that charted the course of ballet as chiefly a product of its dominant performances and personalities.