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This book provides the first ethnographic examination into the life of and the community formed around Pandit Chitresh Das, one of India’s most dynamic, outspoken, and captivating dancers. Born in Calcutta in 1944, Pandit Das immigrated to the United States in 1970 and was instrumental in establishing kathak, an Indian classical dance form, in the States. This work examines issues that arose in teaching, learning, and performing kathak in the United States over forty-five years. As a teacher, how does one transmit cultural and dance knowledge to culturally diverse groups of students? Within an artistic diaspora, how does a culture bearer–teacher maintain, modify, and frame dance repertoire, cultural norms associated with being a dancer, and philosophies surrounding the dance? And how do dancers negotiate the challenges of cultural expression in multicultural contexts? This ethnographic study of one of the longest-running sites of kathak transmission in the United States examines such questions, concluding that even in this hierarchical pedagogical tradition, students and teacher mutually navigate issues of artistic style and cultural meaning to create and sustain a dance culture.

The popularity and profile of African dance have exploded across the African diaspora in the last fifty years. Hot Feet and Social Change presents traditionalists, neo-traditionalists, and contemporary artists, teachers, and scholars telling some of the thousands of stories lived and learned by people in the field. Concentrating on eight major cities in the United States, the essays explode myths about African dance while demonstrating its power to awaken identity, self-worth, and community respect. These voices of experience share personal accounts of living African traditions, their first encounters with and ultimate embrace of dance, and what teaching African-based dance have meant to them and their communities. Throughout, the editors alert readers to established and ongoing research, and provide links to critical contributions by African and Caribbean dance experts.Contributors: Ausettua Amor Amenkum, Abby Carlozzo, Steven Cornelius, Yvonne Daniel, Charles “Chuck” Davis, Esailama G. A. Diouf, Indira Etwaroo, Habib Iddrisu, Julie B. Johnson, C. Kemal Nance, Halifu Osumare, Amaniyea Payne, William Serrano-Franklin, and Kariamu Welsh

This book investigates African American dancers Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham’s self-inventions on screen and in writing to map the intellectual underpinnings and visual impact of their art. Baker was the first Black woman to enjoy a starring role in mainstream cinema and Dunham was the first Black choreographer to be credited for her screen work. Equally, they were the first well-known African American women to produce multivolume accounts of their lives, and their writings serve as valuable firsthand documents of Black women’s interwar experiences. Why did Baker and Dunham enjoy such groundbreaking literary and cinematic careers? What do such careers tell us about the challenges and opportunities that they encountered as African American women seeking to navigate midcentury geographical and cultural boundaries? Why did they turn to life writing and the screen and on what terms were they able to engage with these mediums as Black women? How did contemporary Black screen audiences receive their work? Where do Baker and Dunham’s films and writings fit into African American literary and cinematic histories and why are they largely absent from these histories? This book investigates these questions. In so doing, it uncovers the cultural significance of Baker and Dunham’s films and writings and interrogates their performances within them to recover their authorship.

This book is a social history, theorizing participatory dance in New World public spaces as a tool that has enabled subaltern communities’ political resistance to hegemonic control. Drawing upon musicology, ethnomusicology, iconography, anthropology, dance studies, and folklore, and spanning examples from the eighteenth through the twenty-first century, it identifies recurrent strategic patterns in the music, movement, and “noise” that political minorities--including persons of color, economic underclasses, women, gays, and other resistance movements--have employed to oppose, contest, and transgress dominant cultures’ social control. The book applies multidisciplinary analytical practices to movement and sound in historical idioms, little documented by period scholarship, whose data are indirect, inferential, and reconstructive. Case studies include frontier Pentecostalism; Native American resistance; Shakerism; African American communities; the English- and French-speaking Caribbean; film and theatrical dance; the Stonewall Uprising and Chicago 1968 protests; twentieth-century noise ordinances; and punk-rock, hip hop, and twenty-first-century global protest movements. Examples in diverse media, from prose description to watercolor to film, are selected in order to showcase the consistency of these political understandings across diverse situations and to demonstrate the synthesis of analytical approaches, which this topic mandates. The book argues for understanding participatory music and motion--bodies and sound interacting in contested public spaces--as a central, intentional, effective, and recurrent resistance strategy in American social history.

The popularity of yoga and Zen meditation has heightened awareness of somatic practices. Individuals develop the conscious embodiment central to somatics work via movement and dance, or through touch from a skilled teacher or therapist often called a somatic bodyworker. Methods of touch and movement foster generative processes of consciousness in order to create a fluid interconnection between sensation, thought, movement, and expression. This book probes ideas surrounding embodied knowledge and the conscious embodiment of movement and dance. Using a variety of perspectives on movement and dance somatics, the book draws on both scholarship and personal practice to participate in a multifaceted investigation of a thriving worldwide phenomenon. The goal: to present the mental and physical health benefits of experiencing one’s inner world through sensory awareness and movement integration.

This book explores the transformations undergone by the residents of a Midwestern town when they step out on the dance floor for the very first time. The book uses sensitive fieldwork as well as the author's own immersion in ballroom culture to lead readers into a community that springs up around ballroom dance. It demonstrates how the contemporary performance of ballroom dance among amateurs generates feelings of positive personal transformation, of becoming beautiful. The book also discusses the dance hall as a social space where disparate groups come together to move in synchrony, along with the ways in which race, class, and gender converge in ballroom dancing. The result is a portrait of the real people who connect with others, change themselves, and join a world that foxtrots to its own rules, conventions, and rewards. The author's eye for revealing, humorous detail adds warmth and depth to discussions around critical perspectives on the experiences the dance hall provides, the nature of partnership and connection, and the notion of how dancing allows anyone to become beautiful. The book also considers the relationship between aesthetic values and becoming beautiful.

In east Javanese dance traditions like Beskalan and Ngremo, musicians and dancers negotiate gender through performances where males embody femininity and females embody masculinity. This book ventures into the regency of Malang in east Java to study and perform with dancers. Through formal interviews and casual conversation, the author learns about their lives and art. Her work shows how performers continually transform dance traditions to negotiate, and renegotiate, the boundaries of gender and sex—sometimes reinforcing lines of demarcation, sometimes transgressing them, and sometimes doing both simultaneously. But the book's investigation moves beyond performance. It expands notions of the spiritual power associated with female bodies and feminine behavior, and the ways women, men, and waria (male-to-female transvestites) access the magnetic power of femaleness. A journey into understudied regions and ideas, the book reveals how performances seemingly fixed by tradition are instead dynamic environments for cultural negotiation and change surrounding questions of sex and gender.

This book employs twenty-five years' worth of rich interviews with black and white Virginians, Tennesseeans, and Kentuckians to explore the evolution and social uses of dance in each region. It analyzes how issues as disparate as industrialization around coal, race relations, and the 1970s folk revival profoundly influenced freestyle clogging and other dance forms. The book then reveals how African Americans and Native Americans, as well as European immigrants drawn to the timber mills and coal fields, added to local dance vocabularies. By placing each community in its sociopolitical and economic context, the book explores how the formal and stylistic nuances found in Appalachian dance reflect the beliefs, shared understandings, and experiences of the community at large. The book examines the dynamism of Appalachian dance traditions and the creativity involved in their evolution. Focusing on six dance communities, the book documents the experience of dancing as people have enjoyed it, or continue to enjoy it. It also explores the dance communities' divergent responses to social change, including industrialization, as well as the use of dance for community development.

This book offers fresh histories and theoretical inquiries that resonate across fields of the humanities. Sixteen chapters range from eighteenth-century theater dance to popular contemporary dances in global circulation. In a trans-Atlantic dialogue that demonstrates the complexity and multilayered history of German dance, American and European scholars and artists elaborate on definitive performers and choreography, focusing on three major thematic areas: Weimar culture and its afterlife, the German Democratic Republic, and recent conceptual trends in theater dance. The book aims to offer fresh histories and theoretical inquiries that will resonate not only for scholars working in the field of dance, but also for scholars working on literature, film, visual culture, theater, and performance. It details the intellectual and artistic trends over the last thirty years that have shaped the scholarship featured in New German Dance Studies.

This book provides a sweeping cultural and historical examination of Diaspora dance genres. The book investigates social dances brought to the islands by Europeans and Africans, including quadrilles and drum/dances as well as popular dances that followed, such as Carnival parading, Pan-Caribbean danzas, rumba, merengue, mambo, reggae, and zouk. The book reviews sacred dance and closely documents combat dances, such as Martinican ladja, Trinidadian kalinda, and Cuban juego de maní. In drawing on scores of performers and consultants from the region as well as on the author's own professional dance experience and acumen, the book adeptly places Caribbean dance in the context of cultural and economic globalization, connecting local practices to transnational and global processes and emphasizing the important role of dance in critical regional tourism. Throughout, the book reveals impromptu and long-lasting Diaspora communities of participating dancers and musicians.