Partnering Divinity

This chapter investigates the use of dance in evoking and transmitting ineffable religious experience. While earlier chapters examined group dances performed in public, this chapter turns to more intimate or private performances within the mystic’s imagination. Focusing on female mystics and so-called brides of Christ (including saints, nuns, and beguines) of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it reveals how these women created a new repertoire of choreography (dance-writing) that privileged the body and the imagination. Mystics’ dance language opened creative and subversive avenues to access the radical alterity of God. The first section analyzes the kinetic content of bridal mysticism. The second section takes a closer look at women’s own writings and the (de)privatization of performance. The choreography of intimacy marked a state of interiority and ecstasy; it manifested the privileged, personalized moment of encounter. The third section presents evidence for the gender politics of certain partnerships, in which women were victims of divine domination.

Neuroethology of the Waggle Dance: How Followers Interact with the Waggle Dancer and Detect Spatial Information

Since the honeybee possesses eusociality, advanced learning, memory ability, and information sharing through the use of various pheromones and sophisticated symbol communication (i.e., the “waggle dance”), this remarkable social animal has been one of the model symbolic animals for biological studies, animal ecology, ethology, and neuroethology. Karl von Frisch discovered the meanings of the waggle dance and called the communication a “dance language.” Subsequent to this discovery, it has been extensively studied how effectively recruits translate the code in the dance to reach the advertised destination and how the waggle dance information conflicts with the information based on their own foraging experience. The dance followers, mostly foragers, detect and interact with the waggle dancer, and are finally recruited to the food source. In this review, we summarize the current state of knowledge on the neural processing underlying this fascinating behavior.

At Home and at Work

After a description of Petipa’s home life and six children with his new partner, Liubov Savitskaya, chapter 7 continues the previous chapter’s subject of Petipa’s aesthetic. It examines his working methods, his dance language, the importance of the ballerina’s variation and her primacy in nineteenth-century ballet, to the point that women sometimes appeared en travesti. Petipa’s principal ballerina in the 1870s was Ekaterina Vazem, made prominent not only by her own talent, but by the decision not to invite foreign ballerinas. Although less important than the ballerina, the male dancer in Russia enjoyed more prominence than in the West. Even so, he was treated differently: where ballerinas fused the two components of dance and mime, for men they were often separated, the performer specializing in one or the other. Among the ballets, Mlada and its influence on La Bayadère are considered in detail. The chapter ends with Petipa’s ballet, Night and Day, for the coronation of Alexander III, following the assassination of Alexander II.

Honeybees forage more successfully without the “dance language” in challenging environments

Honeybees use the waggle dance to share information about food-site locations with nestmates. However, the importance of this behavior in colony foraging success remains unclear. We tested whether spatial dance information affects colony foraging success in a human-modified temperate environment by comparing colonies with oriented and disoriented dances. Notably, colonies with disoriented dances had greater foraging success. Over time, bees exposed to disoriented dances showed reduced interest in dancing nestmates. This may explain why disoriented colonies had a higher foraging rate than oriented colonies, as bees did not waste time waiting for information. This change in information-use strategy suggests bees learn about the value of dance information. An agent-based model confirmed that, under challenging conditions, waiting for dance information reduces colony foraging success compared to foraging without social information. Our results raise the possibility that humans have created environments to which the waggle dance language is not well adapted.

Деятельность Жан-Батиста Ланде в Скандинавии.

Статья посвящена скандинавскому периоду деятельности основателя русского балета Жан-Батиста Ланде. С 1721 по 1728 годы Ланде работал в Стокгольме, в 1726 г. гастролировал в Копенгагене и с 1728 до начала 1730 х гг. работал там. Автор рассматривает достижения Ланде в Скандинавии — его педагогическую деятельность и формирование собственного хореографического стиля с уклоном на «серьезные» и «комические балеты» и приходит к выводу, что рождение русского балета нужно рассматривать не как отдельное явление, а как логичное завершение творческого пути французского педагога и хореографа, выработавшего своеобразие своего художественного языка в Швеции и Дании. The article focuses on the work of Jean- Baptiste Landé, known as a founding father of the Russian ballet in Scandinavia. From 1721 to 1728 Landé worked in Stockholm. In 1726 he went on tour to Copenhagen and lived and worked there from 1728 until around 1730. The author examines Landé’s achievements in Scandinavia, his work as a teacher, and the formation of his cho¬reographic style with an emphasis on the ballet sérieux and ballet comique and comes to the conclusion that the formation of the Russian ballet did not stand alone, but was the logical continuation of Landé’s ongoing development. Long before his stay in Russia, he had already formed his own dance language in Sweden and Denmark.

Leeder, Sigurd (1902–1981)

In a career that spanned over sixty years, Sigurd Leeder made important contributions to the dance worlds in Germany, Great Britain, Chile, and Switzerland. His early association with Kurt Jooss was of great importance to them both, with Leeder working not only as a dancer in the Ballets Jooss, but also as a ballet master and teacher at the various schools associated with the company. In 1924 he joined Jooss at the Municipal Theatre Münster as a soloist and as a teacher at the new Westphalian Schule für Musik, Sprache und Bewegung (School for Music, Voice, and Movement), then in 1927 he moved with Jooss to Essen. There he became head of the dance department at the Folkwangschule für Musik, Tanz und Sprechen (Folkwang School for Music, Dance, and Voice) and danced with the municipal dance ensemble that later evolved into the Ballets Jooss. In 1934 Leeder moved to Dartington Hall in Great Britain, along with Jooss, other members of the company, and several students from the school in Essen. When the Ballets Jooss folded in 1947, Leeder established the Sigurd Leeder School of Dance in London. He moved to Chile to become director of the dance department at the University of Santiago in 1959, and then to Switzerland in 1964 to again open his own school. The dance language developed by Leeder and Jooss was a synthesis of ballet and Laban’s theories filtered through their varied dance and theater experiences and distilled in Leeder’s inspirational teaching. He was renowned not only for these teaching skills but also for his exploration, development, and refinement of Kinetographie-Laban (Labanotation).