Paradoxes of Spectacular/Political Performativity: Dionysian Dance in Classical Greek Theater, Dubois’ Tragédie, Femen's Sextremist Protests, and Harrell's Antigone Sr.

In Athenian classical theater (especially in Dionysian choruses; the tragic in Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides; the satyric in Euripides’ Cyclops; or the carnivalesque in Aristophanes), aesthetics, ethics, and politics intermingle in kinesthetic, musical, and textual pragmatics. This paper questions the reference to classical performativity (especially the gendered bodies it stages) in contemporary performances, from Olivier Dubois’ Tragédie (2012) (and the committed nudity it enacts) to Femen's sextremist protests and Trajal Harrell's Antigone Sr. / Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (L) (2012). These issues are central to the philosophy of performance, from F. Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872) to J. Butler's and A. Athanassiou's Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (2013).

Rolling and Trembling of the Abdomen: Movement as a Subaltern Subject in Colonial Egypt

Accordingly to Shay and Sellers-Young (2005) “the term “belly dance” was adopted by natives and non-natives to denote all solo dance forms from Morocco to Uzbekistan that engage the hips, torso, arms and hands in undulations, shimmies, circles and spirals.” Dance historian Curt Sachs depicted the dance as “the swinging of the rectus abdominis” (Sachs 1963). This movement has been performed by many oriental dancers in the past century and has become part of the routine of oriental dancers worldwide. This movement has even named the dance “belly dance,” and become one of the most representative elements of contemporary Egyptian culture.This paper will be organized as follows: firstly, I am going to explain succinctly how I use the term “subaltern” in relation to dance and colonialism. Secondly, I am going to present the main scenarios, actors, and factors in which the rolling and trembling of the abdomen was danced, watched, desired and hated at the end of the nineteenth century, provoking strong love/hate reactions among the fin de siecle public. The discourse intermingles both dance and feminist analysis observing how movement constituted a metaphor of the unequal power relations between the metropolis and the colony within the particular historical context of British colonialism in Egypt.

Hidden Creators, Silent Authors

To be interpreter and at the same time creator seems to be the rule in contemporary dance. It is expected of the dancer to contribute to the making of the piece in which he will appear. Similarly, the choreographer's assistant (also referred as rehearsal assistant) has an active role in the process of creating a dance piece. This paper proposes an analysis of a creative process in which the question of authorship emerges—in our point of view—as the main issue. The onomastic pieces of French choreographer Jérôme Bel will serve as the basis of our analysis, and especially the piece called Isabel Torres, in which the interpreter and the choreographer's assistant had a much more important role in the creation than the choreographer himself. Premiered in 2005, Isabel Torres was supposed to be a Brazilian version of Véronique Doisneau (created in 2004, for the Paris Opera). The creative work made by the dancer and the rehearsal assistant made of it more than a mere version: Isabel Torres is an autonomous piece—so autonomous that Bel offered it to both dancer and assistant, to present it wherever they wished. Who signs Isabel Torres? In which terms is it presented in programs? Do dancer and assistant consider themselves as authors? How does the choreographer deal with it? The absence of the choreographer, the people involved in it, and the kind of work developed in the creative process makes us question the notion of authorship in contemporary dance pieces.

A View of Ancient Greek Dance from 1895

In 1895, the book Dancing, a broad survey of world dance history, was published in London. Mainly written by Mrs. Lilly Grove (later Dame Lily Grove Frazer) after five years of travel and intensive research, it also includes four short chapters by other authors. It was issued in later editions after 1895 and is still an important early source for information about dance history. Of the 454 pages in Dancing, twenty-six are devoted to ancient Greece. I discuss some of Grove's sources, statements, and conclusions in relation to those of more recent writings about dance in ancient Greece.

Dance at Graduate Universities in the South of Brazil: Experiences and Perspectives

This round table presents an overview of activities developed at higher education institutions with graduate and postgraduate studies in dance in Brazil, especially southern Brazil. Oddly enough, amid the global crisis in early 2008, the Brazilian government launched an educational program that allowed the expansion of courses at the graduate level, including dance, in several public and free universities. As an example of this scenario, we present our experiences in two public universities, UFRGS and UDESC. These dance courses have seen increasing interest and confrontation the presence of artists and researchers seeking to investigate their own work or the work of others. How can we contemplate structuring contents and methods to teach dance in the university context? How does a dance artist associate the experience of dancing to academic research? How does teaching dance force universities to think about embodied knowledge? The situation of teaching dance in Brazilian universities shows that there is still a lot to be done, considering that the creation of these courses is rather new and that dance, in this context, is an area of ongoing consolidation. The struggle to create a greater number of dance courses in universities is part of the discussion of this session. The practice of teaching dance in universities seeks to articulate repertoires of knowledges that belong to different traditions and artistic experiences transversed by reflections about contemporary dance, and to qualify the teacher, the dancer, and the researcher.

Staging and Embodiment of the Tragic in Pina Bausch's Orpheus and Eurydice (1975)

This paper is concerned with resonances of the tragic in twentieth-century central-European dance theatet, to be discussed with particular reference to Pina Bausch's 1975 Orpheus and Eurydice. In my study Resonances of the Tragic: Between Event and Affect (2015), I have argued that in terms of a history of the “longue durée,” the evocation of the tragic occurs in a field of tension between technique, the mise-en-scène, and conceptions, as well as procedures and moments of interruption, of suspension, of disruption and of the indeterminable resulting from ecstatic corporeality. Its structure and function can generate an event in the emphatic sense of the term; consequently, it provides a paradigm for recognizing structures of form and of an aesthetic of reception, structures emerging from individual constellations of the fictional and choric, absence and presence. From the perspective of dance studies, the tragic emanates from the representation of horrendous monstrosity testing the limits of what can be imagined by means of the moved body in all senses of the word; but how exactly does Bausch produce the qualities of the ambivalent, ambiguous, and paradoxical—and, consequently, the tragic?

(Re)Searching in the (You)Tube: Digital Archives and Dance Practices

It is a commonly held assumption that new technologies have changed human society, culture, and communication dramatically. New phenomena appear, and the new reality is a challenge on many levels. The mass expansion of the Internet, since the early 1990s, has brought new circumstances at the economic, social, and cultural levels, as well as new forms of behavior and expression. In recent years, the basic practice of instructors, dancers, and dance enthusiasts is searching and downloading videos on traditional Greek dancing. In many cases, the videos are considered “research” products capable of supporting the teaching of dance in traditional dance groups. What inevitably emerges is a mode of YouTube as a new digital dance archive. In this peculiar condition, the production, distribution, and “assessment” of the content are in the hands of the user community, who, as Derrida notes, are possessed by one “irrepressible desire to return to the origin”. In Foucault's terms, the archive is a space of enunciation. Repositioned as something that defies exhaustive description, for Foucault, the archive becomes engaged in the production and authorization of discourse itself. This perspective raises questions about the issues of standards, evaluation, and quality of the “material”. But, the most important question is, what is the concept and the content of the terms “research” and “teaching?”

Dancer–Researcher–Performer: A Brazilian Method

Brazil, a country of miscegenation, saw its culture being built considerably rich from the shock of the differences that were presented here throughout the history: indigenous people (first inhabitants), Europeans (coming from our colonizers), and Africans (through slave labor arising from Africa). The Brazilian method dancer–researcher–performer (BPI, or Bailarino–Pesquisador–Intérprete, in Portuguese) proposes the development of the dancer framed in popular manifestations in Brazil, where the subject first contacts its own origin and then performs field research in some popular manifestation. The experience is unfolded in directed practical labs, where the emotional records of this encounter, between the interpreter and the individuals in the field, are elaborated and developed reaching a very unique and expressive movement quality, coming from the subject in process.In the artistic product created in the BPI, the dancer does not interpret a character: the character is embodied; it lives what emerged from the body; it is a real interlacing and elaboration of the relationship of its country culture with artistic creation.The BPI leads the interpreter in an integrative way, going against the current trend in dance, in which the dancer must leave his or her body at the disposal of idealizations. We will describe a process of a BPI whose fieldwork took place with the Terecô agrarian religious manifestation, rural women who work as breakers of the babaçu coconut. The product of this process, which occurred with the author, was presented in the communities within the Amazon forest in Brazil.

She's Beauty and She's Grace(less): The Mercurial Femininity of the Modern Disney Princess

Focusing on characters from Disney's three most recent “princess” films, Tangled (2010), Brave (2012), and Frozen (2013), I examine the development and divergence of these figures from “classic” Walt Disney models. Their mercurial character, as illustrated through gesture and movement, presents a firm contrast with and significant departure from their predecessors in films such as Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1959)—protagonists who exhibited a static character reflective of their social roles through the “embodiment” of balletic grace. Expanding on existing research comparing Walt Disney–era princesses with those from the Disney Renaissance of the 1980s and 1990s, I explore the significance of this shift in representation. Viewed as a metaphor for contemporary femininity, how do these modern princesses resolve the incongruity between their official social stations, proscribed behavior, and “real” personalities through their bodies over the course of the films?I believe that the conflict staged on these animated bodies is representative of larger societal issues emerging from contested definitions of both feminism and femininity, and that the Disney princess offers a contemporary site for the expression and resolution of this dissonance. Viewing the body of the Disney princess as representative of a larger female “social body” and conflict that occurs within her as indicative of the larger forces that shape female identity, I integrate my study with historical dance scholarship which regarded movement as indicative of the presence of an Apollonian/Dionysian dialectic working within culture.

Mini & Macho, Small & Sexy: The Perpetuation of Heteronormativity, Hegemonic Masculinity, and Femininity Within the Culture of Competitive (Jazz and Hip-Hop) Dance

This paper critically assesses the expectations of competitive jazz dance adjudicators and the effects of these expectations on the presentation of gendered and sexualized dance choreographies by private dance studios. Expectations for competitive dance students with regard to technical ability, execution of choreography, and age/gender (in)appropriateness are unclearly articulated by competitions and adjudicators throughout Canada and the United States. Nevertheless, parents and students enter into private dance studios with pre-conceived notions of what it takes to “win” at competition and demand that their training and choreography reflect this. The onus is on dance teachers and choreographers, then, to adhere to this rapidly evolving culture of dance competition, or otherwise risk losing customers and funds.This paper critically examines current trends in competitive jazz and hip-hop dance through interviews and conversations with three professional competition dance adjudicators. As a competitive dance studio choreographer and researcher, I question the role that competitive dance culture plays in the gendering and sexualization of amateur dancing bodies. Ultimately, what are the implications of the perpetuation of heteronormativity, hegemonic masculinity, and femininity through the dances created for competition on adolescent dancing bodies? What other options are available for private competitive dance studios wishing to simultaneously participate in and disrupt this culture without losing their businesses?