Results by title

In Appalachian Dance: Creativity and Continuity in Six Communities, Susan Eike Spalding brings to bear 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.

Spalding analyzes how issues as disparate as industrialization around coal, plantation culture, race relations, and the 1970s folk revival influenced freestyle clogging and other dance forms like square dancing in profound ways. She reveals how African Americans and Native Americans, as well as European immigrants drawn to the timber mills and coal fields, brought movement styles that added to local dance vocabularies. Placing each community in its sociopolitical and economic context, Spalding analyzes how the formal and stylistic nuances found in Appalachian dance reflect the beliefs, shared understandings, and experiences of the community at large, paying particular attention to both regional and racial diversity.

Written in clear and accessible prose, Appalachian Dance is a lively addition to the literature and a bold contribution to scholarship concerned with the meaning of movement and the ever-changing nature of tradition.

2023 de la Torre Bueno® First Book Award, Dance Studies Association

The impact of folkloric dance and performance on Mexican cultural politics and national identity.

The years between 1910 and 1940 were formative for Mexico, with the ouster of Porfirio Díaz, the subsequent revolution, and the creation of the new state. Amid the upheaval, Mexican dance emerged as a key arena of contestation regarding what it meant to be Mexican. Through an analysis of written, photographic, choreographic, and cinematographic renderings of a festive Mexico, Choreographing Mexico examines how bodies in motion both performed and critiqued the nation.

Manuel Cuellar details the integration of Indigenous and regional dance styles into centennial celebrations, civic festivals, and popular films. Much of the time, this was a top-down affair, with cultural elites seeking to legitimate a hegemonic national character by incorporating traces of indigeneity. Yet dancers also used their moving bodies to challenge the official image of a Mexico full of manly vigor and free from racial and ethnic divisions. At home and abroad, dancers made nuanced articulations of female, Indigenous, Black, and even queer renditions of the nation. Cuellar reminds us of the ongoing political significance of movement and embodied experience, as folklórico maintains an important and still-contested place in Mexican and Mexican American identity today.

Creating with Roots is a critical introduction to the history, theory, and creative practice of Chinese national folk dance, the Chinese-speaking world’s most popular contemporary dance form. A complex cultural and artistic phenomenon that resists simple categorization, Chinese national folk dance merges folkloric material with contemporary stage aesthetics and blends rural folk dances of the Han majority with dances representing China’s minoritized ethnic communities, bridging cultural differences of geography, economic class, and ethnicity. As such, Chinese national folk dance has become a lightning rod for current debates in the arts worldwide—how to balance local heritage with artistic innovation, how to maintain cultural integrity amid commercialization and Eurocentrism, and the ethics of representation in contemporary multiculturalism. Chinese national folk dance is increasingly a globalized phenomenon: schools, classes, competitions, and performances of professionals and amateurs now exist all across the world. Originally published in Chinese and authored by prominent Chinese dance scholar, Rui Xu, this English translation will be an essential resource for the global conversation about how dancers and choreographers navigate tradition and innovation in contemporary national folk dance choreography. 

Creating with Roots offers a detailed breakdown of key terms and concepts necessary for understanding Chinese national folk dance and analyzes 37 examples of choreography dating from the 1940s to 2000. The author situates these explanations within the longer history of cultural practice and theory in China and in relation to the international dance discourses of the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and North America. 

Dissenting Through Dance examines how femme activists in contemporary Turkey deploy folk dance as a powerful tool of political resistance and collective solidarity. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, choreographic analysis, and archival research, the book examines how traditional dances, particularly those rooted in marginalized cultures such as Kurdish, Roma, Alevi, Laz, and Hemşin communities, are reimagined to contest misogyny, cultural erasure, and oppressive gender politics. Sevi Bayraktar brings to life the stories of feminist, LGBTQ+, and grassroots activists occupying public spaces with dance as a form of protest when conventional forms of assembly are suppressed or criminalized in Turkey.

Working outward from these femmes’ stories, protests, and dances, Bayraktar argues that by reconfiguring Turkey’s folk-dance heritage for their contemporary political aims, dissenting femmes rechoreograph national space in opposition to the state as a way to reclaim the public sphere for pluralist democracy and to subvert hegemonic discourses about Turkish national identity, neoliberal economic development, and female and ethnic bodies. By moving together, activists subvert patriarchal norms, embody new visions of community, and create moments of hope, joy, and resistance even under conditions of surveillance and fear. 

The Performer-Audience Connection is a pioneering foray into one of the major puzzles of human communication: the communication of emotion in dance. It is the first attempt of its kind systematically to investigate what performers wish to convey and what audiences perceive in the performance of dance.

The centerpiece of this provocative book is an examination of performer intentions and audience response at eight dance performances in Washington, D.C. Part of the Smithsonian Institution Division of Performing Arts Dance Series, these concerts featured a variety of dance genres and cultures: American tap dance, Kathakali dance-drama from Kerala, India, Japanese Kabuki, contemporary avant-garde dance, Philippine folk dance, the Indian classical tradition of Kuchipudi, and modern dance to an AfroAmerican spiritual.

How did dancer and audience interact at the emotional level on these eight occasions? What affected performer-audience rapport? Through interviews of both spectators and dancers, Judith Lynne Hanna explores the performers' ways of imparting emotion through movement and audience members' expectations and responses. In doing so she casts new light on important issues of cultural identity, sex role, historic attitudes toward dance, and even marketing the arts today.

A landmark work not only for performers who wish to reach their audiences more effectively but also for choreographers, anthropologists, specialists in nonverbal communication, behavioral scientists, educators, and all who are fascinated by the arts and the special magic of the "performer-audience connection."