This article opens up questions around introducing Bharatanatyam, a form of Indian classical dance, to undergraduate learners within a North American university setting. The aim is to observe how the learners understood and received a particular cultural practice and to explore issues related to learning goals, curriculum content, approaches to…

In January of 2010, in Cebu, a southern province of the Philippines, a collaborative dance performance occurred between 1500 Filipino inmates, the choreographer Travis Payne, and backup dancers representing the late American pop star, Michael Jackson. The event took place at Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Centre, a maximum security…

This paper researches the statutory educational regulations used as a foundation to introduce traditional Greek dance in the school curriculum and which transformed it into a taught subject with connections to the ideological-political and social conditions prevalent in Greece at the time. It particularly concerns the connection between the aims…

Frame Matching is a codified theory of partner-dance connection. It establishes a framework for breaking down and teaching Swing and Blues dance connection. It is the act of creating, maintaining, or changing tension between partners with posture and tone, in order to lead and follow energy and direction. Frame Matching is explained in terms of…

This is a viewpoint that discusses the criteria applied for an objective, academic assessment of dance education and comments upon the status of dance education both in secondary education schools and professional dance schools in Greece today. The viewpoint concludes by proposing the need for an independent undergraduate dance degree to be…

This qualitative study explored the use of metaphor within a somatic context as a means to bridge the divide between technique and expression in two undergraduate advanced intermediate ballet classes. Data included surveys, classroom observations, student journal responses and student work, as well as surveys and journal responses, one year after…

This essay investigates the ways dance narratives are constructed and aims to reconfirm the significance of dance narratives in the creation of meanings within dance practices. It draws on key concepts in narratology and psychoanalysis. These two critical perspectives are applied to the analysis of the narrative in Kenneth MacMillan's 1991 one-act…

This dialogical article reflects stories of encounter. The unexpected collision of our worlds and thoughts, and the familiarities and tensions we came to recognize in each other's experiences when facilitating collaborative research in two communities of dance teachers, has given birth to this shared line of inquiry. We have come to acknowledge…

This paper explores how young ballet dancers' bodies are constructed and narrated through their desire to become performing ballet dancers. The schooling of the balletic body engages the young dancer in embodying the discipline of ballet and in developing a particular belief in a performing body. The embodied set of acquired dispositions that are…

This case study focuses on a group of teachers' and students' opinions regarding the recent reforms in the dance department of Tainan University of Technology (TUT) in Taiwan. The author uses Pierre Bourdieu's theory of forms of capital and symbolic violence to probe for the motivation, process and consequences of the changes brought about by…

Euro-American performance arts are exceptional among the world's cultures in that music and dance are separable and constitute independent disciplines. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a distinct consciousness emerged that demonstrated an awareness of the varying and protean relationships that music and dance can share. While…

Professionalism in Dance Education is a complex construction. It can be imposed from the outside (degree completed, job status, salary) or can be identified from the professional herself. Seven graduate dance education students were interviewed with specific focus on the transition from student to professional and the feelings surrounding this…

This is a case study investigation into creativity involving young dancers and faculty members on the UK government-funded pre-vocational contemporary dance training programme. Qualitative research techniques were used to gather and interpret data on how individuals nurtured and viewed creativity at an individual level, as well as how the…

Since the development of interdisciplinary practice, dance has fashioned and cultivated many relationships with other art forms. In this search to uncover new territory choreographers often merge art forms to facilitate the broadening of their field. Writing has always been a successful tool in the communication and critique of dance performance.…

Sophie Fedorovitch (1893-1953) had a formative influence on the designs of English ballet as it developed during the 1930s and 1940s. Trained as a painter, she was a Polish-born Russian who adopted England as her homeland. Reticent by nature, little is documented about Fedorovitch's life and work. This paper examines her sources of influence,…