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While choreographer Anna Halprin's work has been characterized as embodying the cultural ethos of the New Left, it is also aligned with the race and class interests that spearheaded urban renewal in San Francisco. Contextualizing Halprin's Parades and Changes in relation to political and economic developments during the 1960s suggests the work's contradictory affiliation with both an urban elite and utopian countercultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TDR's editors consider the impact of the pandemic on performance, teaching, and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Happyology — Tears of Joy exercises and exposes a current imperative of happiness in times of structural precarity and exhaustion as it raises questions on the efficacy of acting one's autobiography under these conditions. The performance asks us to speculate on who can be an agent of change within the political economy of independent theatre and its labor practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On a sunny day in a studio overlooking the Hudson River, a Mark Morris dancer guides a group of medical students in choreographing their patients' stories. This class in narrative medicine provides a safe laboratory where doctors-to-be learn to view their relationships with future patients as an improvisatory partnered dance in which the choreography adjusts moment to moment as new challenges, details, and possibilities for healing emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Promoted as a tourist attraction to highlight the benevolent treatment of black migrant laborers at South African gold mines, mine dance performances by workers became a symbol of both "authentic" preindustrial African culture and, paradoxically, the progress made towards industrializing the nation. Excavating both state-sponsored, industrial archives and the photographs of black South African Ernest Cole enables a reframing of the ways dance was mobilized and extracted during apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public video project The Public Library includes the performance of writing field notes and of choreographed dance sequences — which together serve as an ethnographic prompt for discussions about city life in northwestern Canada. The growing presence of crystal methamphetamine in sidewalk life and in the lives of First Nations persons is part of the discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Themba Mbuli's SOLD! integrates differently abled dancers in a performance that remembers the 1904–08 Namibian genocide. SOLD! pays homage to four unnamed women and a young boy whose mortal remains were among the first skulls repatriated from Berlin to Windhoek in 2011, as it animates the excesses of colonial officials who obtained body parts for use in eugenics, phrenology, and other racial-hygiene sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ko Murobushi (1947–2015) is considered one of the most significant figures of Japanese butoh in the post–Tatsumi Hijikata era. His manifesto, published right after Tatsumi Hijikata's death, is believed to mark the beginning of a new era for butoh. Murobushi's work reflects both his understanding of the "outside," a concept used to describe the dancing body in butoh, and his study of self-mummification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Minimalist lines often show up in philosophical and theoretical writings to diagram accounts of human perspective. But they also show up to do the opposite: to diagram the possibility of structures that precede or exceed a human perspective. By inhabiting scored lines as bodies in performance and simultaneously imagining what it is to score these lines from above, choreography can animate philosophical and theoretical approaches to perspective to reveal how multiple even minimal lines can become. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of the Wallflower Order Dance Collective and how it used dance as a means of social reproduction in the U.S. Topics discussed include the social reproduction of labor power, concert dance and feminist movements, the split of the collective in 1984 which created the companies Dance Bridge and Crowsfeet, and the renewed interest on Marxist-feminism.

The article discusses the performance of a site-specific dance on the beach at Frankfort, Michigan. It mentions how the dancer works with her disabilities and incorporates the interaction of the material culture at the beach, as well as the sense of change that both her body and the beach undergo each day..

The article contextualizes European modernism in the light of butoh's neuromuscular discourse. According to the article, European modernism, like butoh was also intensely preoccupied with the superficial body of neurophysiological distortions similar in experience, history and subjectivity that never materialize in the first instance. This failure of socio-historical gestation coincides with the lack of precursors that has defined modernism and its aesthetic responses in Europe and Japan.

The article reviews the dances by Dave St-Pierre including "La Pornographie des âmes," "Un Peu de tendresse, bordel de merde" and "Foundres." According to the article, St. Pierre's moving stagings of medical interventions despite being notorious for nudity offer performative reflections on illness and subjectivity. The work's potency lies in its open avowal of mortality, queering of relations to dying and the artist's willingness to perform through the body's rapid transformation.

The article discusses the mystery and grotesqueness of the Argentine tango in the milieu of the milonga, or dances held in tango clubs in the Argentinian capital of Buenos Aires. The milongas and the grotesque theater are both expressions of the people's traumatic and violent experiences and feelings of pain, tension and longing for comfort and belonging. Argentina's history of terror and economic crises is presented. Tango and the customs of the milonga are described in detail.

An essay is presented which discusses "Batty Moves," a dance performance choreographed by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and how it taught her about the place of Africans in the U.S. "Batty Moves" was performed between 1997 to 2007 at different venues, and the author claims that it bridges the differences between African Americans and Africans. She said it taught her how to relate as a Ghanaian in the country, and that its message to African Americans was to accept who they were and to celebrate their differentness from the Caucasian norms of beauty.

In this article the author explores the relationship between the development of macho dancing in the Philippines and the social and political changes that have taken place in the country since the departure of dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The author argues that the bodies of male dancers who perform macho dancing can be read as representing the cultural-political shifts that the Philippines have undergone in this period. Some of the changes that are explored include the feminization of male labor and the country's political movement towards neoliberalism.

This article discusses performances that are staged as a way to depict indigenous cultural histories to tourists. The author describes a dance performance at the Sarawak Cultural Village in Sarawak, Malaysia that references stereotypes of the Orang Ulu tribe. He discusses how performances for tourists must be designed to appeal to local residents as well and comments on replica dwellings at the Sarawak Cultural Village where actors demonstrate the everyday life of village natives. He suggests theatrical performances offer simplified depictions of historical native life and discusses how the issue of cultural ownership applies to the performance of cultural dances by performers from different cultures.

This article discusses RoseAnne Spradlin's dance performance "Survive Cycle" at the Dance Theater Workshop in New York City.

This article examines dance's relationship to temporality through a critique of the trope dance and its performance as vanishing present bodies. Reframing of ongoing temporal and spatial perceptions can prove that the persistence of the assumption that dance and performance are best defined by the formal disappearance of present moving bodies. Dance and performance merge into the topological surface of melting affects, a connecting movement that does not even belong to the embodied human body alone.

This article presents an interview with dance choreographer Bill T. Jones. According to Jones, he has already made a reputation of doing outrageous things in performance. One man's outrageous is another man's spontaneously unguarded expression. Jones recalled that when he arrived at the DCA Conference in Pittsburgh, it was full of that strange breed of people who are called the professional dance critics. According to Jones, he did a program--a repertory work to music by Jacques Brell and Berlioz--with the spectacle of two men dancing. It was a beautiful program and very well danced and someone who had heard about the Still/Here controversy might be scratching his head. Jones states that he used to say that he was more interested in, or at least as interested in who was dancing as what was being danced. Now, he thinks it's almost been reversed. He thinks more conventionally; he's almost more interested in what is being danced than who is dancing. Because he realized that if he's going to stay in the dance world, the dance world has got to be the medium that is going to help his artistic and spiritual development.

This essay explores the origins and contours of choreographer Anna Halprin's invention of urban ritual and the mechanisms for conveying meaning that this contributed to contemporary dance aesthetics. Halprin urbanized ritual in part by rewriting the role of the spectator, making her a witness: an individual who is present at the performance to support it with her attention rather than look to it for diversion or entertainment. Halprin's ambition is to change individuals present at the performance, although as she told Richard Schechner when pressed, this is an experiment that has spanned her entire career. It is an experiment that began with The Four-Legged Stool in 1961. Critical to this discussion is the argument that the consideration of a choreographer's educational and philosophical history is essential to the writing of any postmodern dance history and particularly to the consideration of ritual as a performance methodology and strategy in the 20th century. In The Five-Legged Stool, Halprin implicitly challenged the routinized use of ritual as a theatrical touchstone by 1940s and 1950s modern dancers. With her urban ritual she inaugurated the rougher life-as-art dance theatre of postmodernism. Forty years later, in Still Dance, she gleaned from Stubblefield how to parse her genre of urban ritual even closer to its essence. Led by Stubblefield she shed audience, choreography, and all but the most elemental movement vocabulary, so that what remained was the essence of the performer. She wore her age, her female identity, and her private history as an aged woman on the edge of eternity as her costume.

Discusses the efforts of an Asian performer to embody his character in a production by examining the ritualistic dance Carya Nrtya in Kathmandu, Nepal. Background on the ritual context of the dance; Background on the music used for the dance; Cultural significance of the dance.

Examines the cultural identity of the Unangax tribe as expressed through the dances they performed at the 28th Annual Festival of Native Arts in Fairbanks, Alaska. Information on the Native American tribes that participated in the festival; Types of dances performed by the Unangax at the festival; History of the tribe.

Discusses the aesthetic of collage as presented by artist Merce Cunningham. Concept of collage in dances; Definition of collage by surrealist Max Ernst; Way in which the discreet fragments of collage resonate in the eye and mind of the viewer.

Examines the appropriations of Tanzania to the `traditional' dance (ngoma), as a national symbol. Transformation of the ngoma in the domain of popular culture; Its incarnation as a tourist attraction.

Relates the experiences of a Japanese choreographer. Dance lessons learned; Views on dance performance; Information on dance exhibitions.

Co-winner, 1998 TDR student essay contest. Today's European choreography is a "reduction" of expansiveness, the spectacular, the unessential. Along with this minimalism ahs come much nakedness onstage. This showing of the body reveals the power of the surface, the "skin of our time: open, marked, rented." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critiques various dance performances, dance festivals, and producing institutions in New York. Includes institutions such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Dance Theater Workshop and the Pina Baausch Tanztheater Wuppertal; Performances such as `Nur Du', `La Valse', `Prodigal Son', `La Sonnambula', `Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk', `Riverdance', `Lord of the Dance' and `Tap Dogs'.