Dance and Society

Ruth St. Denis had been performing dances inspired by Far East cultures for two decades when she and Ted Shawn launched an extensive performance tour to these same distant lands in the mid-1920s. What they experienced on this landmark tour continues to be a provocative subject nearly a century later.

Through the work of a diverse gallery of artists including Jerome Robbins, Ohad Naharin, and Roy Assaf, the connections between dance and the practice of somatics is both explained and explored.

A look at how dancers archive and translate embodied ‘language’ and histories across culture and gender divides.

This essay explores two performances presented ten years apart: Merián Soto’s Sacude in 1999 and Victor Quijada’s Punto Ciego in 2009, viewed through the lens of Latinidad during the decade between them.

This essay challenges us to peer through the lenses of cultural appropriation, historical contextualization, and culture exchange when examining dance broadly, twentieth century dance specifically, and modern dance pioneers.

Motion capture and Labanotation have been employed to document dance, but the art form's impermanence has long posed challenges to historians and those who wish to preserve it.

Dance, historically, has offered a portal between planes of existence, past and present, and embodied alternate realities. This essay explores this act of transcendence through works by Eiko Otake and Joanna Haigood.

With particular emphasis on Katherine Dunham and Alvin Ailey, this essay examines how dance artists have addressed social concerns through their work, especially since the 1940s.