Zurich Dada had a profound impact on twentieth-century dance, bringing new possibilities to a rapidly changing field. The Dadaist performance ideas were mainly drawn from pre-World War I artistic movements—Futurism, Expressionism and Cubism. Coming together during World War I in Zurich, the artists and writers who made up the group found themselves loosely unified in a desire to destroy traditional forms of expression and build a society based on a purer vision encompassed in new artistic forms. The intensity of time and place—a small city far from the immediate battles of the war—allowed for an exchange of ideas that reactivated, integrated and reshaped the pre-World War I manifestoes and experiments of the various art movements.

Elizabeth Souritz's book Soviet Choreographers in the 1920s (first published in the U.S.S.R. as Khoreograficheskoe iskusstvo dvadtsatykh godov [Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979) is presently in preparation for publication by Dance Horizons. The book focuses on one particular aspect of Soviet choreography in the 1920s – the changes within the ballet institution, that is, the state lyric theaters. Although her main purpose is to excavate the choreography itself, and especially the work of three key artists (Alexander Gorsky, Kasian Goleizovsky, and Fedor Lopukhov), in the course of reading about the ballets, we also learn a great deal about the dance and theater life on the periphery, about who was included and who excluded from the mainstream and why, about the aesthetic and political debates that brought some of the projects to fruition and buried others, and about the ways in which the period served as a kind of linchpin in the history of ballet. We see in Souritz's account a microcosm both of the larger Soviet dance world of the 1920s and of the larger picture of state cultural institutions.

The book sheds a welcome light on an era, a group of choreographers, and a series of ballets that have previously been little known in the West. We have been tantalized by brief references in the available literature to the revolutionary ballets celebrating the October Revolution of 1917, to the revisions of the classics that remain in the Soviet repertory, to the remarkable innovations inspired by modernist experiments in all the arts of the period, and to the “model ballet” The Red Poppy. These topics fascinate us not only for their own sake, for they have been a missing chapter in our knowledge of dance history, but also because they illuminate the history of American ballet, and in particular the early roots of George Balanchine's oeuvre.

Isadora Duncan inspired many such passages of fervid prose among her admiring contemporaries. From the beginning of her career, around the turn of the twentieth century, to her death in a bizarre automobile accident in 1927, those who saw her dance were less interested in writing about what she actually did than in presenting their bedizened responses to her.

Yet even as she evoked a fragrant never-never land, this American was creating a contemporary image for the stage dancer. Not a steely-legged virtuoso whipping off pirouettes, not a coquettish quasi-virgin, not a disembodied nymph, but a noble-spirited woman, bold, yet pliant — tree to use her imagination and her body as she wished.

Most individuals who spend serious time with children recognize that children are not simply small versions of adults. Not only are their bodies different, but they also think differently. The dance educator, just like other educators, must attempt to see the world from the child's point of view if the teaching-learning process is to be successful.

One framework for conceiving the world from the child's point of view comes from Jean Piaget, a scientist who was interested in the development of cognitive skills used in science—ordering, classifying, inferring, thinking in propositions, and hypothesizing. Such skills are important not only in science, but in any logical use of the intellect. Inasmuch as dance educators claim interest in the child's intellectual as well as emotional and physical self, an understanding of Piaget's theories may generate valuable insight. Yet neither Piaget nor his many followers who have applied his theories to specific areas of education have examined dance education through this lens.

New York City is the geographic center for dance in America, and the New York Times is “newspaper of record” for the city. It might be assumed, then, that a researcher looking for historical information about dance in America would find a great deal of it by consulting the New York Times Index. That, at least, is what I thought before beginning to gather documents for a dance bibliography for users of Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. Yet a few random dips into volumes of the NYT Index yielded confusing and (for my purposes) unuseable citations. I therefore decided to set my bibliography aside for a time and instead conduct a search through the entire NYT Index, tracing its treatment of articles on dance, from the first long-hand edition of 1851 up to the present. This is an examination not of the New York Times' coverage of dance but of the NYT Index's useability as a reference tool for dance researchers.

In recent years, dance, in its broadest sense, has been used in many general conditioning and exercise programs. Aerobic dance and, more recently, “jazzercise” have become increasingly popular in programs sponsored by YMCAs and recreation departments. In addition, the more traditional or established forms of dance, such as ballet, modern, square, social, and folk dance continue to provide recreational activity for people of all ages.

Although there is considerable interest in dance in its many forms, little research has been conducted on the physiological effects of participation in various types of dance programs. The energy cost of some dance styles, such as aerobic dance (Igbanugo & Gutin, 1978) and tap dance (Noble & Howley, 1979), have been reported. In addition, the heart rate response of college students enrolled in modern dance classes and the beneficial effect of modern dance on sedentary college females have also been investigated (deGuzman, 1979). Recently reported (Rosentswieg & Tate, 1979) was the volumetric determination of the body composition of female dance majors (25.4% fat), professional dancers (21.4% fat), and dance educators (18.3% fat). Also reported in this study was a breakdown of the percent of fat of the professional dancers by style of dance performed: jazz dancers were 23% fat; modern dancers were 19.8% fat; and ballet dancers were 16.4% fat. Rimmer (1981) reported a mean body density (Db) of 1.0529 and percent fat of 20.13 for a small group of highly trained female dance majors.

Concentration is an important process in building a dancer's foundation for performance—a learned process. One must be able to focus attention to a purpose, a motive, or an intent and simultaneously remove what is nonessential. To a dancer, concentration is the discovering of a personal awareness of movement, a kinesthetic awareness of the human body (internal focus). This kinesthetic awareness is focused on the conscious use of the center that controls movement, i.e., the center of mass (center of gravity). When the body performs in equilibrium, e.g., in balancing activities, it is necessary to sense energy going from that center and returning to that center. It is the control of the center that provides freedom in the use of the arms and legs, which gives the dancer an effortless carriage of the head, free of tension in the neck and shoulders. Bonsignore (1983) believes that balance is a dynamic concept in dance. The dancer must constantly be kinesthetically aware of the direction of energy as it flows through the body. Muscles are continuously responsive to the center of the body, making minute changes that will be reflected to the distal parts of the body (Hays, 1981).

More than any other era in the history of ballet, the nineteenth century belongs to the ballerina. She haunts its lithographs and paintings, an ethereal creature touched with the charm of another age. Yet even when she turned into the fast, leggy ballerina of modern times, her ideology survived. If today the art of ballet celebrates the danseur nearly as often as the danseuse, it has yet to rid it aesthetic of yesterday's cult of the eternal feminine. Like her nineteenth-century forbear, today's ballerina, an icon of teen youth, athleticism, and anorexic vulnerability, incarnates a feminine ideal defined overwhelmingly by men.

In the first decades of the twentieth century Cecil Sharp ushered in a revival of ceremonial dance in England through his own teaching of the dances and through published manuals such as The Morris Book and The Sword Dances of Northern England. Sharp's lead was followed almost immediately by a number of collectors. The demand for dance manuals has never slackened, so that now the literature on how to dance the English ceremonial dances is substantial. Publishing manuals on how to perform these dances has had the obviously salutary effect of preserving them for posterity, but it has also had a deleterious effect on the traditions as living, growing, aesthetic phenomena. At the outset I should stress that I am not naively claiming that “folk process” and “oral transmission” are synonymous phrases, nor am I making the simple assertion that folk materials cease to be “folk” when they are written down. The complex relationship between the broadside ballads and the oral singing tradition in England is well known. Certainly no folklorist today should be so romantic as to assert that writing is the curse of the folk classes. However, the evolution of English dancing has undeniably been radically affected by written manuals.

In the Western music world a score written by a composer is distributed to members of an orchestra who individually learn their parts, come together to rehearse under the guidance or a conductor, and then perform before the public. In the drama world a script written by a playwright is distributed to actors who individually learn their parts, come together to rehearse under the guidance of a director, and then perform before the public. In both worlds a creator has written a kind of “instruction manual” for trained readers to use when preparing for an event to be seen and heard by the public. In both instances the performers as well as a conductor or director read the instruction manual, and each may contribute to interpretation in the process of “translating” that leads from the written medium to the performance medium. And in both instances differing views have evolved regarding how much liberty individuals should take in interpreting or modifying what is on the notated or scripted page as they prepare for performance.

John Forrest's essay, “Here We Come A-Fossiling,” is a refreshing and rare effort by a folklorist to articulate an aesthetic distinction between dancing in the folk tradition and dancing in the folk revival. Since neither “tradition” nor “revival” are clearly defined within the discussion, however, Dr. Forrest's argument may seem a little obscure to any but a folklorist or a folk dance enthusiast. At least to this “revivalist,” it also seems a little harsh to claim that there is a wide chasm rather than at most a delicate line between two types of people who both dance the Morris for the love of it.

There is considerable tension between those who engage in formal study of folklife and those who love to sing or dance the materials collected by the field worker. Perhaps one of the most divisive and unwelcome trends emerging out of the development of folklore as an academic discipline has been the quasi-deification of certain performers as “traditional” and a vigorous denigration of “revivalists” or “interpreters.”

The most exuberant example of dance among the Jews is the dance at weddings. For this rejoicing, Jews have paid the most attention to how they danced in order to celebrate the new couple and also to enhance many different aspects of the marriage process. Written sources have recorded examples of wooing and wedding dances from the biblical period through all the vagaries of more than two thousand years of Jewish life. Today countless examples of wedding dances of the Jews still exist, but relatively little scholarship has focused on them.

Outstanding is the remarkable variety of all these dances and the paradoxical fact that they are all unified by the single Jewish phenomenon of a mitzvah. A mitzvah is a commandment of Jewish life; one of these is the commandment that one must dance at a Jewish wedding. This commandment has been honored through the centuries in all the diverse places Jews have been forced to live—the ghettoes, the Pale of Settlement, the mellah, imposed exile or changes through immigration and through choice.

Why do we dance at weddings? What are we marking and celebrating? Scholars of the family and society have abandoned their efforts to discover for marriage a universal definition which was once thought of as helpful for answering these questions. The search for the lowest common denominator of marriage in all cultures that would reveal the universally shared features of the institution offers little insight into this ubiquitous and complex human relationship (Gough, 1959). Love, economy, alliance, and even oppression have all been abandoned as possible common threads weaving together two people in a socially sanctioned union. We must discover alternative questions to ask in order to understand what marriage reveals about a society and how it functions for the group and the individuals.

Despite the popularity that the Yemenite Jewish dance has achieved among a general public, through Israeli folk dance and stage adaptation by groups such as the Inbal Dance Theater, scholarly treatment of this dance tradition is still in its early stages. My intent in this paper is to address an area neglected by other researchers: the examination of Yemenite Jewish dance in the context of village life in Israel, and further, the consideration of the social significance of the dancing. I will identify the significant social subsets of the village, examining the similarities and differences of dance repertoire and criteria for aesthetic evaluation among these groups as seen in the course of wedding celebrations. These similarities and differences will introduce the dimension of social meaning the intersection of form and function, symbol and meaning, dance and culture.

A moment for definition of basic terms: I use the term culture in its sense as a common conceptual framework, including beliefs, values, and symbols. Culture, as a common conceptual framework, is constantly enacted and re-enacted in actions, events, and symbolic expressions. This formulation is similar to Geertz's definition of culture as “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life.” I approach dance as one such symbolic form. Dance style is not arbitrary. It is a learned and patterned activity. By carefully investigation native attitudes, it is possible to learn how dance operates as symbolic and expressive behavior.

The lack of bibliographic indexing services devoted exclusively to the field of dance has allowed a large body of literature to remain virtually inaccessible to the scholar and interested reader. Indexes and current bibliographies are sorely needed in this field.

This selected bibliography, covering 1979, is a continuation of the effort begun in 1978 by those who attended the ADG-CORD Dance Conference in Hawaii. Discussions on the need for bibliographic tools led to the compilation of the first “Annual International Bibliography on Dance History: The Western Tradition” (DRJ 12(2), Spring/Summer 1980), compiled by Nancy Chalfa Ruyter.

The 1979 bibliography has been compiled in much the same way as the 1978 one. An additional category has been added for references to materials on music as it relates to dance. There are thirteen categories in total. The seven indexes guide the reader to materials by time, geographic location, and subject matter; to individuals, dance works, and companies or schools named in titles; and to authors, editors or translators of materials.

Ever since the question was first posed during the time of the House of Hillel and Shammai, there has always been an issue about how one dances before the bride. The action of Rabbi Aha who took the bride on his shoulders and danced with her exacerbated the problem seventyfold for other rabbis asked if they too could dance with a bride on their shoulder. Rabbi Aḥa actually reawakened the question and raised it to a new level: Does one even dance before or with the bride at all?

By turning to examples in the different Jewish communities including the Babylonian of the fourth century where Rabbi Aḥa lived, the European communities of the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries and also in Israel today, several different ideas as to how to dance before the bride emerge. These examples are to be found in various written sources such as the Talmud, the Shulḥan Arukh, Responsa literature and books by rabbis, as well as memoirs. The Talmud, written in the first half of the third century, is of great value for the study of Jewish history, law, theology, ethics and folklore. Examples of dance also appear there. Dance descriptions also appear in other commentaries by later rabbis, such as the definitive sixteenth century code by Rabbi Joseph Caro, the Shulḥan Arukh. Responsa literature too, provides us with dance information though it is a special genre of literature embracing every aspect of Jewish life, usually responses by rabbis to legal questions posed by individuals and communities. It is rarely an organized or systematic body of writings and of the several centuries when this vast body was produced, only a few hundred survive. Nonetheless, dance and questions of behavior during dancing at weddings are in evidence.