"Imaging Dance," available from Georg Olms Verlag

The most ancient pieces of evidence about dance belong to an extensive corpus of images produced by our ancestors on a variety of objects (shelters, cave walls, rock outcrops, items made in baked clay and metal, pottery), with most diversified techniques (carving, painting, graffito, pecking), and going back to at least the late Paleolithic age. Since 1959, the year when French ethnologist Maurice Louis published in Les origines préhistoriques de la danse the earliest research about a limited group of dance scenes, the study of prehistoric visual sources has made a great progress. 1 In the course of over fifty years of research, post-Paleolithic rock paintings and carvings, found mostly in the sites distributed in the Alpine area (Valcamonica, Valtellina, Valais, Valle d'Aosta, Mt. Bego), have been subjected to a methodical and comparative analysis. The in-depth studies on some types of representations—such as the tools used in daily activities (ploughs, wagons, weapons, huts), the animal figures, or the symbolic concepts (cupmarks, labyrinths, solar symbols, shovels, geometrical figures, topographic " maps ")—have outlined interpretative hypotheses of great interest. On the contrary, in spite of the elaboration of an effective interdisciplinary method, the study of the gesture and dance has not advanced in the same way. It is sufficient to leaf through some recent manual of the dance history to notice that the space devoted to manifestations of the art of dancing in pre/proto-historic Europe is limited to only a few lines of text and some images. The reason for such a situation —cer-tainly not attributable to lack of data—has to do with issues of research logic. First of all, the analysis of the oldest documents concerning dance requires a competence in study of images rather than in the art of dancing. At least initially, the analytical method of dance representations and representations from prehistoric period do coincide. It is also indispensable to put aside the aesthetic issue: prehistoric depictions are not a product of the mentality searching for beauty and harmony as images have been codified in the Western culture. Nor does it suffice to explain, as many studies of history of ancient art have done, that the decoration of whole surfaces on an object came from the need to fill all its available space with images (horror vacui). Finally, a difficulty concerning the approach to the topic of prehistoric dance is, on the one hand, the issue of the meaning in " represented " gestures and dance; on the other, once a theory of prehistoric dance is drawn up, a question arises regarding the cognitive value and the level of " scientific nature " attributable to the scholarly interpretations. 2 If we consider the role of dance in the archaic world, we also discover the need to underline two essential elements: the social function and the magic-symbolic function, which we could define as " cosmic interaction ". 3 An extremely relevant event occurs at the very moment when a community member joins others in dancing: as the rhythmical movement prevails and each dancer refines the coordination of his/her movements with those of the partners, the perception of the self is gradually reduced to the point that each participant feels a transformation of his/her own individuality into the role of " cogwheel " within a perfect human mechanism of dancing ensemble. This process, induced by the rhythmical element is accompanied also at the most elementary level by the intense feeling of harmony, which comes to exist among all dancers. 311

2010

1978

Abstract: Over 250 monographs, journal articles, and papers are cited in this selected bibliography of resources on the anthropology of dance. Most of the entries were published during the 1960s and 1970s. Entries are arranged alphabetically by author and give ...

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research, 2008

Dance Research Journal, 2002

This course is a broad survey of dance in historical contexts classical and contemporary, Western and World. The cultural, training, choreographic, and performative records of dance practices, predominantly of the 20 th and 21 st centuries, will be our arena of investigation. Engaging with these foundational contexts, students will read, write, watch, research, and present regarding seminal dance figures, movements, eras and their social and cultural reverberations. Dance's relationship to other arts practices throughout history will also be a subject of inquiry, lecture, and discussion. One cannot deconstruct what one does not yet know confidently; making connections between personal history (in dance and beyond) and dance's larger history, students will be challenged to locate themselves as thinkers and nascent creative artists more specifically within historical spectra. The indicated 4000 level of this course conveys the expectation that all work will be at the most advanced undergraduate level of research, writing, and academic integrity.

Music in Art XL/1–2 , 2015

The most ancient pieces of evidence about dance belong to an extensive corpus of images produced by our ancestors on a variety of objects (shelters, cave walls, rock outcrops, items made in baked clay and metal, pottery), with most diversified techniques (carving, painting, graffito, pecking), and going back to at least the late Paleolithic age. Since 1959, the year when French ethnologist Maurice Louis published in Les origines préhistoriques de la danse the earliest research about a limited group of dance scenes, the study of prehistoric visual sources has made a great progress. 1 In the course of over fifty years of research, post-Paleolithic rock paintings and carvings, found mostly in the sites distributed in the Alpine area (Valcamonica, Valtellina, Valais, Valle d'Aosta, Mt. Bego), have been subjected to a methodical and comparative analysis. The in-depth studies on some types of representations-such as the tools used in daily activities (ploughs, wagons, weapons, huts), the animal figures, or the symbolic concepts (cupmarks, labyrinths, solar symbols, shovels, geometrical figures, topographic "maps")-have outlined interpretative hypotheses of great interest. On the contrary, in spite of the elaboration of an effective interdisciplinary method, the study of the gesture and dance has not advanced in the same way. It is sufficient to leaf through some recent manual of the dance history to notice that the space devoted to manifestations of the art of dancing in pre/proto-historic Europe is limited to only a few lines of text and some images. The reason for such a situation-certainly not attributable to lack of data-has to do with issues of research logic. First of all, the analysis of the oldest documents concerning dance requires a competence in study of images rather than in the art of dancing. At least initially, the analytical method of dance representations and representations from prehistoric period do coincide. It is also indispensable to put aside the aesthetic issue: prehistoric depictions are not a product of the mentality searching for beauty and harmony as images have been codified in the Western culture. Nor does it suffice to explain, as many studies of history of ancient art have done, that the decoration of whole surfaces on an object came from the need to fill all its available space with images (horror vacui). Finally, a difficulty concerning the approach to the topic of prehistoric dance is, on the one hand, the issue of the meaning in "repre-sented" gestures and dance; on the other, once a theory of prehistoric dance is drawn up, a question arises regarding the cognitive value and the level of "scientific nature" attributable to the scholarly interpretations. 2 If we consider the role of dance in the archaic world, we also discover the need to underline two essential elements: the social function and the magic-symbolic function, which we could define as "cosmic interaction". 3 An extremely relevant event occurs at the very moment when a community member joins others in dancing: as the rhythmical movement prevails and each dancer refines the coordination of his/her movements with those of the partners, the perception of the self is gradually reduced to the point that each participant feels a transformation of his/her own individuality into the role of "cogwheel" within a perfect human mechanism of dancing ensemble. This process, induced by the rhythmical element is accompanied also at the most elementary level by the intense feeling of harmony, which comes to exist among all dancers. 311

The International Journal of Screendance, 2017

No abstract availableThis review essay was originally published by Parallel Press, an imprint of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, as part of The International Journal of Screendance, Volume 3 (2013), Parallel Press, http://journals.library.wisc.edu/index.php/screendance/issue/view/55. It is made available here with the kind permission of Parallel Press.