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  • Stepping Backward and Moving Forward
  • Helen Thomas

The five essays in this issue are quite diverse in terms of subject matter, context, and approach. However, if there is one aspect that links them, it is a concern with historical framing, whether it is to shed new light on a subject through a critical analysis of certain shifts in recent dance practices by addressing the historical precedents from whence they emerged (Kloetzel, Haitzinger, Joncheere), or to bring to our attention the importance of a highly regarded performer or author in their day, who somehow got lost in in the mist of time and is now being brought back into the light (Burden, Saumaa). The authors hail from the Canada, Austria, Belgium, Britain, and USA, thus continuing the international focus of the journal.

In the first article, Melanie Kloetzel, takes her point of departure from the increasing interest in and development and diversification of “site dance” in recent years, with presenters and dance festival directors, etc., progressively attracted to staging dance outside of the confines of the theater, in the hope of attracting a broader audience base to dance. Kloetzel shows how these groups, along with choreographers, have pressed the boundaries and margins of “site-specific dance,” where the dance created is generally viewed as a direct response to or negotiation with the environment in which it is made. As a result, as Kloetzel points out, a larger lexicon has emerged to accommodate the new directions. The focus of this article, “dance on tour” or “site-adaptive dance,” as Kloetzel calls it, is much more difficult to pin down than some of the other terms coined to cover the diversification in dance on site. Kloetzel traces the historical precedents from “site-specific” dance to the “turn to site mobility” (for performers and audiences), “serialization,” and “site-adaptive” dance, noting that there was already a visible tendency toward “adaption” in earlier dance site work by, for example, Trisha Brown. Kloetzel examines how this became more pronounced in the work of key arts exponents such as Ann Carlson, Pearson Widrig Dance Theater, Eiko & Koma, Stephen Koplowitz, and in her own work. Given the increasing tendency to “tour” site dance, Kloetzel argues strongly for a “thorough examination for serialized site work to take place.”

Nicole Haitzinger’s article also begins from the present time by evaluating two contemporary dance works that offer a critique of the “negrophilic” outlook embedded in European dance productions of the 1920s: Faustin Linyekula’s La Création du Monde 1923–2012 and Vera Mantero’s one mysterious thing said e.e. cummings (2002). She compares and contrasts these works through a theoretical “re-reading” of the 1920s dance productions these choreographers respectively comment on, the futurist La Création du Monde (1923), choreographed by Jean Börlin for Ballet Suédois, and the performances of Josephine Baker. Adopting Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s construct of “Africanistic” and a “post-colonial reading of the cultural memory of dance,” Haitzinger argues that there is a tendency in the contemporary works to “essentialize” or “stereotype” the “staging” of Africa in the 1920s through a mistranslation of their historical references, which she shows have more in common with the idea of “plurality in the Africanist sense.” Linyekula’s and Mantero’s productions, for Haitzinger, speak more to the complex relationships between art and politics in the present day than presenting a “faithful” account of their historical examples. [End Page 1]

In the third article, Ayla Joncheere traces what her research reveals to be the recent invention and development of Kalbeliya Dance from Rajasthan since the late 1980s and its subsequent legitimation as an “intangible cultural heritage” by UNESCO in 2010, which bestowed on it the status of an “ancient tradition from India.” Joncheere tells us that she became fascinated by Kalbeliya dance after watching a video of it at twelve years of age. Several years later, she ended up performing with Rajasthani performers who visited Europe to perform in international world music festivals. From there, she continued what she terms as her “unconscious fieldwork” by traveling to and living with Kalbeliya dance families in Jodhpur, before she developed her more “formal” ethnographic research. Thus, the...

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