Dancing out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis's "Radha" of 1906

Exotic Identities: Dance, Difference, and Self-fashioning

“…"Understanding the multiple features of that experience," Ann Cooper Albright argues, "will help us to articulate how the dancing body can at once enact and resist its own representation" (1997,12). As groups electively constitute themselves around identifiably exotic or foreign dance practices, the new dancing bodies transform those practices (Desmond 1997). Simultaneously, we reiterate, the dance forms taken into the body and perfected through practice also transform the dancer-providing a defense against cultural impositions and challenging received notions about what certain kinds of bodies can and cannot be.…”

“…While each dancer exhibited tremendous individuality, certain shared characteristics emerged that laid the groundwork for modern dance: initiating waves of movement from the torso, dancing barefoot, employing free movements of the entire body, and exploring light and three-dimensional space. Ruth St. Denis was particularly attracted by the ways in which Eastern cultures appeared to fuse religious transcendence with sensual corporality, and she took inspiration from these traditions for her modern compositions (Albright 2007;Daly 1995;Desmond 1991;Koritz 1997;Manning 1997;Tomko 1999).…”

From inclusion to integration: intercultural dialogue and contemporary university dance education

“…Interestingly enough, the first academic dance programmes included folk and ballroom dance, before modern dance took over in the 1920s (Marks 1957;Hagood 2000). Furthermore, modern dance's pioneering choreographers were inspired by and appropriated from African, Native, and Asian cultures (Manning 2004;Shea Murphy 2007;Desmond 1991). Appropriation is not the same as collaboration, of course, which is the ideal; nonetheless, if we do need to be true to our histories, then we should embrace our pioneers' cross-cultural intention to embrace different dance forms.…”

‘Freaky is just how I get down’: investigating the fluidity of minority ethnic feminine subjectivities in dance

“…I suggest that dance is a prime leisure activity where discourses surrounding the gendered and racialised 'Other' are revealed and even disrupted. Desmond (1991) argues that dance is an important leisure space where women negotiate and re-articulate discourses of race, ethnicity, and 'cultural otherness ' (p. 42). McRobbie (1994) similarly suggests that dance spaces sustain 'less stable, emergent subject positions' (p. 173) that contravene traditional modes of femininity.…”