Anthropology of dance and performance

Currently, belly dance is practised worldwide, producing a global market of classes, workshops, festivals, competitions, and performances. In this sense, Egypt attracts amateur and professional dancers from all over the world that crave contact with the cultural birthplace of their practice, seeking knowledge “from the source”. However, in Egypt, even though professional belly dance shows are highly popular in commercial venues, parties and weddings, the belly dancer is an outcast in Egyptian society, mostly seen as a woman of low morals. Based on two months of fieldwork in Egypt and on the experience of a group of Brazilian belly dance practitioners during their cultural holidays in the country, this dissertation investigates the relations developed by Brazilian belly dance practitioners towards and within the Egyptian belly dance market. Contrasting the foreign idealisation of the “authentic Egyptian belly dance” as an “ancient, feminine and sacred practice” with local representations of the same dance as a “vulgar entertainment”, this research proposes an analysis of these contrasts through an intersectional approach. It discusses the intertwinement of the categories of class, race, gender and sexuality in the production of different approaches to, representations and styles of belly dancing in Brazil and in Egypt.

«Мышечное связывание» в истории современного танца: От режима массовости к режиму коллективности «Muscular binding» in the history of the contemporary dance: From the mass mode to the collective mode В статье рассмотрена концепция «мышечного связывания», которая представляет собой опыт движения человека в унисон с другими. Если режим массовости модернисткой культуры начала ХХ века восходит к ритуальным практикам и имеет целью создание новой общности, то с середины ХХ века возникает новый режим – режим коллективности, совместного опыта телесной вовлеченности в спектакль зрителя и исполнителя (начиная с опытов Джадсон Черч театра).
Ключевые слова: современный танец, танец модерн, массовый танец, Джадсон Черч театр, сайт-специфичный перформанс, социальная хореография, Ивана Мюллер, «публичное движение», театр участия.

«Muscular binding» in the history of the contemporary dance: From the mass mode to the collective mode

The article aims to look at the conception of «muscular bounding» – experience of human beings moving in unison – in relation to dance practice ranging mass dance at the beginning of the XX century as a possibility of creating a new form of communities, a new aesthetic experience of spectatorships starting in the middle of the XX centuries and new forms of collectiveness suggested by practice of social choreography and even more by social movement.
«Muscular binding» in the history of the contemporary dance: From the mass mode to the collective mode

Este trabajo explora la manera en que la ejecución de la Danza de Aztecas, en el contexto de la fiesta patronal en honor a la Señora Santa Ana, contribuye a la forma de vida comunitaria en Santa Ana Tlacotenco a través de la experiencia emotiva que produce en los participantes. El proceso de investigación permitió observar que la dimensión emotiva de la Danza de Aztecas se produce por la relación entre los elementos y estructuras sonoras, kinéticas, poéticas y performáticas ejecutadas en el contexto de la fiesta patronal.

Las estructuras sonoras, kinéticas y poéticas de la Danza de Aztecas detonan diversos estados emocionales en los participantes. La disposición de esas estructuras sonoras, kinéticas y poéticas en la secuencia performática conforman una experiencia emotiva en los copartícipes que es reconocible de manera general, pero experimentada de forma particular por cada uno de ellos. Las experiencias emotivas permean las relaciones intrapersonales, interpersonales y comunitarias que los sujetos sociales construyen durante los ensayos y la fiesta. Dichas relaciones refuerzan la base de la vida social comunitaria en Tlacotenco, que es reconocida por su forma de organización, como sistema de cargos.

La tesis se compone de tres partes. La primera corresponde a la delimitación del problema de estudio y la revisión del estado de la cuestión, así como los referentes conceptuales y metodológicos empleados en la misma. En la segunda parte se presentan las experiencias etnográficas que sustentan los planteamientos del trabajo. Finalmente, en la última sección se muestran las reflexiones surgidas en el diálogo de la experiencia etnográfica y los planteamientos teóricos.

Founded in 2009, CORPUS now includes more than 450 researchers who work in 67 countries. Created after a series of seminars organised between 2001 and 2008 in the Social Sciences High School (Paris) and the Autonomous University of Madrid, CORPUS intends to participate in the construction of a widely open anthropology of body, offering spaces to cross-thinking and dialogues about this fascinating study object.
CORPUS members are architects, anthropologists, archaeologists, art or social historians, literary or cinema scholars, gender, sport or media specialists, musicologists, philologists, philosophers, physicians, psychologists, sociologists… They all share a curiosity about the body and a common taste for interdisciplinary dialogues.
The general coordinator and the coordination committee, whose composition reflects the disciplinary, geographic and cultural diversity of the CORPUS members, see to the execution of the network objectives and work to its development.
The membership of this network is totally free.

The paper begins with historical data about the Yugoslavian Club established in Dayton, Ohio in 1974. Affiliated with this club was a group named Yugoslav Dancers, founded to perform at the Dayton International Festival. In the 1980s Yugoslav Dancers became the Zivio Folk Dance Group, presenting every year a different suite from former Yugoslavia – choreographed especially for this major festival event by
enthusiastic Zivio members. After 1994 the club's name was changed to South Slavic Club and at this time it welcomed Bulgarians into the club and dance group. My study
focuses on the Zivio leadership and repertoire that unified people through rehearsal-repertoire-costume-performance activities and celebrations.

Performance forms and Ritual have undoubtedly been linked in human culture since primordial times. The first “theatrical” performances have been speculated to have either originated in early agricultural practices of fertility renewal, or with shamanistic practices involving magic and healing, or both.
In the modern study of religion by social scientists, such as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, we see a largely accepted view that the structure and shape of any given religion and its practice will mirror the overall structures and ideologies of the societies that engender it. In general:
􀁳􀀀 All religions embody a world view
􀁳􀀀 All religions reinforce the world view of the societies that embrace them Established religions may be put to different uses in different societies (Christianity, Judaism and Islam are different in the different communities in which they exist.)

This paper explores the interplay between ritual and religion in Japan, the Persian Gulf and in Iran. The three ritual forms, Kagura, the Zar and Ta'ziyeh are exemplary of the greatest ritual performance forms in the world, and they embody the same ritual structure despite their great geographical separation.

Contemporary European theatre builds on many traditions, yet two seem particularly at odds: wandering theatre troupes and publicly funded municipal theatre institutions. While the Italian commedia dell’arte, the French théâtre de la foire or the German Wandertruppen frequently appear as marginalised, itinerant phenomena in theatre histories, the public city, state or national theatres of these three countries embody aristocratic patronage, bourgeois audiences and artistic continuity. This contrast has not always and everywhere been as crass, however. While nineteenth-century Germany did indeed see the gradual erosion of wandering troupes, a few well-known European theatre artists of the twentieth century have kept up a tradition that brings together civic engagement, public patronage, and transnational aesthetics with the institutionalised traditions of European public theatres. Among others, Dario Fo, the theatre anthropologist Eugenio Barba, and the founderof the festival d’Avignon in France, Jean Vilar, need mention here. This contribution adds another chapter to this historiography by focusing on the often overlooked but complex artistic tradition of Roberto Ciulli’s Theater an der Ruhr in the German postindustrial Ruhr valley city Mülheim.

‘Artistic Diplomacy: On Civic Engagement and Transnational Theatre', in: Breed, Ananda and Tim Prentki. (eds.) Performance and Civic Engagement. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 269-300.

CONGRÉS INTERNACIONAL «LA DANSA DELS ALTRES». Alteritat i joc en la festa popular: moros, cristians i altres fi gures del diferent en el teatre, la música i la dansa de la tradició.
Biar (País Valencià), 7-9 de juliol de 2016.
Seu universitària de Biar, Auditori de la Casa de Cultura (Plaça del Convent, s/n).
Direcció científica: Raül Sanchis Francés i Francesc Massip Bonet (Universitat Rovira i Virgili).

Capacity for character: fiction, ethics and the anthropology of conduct Method acting is one of the most popular theatrical rehearsal systems, according to which actors seek intense identification with characters. In this article, I draw on fieldwork with a professional contemporary German theatre to suggest an alternative view. Rather than training to merge with characters, actors understand characters as a 'repertoire of fiction' they freely draw upon to compose themselves. Training for characters thus facilitates the capacity to detach and appropriate traits of different, imagined and real, persons. It is thus an active and reflected stance that minds the gap between actor and character, rather than a passive and predominantly embodied taking on by actors of fictional characters and their traits. Informed by discussions on the notion of conduct in the anthropology of ethics, this article investigates how training the 'capacity for character' can inform anthropological understandings of detachment, reflexivity and personhood.