For eight years, dancers in the United States performed and taught as employees of the federal government. They were eligible for the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), a Department of Labor program that assisted the unemployed during the recession of the late 1970s. Dance primarily occurred in artistic or leisure contexts, and employing dancers as federal government workers shifted dance to a labor context. CETA dancers performed “public service” in senior centers, hospitals, prisons, public parks, and community centers. Through a combination of archival research, qualitative interviews, and philosophical framing, I address how CETA disrupted public spaces and forced dancers and audiences to reconsider how representation functions in performance. I argue that CETA supported dance as public service while local programs had latitude regarding how they defined dance as public service. Part 1 is entitled Intersections: Dance, Labor, and Public Art and it provides the historical and political context necessary to understand how CETA arts programs came to fruition in the 1970s. It details how CETA arts programs relate to the history of U.S. federal arts funding and labor programs. I highlight how John Kreidler initiated the first CETA arts program in San Francisco, California, and detail the national scope of arts programming. In Part 2 of this dissertation, CETA in the Field: Dancers and Administrators, I focus on case studies from the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and New York, New York CETA arts programs to illustrate the range of how dance was conceived and performed as public service. CETA dancers were called upon to produce “public dance” which entailed federal funding, free performances in public spaces, and imagining a public that would comprise their audiences. By acknowledging artists and performers as workers who could perform public service, CETA was instrumental in shifting artists’ identities from rebellious outsiders to service economy laborers who wanted to be part of society. CETA arts programs reenacted Works Progress Administration (WPA) arts programs from the 1930s and adapted these ideas of artists as public servants into the Post-Fordist, service economy of the 1970s United States. CETA dancers became bureaucrats responsible for negotiating their work environments and this entailed a number of administrative duties. While this made it challenging for dancers to manage their basic schedules and material needs, it also allowed for a degree of flexibility, schedule gaps, and opportunities to create new performance and teaching situations. By funding dance as public service, CETA arts programs staged a macroeconomic intervention into the dance field that redefined dance as public service. / Dance

This dissertation shed light on the hitherto overshadowed area of nonfictional analog dance media by contextualizing and historicizing it within the North American dance field. It is a revisionist historiography examining how nonfictional dance media has been conceptualized, regulated, and institutionalized in tandem with the North American dance field's agenda of legitimizing dance as an artistic and academic field. Approaching the discursive shape of nonfictional analog dance media as a unique cultural construction, I argue that nonfictional dance media is not a simple stand-in for live dance, but an ambiguous and ambivalent object reflecting our beliefs and desires projected on dance. Thus, I suggest that nonfictional dance media provides a strategic setting for reconsideration of the operation of the dance field, especially that of North America. The research questions this study addresses include the following: how was the field of nonfictional dance media formulated and institutionalized according to the North American dance field's agenda of legitimizing dance as an artistic and academic field; how has nonfictional dance media constituted and reconceptualized the knowledge claims in the dance field by preserving and representing dance; and how has the discourse of nonfictional media resonated with the discourse of dance in modernity? As a historiography, I re-write the genealogy of nonfictional analog dance media within the formation of the North American field between 1927 and the 1980s. Also, for case studies, I compare the New York Public Library's Dance Division and the George Balanchine Foundation Video Archives to examine the discourse of dance preservation, while analyzing the schism between the intention and the reception of an ambitious TV dance program Dancing (Channel 13/WNET, 1993) to examine the discourse of dance representation. In so doing, I explore how nonfictional dance media has shaped and been shaped by the North American dance field's internal conceptualization of dance knowledge and external advocacy of legitimizing dance in its society. This study suggests that nonfictional dance media is--just as dance is--a phenomenon with cultural, economic, and political implications and imbalances. Particularly highlighting that media's duality of an icon and an index corresponds with the conceptualization of dance as choreography and performance, I further find that this duality resonates with the ambivalent desires of the modernist temporality. While time has been rationalized, the attraction of contingency has also increased in reaction to it. Similarly, while nonfictional analog dance media has been rationalized, controlled, and institutionalized according to the American dance field's agenda of legitimizing dance, this effort of rationalization not only raised the criteria of knowledge claims but also enhanced the attraction of the irrational, contingent aspect of dance. Given that, this dissertation argues that nonfictional dance media is not a simple imprint of dance but the barometer of ambivalent and fluid beliefs and desires projected on it. / Dance

This is a story of a cross-cultural dance exchange conceptualising myth as a living art through traditional Kathak dance form in collaboration with contemporary Aboriginal dance form, weaving and celebrating the reconciliation and independence of all people through male and female energy to evoke an ancient universal serpent energy. It continues the poetic traditions of interpretation which accompany the arts in both Indian and Aboriginal cultures. / Master of Arts (Hons)

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed November 17, 2009). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 238-253).

Thesis (M.M.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2007. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [295]-312).

Thesis (M.A. in Dance)--Shenandoah University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed June 27, 2006). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 853-893).