This thesis examines the principles and policies underlying the need for transformation within the Playhouse Dance Company (PDC) in Durban and the actualities of implementing these visions and procedures. It is proposed that artistic structures, ideals and processes cannot remain impervious to the climate of change. Alterations in the political arena demand radical permutations within arts councils and their concept of repertoire, educational programmes and training. Transformation is linked to the problem of identity and it is suggested that the company is in the midst of a journey towards "becoming" rather than "being". Chapter One comprises an overview of changing trends in the arts globally and the impact on South Mrican art forms and processes. There is also an examination of the past, the establishment of arts councils and the colonial heritage of the dance companies within these councils. The formative years of the NAP AC Dance Company and the strategies formulated by former artistic directors have, it is suggested, hampered the transformation process. Chapter Two focuses on the PDC's endeavours to transform between the years 1993 and 1997. Lack of funding, conservative public tastes and training processes are. all' issues confronting management, choreographers, educators and performers in attempting to provide a clear direction towards transformation. The company walk a tightrope as they struggle to balance the heritage of their artistic past while giving birth to a new heritage for the future. Chapter Three discusses two areas that reveal measurable attempts at transformation. Hawkins offers re-inventions of the classics which encourages innovation, and Siwela Sonke was conceived to draw on dance forms located in Kwazulu-Natal in the search for a South Mrican dance aesthetic. Chapter Four investigates whether transformative visions are becoming a reality and suggests how the company could extend the process further. This chapter concludes with .. ideas about the nature of culture and how this informs,the exercise of transformation. This thesis proposes that transformation within the PDC is occurring even though it has its shortcomings. The main thrust of the research is to investigate, identifY and document factors that are contributing to current dance trends in Durban.

abstract: Don't Hold Your Breath is an evening-length performance created and performed by Sarah "Saza" Kent and EPIK Dance Company that consisted of street and concert dance combined with hip hop theatre, spoken text and live singing. What began as a one-woman show about the choreographer's life, turned in to an ensemble piece that included the stories of many people, including ten community members who were interviewed on their views of life and death after being affected by a diagnosis. The show follows Kat, a young woman tiptoeing the line between her party girl past and the thought of finally growing up and settling down. Typically confident and self-assured, she is now grappling with the idea of life and death. Kat finds herself in an MRI machine that could ultimately determine her fate. As the machine examines her body, she begins to examine her life, causing her to confront some of life's most existential questions. Has she spent her time wisely? Would she do anything differently if given a second chance? When it comes down to it, and all distractions are stripped away, what is truly important? Her thoughts take her to memories of her past and visions for her future as she faces the reality that life is finite and tomorrow is not promised. This document is an account of the show's process and serves as a place of explanation, analysis, and reflection, while also questioning its significance on a personal level all the way to its place in the field. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Dance 2018

Die Zusammenarbeit von Merce Cunningham und John Cage beruhte auf dem grundlegenden Prinzip der getrennten Entwicklung und Erarbeitung von Klang/Musik und Tanz/Bewegung (Cunningham 1994). Für den getrennten Arbeitsprozess wurden nur Zeitklammern und die Dauer der Gesamtaufführung als gemeinsame Parameter festgelegt. Diese Trennung von Musik und Tanz bildet die notwendige Voraussetzung für die erweiterte Arbeit der Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) mit Cage und anderen Composer-Performern in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren, die die elektronischen Klänge live, in der Aufführung, generierten. Der Text untersucht das Verhältnis und die Schnittstellen der beiden Performance-Systeme.

Submitted by Cássia Santos (cassia.bcufg@gmail.com) on 2017-06-23T13:07:28Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Michael Silva - 2017.pdf: 9912596 bytes, checksum: bb97522cfbfdb005f4a3daa1394bdd89 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2017-07-10T13:54:52Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Michael Silva - 2017.pdf: 9912596 bytes, checksum: bb97522cfbfdb005f4a3daa1394bdd89 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-10T13:54:53Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Michael Silva - 2017.pdf: 9912596 bytes, checksum: bb97522cfbfdb005f4a3daa1394bdd89 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-04-28 / This research use the performance notion from studies of Department of Performance Studies at New York University, especially in the work of the playwright Richard Schechner, and pounces toward “Por Instantes de Felicidade” (“Moments of Happiness”), Quasar Dance Companycelebrating spetacle its twentieth anniversary. This work, therefore, questions itself about the historical journey of this company; about how its national and international projection occurs and about its characteristics as a dancer producer to thenceforth to do a poetic reading about this spectacle. In order to get that, this paper proposes a conceptual reflection that signals the epistemological view cast upon the documents of this show and about this company, and it makes a detailed description of the spectacle “Por Instantes de Felicidade” to perceive it formally and contextually. The reading of the show counts on the video images of its local premiere on April 18 and 20, 2008 at Teatro Goiânia, with the extras of such a DVD, an interview with the choreographer Henrique Rodovalho and a writing questionnaire with the interpreter Daniel Calvet. One of the conclusions reached in the research is that the show studied excels by a virtuous performance of dance and that its strong self-referential content ends up characterizing it as a spectacle fundamentally entertainment, especially for its theme to be commemorative. From the interviews conducted with the dancers João Paulo Gross, Marcos Buiati and Martha Cano, who danced it in later years, it is concluded, among other things, that this vigorous performative pattern of the company is physically very demanding for the bodies of the performers. / A pesquisa que aqui se segue usa a noção de performance dos estudos desenvolvidos na vertente de investigação do Departamento de Performance Studies da New York University, especialmente no trabalho do teatrólogo Richard Schechner, para se lançar em direção ao espetáculo “Por Instantes de Felicidade”, da Quasar Cia. de Dança, por meio de seus registros documentais. Este trabalho se questiona sobre o trajeto histórico da companhia; sobre como ocorreu a sua projeção e sobre suas características enquanto produtora de dança para, a partir desses elementos, lançar sua leitura poética da obra de dança acima citada. Para tanto, propõe uma reflexão conceitual que sinaliza o olhar teórico lançado sobre os documentos de tal espetáculo e sobre a companhia; bem como traz uma descrição pormenorizada do “Por Instantes de Felicidade”, para entendê-lo formal e contextualmente. A interpretação do espetáculo conta com as imagens em vídeo de sua estreia local dias 18 e 20 de abril de 2008 no Teatro Goiânia, com os extras de tal DVD, com uma entrevista realizada com o coreógrafo Henrique Rodovalho e com um questionário realizado com o intérprete Daniel Calvet. Uma das conclusões a que se chega na investigação é que o espetáculo estudado prima por uma performance virtuosa de dança e que o seu forte conteúdo autorreferencial acaba por caracterizá-lo enquanto um espetáculo fundamentalmente de entretenimento, especialmente por seu tema ser comemorativo. Das entrevistas realizadas com os bailarinos João Paulo Gross, Marcos Buiati e Martha Cano, que dançaram-no em anos posteriores, conclui-se, entre outras coisas, que esse padrão performático vigoroso da companhia é fisicamente muito exigente para com os corpos dos intérpretes.

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Die Zusammenarbeit von Merce Cunningham und John Cage beruhte auf dem grundlegenden Prinzip der getrennten Entwicklung und Erarbeitung von Klang/Musik und Tanz/Bewegung (Cunningham 1994). Für den getrennten Arbeitsprozess wurden nur Zeitklammern und die Dauer der Gesamtaufführung als gemeinsame Parameter festgelegt. Diese Trennung von Musik und Tanz bildet die notwendige Voraussetzung für die erweiterte Arbeit der Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) mit Cage und anderen Composer-Performern in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren, die die elektronischen Klänge live, in der Aufführung, generierten. Der Text untersucht das Verhältnis und die Schnittstellen der beiden Performance-Systeme.

My dissertation examines mass movement and dancing choruses as forms that proliferated across national, political, and artistic boundaries during the interwar period. Bringing together diverse professional and amateur dance practices such as German movement choirs, American and Soviet pageantry, Busby Berkeley films, and early Martha Graham, I analyze how concepts of unity, precision, and futurity operated within the shared mass movement aesthetics but divergent politics of the United States, Germany, and Soviet Russia. While these forms have been examined by dance scholars as individual phenomena or in their national settings, there has been no full-length comparative study that encompasses this range of forms of dance and national and political ideologies. I argue that form does not predetermine a politics; rather, forms gain political significance through use and interpretation by artists and spectators with political and ideological perspectives—sometimes overt, sometimes implicit. Furthermore, the relationship among the individuals within a group and whether and how they relate to a leader is indicative of how the group participates in politics. I examine the development of German movement choirs and their association with political movements in Weimar and Nazi Germany; I pay special attention to the leftist movement choir activity of Martin Gleisner and Jenny Gertz, figures not well-known in English-language scholarship. I compare Soviet mass spectacles and American leftist dance, both of which were influenced by the Pageantry Movement, and argue that the artists’ political relation to the state impacted what kinds of futurity they could imagine. To argue that the precision chorus line was a site that produced and contested ideals of American womanhood, I bring together the Radio City Rockettes, the chorus in the all-Black film Harlem is Heaven (1932), and Busby Berkeley’s Dames (1934). Finally, I analyze Martha Graham’s all-female 1930s company alongside her political work Chronicle (1936) to discover connections between the company’s social visions and how the choreographed work implicated spectators in a collective future. My project contributes to the dance historical field by bringing together a broad range of artistic and cultural phenomena that are more often found within their national or genre boundaries. By connecting these sites of inquiry through archival research and analysis of textual and visual materials, I show that the political identity of a mass or chorus develops from the particular way that the individuals within the group relate to one another, to any leader present or imagined, and to the constituted outside of the group. In making these arguments, I seek to make dance history part of a larger social history of aesthetics and politics.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, American dance artists have presented complicated images of American identity to world audiences, as dance companies traveled abroad under the auspices of the US State Department. This dissertation uses oral history interviews, archival research, and performance analysis to investigate how dancers navigated their status as official American ambassadors in the Cold War and the years following the 2001 terrorist attacks in the US. Dance companies worked and performed in international sites, enacting messages of American democratic superiority, while individual dancers re-interpreted the contours of American identity through personal encounters with local artists and arts practices. The dancers’ memories of government-sponsored tours re-insert the American artist into American diplomatic history, prompting a reconsideration of dancers not just as diplomatic tools working to persuade global audiences, but as creative thinkers re-imagining what it means to be American. This dissertation begins in the late 1950s, as the State Department began discussing appropriate dance companies to send to the Soviet Union, as part of the performing arts initiatives that began in 1954 under the direction of President Dwight Eisenhower. The dissertation concludes by examining more recent dance in diplomacy programs initiated in 2003, coinciding with the US invasion of Iraq. My analysis considers New York City Ballet’s 1962 tour of the Soviet Union, where the company performed programs that included George Balanchine’s Serenade (1934), Agon (1957), and Western Symphony (1954), and Jerome Robbins’ Interplay (1945) during the heightened global anxieties of the Cuban Missile Crisis. My analysis of Ailey’s 1967 tour of nine African countries focuses primarily on Revelations (1960), which closed every program on the tour. Moving into the twenty-first century, I analyze A Slipping Glimpse (2007), a collaboration between Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and Tansuree Shankar Dance Company, which began as a US State Department-sponsored 2003 residency in Kolkata. To explore each tour, I consider government goals documented in archived minutes from artist selection panels; dancers’ memories of the tours, which I collected in personal interviews conducted between 2007 and 2009; and performance analysis of the pieces that traveled on each tour. / text

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T18:15:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Giancarlo Martins.pdf: 9816916 bytes, checksum: b4a396da42ac4d1ed91e23ce1a3a0232 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006-09-25 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / In the last ten years, actions developed in dance, live and in the media, left the focus in Rio-São Paulo. Spread through several places in the country had taken a new geography of ideas that understand dance as a communication process of the body, organized as a thought that questions power structures, artistic procedures and boundaries between languages. This masters essay selects, as investigation corpus, some of these experiences employed in the education, in the circuit (festivals, shows and meetings), and in the research and creation in dance that, as survival strategy, creates decentralized cultural polar regions. The intend is to demonstrate that these experiences have propose new communication actions to dance. They push punctual changes in the dance market and in the development of public politics of cultural motivation and reconfigure, not only the esthetic system in which they are in, but the whole cultural system, contributing, in this way, for the dance survival and your effective insertion in the social fabric. As methodology, it was used a data analysis in a systematic way, that being, understanding the articulations between the investigated elements, based in the evolution theories proposed by the evolutionist scientist Richard Dawkins (2000-2001), in the concept of body and media proposed by the researchers Helena Katz and Christine Greiner (2000, 2001, 2003 and 2005) and in the cultural and political studies such as the ones developed by Bauman (1999), Agamben (2002), Bhabha (1998) and Foucault (1979 and 1996). Both, the bibliographic research and the field investigation (interviews and case studies) show that the strategies have been developed to recommend new ways of understanding and event organization, information flow and company conception and educational projects in dance. Actions that exist in the relation body and environment, in a contaminator flow, co evolutional, and non-determinist. / Nos últimos dez anos, ações desenvolvidas no campo da dança, em contextos presenciais e na mídia, deixaram de se concentrar no eixo Rio-São Paulo. Espraiadas por diversas regiões do país, têm desenhado uma nova geografia de idéias que entende a dança como um processo comunicacional do corpo, organizado como um pensamento que questiona estruturas de poder, procedimentos artísticos e as fronteiras entre as linguagens. Esta Dissertação de Mestrado foca, como corpus de investigação algumas destas experiências empreendidas na área de educação, de circulação (festivais, mostras e encontros) e de pesquisa e criação em dança que, como estratégia de sobrevivência, criam pólos culturais descentralizados. O objetivo é demonstrar que essas experiências têm proposto novas ações comunicativas para a dança. Impulsionam transformações pontuais no mercado da dança e no desenvolvimento de políticas públicas de incentivo à cultura e reconfiguram não apenas o sistema estético em que estão inseridas, mas todo o sistema cultural contribuindo, dessa maneira, para a sobrevivência da dança e sua efetiva inserção no tecido social. Como metodologia, trabalhamos a análise dos dados de maneira sistêmica, ou seja, entendendo as articulações entre os elementos investigados, a partir das teorias evolutivas propostas pelo cientista evolucionista Richard Dawkins (2000, 2001), do conceito de corpomídia proposto pelas pesquisadoras Helena Katz e Christine Greiner (2000, 2001, 2003, 2005) e dos estudos culturais e políticos tais como os desenvolvidos por Bauman (1999), Agamben (2002), Bhabha (1998) e Foucault (1979, 1996). Tanto a pesquisa bibliográfica, quanto a investigação de campo (entrevistas e estudos de casos) evidenciaram que estratégias vêm sendo desenvolvida para propor novos modos de entendimento e organização de eventos, circulação de informação e concepção de companhias e projetos educativos em dança. Ações que se dão na relação corpo e ambiente, num fluxo contaminatório, coevolutivo e não determinista