Editorial
1Definitions of dance are manifold, involving social and cultural, historical and regional, formal and individual considerations. Dance is inevitably in specific ways bound up with issues of gender, sex/uality and ethnicity. It figures as a particularly complex site where notions of gender and sex/uality interact with issues of ethnicity, of corporeality and the symbolic, of the individual and the collective, of art and ritual in diverse cultural sites from religion to sports to the arts, from spontaneous expression to choreographed and/or ritualised performances, from the street, to the club scene and the stage, to the movies. The four articles assembled in this issue of gender forum testify to the complexity of the subject and accentuate the interrelatedness of dance and gender from rather diverse angles, rendering it as both, a possible site of doing and undoing gender.
2In “Only the Dance Is Sure.’ Dance and Constructions of Gender in Modernist Poetry” Julia Hoydis focuses on some of the central innovations and transformations in early 20th century dance in relation to their influence on Anglo-American modernist poetry. Arguing that dance is an important source of inspiration that shapes the imagery in many works of T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and W. B. Yeats, it is also tied to constructions of gender, which engage with modernist aesthetics and reflect the body politics of the late Victorian era.
3“Shifting Tides: A Multidisciplinary Creative Process Fusing Dance, Somatics and Black Feminist Theory” is a transcript of a conversation between the choreographer Cherie Hill and her friend and teacher Nii Armah Sowah. Cherie Hill is interested in human connection, and conceptually interested in exploring the ways connection heightens our self-awareness and understandings of cultural and gender difference. The interview explores the means of interpersonal connection through dance and how black feminist standpoint theory can be applied to choreography. As Hill states: “The interview depicts how I pushed the performers to discover who they are on a deeper psychosomatic level, to develop self-awareness in their whole bodies, in order to cultivate a higher communal cognizance, while staying aware of their racial and gender biases.”
4As Mary Ann Maslak and Stanley M. Votruba note, “art forms maintain a well-established history throughout the world. Dance, one art form, maintains a particularly rich historical tradition, grounded in the local environs of socially accepted norms that have evolved both over time and through the influence of external social forces. Argentine tango, in particular, has been recognized as an international art form deeply rooted in local culture.” In their contribution “’Two to Tango’: A Reflection on Gender Roles in Argentina” they critically examine the roles of man and woman, “male” and “female” positionings in this dance rooted in Argentine culture. In the forth article of “(Con)Sequences” Linda White and Jonathan Miller-Lane draw on their experiences during training lessons in Aikido practices. Their paper argues that “due to the lack of competition and an agreement to cooperate with other bodies, an awareness of the connection between participants based in ki or chi energy, and the development or performance of power that is neither masculine nor feminine” Aikido may provide a site of experiencing un-gendered positionings. By seeking to understand this phenomenon from the body up, rather than from theory down, White and Miller-Lane challenge formulations of gender as total and inevitable and offer specific examples of the disconnection between gender and the body.
5Concluding this issue gender forum is also very happy to feature two poems by critically acclaimed and prolific author Wanda Coleman. They form part of a new series of poems entitled Night Coffee. The semiologies running through the verses appear to add to the concerns addressed by the articles in this issue as they also display an emphasis on the rhythmical, the sensual and physical, while also referring to gendered and ethnic positionings.