Émile Jaques-Dalcroze was a Swiss musician and music educator who developed a method of music education that combines movement and ear training with physical, vocal, and instrumental improvisation. He is often called Dalcroze, the pseudonym he added to his family name Jaques (spelled without a ‘c’) as a young man. In English his method is known as Dalcroze eurhythmics. In the early 1900s he devised activities of rhythmic stepping, breathing, conducting, and gesturing to help people experience musical concepts and feelings in the body. A charismatic teacher and pianist, Dalcroze presented demonstrations of his experimental pedagogy throughout Europe, and from 1910 to 1914 he taught several hundred professional students from various countries at the Bildungsanstalt Jaques-Dalcroze, the purpose-built training institute he directed in Hellerau, near Dresden. In 1915 he established the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze in Geneva, the city where most of his sixty-year career unfolded. In addition to inspiring many who became teachers and artists, he composed and wrote prolifically. He published a large musical oeuvre, teaching manuals, articles, reviews, and several books of essays and memoirs. His influence extended beyond music into dance, theatre, therapy, and education. The Dalcroze method, handed down and enriched by generations of teaching musicians, continues to explore core practices of this heritage today. Geneva serves as centre for the most advanced qualification, while training programs are offered in Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia.

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Socio-cultural Background A country with too much geography and little history. Such was the description given by John A. Macdonald, first prime minister of the newly minted nation of Canada in 1867 at the time of Confederation. Today, Canada's territory represents an area covering roughly ten million square kilometres with a population just under thirty million. Linguistic duality and a relatively short past as a country are further unavoidable realities that continue to shape the Canadian identity and to cause concerted actions to be harder to achieve. In dance the annual Canadian Ballet Festivals (1948-1956) offered the first chance to take stock of rising professionalism throughout the provinces. Later the Dance in Canada Association (1973-1989) would take on a similar mandate with its yearly conferences showcasing master classes, performances and occasional research papers; it also launched the first homegrown magazine specialising exclusively in dance matters. Yet cultural duality, an integral part of Canadian life, was also apparent in the differences in the dance experience of French and English Canada. French Canadians upheld strict traditional values urged by the powerful Catholic clergy's disapproval of dance activity. Dance events and institutions were less woven into the social fabric and the prevailing mentality was hard to change. Thus, even though Montreal was Canada's cultural metropolis and trade capital earlier in the century (two key positions which Toronto now holds) it was late in launching its major ballet company. Les Grands Ballets Canadiens emerged in 1958 coming a long time after the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's founding in 1938-1939 and Toronto's National Ballet of Canada created in 1951. Dance Education Dance research can mainly be fostered when the field enjoys academic recognition within a given society. Dance education registered a similar lag in French Canada when compared to the rest of Canada. Toronto's York University and the University of Waterloo championed the first undergraduate dance majors in 1970, while in Montreal UQAM (Universite du Quebec a Montreal) and Concordia University both opened dance programs only in 1979. Graduate studies in dance were offered at York as early as 1976, with UQAM providing a French language M.A. in dance studies as recently as 1993. At present, the other Canadian universities with undergraduate dance degrees are Simon Fraser University (British Columbia); the University of Calgary (Alberta); the University of Winnipeg (Manitoba); and finally the University of Regina (Saskatchewan). However it is mostly within the graduate context that new ideas are debated and research is encouraged. York University's M.A. programme stresses interdisciplinary dance research in history, ethnology, education, movement analysis, reconstruction and multimedia development. The focus of UQAM's graduate studies on the other hand is a cross between two models: the M.F.A. performance and choreography project and the regular research thesis format that covers the fields of ...

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Around the time Marcia Siegel's dance writing career began, an important predecessor's ended with the death in 1962 of Beryl de Zoete, critic and ethnologist. Of Dutch descent, de Zoete was born in London in 1879 into a family of brokers whose name still figures prominently on the British stock exchange. Traveling independently, using her gifts for meeting people and learning languages, she wrote three unprecedented ethnographies, beginning with the book she produced with Walter Spies, Dance and Drama in Bali (1938), and followed by The Other Mind: A Study of Dance in South India (1953) and Dance and Magic Drama in Ceylon (1957). From the late 1920s through the mid-1950s, de Zoete also published many articles on her encounters with European dance and music, and her reviews of performances and books appeared regularly in newspapers, most notably in the influential weekly New Statesman and Nation. After she died, her friend Arthur Waley completed her planned collection of short pieces, The Thunder and the Freshness (1963), titled after poet John Keats's description of a waterfall. This image evoked, for her, the sound of dance drumming before dawn.In this talk, I sketch de Zoete's life and begin to think about how she worked as a writer. As part of my doctoral research, I investigated her connections with Dalcroze Eurhythmies, which teaches music through movement and improvisation. I also draw on previous work by Margaret Dale, who remembers de Zoete's visits to Sadler's Wells Ballet rehearsals in the 1940s and later consulted her about presenting Sinhalese dance on BBC television.

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