Dance and Ethnicity

Abstract

Ethnic groups have been defined as people who share a common ethos based on ancestry, nation, language and other identity markers. This volume brings scholars from across the globe that have incorporated perspectives from critical and cultural studies in an investigation of what it means to define oneself in an ethnic category and how this category is performed and represented as an ethnicity. The essays in this volume engage the four themes of identity construction, local and transnational politics, appropriation and related exotification, and resistance that are part of the ongoing discourse in the relationship between dance and ethnicity. Cumulatively, the essays in their research approach and methodology document the change that has taken place in dance studies from the ethnic as an easily identified category based on biology and geography to ethnicity as a fluid concept and dance as an active contributor to the creation and negotiation of it.

Choreography as Ideology: Dance Heritage, Performance Politics, and the Former Yugoslavia

“…For Igor Moiseyev, as Bajić Stojiljković writes, the intention was to develop a creative interpretation based on folk material (2016a, 93), as opposed to “faithfully” translating the music and dance of the Soviet people on the stage 17 . Similarly, Anthony Shay argues that folklore had to be cleaned up, colorfully costumed, dramatically rechoreographed, and repackaged so it could compete onstage with other art forms, no matter how classical or refined (2016b, 114). For Yugoslav choreographers, this type of “cleaning up” was realized by stylizing the repertoire.…”

“…18.In the Yugoslav and the post-Yugoslav dance milieu, this approach has commonly been referred to as stilizacija , whereas non-Yugoslav authors have used terms such as “spectacularization” (Shay 2016b). Andriy Nahachewsky (2001) calls this strategy “theatricalization,” and he identifies two contrasting cases used in the revival of folk dance, based on the delineations of the Ukrainian dance scholar Kim Vasylenko.…”

Choreographic Pattern Analysis from Heterogeneous Motion Capture Systems Using Dynamic Time Warping

“…Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) is a prominent element of people's cultural identity as well as a significant aspect for growth and sustainability [1]. The expression of identity through Intangible Cultural Heritage takes many forms, among which folkloric dances hold a central position [2]. It is reasonable to consider that analyzing choreographic sequences is essentially a multidimensional modelling problem, given that both temporal and spatial factors should be taken into account.…”

Folk Dance Pattern Recognition Over Depth Images Acquired via Kinect Sensor

“…Folk dances are important to ICH; they are directly connected to local culture and identity (Shay and Sellers-Young, 2016). Hence, the preservation of folk dances is a basic requirement, since the history and style of each folk dance will be readily available to the public through a system that includes descriptive information, videos, movement and 3D modelled data relevant to it.…”