Seminars

Drawing upon oral histories, fieldwork, and the discipline of religious studies, this article examines the enchantment of ecstatic dance in California. Contemporary ecstatic dance involves improvised movements to a live DJ who curates a dynamic soundscape of electronic music. For this study, enchantment refers to a feeling of wonder, awe, transcendence, or ultimacy that may resemble an encounter with the sacred, but is broader than the term religion. The first section incorporates insights from thinker Marcel Gauchet to understand and interpret the enchantment of ecstatic dance. Improvisational movement and music work synergistically to efface hierarchies, form fellowship, and experience transcendence. The second section considers the unsettling side of enchantment. Here I use Ecstatic Dance Oakland as a case study to reveal how enchantment may function to obscure accountability, thereby resembling a cult. This study aims to show both the overwhelmingly restorative and potentially harmful functions of ecstatic dancing bodies.

Throughout the twentieth century, dance teachers at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) championed an innovative, holistic pedagogy, recognizing dance’s longstanding history as a vehicle for celebration, resistance, and self-expression in African American life. Housed within physical education departments, these teachers presented dance as a “sport becoming an art,” with the capacity to stimulate students’ bodies and minds in tandem. They used movement to teach their students – primarily young Black women – that their bodies were beautiful and inherently imbued with creative capacity, generating a sense of social responsibility and cultural pride in African American heritage. Beyond campus, HBCU dance teachers led community-based dance workshops in their home cities and embarked on regional tours with extracurricular performance troupes; for those institutions based in the American South, these efforts contributed to desegregation efforts in the wake of Jim Crow. Focusing on programs led by Charles Williams of the Hampton Institute, Maryrose Reeves Allen of Howard University, Mabel Love of Fisk University, and Mozel Spriggs of Spelman College, this chapter reveals how HBCU dance programs have enabled generations of teachers, students, and audiences to think more profoundly about the body’s capacity for communication and self- expression, particularly during periods of heightened political stakes, social movements, and cultural revolution.

In the twentieth century, dancers were among the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of motion picture technology. They used small-gauge cameras as an aid in memorizing choreography and restoring forgotten pieces. They also recorded their daily lives. Filled with encounters with the cultural elite of their time, at home and abroad, this footage forms a spectacular visual record. An attuned sense of time and space, polished through dance training and practice, often translated into adept camerawork and editing in films by dancers. This talk focuses on 8mm films by Rudolf Nureyev, as well as a circle of his colleagues and friends, shot between the late 1950s and mid-1960s, to discuss private films as a rich yet understudied source of the history of dance.

This chapter broadly surveys two opposing aesthetic trends of the early twentieth century— expressionism and mechanicity—to suggest how each might come to inform the other, together underpinning a wide array of feminist responses to metropolitan modernity. Taking the choreography of Ruth Page as an early case study, Henry argues that dance modernism’s emphasis on the “kinesthetic” becomes a hinge-point for feminist artists across genres; this discourse finds its most complete and evocative portrayal, she suggests, in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s debut novel, There is Confusion (1924), which follows the trajectory of a Black ballerina in Harlem.