Greek Dancing Gender Roles

“Stripping the Emperor: The Africanist Presence in American Concert Dance”, and excerpt from Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, was written by Brenda Dixon Gottschild. Gottschild is a well-known author, dance historian, performer, and choreographer as well as a professor of dance studies at Temple University. She has also written multiple books including The Black Dancer Body, Waltzing in the Dark, and Digging. In her article “Stripping the Emperor: The Africanist Presence in American Concert Dance”, Gottschild explores the similarities and differences in the characteristics of Africanist and European technique, and how they draw from each other.

In much the same way that a woman was not held responsible for acts of adultery,

After giving a brief introduction to her subject, Desmond quickly begins her analysis on the piece Radha choreographed by Ruth St. Denis. She states that St. Denis was one of the mothers of modern dance in America despite how her works are not as well remembered as others including Martha Graham’s. She depicts Radha by describing the dancing quality, patterns in choreography, lighting, set, and costume in detail. Desmond also recounts the social issues that are reflected in the piece including gender roles and race. The author’s main point in writing “Dancing Out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis’s Radha of 1906” was to introduce St. Denis and share her detailed analysis of St. Denis’ Radha.

The two live dance works viewed this year were “Emergence”, performed by Sydney Dance Company, choreographed by Rafael Bonachela, performed at the Princess Theatre and a recorded dance performance titled “Image”, choreographed by Jason Northam and Liesel Link. The two dance performances substantiated were exceedingly diverse and dissimilar. The two performances juxtaposed their intentions and interpreted opposing elements through diversity in movement vocabulary, structural devices and form, performance skills and technical elements.

In most ancient civilisations, dance was an important component in temple rites. In ancient Egypt, priest and priestesses would perform stately movements mimicking significant events that had occurred, such as war and famine. Bangarra Dance Theatre’s 2008 original production of Mathinna evokes the calamity, confusion and prejudice experienced by the members of the Stolen Generation. The performance is inspired by the true story of a young Aboriginal girls’ journey between the traditional lives of her ancestors to her western colonial adoption. In response to Bangarra’s production, Dance Critic Neville Wright composed that “Mathinna is a powerful dance work that I believe should be seen by audiences across Australia. It successfully educates and informs modern audiences about the hardships and horror that the Aboriginal people endured during what was a very shameful period of Australian history”. The following report will investigate the validly of this quote by evaluating three separate sections of the performance.

Upon initial reading, the poem’s title, genre, and speaker offer a unique perspective on a normally exciting aspect of weddings: the dress.

Jane Desmond introduces her article, “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies,” by describing a dance that readers can picture as the dance of tango in their minds. This helps lead to her connecting dance, or body movement, with cultural studies and social identities. In her article, Desmond focuses on connecting how dance and body movement can be portrayed differently in social identities, such as race, class, gender, nationality, and sexuality.

Sally Banes is an American writer and dance historian and critic. She is also a professor of theater history and dance studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Banes has written multiple books and contributed to many documentaries and films. The book Moving History / Dancing Cultures, which Banes contributed to, includes the article “Choreographic Methods of the Judson Dance Theater”. This book was published in 2001.

In the world of Ancient Greece, a large array of deities were worshipped. Each god had their own forms of identification in which they used to express themselves. This includes things such as personality, style, sexuality, and many other things. One of these forms of expression was gender. The Greeks seemed to focus more on the two typical genders, which are male and female. Some Greek gods seemed to play into certain gender roles, but others portrayed traits of the opposite sex. In this paper, I will be analysing the possibility that the Greeks believed the female and male genders were closely connected and that is why many of the gods are described with blended aspects of gender.

Rebecca Futo Kennedy is a woman who studies the controversies of the formation of the identity of Classical Athens. She works at Denison University as a professor of classics. Her primary interests are imperialism, the problems with foreignness, and geography theories pertaining to Athens. She is an ancient Greek historian who is trying to find the relationship between these theories and the history of race and ethnicity in ancient Greek culture. Her thesis statement in Elite Citizen Women and the Origins of the Hetaira in Classical Athens is to argue that the word hetaira does not mean a status but a person associated with a set of behaviors that are typical in the culture of the Greek elite. Her article is relevant when trying to understand the woman’s role in classical Athens.

All the movements scream a message of how society imposes social and domestic activities on women. They must always work efficiently but still be an object of beauty, always perfect (shown through certain movements) but the viewers can see the strain and damage on the women when they collapse or make exhausting sounds. As we learned previously, dance can be used to express emotions that can impact a message positively or negatively. All movements have a purpose and choreographers can evoke response from the viewers as to why the dancer dances in an open space or mirrors the movements of another dancer on stage or uses props in a performance. Germaine Acogny’s famous work, Waxtaan depicted African politics through different elements and the relationships of the dancers through space and time on the stage. Waxtaan means “argument,” and the dancers gave the impression of talking through the body. The dancers created their own music with claps, footfalls and body percussion. The dancers mimic the heads of state, the ministers, the politicians, the men in

Under the male gaze, the female body will always be sexualized no matter what choreography she is executing, how she is dressed or what she says. This occurs because the male gaze is driven by “sexual anxiety” (Schultz, 368). This means that a male feels the need to look at a woman as an object in order to make her difference and the “mystery” that surrounds her seems rational in his mind. I pose the following question, “Why does this matter to my argument and to ballet?” The male gaze has been instituted within the audience and within society that art must be viewed in a certain way.

Reading this chapter also had me thinking of how different cultures look at dance. A great example of the difference is, how in our culture we can go to our song and dance get-togethers and dance how we want, however, in the Asante culture, music stops if someone is not dancing up to standards (pg. 72).

Abramovic’s performances can be read as feminist works, even though she has expressed that she “was not particularly concerning herself with ‘womens’ issues” (Richards, 2010:19). This could be due to her upbringing in Yugoslavia, where as a Communist country, there is less gender inequality than that which is experienced by many women in the Western world (Richards, 2010:19). Also, as a woman, Abramovic was given the freedom to perform pieces such as her Rhythm series, as she was seen as less of a threat than other artists in the 1970’s (Richards, 2010:2). This is problematic in itself, as it shows that as a female artist, Abramovic was not expected to create much of an impact on the political world, perhaps suggesting that even in a country where women have more gender equality with men, they are still subjected to the ideologies that women belong in the private sphere, whereas men are thought to belong in the public sphere, meaning that they are taken more seriously in political issues and are thought to have more influence in these.

Since 1950’s, contemporary dance practitioners, both modern and post-modern choreographic artists/dancers, have worked with a group of dancers as a small community or social group to create group works. This essay will discuss and reflect on the precise nature of the working and decision-making relationships amongst the choreographer and the dancers; what the group dances looked like, or how the choreographies composed the group on stage; nature of the studio and rehearsal processes and processes of transmission of corporeal values; and lastly, how the group worked together in terms of ‘pay and conditions’ and how and where they rehearsed and performed. Using, internationally recognised choreographers Merce Cunningham and Twyla Tharp, I will discuss these questions on the processes of group dances by how these choreographers worked and developed a group of dancers.