John Bowen's Ghost Dance

All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing. Pretty soon in next spring Great Spirit come. He bring back all game of every kind…all dead Indians come back and live again. They all be strong just like young men, be young again. Old blind Indian see again and get young and have fine time. When Great Spirit comes this way, than all the Indians go to mountains, high up away from whites. Whites can't hurt Indians then. Then while Indians way up high, big flood like water and all white people die, get drowned! After that, water go way and then nobody but Indians everywhere and game all kinds thick… (Wovoka, The Paiute Messiah qtd. In Brown 416).

The music changes now as the musicians start to play a march. The dancers then remove the flower from their hats pull their hats down low to resemble a soldiers headwear. In addition, they turn their canes upside down holding them as if they were guns and start marching off stage. Simultaneously, the lights turn dark blue on stage and the dancers faces turn serious. Their once extravagant and lighthearted movement is now stiff and somewhat serious. The audience however, laughs at this shift in theme. All the dancers march off stage except the center girl, she continues to march in a circle making faces and poking fun at the others. Finally, she leaves the stage laughing loudly and dramatically at herself. She comes on one more time only to

Christianity entered into the area and saw the Ghost Dance as a threat to the message they were trying to spread. The government wanted Indians to become more ingrained into the white man’s culture, so because of this the Ghost Dance became illegal. The Native Americans tried to stress that the Ghost Dance help Christian elements. The Indian Office of the government did not see this though. Threats came to the Native Americans if they participated in anyway with the Ghost Dance.

In 1973, Christopher Bruce heard about the murders going on in the small villages and towns of Chile on the orders of the government; just to show off their power, and how they were not afraid to use it. Bruce found out as a result of a letter received from a widow of a Chilean folk singer who had been murdered. He was asked to do work for the Chilean Human Rights Committee. The dance first premiered in 1988, the costume designer being Belinda Scarlett and the music being by Incantation, playing the song ‘Ojos Azules’ which is Spanish for ‘Blue Eyes’.

Most of the women and children in Big Foot's tribe were family members of the warriors who had died in the Plains wars. The Indians had agreed to live on small reservations after the US government took away their land. At the Wounded Knee camp, there were 120 men and 230 women and children. At the camp, they were guarded by the US Seventh Cavalry lead by Major Samuel Whitside. During the year 1890 a new dance called the Ghost Dance started among the Sioux and other tribes. The Sioux's Christ figure, Wovoka, was said to have flown over Sitting Bull and Short Bull and taught them the dance and the songs. The Ghost Dance legend was that the next spring, when the grass was high, the Earth would be covered with a new layer of soil, covering all white men. Wild buffalo and horses would return and there would be swift running water, sweet grass, and new trees. All Indians who danced the Ghost dance would be floating in the air when the new soil was being laid down and would be saved. The Ghost Dance was made illegal after the Wounded Knee massacre though. On December 28, 1890 the Seventh Cavalry saw Big Foot moving his tribe and Big

Bob Fosse still lives as the most prominent figure in the field of jazz dance. Fosse was an artist, his dances were a direct reflection of him: provocative, creative, motivated, driven, tough, ruthless, and full of humor. His choreography was sexual, highly demanding of even the most trained and skilled dancers, full of humor and at other times bleak cynicism. Throughout his works, Fosse tackled the full spectrum of human emotions. As an artist, Fosse was known for his uncompromising modern style. It grew to be unmistakable with his sexually suggestive forward hip-thrusts; the vaudevillian humor of hunched shoulders and turned-in feet; and the mime-like articulation of hands. It was through this unique voice and innovative style that Fosse

For many tribes of Plains Indians whose bison-hunting culture flourished during the 18th and 19th centuries, the sun dance was the major communal religious ceremony . . . the rite celebrates renewal - the spiritual rebirth of participants and their relatives as well as the regeneration of the living earth with all its components . . . The ritual, involving sacrifice and supplication to insure harmony between all living beings, continues to be practiced by many contemporary native Americans. -Elizabeth Atwood LawrenceAs the most important ritual of the nomadic Plains Indians, the Sun Dance in itself presents many ideas, beliefs, and values of these cultures. Through its rich symbolism and complicated rituals we are able to catch a glimpse

In Native American religions a dance called the Sun Dance is used as the rite of passage for young men. You men would stick a rod though their peck and dance around a pole of three days as a way to become connected with the Spirit World. The pole is used to show strength and the boys would quickly have to get the rod out by dancing. Another rite of passage in Native Americans religions is the Vision Quest. Young boys and girls partake in this to find their spirit animals. They go into the woods mostly naked and sometimes covered in body paint and fast in the woods for days. Eventually a spirit comes to them, most of the time as an animal but it can be in human form, and is said to be their guardian

It is important to note that the majority of the academic sources concerning Sun Dance are written by anthropologists, primarily those who participated in cultural genocide in the 19th and 20th centuries. There are very few recorded accounts in existence of the intimate details of Sun Dance that are authored by the Indigenous people who actually practice and participate in it. There are no videotaped records available online. Before the criminalization of Native spiritual practices, rituals like the Sun Dance were mutually respected and therefore shared between Indigenous peoples. Settler violence forced these practices underground, and therefore they are still hidden and heavily protected from outsiders. In 2003, there was a gathering of Bundle Keepers and spiritual leaders of the Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Nakota, Dakota, and Lakota Nations to discuss the exploitation of sacred ceremonies. Chief Arvol Looking Horse of the Lakota Nation, 19th Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe, released a statement

The type of music that was in the video “Sinnerman” by Alvin Ailey Revelations started off religious like and it had soft singing with lyrics which sounded like a opera. As the video went on, the music instantly changed to more of a tribal sound with the use of drums, maracas, and a male singer (0:31) with a choir in the back. Throughout the video, the lyrics are saying “Lord won’t you hide me?”, this represents the fact that this performance is a spiritual and a connection to God. The type of dance in this performance would be ballet, modern, and also contemporary. It would be considered ballet because of the flips, turns, and leaps that the dancers do, and it is considered modern and contemporary because of the freedom of movement that is

Kyle Abraham’s “Absent Matter” is the newest dance performed by the Abraham In. Motion company and the Joyce Theater located on 175 8th Avenue in New York, NY was debuted on November 10, 2015. This is another racially driven performance by Pittsburgh born Kyle Abraham dancer and choreographer (Kourlas). The dance is broken down into three separate sections including “The Quiet Dance”, “Absent Matter”, and “The Getting”. All three sections are performed with a sense of spontaneity and sincerity which is inspired from both Jazz and Hip-hop music and dances (Kourlas). It is believed this most recent production is inspired by the police brutality around the United States, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

The point of view shifts fluidly from person to person in That Deadman Dance, though there is one main voice, and that is the young Noongar Boy (later man) Bobby Wabalanginy. He has many roles, one of them as a communicator: “Bobby knew he was a storyteller, dancer, singer” (394), between the two cultures. His name is significant in symbolising both belonging and not belonging to either culture. His birth name Wabalanginy is drawn from the root Wab – which means to play in Noongar language. Bobby’s sense of playfulness and creativity, as well as his strong sense of personal identity, are major driving forces in the novel. He is a comfortable inhabitant of both the black and white worlds, and intelligent and eager to learn from the colonisers.

In 1975, Gus Giordano published the book, The Anthology of American Jazz, which lays out everything that he discovered over the course of his career (“History.”). Giordano’s technique, drawn from his previous training, cultural upbringing, and his immigrant roots, created a true American art form (Sabo, “Embodying Classical Jazz Dance Technique” 2). Unlike Mattox’s complex aesthetic and Luigi’s balletic quality, the central value of Giordano’s jazz technique is derived from the power and strength initiated from the core and extending through the rest of the body (Sabo, Made in America 63). Though many forms of dance contain this principle, Gus took it a step further by specifying the importance of energy in even the smallest parts of the body. For example, his book suggests exercises for conditioning the fingers in order to correctly perform his signature, often complex, hand positions seen throughout his choreography (Sabo, “Embodying Classical Jazz Dance Technique” 5).

I have been reading Judith Orditz Cofer's Silent Dancers the essay for a week and have been enchanted yet fascinated by the story. I loved the essay was written in two different types of fonts. The italicized version is referring to the home movie that Cofer is watching with her mother. The regular font is more of Cofer's narrative and commentary about the lives they lived form immigrating from Puerto-Rico to Paterson New Jersey. One thing I noticed is how Cofer is watching and perceiving the home movie differently than her mother. Cofer sees the three women sitting side by side and they are all wearing red dresses, but they are very different from each other.

1001 Nights is a collection of stories set in Southwest Asia, West Asia, the Middle East and other Islamic states. There is no known author for 1001 Nights and the origin of the stories has little known. The book and its stories are very well known in the Arab world and very well known in Europe and the America's. So much so that tales from the book have been adapted into the loosely based 1992 film Aladdin. While the stories are so well known, the culture of the Arab world is not. Much of a societies culture comes from their Art, Music, and Dance. All of which is rich throughout Arabic history.