Transmigratory moves

This year's conference explores the ways in which dance forms circulate across communities, regions and nations, acquiring new meanings as they travel. While the term "globalization" has gained currency in scholarly debates of recent years, the dispersion of performance practices is hardly a new phenomenon. Thus, the conference includes both historical and contemporary analyses of dances' migrations. What happens when dances migrate? It is common knowledge that founding figures in European and Euro-American modern dance appropriated Asian movement vocabularies in their choreographies. But scholars are only beginning to examine the ways in which Latin American, African, and Asian "fokloric" dance convention has been inflected by European concert dance training and stage practice, as well as MTV choreographers. By focusing on the circulation of movement styles, pedagogies and performance conventions, we hope to trouble some of the categoric distinctions which have tended to divide dance research: between "Western" and "non-Western", "classical" and "folkloric", and "ritual", "social" and "theatrical" genres. Arguably, the histories of many contemporary dance forms are more complex than such restrictive categories would admit ...