This study examines embodiments of the traditional Korean mask dance, t’alch’um, in the post-Korean War period. The military government and university student activists in South Korea utilized the t’alch’um as a pivotal vehicle for establishing “Korean” identity and subjectivity during a period of nation-building, from the 1960s to the 1980s. However, they each used different methods and pursued different goals. The government established the Cultural Heritage Protection System in 1962 with the goal of safeguarding the original form of the mask dance. One impact of the government’s system was to consolidate the power of the dictatorship. In contrast, university student activists recognized the necessity of preserving tradition and establishing an identity and subjectivity for the public. They created their own theater, called madanggŭk, by connecting the principle of satire from the mask dance with socio-political and economic issues that resulted from the dictatorship’s oppressive policies. Through madanggŭks, the activists sought to promote “Koreanness” that originated from minjung (common people) and one important outcome was their expression of resistance against the dictatorship. Assessing these two reconstituting activities in the post-war era, the main purpose of this dissertation is to shine a critical spotlight on how the reconstitutions of dances past were differently appropriated and the impacts they exerted on national identity and subjectivity.

Although one of the goals of some developing reconstitutions of the mask dance was to challenge previous conservative and hierarchical ideologies, vestiges of 19th-century Korean Confucian patriarchy remained active in social and cultural conventions. This study analyzes how gender binaries in hierarchical relationships were circulated in reconstitutions of the t’alch’um. I examine how patriarchal family structures, sexual division of labor, and stereotyped images of women are depicted in androcentric storylines of the mask dance and madanggŭk. I also analyze how vestiges of Korean Confucian patriarchy influenced relationships between men and women in performing groups.

This project employed several methodologies: oral interviews; analysis and interpretation of archival materials and secondary literature; and movement analysis of the t’alch’um and madanggŭk as captured in photographs. While in South Korea from 2011 to 2013, I gathered written and visual documents and conducted interviews with professional dancers and scholars. Few moving image records exist for period reconstitutions of the mask dance and madanggŭk. Limited numbers of still pictures are available for t’alch’um and madanggŭk productions in this period. However, using photos, I studied various performing factors: what body parts performers primarily utilized, how performance environments appeared, how performers located themselves in relation to spectators, and what costumes performers wore.

These methods enable me to argue that neither the Korean government reconstitutions nor university student performances of madanggŭk escaped from the reach of Confucian philosophy, sovereign-centered system, and hierarchy, even though they each pursued democratic revolution from the 1960s to the 1980s. This study approaches the two reconstitutions with perspectives gleaned from several disciplines as it addresses cultural production in connection with politics, industrialization, and gender role issues.

My dissertation project examines past and current understandings of the Jarabe Tapatío, which has come to be widely recognized as the national dance of Mexico. To conduct this investigation, I have utilized textual sources and oral accounts from personal interviews. I have also drawn on bodily renderings of the Jarabe Tapatío - some from my own practice of the dance, others that I observed in performance, and still others that I taught students to embody as imparted by Alura Flores de Angeles' "the God Mother of Mexican Dance." First, I investigate how the teaching and performance of the Jarabe Tapatío in 1920s and 1930s Mexico was sanctioned by the state to operate alongside a post-revolutionary nationalism which built up seemingly inclusionary polices that were in fact designed to eradicate the indigenous population, promote mestizaje as the ideal race for a homogeneous nation, re-affirm class positioning, and consolidate traditional gender roles. I examine the teaching and performance of the JarabeTapatío at events organized by the Secretary of Public Education (SEP) in rural schools, Cultural Missions programs, festivals, and weekly concerts. I unpack the love narrative as articulated by Flores de Angeles to examine the intersectionality of nation, race, gender, and class and how these constructs were incorporated within the costume, music, and dance movements of the dance. I also analyze the many ways in which several public presentations of the Jarabe Tapatío, by SEP school girls and by Nellie and Gloria Campobello- bodily consolidated and also contested post-revolutionary ideas as espoused by the SEP in the 1920s and 1930s. Secondly, I explore the teaching and performance of the Jarabe Tapatío in the twenty-first century to ask whether the dance has changed over time with immigration. I interviewed five twenty-first century United States practitioners and a number of dancers from California, Illinois, New Mexico, and Texas. In my interviews I found that contemporary performances of the Jarabe Tapatío ignited internal discussions concerning gender, race, class, and nation. Nonetheless, preservation of Mexican heritage assumed greater importance. Thus, a 1920s post-revolutionary ideology continues to be reinforced by these twenty-first century United States practitioners.

This dissertation investigates western-developed "Laban" methods that middle-class Korean female Laban specialists transported to South Korea and, there, tactically adapted to South Korean contexts during the 1990s and the early twenty-first century. It particularly focuses on how these Korean women's repurposings of "Laban" methods intersect with conditions of global capitalism and specific South Korean cultural politics, job markets, and dance instruction and employment networks. I claim that the specialists gained professional power by acquiring western-issued professional "Laban" credentials, which positioned them to create an alternative space for employment within already competitive and feminized dance markets. They founded the Korea Laban Movement Institute at home and have expanded their "Laban"-based creative movement education to the public with the support of a number of state and city grants. Their successful expansion of public dance/movement education has capitalized on opportunities afforded by the Korean state's cultural policy since the early 2000s, which has included the promotion of public arts and culture education, including dance, to foster "cultural democracy." At the same time, their approach to devising student-centered, experimental, and creative movement classes for laypeople that incorporate "Laban" methods has challenged longstanding models in South Korea for fashioning dance careers oriented to professional performance and dance education that focuses on technical training. I argue that these women's recasting of "Laban" methods results not from colonial force, but from the choices they have made as South Korea's modernity emerges within the frame of global economy. And, their embrace and adaptation of "Western" bodily knowledge and emphasis on cultivating individualism in and through Korean bodies have countered Confucian-based hierarchical authoritarianism and social collectivism.

Taking a global perspective, this dissertation draws on interviews, observation data, and archival materials to explore the connections among multiple factors: culture and political-economy, global capital and nation-states, and physical practices and gendered labor markets. It also emphasizes the transformation of practices when they are transported transnationally. My case study shows Korean transmigrators negotiated new meanings, forms, and values of this deterritorialized western practice for their own purposes, and they did not simply reproduce western values.

This dissertation examines the development of experimental Middle Eastern dance in the United States. It focuses on terminology, ideas, and practices presented by six choreographers and their works performed at An Evening of Experimental Middle Eastern Dance (EEMED). In order to understand the emergence of experimental Middle Eastern dance, the dissertation analyzes discursive practices of genres and types of relationships choreographers produce between "traditional" and "experimental" Middle Eastern dance.

The data for this dissertation primarily comes from oral history interviews conducted with six core EEMED choreographers. In order to present their original and innovative contributions, the project factors in literature from two groups with which they frequently connect, including dance scholarship covering predominantly the fields of Middle Eastern dance, American modern dance, American post-modern dance, and the American Middle Eastern dance community. The project not only works to formulate theories that grow out of the core EEMED choreographers' practices but supports them with scholarly theories, including Judith Butler's gender construction, Edward Soja's Thirdspace, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's rhizome, Michel Foucault's discourse, and Amy Devitt's, John Frow's, and Carolyn Miller's genre construction.

This dissertation demonstrates that through citation and reiteration most traditional Middle Eastern dance genres conceal their construction and solidify over time into stable inner essences, naturalness, and identities. In this process, they push those who do not comply with rules and structures into the margins. However, the core EEMED choreographers expand and empower these margins. Their practices highlight uniqueness and hybridization over repetition and solidification and create fluid movement through porosity borders. By claiming their experimental Middle Eastern dance is a part of Middle Eastern dance, the core EEMED choreographers expand Middle Eastern dance's genre repertoire. Thereby, they create a new discourse of Middle Eastern dance.