Center for Learning in the Arts, Sciences and Sustainability

The Dancing History Collection provides new source materials for inquiry in dance history and culture, using reconstruction as a methodology for research. The emphasis of the Collection is to enable the performance of representative movement from different places and times, to deepen dance research practice that has relied heavily on viewing dances. The Dancing History Collection: Cultural Dances, Part 1 contains nine dances from six countries: Israel; Vietnam; India; Nigeria; Argentina and Finland. Each chapter includes factual information, descriptions, and an intra-cultural perspective derived from oral interviews of cultural, historical, or stylistic experts.

New understanding can be gained by reconstructing dances, entering them, and identifying what the experience of the dances entails. The Collection provides original Labanotation scores that document cultural dances that have not previously been available in dance score format for reconstruction. Reconstructions of the dances reveal how they work with variables such as: the design of space; level of movement difficulty; involvement of different parts of the body; music/dance relationships; and the use of individual dancers versus pairs of dancers, or groups made of many pairs or individuals.