Search Results (19)

This essay argues that dance festivals are choreographed spaces that shape cultural heritage. The Konark Dance Festival in Odisha, India, is an annual program situated around the Konark Sun Temple, a UNESCO-recognized World Heritage Site. The following explores the interrelationship between the modern space of the temple monument and the modern format of festival dances in Konark. The festival project juxtaposes the monument’s archaeological value with the dances’ cultural value in choreographic neatness, which requires a critical interrogation to determine the negotiations, appropriations, and discomfort these processes otherwise entail. This article also branches out into cultural discourses beyond the stated festival that examine the historical, diplomatic, and touristic networks the dance festival often encompasses. Following the creation of the modern state of Odisha (in 1936) and of the independent nation of India (in 1947), Odisha regional dance forms were remodelled to produce the state dance Odissi, which gained national “classical” recognition in the 1960s and subsequent international repute. Odissi dance has subsequently been formulated and globally circulated as an anthropomorphic symbol of the geopolitical state of Odisha. Through ethnography, visual study, and choreographic analysis, this essay explores the (re)presentational aspects of the region-state in and through dance, which rhetorically inform the staging of the Konark Dance Festival. Full article

This study introduces an innovative integration of Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) with biomechanical principles to examine the golf swing dynamics from an ecological perspective. Traditionally, LMA focuses on the qualitative aspects of movement, often isolated from external influences. This research bridges that gap by investigating how golfers manage and adapt to the inertial forces of the club throughout the swing. Using motion tracking sensors and screw theory, we analyzed the spatial movement pattern in the Kinesphere (mapped as an icosahedron) and related it to force dynamics in the Effort Cube through the inertia tensor. The results showed significant differences between skilled and novice golfers in terms of how efficiently they align their movements with the club’s inertia. Skilled golfers demonstrated smoother Instantaneous Screw Axes (ISAs) and better synchronization with inertia forces, while novice golfers exhibited more abrupt deviations. These findings suggest that integrating qualitative movement descriptors with biomechanical models provides deeper insights into swing efficiency, performance improvement, and injury prevention. This combined framework offers a novel method to enhance both qualitative and quantitative analysis of golf swings. Full article

The immune system plays a critical role in inflammation by initiating responses to infections or tissue damage. The nuclear factor-κB (NF-κB) pathway plays a key role in inflammation and innate immunity, as well as other cellular activities. Dysregulation of this well-choreographed pathway has been implicated in various diseases, including cancer. CARD11 is a key molecule in the BCL10-MALT1 complex, which is involved in transducing the signal downstream of the NF-κB pathway. This study aims to elucidate how CARD11 overexpression exacerbates the prognosis of colorectal cancer (CRC). To identify the cellular pathways influenced by CARD11, transcriptomic analysis in both CRC cell lines and patients was carried out on CARD11– overexpressed HCT-116 and HT-29 CRC cell lines alongside empty vector-transfected cell lines. Furthermore, a comparison of transcriptomic data from adenoma and carcinoma CRC patients with low- (CARD11–) and high-(CARD11+) CARD11 expression was carried out. Whole transcriptomics and bioinformatics analysis results indicate that CARD11 appears to play a key role in CRC progression. Absolute GSEA (absGSEA) on HCT-116 transcriptomics data revealed that CARD11 overexpression promotes cell growth and tissue remodeling and enhances immune response. Key genes co-expressed with CARD11, such as EP300, KDM5A, HIF1A, NFKBIZ, and DUSP1, were identified as mediators of these processes. In the HT-29 cell line, CARD11 overexpression activated pathways involved in chemotaxis and extracellular matrix (ECM) organization, marked by IL1RN, MDK, SPP1, and chemokines like CXCL1, CXCL3, and CCL22, which were shown to contribute to the more invasive stage of CRC. In patient samples, adenoma patients exhibited increased expression of genes associated with the tumor immune microenvironment, such as IL6ST, collagen family members, and CRC transition markers, such as GLI3 and PIEZO2, in CARD11+ adenoma patients. Carcinoma patients showed a dramatic increase in the expression of MAPK8IP2 in CARD11+ carcinoma patients alongside other cancer-related genes, including EMB, EPHB6, and CPEB4. Full article

Around the world, the development of large dams has been increasingly contested. India is no exception and has seen the mobilisation of powerful domestic and transnational socio-environmental movements against dams over more than four decades. In this context, the State of Sikkim in northeast India has been entangled in prolonged hydropower development conflicts since the late 1990s. This article analyses these conflictive entanglements between the Government of India, the State Government of Sikkim, power companies and Sikkim’s autochthonous tribe, the Lepchas. It zooms in on the period of 2011–2017, which saw an abrupt escalation of the conflicts to analyse the messy, deeply political and often unpredictable and contradictory world of dam construction and its contestations. Our analysis is informed by the power cube framework developed by John Gaventa. Our analysis shows how hydropower development is deeply intertwined with local patronage relationships. We show how local elections bring out dam conflict and the operation of power into the open, sometimes leading to abrupt and unexpected switches in positions in relation to hydropower development. We show that these switches should be seen not only as “strategic electoral tactics” but also and importantly as contentious political struggles that (re)configure power in the region. We show how in this process, powerful political actors continuously seek to stabilise power relations among the governing and the governed, choreographing a specific socio-hydraulic order that stretches way beyond simple pro- and anti-dam actors and coalitions as it is embedded in deep hydro(-electro) politics and power plays. Full article

This article explores the first-time choreographic collaboration between Eiko Otake, a renowned Japanese dance artist, and Wen Hui, a celebrated Chinese choreographer and filmmaker, which took place in mainland China in January of 2020. The outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan compelled Otake to return to the US prematurely, and the subsequent global pandemic led the two artists to continue working together through the computer screen. Constructed from daily footage of Wen and Otake moving together, conversing about their personal histories and choreographic works, and visiting the Nanjing Massacre Memorial, the resulting documentary film No Rule Is Our Rule (2023, 74 min) offers a poignant portrayal of their creative process, which places utmost importance on honesty and openness. Through an in-depth analysis of their artistic exploration presented through the film, the article examines how their collaborative endeavor which prioritizes corporeal interaction and unfiltered dialogues can be conceived as a form of mediated social choreography. I argue that their embodied methodology, grounded in the interweaving of personal and social memories, points to the potential for collective healing from the tension and trauma in Sino-Japanese history and promotes collective imagining through intercultural dialogues. Full article

This essay offers a critical introduction to the circulation of racial materialities, and especially whiteness, in North American and European academic contexts. It proposes that we can escape from the dominant epistemology of identity as a fixed attribute of individuals without losing the urgent and much-needed analytics of identity as social and material force. In the gap between “identity politics” and a richer critical politics of identity lies the difference between a discursive public sphere of agonistic conflict and one of potentially transformative relationality. Drawing on critical race theory and especially black radical thought, my analysis rejects the reduction of identity to discrete census categories and attempts to situate contemporary scholarly practices in the context of a planetary decolonial movement. If “identity” today is all too frequently dismissed by a methodological whiteness that strictly separates it from materiality, politics, and knowledge, then a dramaturgical or choreographic analytics of race might better address how racial materialities operate both above and below the level of individual bodies, subjects, and citizens. Synthesizing practical insights from artistic research and performing arts with critical theories of race and identity, this essay refers to some of the author’s recent personal experiences at academic events in order to describe and analyze whiteness as a form of social choreography. Full article

During the existence of Yugoslavia (1945–1991), the leading political ideology of “brotherhood and unity” had to be manifested in all forms of cultural life. Promoting the physically capable body as part of a larger cultural movement, Yugoslavia witnessed the transformation of physical daily regimens into mass bodily spectacles performed at stadiums, called sletovi, demonstrating the power of mass-choreographed discipline. Similarly, Yugoslav choreographers were encouraged to develop a distinct performance aesthetic based on stylization as a rhetoric for modernization, using folk dance as a medium to showcase and promote the collective body of the people through choreographed folklore spectacles. Focusing on these two case studies that exemplify how mass choreography was used as a strategy to choreograph the Yugoslav society, this paper analyzes how political ideologies and their constructions through physicality supported the Yugoslav state project, thereby pointing to the present-day remnants of these aesthetics in the post-Yugoslav republics, evident in mass protests. By utilizing archival and choreographic analysis, I demonstrate how movement and dance impacted the public understanding of unity and helped the creation of a Yugoslav socialist society, drawing from Andrew Hewitt’s thesis on “social choreography”. Full article

Multiracialism, or the concept of “mixed-race”, remains a key racial discourse within twenty-first-century North American societies. Scholarly and mainstream studies of multiracial people often highlight the function of speech in theorizing mixed-race experiences, where interviews or other first-person narratives resist racialized stereotypes and express complex multiracial identities. Yet these studies often overlook the body as a comparable analytical site, ignoring how the body’s mobilization—in dance, choreography, and everyday actions—might further nuance mixed-race subjecthood. My article emphasizes experimental dance and choreography as alternative methods for imagining multiracial subjects, where these body-based approaches reject both stereotypical depictions of multiracial people in mainstream media and “transparent” representations in interviews. Drawing on the concept of “opacity,” which describes unknowable, illegible difference, I propose that experimental dance enables the expression of “opaque” multiracial subjectivities. This article then offers a choreographic analysis of Glenn Potter-Takata’s Yonsei f*ck f*ck, an experimental dance that produces opacities for its performers, who are of mixed Japanese heritage. Through movement scores, stand-up comedy, and a re-created “late-night” talk show, the dance invites audiences to move beyond the desire to recognize, categorize, and “know” the mixed-race Asian American performer. Full article

This article discusses how orientalism has operated and continues to operate within the North American artistic landscape of dance artists. The author starts by focusing on Uday Shankar (1900–1977), one of the major, though often overlooked, figures over the last 100 years of South Asian (and predominantly Indian) dance performance on the concert stage in the diasporic context, to consider how orientalism, the desire for authenticity, a nationalist agenda, religious fundamentalism, economic necessities, multi-cultural initiatives, and diversity desires all interact and coalesce to form an undercurrent of limited potentials about how and why South Asian dance can exist within the American performance discourse. In an auto-ethnographic move, the author then juxtaposes Shankar’s historical legacy with a new artistic project by the author (b. 1969), entitled Reorient the Orient, premiering in 2024. The writing uses archival sources such as photographs, programs, publicity materials, featured essays, newspaper previews, reviews, filmed dance footage, choreographic analysis, and personal reflections to explore how social factors and personal ambitions create awkward relationships within orientalism’s manifestations in the diasporic U.S. performance landscape. Full article

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate qualitative value indicators of region-based community dance for cultural urban regeneration. To this end, the conceptual structure of local-based community dance was explored and evaluation indicators were developed by deriving questions related to this. The specific research procedures and results are as follows: First, a literature review and Delphi survey were conducted to obtain factors and questions regarding qualitative value indicators. Consequently, four factors of local singularity, convergent creativity, sustainability, and community culture were obtained with 43 questions. Next, a preliminary survey targeting 122 people who have participated in representative local dance festivals (the ‘Wonju Dynamic Dancing Carnival’, ‘Cheonan World Dance Festival’, and ‘Andong Maskdance Festival’) in Korea was conducted to determine the relationship between the factors and questions. Multi-dimensional value indicators with 30 questions in four factors were obtained from an exploratory factor analysis using SPSS version 25.0. Then, the main survey, targeting 341 people who have participated in three representative local dance festivals in Korea, was conducted to verify the validity of the value indicators. Finally, evaluation indicators of 26 questions (seven questions for regional uniqueness, five questions for convergent creativity, seven questions for sustainability, and seven questions for community culture) were developed from a confirmatory factor analysis using AMOS version 24.0. Additionally, the contents evaluated by each factor are as follows: Firstly, ‘Local Singularity’ is a factor in whether the evaluation target sufficiently contains the unique characteristics of the region. Secondly, ‘Convergent Creativity’ is a factor in whether the evaluation target converges the indigenous culture (traditional culture) and acceptance culture (modern culture) of the region well. Thirdly, ‘Sustainability’ is a factor in whether the evaluation target contributes to the sustainable development of the region. Fourthly, ‘Community Culture’ is a factor in whether the evaluation target contributes to the formation of community culture in the region. This study is significant in that it emphasises the potential possibility of community dance, which can contribute to cultural urban regeneration based on the perspectives of cultural democracy. Therefore, the results of this study are expected to be extended and applied to various types of community dance in the future. Moreover, it is further forecasted that this study will suggest the meaning of the qualitative valuation of art and culture for a variety of subjects, such as policy experts and administrators, as well as for directors, choreographers, and participants in community dance. Full article

As a Colombian scholar and artist, the author of this essay interrogates feminist aesthetics and artistic practice in a choreographic mode; improvising to see where movement takes her. This first impulse creates the space for performing writing and opening the space of creation. The movement starts at home, immersed in everydayness, aided by poetry and the analysis of the work of three other contemporary Colombian artists who also start at home in their artistic practice. Here, home is also a reference to all the artists’ (including the author’s) place of birth: Barranquilla, Colombia. The aesthetic philosophical tradition comes into play against the backdrop of the ideas presented by Simone de Beauvoir in her seminal The Second Sex (1949), who urges women in the middle of the twentieth century, to transcend, to fight against immanence. The works of Clara Gaviria, Raisa Galofre and Jessica Sofía Mitrani accompany the author’s journey while she arrives at the realization that it all starts with the need to transcend the quotidian while using, precisely, the apparent banality of such everyday things and tasks. Through the created art objects, the author creates an essay about, around and beyond artistic feminist practice and aesthetics. Full article

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the interrelationship between time spent underwater (UW), movement frequency and accompanying blood acid base balance response. Elite artistic swimmers (n = 6) participated in the investigation and were all familiar with the testing procedures. All athletes completed the same choreographed artistic swimming routine. The routine was videoed and the number of movements during each ‘lap’ of the routine counted. Fingertip capillary blood samples were collected prior to the routine 60 sec post routine for pH, partial pressure of carbon dioxide (pCO2), partial pressure of oxygen (pO2), bicarbonate (HCO₃⁻) and potassium (K+). and lactate (La) concentration (mmol/L). On a separate day an incremental exercise test to exhaustion was performed on a cycle ergometer for determination of maximal oxygen uptake (VO2max). Over half the routine was performed underwater (56 ± 4%). Aside from pCO2 (−1.07 ± 12.29%, p = 0.686), there were significant changes in all variables measured from the BG analysis. VO2peak was significantly correlated to total UW of the routine (r = −0.93; p = 0.007). as well as ∆PO2 r = 0.47 and ∆HCO3 r = 0.51. There was also a significant correlation between total UW and post routine pCO2 (r = 0.86; p = 0.030). There was also a significant correlation between total movements during the routine and post pO2 (r = −0.83; p = 0.044). These data show UW in combination with movement rate during a AS routine imfluence the metabolic response to the exercise. In addition, VO2max represents an important performance variable influencing AS performance. Full article

Background: Physical activity (PA) is recommended in the management of patients with pulmonary fibrosis (PF) to improve health outcomes. Dance is one such form of PA which is meaningful, valuable, enjoyable and has demonstrated positive physical and mental health effects. Methods: With pre-post design, 16 patients, members of the Irish Lung Fibrosis Association, were enrolled in this study. Once weekly, 75-min dance sessions were delivered for eight weeks via Zoom by an experienced choreographer. Participants completed Chronic Respiratory Questionnaire Self-Administered Standardised Format (CRQ-SAS) and European Quality of Life 5 Dimensions 3 Level Version (EQ-5D-3L) to assess self-rated quality of life. A paired-sample t-test was employed to assess the mean differences between the pre-and post-intervention scores. Results: Most patients (78.57%) were aged over 60 years; with 71.43% diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis more than 3 years ago. We performed an analysis of 10/16 participants who completed the intervention (5 males, 5 females). On CRQ-SAS scale we found, (a) dyspnoea—small to moderate magnitude improvement of 0.5–1.0 among 50%, (b) fatigue—small to moderate magnitude improvement of 0.5–1.0 among 40%, (c) emotional function—small to high magnitude improvement of 0.5–2.0 among 50%, (d) mastery—small magnitude improvement of 0.5 among 20%. Participants reported their health moderate to best on Visual Analogue Scale of EQ-5D-3L which improved by 1–3 scale among 40%. Mental health improved as percentage of not feeling anxious or depressed rose post event from 42.86% to 72.73%. Conclusion: Our findings demonstrate that a virtual dance intervention is acceptable, enjoyable and feasible for improving health outcomes among PF patients. More organised and continuous events in future may reveal cost-benefit ratio and impact on health outcomes. Full article

The purpose of this study was to explore strategies for distributing online content of dance post COVID-19 in Korea. And specially to discuss the distribution strategies of online performances through videoization of dance performances and OTT (over-the-top) streaming: (1) Methods: For this purpose, a survey was conducted on the distribution strategy of dance online contents for a total of 100 practitioners such as dance field, video contents, and art management. A total 91 sample were used except for defective questionnaires, and Vavra (1997)’s modified important performance analysis was conducted; (2) Results: The results of the matrix through the modified IPA analysis are as follows: first, the first quadrant included ‘quality of dance performance’, ‘platform for OTT streaming’, and ‘promotion for potential audience development’. This means that both explicit and intrinsic importance are high, and it is an important execution factor that has a positive effect on the satisfaction of the online contents of dance only if it is met. Second, the second quadrant included ‘brand awareness of choreographer or dance company’, ‘creative composition and choreography’, and ‘fee and price criteria’. This is a case of low explicit importance but high intrinsic importance, and these factors are attractive attributes that affect the satisfaction of dance online contents, although consumers do not expect it to be important. Third, the third quadrant included ‘new formats and curation’, ‘convergence technology (AR, VR, 3D, etc.) for the field sense’, and ‘online audience service (communication, membership, etc.)’. This means that both explicit and intrinsic importance are low, and if these factors are met, it can have a positive effect on the satisfaction of viewing of dance online contents. However, it does not have a negative effect even if it is not met. Fourth, in the fourth quadrant, ‘production and editing competency’, ‘quality of videos and sounds’, ‘copyright of performance creation’, and ‘fandom and audience management’ was included. This is an essential attribute in the distribution strategy of dance online contents because it has high explicit importance and low intrinsic importance, and it can have a negative impact on satisfaction when these factors are not met. Full article

Endurance training (ET) has multiple beneficial effects on cardiovascular health (CVH), but there is an evident lack of knowledge on differential effects of various types of ET on indices of CVH in women. The aim of this study was to analyse the effectiveness of two different types of ET on changes in indicators of CVH in apparently healthy adult women. The sample included 58 women (24 ± 3 years; height: 165 ± 6 cm, mass: 66.7 ± 7.2 kg, BMI: 24.3 ± 2.5 kg/m², at baseline) divided into one control non-exercising group (n = 19), and two exercising experimental groups (EE). The first EE participated in choreographed aerobic-endurance training (CAT; n = 19), while the second participated in treadmill-based endurance exercise (TEE; n = 20) during the experimental protocol (8 weeks, 24 training sessions). The testing included pre- and post-exercise protocols and measures of anthropometric/body composition indices, lipid panel, and endurance capacity. Two-way analysis of variance for repeated measurements with consecutive post hoc analysis was applied to the “group” and “measurement” variables. The main significant ANOVA effects found for measurement, and “Group x Measurement” interaction (p < 0.05) were found for all variables but body height. The EE induced positive changes in lipid panel variables, anthropometric/body-build status, and endurance capacity. However, TEE improved endurance capacity to a greater extent than CAT. The results suggest that that the optimal exercise intensity and self-chosen type of physical-activity may result in positive effects on indices of CVH, even in women of young age and good health status. Full article