Editor's Note

This issue of Dance Research Journal has us examining dance in Ukraine, Greece, Israel, the United States (by way of Australia), Germany, and the Yugoslav region. In these pages, the very definition of “Western” dance is thrown open for debate, along with many of our investments in the value of geographic, national, and classed artistic labels in dance studies. In this conversation, we will look at ballet, arguably the most “Western” dance form, differently in the context of the current war in Ukraine as one school navigates their relationship to the past while the country is in the midst of current turmoil. We will consider the argument that “the West” neglects contemporary Greece (while romanticizing ancient Greek culture as Western) thereby leaving this culture under-theorized. We’ll look at the symbolic attempt to connect a fractured Jerusalem by choreographically rising above. We’ll reconsider the choreopolitics of a post-modern African American icon. Film studies provides a means of interrogating ways of reckoning with Germany’s terrorist past through embodied conjuring. And we will look at the impact and uses of choreographic traditions of local and national belonging in a changing post-Yugoslav region. Our notions of “high art,” spectacle, and embodied identity are troubled in each essay, particularly around “Western” dance definitions of “concert” vs. “folk” dance. All of the pieces take on the ways in which broader political forces shape our senses of national belonging through dance (dance for the people, dance for the elite, and dance for the state), especially at times of profound national shifts and crisis.