Choreologia

　　In December 2020, the International Olympic Committee announced the addition of breakdancing, as a new Olympic sport, for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris. Overseas, it has already been officially incorporated in the Youth Olympic Games. This indicates the widespread fame of street dance forms, including breakdance.
　　As a dance form, breakdance originated in the 1970s within the African American culture of the United States. Breakdance spread globally, targeting the youth, but its artistry was questioned.
　　This article examines the artistry of breakdance “battles.” First, we elucidate the history of breakdancing and describe the various characteristics of a battle. Further, we implement Landsdale and Dodds’s theory—which uses Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality—as a guide to outline the ideal path of intertextuality between breakdance battles and development. Next, the breakdance battles will be compared with the intertextual “borrowing/quoting.” Finally, we will use an actual case study of a breakdance battle to extract the conditions required for evoking artistry.

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Within critical discourse, there are a multitude of terms to describe work in which dance practice merges with screen-based mediums, such as “screendance,” “dance film,” “cine dance,” “videodance,” and “dance for camera.” The term “screendance” has been gaining popularity over other terms because it encompasses the broad diversity within this field. The purpose of this study is to clarify the definitions of screendance as an umbrella term distinguished from other modes of description and reveal its possibilities and issues. Our results showed that screendance implies that “the end-point of the endeavor is a mediated image of dance on a screen, any dance on any screen,” and it was used for many videos on YouTube as well as experimental dance videos that did not feature human bodies dancing. The former promotes democracy of dance and unearths the creativity potential in popular dance, while the latter frames dance as a metaphor without bodies, which triggers a reconsideration of the question of what dance is. Lastly, we explore the idea that screendance’s broad concept causes a lack of unity in dance

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This paper investigates how Japanese dancers have represented ‘black’ or ‘black people’ (Kokujin) in their performances and analyzes their meanings, their ambivalent feelings towards Kokujin, and the influence of American diplomacy in the Post-War period.
　　In Hijikata Tatsumi’s dance piece Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors) in 1959, thought as the first Butoh performance, he painted his body black to represent the black male character from Jean Genet’s novel. However, it was not only Hijikata who performed ‘black’ in this period. After WWⅡ, Japanese dancers picked up the subject that concern to black people such as the social movements of Afro-American, or used music and dance techniques related to black culture, and performed some representations of blackness by various ways especially in the period of 1950s-70s. Here, we can point out the influence of dancers who came to Japan such as Katherine Dunham or Alwin Ailey, and the jazz music that spread during this era, and the US’s policy towards Japan lay behind them.
　　This study will show that in these representations of black people, there is a sense of solidarity of Japanese dancers with Afro-Americans, problems of discrimination that existed in different phases in Japan, and also Japanese people’s own prejudice towards black people.

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