Social history picks up the drumbeat of dancing in both the condemnation and the celebration of popular culture. Listen to the curé of Savigny (Rhône) in 1821, worrying about the peasants' overindulgence: “since they are full of passions, and dancing only enflames these passions, since these meetings never finish without crime, since a single debauched person can infect those who watch him, and since things are said [at dances] which should not be heard, and things are done which should not be seen, it is prudent for priests to oppose dances altogether.” A century later this was the mot d'ordre of his eminence the Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris, who proscribed modern dancing, and also that of the moral pundit of Le Peuple, who called the tango, the fox trot and the shimmy “une sorte de précoce et dangereuse défloration virginale.”

There is evidence for the existence of some kind of grammatical structure in a passage from Golek Lambangsari, a Javanese classical court dance for women, composed by Sasmintamardawa of Jogjakarta, Java. In the passage under examination Sasmintamardawa used two different choreographic methods for manipulating the Javanese classical dance material: first, the more usual traditional, multipart variations with their connecting transitions; and second, very short, simple variations which seem not to have transitions between them. An analysis of the boundaries between the phrases in this passage reveals that the boundary conditions are different for each choreographic method, and further, for each level of the structure of the passage. The latter discovery indicates that the structure of the passage (no matter which choreographic method is considered) is different at each of three levels which I define in the boundary analysis—phrase, subphrase, and basic movement unit—and that there is some overall organizing grammatical principle causing this to be so. An explanation of Jogjanese classical female dance style phrase structure precedes the boundary analysis of the passage from Golek Lambangsari.

Every few years there is a resurgence of interest in what has come to be known as danse du ventre or, less elegantly, belly dancing. By whatever name it may be called, however, this dance has inevitably elicited an exaggerated response from those not accustomed to the social background to which it belongs. In the past a climate of disapproval has hampered any attempt at serious evaluation of this dance form; at the present time the situation has reversed to a point where the enthusiasm of its protagonists has become the chief hindrance to an objective assessment. A dance whose enduring charm has managed to survive not only a body of disparaging commentary, but the spurious and tawdry aura surrounding so many of its practitioners, seems deserving of a fresh appraisal.

The Irigwe, numbering around 17,000, are the third largest of several dozen so-called “plateau pagan” tribes on the Jos Plateau in Benue-Plateau State, Nigeria. Situated on the western edge of the Plateau around 20 miles west of the towns of Jos and Bukuru, the Irigwe have their own language and social traditions which clearly distinguish them from the other plateau tribes. They are currently reknowned all over the Plateau, indeed all over Nigeria, as skilled dancers. The focus of this paper will be to describe and analyze briefly the importance of Irigwe dance groups as emissary delegations, traditionally between various Irigwe sub-groups, and nowdays also between Irigwe as a whole and the rest of Nigeria. The maintenance of boundaries between socio-cultural groupings which regularly interact often involves agents of one sort of another who serve (on a de facto if not on an explicit basis) as bridges between the groupings. Dance group members in effect form such bridging agents in Irigwe.

Irigwe is a segmentary society lacking any traditional political chieftaincy. Twenty-five semi-autonomous agnatically based tribal “sections” are bound together on the one hand by each section's having exclusive responsibility for performing one or another ritual felt to be necessary for the tribe, and on the other hand by cross-cuting affinal and cognatic bonds mediated by both primary and “secondary” intersection marriages (Sangree 1972). The Irigwe divide their 25 sections into two geographically discrete clusters: Rigwe, the “parent” division, south of the swiftly flowing Ngell River with 10 sections, and Nyango, the “child” division, north of the river, with 15 sections.