Training in classical music is essential when mastering classical dance forms of India. “Music comprises song, instrument, and dance,” this Sanskrit aphorism dates back to the 13th century treatise Sangeet Ratnakar by musicologist Sharangdev. As richness and complexity grew in the Indian classical music system, it influenced the content and repertoire of Kathak classical dance. This is not limited to technical dance innovations, but also the instruments, lyrical compositions, raga modes, and tala rhythm cycles. These components played a large role in the variety and depth of the kathakaar’s (story teller’s) presentation. When following the lineages, it is evident that not only were members of each family well versed in dance, they were fluent in vocal and percussion, propagating each part of the tradition. Even in modern professional dance institutes such as The National Institute of Kathak Dance in New Delhi, pupils study voice and percussion along with dance. In this paper, I draw from more than a decade of training in Kathak dance and Hindustani music, as well as historical sources, participant observations, and interviews with students and professional dancers and musicians to demonstrate that intimate knowledge of music heightens and accelerates a dancer's grasp of nuanced expression and innovation in Kathak. Although, in this day and age, students often focus on a singular artform, those who engage in the traditional tutelage system receive diverse exposure of complementary subjects thus developing a deeper understanding of the artform.

This paper provides a three-part structure for positioning the anthropology of dance in the United States—from its emergence in the early 1900s to the present—as an applied practice. Section one begins by identifying Boasian influences through the efforts of Ella Cara Deloria and Zora Neale Hurston. Their field research explored how cultural knowledge among the Native American (Deloria) and African Diasporic (Hurston) communities with whom they were part revealed strategies of adaptation and survival. With an emphasis on language preservation, another important contribution demonstrated emic views of individual and collective experience. Section two investigates Gertrude Kurath who helped pioneer the discipline of dance anthropology with fieldwork largely focused on documenting Native American groups. Inspired by presumed cultural decline, she generated grounded theories and methods or etic frameworks for comparative dance study. Discussion of Kurath’s 'outsider' approach considers how socio-economic and political developments parallel Deloria and Hurston’s 'insider' motivations. It is this point that leads to section three, which offers a springboard to articulate a model of applied dance anthropology for the twenty-first century. Unifying these scholars was their commitment to recognize issues impacting quality of life—putting ‘anthropology’ to use. Current research directions that combine emic and etic perspectives to solve practical problems and improve human experience offers new insights about the primary function of dance culture to navigate change. The paper concludes by describing the author’s investigations grounded by principles of social engagement, embodied awareness, and environmental relations, which substantiate the significance of applied dance anthropology to advance cultural studies.

Motivated by a desire to reclaim punk’s anti-establishment roots, youth of the hardcore punk subculture sought an outlet for their social and political disillusionment through a new music style that was harder, faster, and louder—for them, angrier. The collectively-produced live show, a manifestation of hardcore’s DIY (do-it-yourself) ideology, is the crux of the scene, and moshing, the movement practice that accompanies the live music, is the show’s main event. This dance practice epitomizes the music scene’s extreme aesthetic, where moshers must “dance hard or die” (Warzone, 1988), as they forcefully carve out an open pit with roundhouse kicks, floor punches, and cartwheels. While the movement reads as untenable, even violent, to outsiders, participation in this fury is that of communally protected consensual risk and demonstrates a dancer’s understanding of the scene’s brand of angry rebellion. Thus, at the core of hardcore’s identity lies a tie between the performance of anger and subcultural authenticity. Yet, there is an ambiguity to the performance of anger as it flirts with the borders of violence and dramatization (Meintjes 2017). In this ethnographic project, I address this ambiguity, employing dance scholar Judith Hamera’s framework of technique to examine how the hardcore scene uses moshing to negotiate itinerant social understandings of authenticity within the blurred lines between anger, violence, and spectacle. Rather than seek clarity around the categorizations’ nebulousness, I center how one community mobilizes anger’s ambiguity as a mechanism for boundary maintenance, and more broadly, I illuminate the stakes of protecting underground illegibility.