ABSTRACT
This chapter considers motives and practices of engagement among professional and amateur contemporary practitioners of two traditional dance forms: step dance and short sword rapper. Through a series of semi-structured interviews, dancers of both forms offer informative and intimate accounts of their performance and training processes. These reveal diversity in aesthetic focus, the ways that innovation is driven, whether through collaborative endeavour or choreographed singly, and the significance of social interaction and competition in sustaining dance activity. The subsequent exploration of attitudes to creative agency and authenticity, to presentation and representation, alongside the new realities of geographic and social mobilities, are shown to impact on the form and content of the dances. Consideration is given to some of the ways in which these dancers and their dances draw on new spatial configurations, cross arts collaborations, digital communication and integration with diverse dance genres to generate meaning for themselves and others. In doing so, they open up the potential for newness in dance traditions that are recontextualised, yet celebrate indebtedness to past creativities.
