ABSTRACT

In the process, the author highlights the most salient aspects of the author communication model: the participants, their enactment locations, and the infrastructural supports that carry and shape their messages. In this chapter, the author presents data about the dance groups that meet regularly in a fixed location, through the rubric of his communication model. Specifically, the author examines the groups through the lenses of location, the people communicating, social infrastructure, objectives, internal organization, financial organization, temporal organization, artistic infrastructure, and messages. In the remainder of this chapter, the author describes instruments, composition, women's dances, and mixed dances. A creative thread runs through all artistic activities of Balessing dance groups, imbuing even the most moribund with a certain level of animation. Leaders of dance groups hope to effect changes in part through the construction of symbolic moral and social infrastructures.