Dancing in Utopia
Bought in 1925 by Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, the Devon estate of Dartington Hall earned itself a place in the annals of utopian schemes through the Elmhirsts' conviction that arts, education and work could all be integrated into an abundant life for the participation of everyone. From the perspective of the time, when dance was not necessarily given equality with other arts, they believed in dance as an art for the betterment of society. As early as 1932 a Dance School was built on the site. It offered professional training in modern dance, and acted as a base for community outreach. From the 1960s, Dartington College of Arts became a fulcrum for intercontinental exchanges and the Dartington Dance Festivals of the 1970s provided inspiration for a generation of independent and radical choreographers. After Dartington College of Arts moved from the estate in 2010, many dance artists were able to develop their work in the vacated studios. Schumacher College, Dartington's ecological education centre, meanwhile evolved degree qualifications that combined rigorous science with discovery methods deriving from the embodied training that dancers had been developing. This new edition of the book, first published in 2007, assesses Dartington's dance legacy in its centenary year, with insights into dance of the twenty-first century. For students of history, it provides a lens through which to view a century of change in dance and society. Enthusiasts of Dartington Hall will find here a compelling narrative about exceptional artists working within the often impossible demands of utopian dreams.
Butoh and Suzuki Performance in Australia
In Butoh and Suzuki Performance in Australia: Bent Legs on Strange Grounds, 1982-2023, Marshall considers how the originally Japanese forms of butoh dance and Suzuki's theatre reconfigure historical lineages to find ancient yet transcultural ancestors within Australia and beyond. Marshall argues that artists working in Australia with butoh and Suzuki techniques develop conflicted yet compelling diasporic, multicultural, spiritually and corporeally compelling interpretations of theatrical practice. Marshall puts at the centre of butoh historiography the work of Tess de Quincey, Yumi Umiumare, Tony Yap, Lynne Bradley, Simon Woods, Frances Barbe, and Australian Suzuki practitioners Jacqui Carroll and John Nobbs. Jonathan W. Marshall's Bent Legs on Strange Grounds is an important contribution to the body of literature on butoh, as well as to studies of dance in Australia that will be valuable to practitioners and scholars alike. Detailed discussions of Australian butoh artists open up consideration of how global and local histories, migrations, and landscapes not only were key to butoh's formation in Japan, but also to its continued development around the world. Attention to butoh's emplacement in Australia, Marshall convincingly argues, reveals insights about national identity, race, power, and more that are relevant well beyond the Australian performance context. -- Rosemary Candelario, Texas Woman's University, co-editor, Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2018) Marshall's Bent Legs on Strange Grounds explores the remarkable transformative era of Australia's reconsideration of its place in the region. A definitive study of Australian experiments in butoh and the theatrical vision of Suzuki Tadashi, the book shows how new corporeal and spatial dramaturgies of the Japanese avant-garde fundamentally changed Australian performance. Expansively researched and annotated, this impressive study connects Australian performance after the New Wave with globalization, postmodern dance, Indigeneity, and subcultures, and it details the work of leading Australian/Asian artists. Bent Legs on Strange Grounds speaks about the development of embodied knowledge and the consequential refiguration of Australia's sense of being in the world. It is also a study of butoh and Suzuki's legacy in global terms, wherein Australian experimental performance also becomes something larger than itself. -- Peter Eckersall, The Graduate Center, CUNY, author of Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan (2013).
Funny Moves
Funny Moves: Dance Humor Politics explores the intersection of dance and humor and the political stakes that bodies incur when they dare to be both aestheticized and funny. The editors posit that funny moves are dance's Other--the missteps or oversteps that don't fit a particular dance form. Funniness in dance, whether gleeful, surprising, or odd, causes disruptions which may be progressive or conservative, inciting pleasures that counterbalance the artform's often serious codes. Writing from Latin America, the Caribbean, South Asia, Europe, and the United States, the book's ten authors provide diverse observational techniques and creative vocabularies for finding, analyzing, and theorizing funny moves across dance forms, dance scenes, and dance screens. Some of the authors find hope in the laughter of their artist subjects and their audiences, and some linger in the ambiguity and confusion so created. Each essay takes on a single surprise factor or a choreographic comic rupture, relishing in the amassed effects or affects across an absurdist cinematic, staged, or quotidian sequence. What is "funny" in each case pops up as a wildcard that evokes recognizable shared experiences, sometimes pushing back against dominant or mainstream logic and its supremacist laughter.
Text as Dance
This book offers a groundbreaking investigation into issues of gender, power and the representation of sovereignty in French Baroque court ballet - and in today's performances that recall them. Mark Franko uses powerful interpretive tools derived from historiography and critical theory, especially the work of German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, to offer the reader both a historical and a theoretical interpretation of this genre of dance in France (c. 1615-1654), as well as its aftermath and legacy today. Through doing so, he reaches conclusions about how sovereignty and power were both perceived by viewers at the time and how they were represented through dance, given that it was the noble class who devised and performed court ballets. He enquires into the role of choreography and theatricality as potentially critical forces operating at the heart of sovereignty. Franko places the work of Louis Marin on power, representation and movement in French Baroque painting and performance in juxtaposition to that of Benjamin on theater. Other historians whose work is prominent in this study are Ernst Kantorowicz, Michel Foucault and Jos矇 Antonio Maravall. With wide breadth in the work of historians, philosophers, political scientists, critical theorists, musicologists and dance historians, this is the culmination of a career's-worth of scholarship and research in the field.
The Joy of Salsa
Dance into a World of Joy and ConfidenceEmbark on an exhilarating journey with The Joy of Salsa: Unleash Your Confidence, Step by Step, where the thrill of dance meets personal transformation. Enter a vibrant world of rhythm and movement that promises to lift your spirits and boost your confidence.Explore the heart and soul of salsa, as you discover its rich origins and diverse styles in the opening chapters. Whether you're a newbie taking your first step or a seasoned dancer, this book offers a treasure trove of insights and techniques to enhance your journey. Learn the foundational steps and footwork, and feel the rhythm that will guide your every move.Dive deeper into the art of salsa with chapters dedicated to perfecting posture and balance-a critical component for any dancer. Experience the music on a new level, understanding its beats and expressions, and becoming one with its flow. As you advance, unlock the magic of partner work, mastering the subtle art of communication without words.Add your unique flair with styling techniques that will have you spinning and turning with grace and confidence. The book offers practical strategies to overcome common dance fears, empowering you to glide across the dance floor with self-assurance. Structured practice guides and goal-setting advice ensure not just improvement, but true mastery.Experience the joy of salsa in social settings, understanding its culture and etiquette to enrich your interactions and connections. Beyond steps and spins, discover the incredible fitness benefits of salsa, making it a fulfilling workout for body and spirit. Finally, the book invites you to continually expand your skills and embrace salsa as a lifelong journey of joy and growth.
Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts
Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts offers a profound exploration of the rich interplay between classical Indian dance forms and the broader realms of literature and the arts. This book delves into the historical, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions of classical Indian dance traditions, such as Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Odissi, Kuchipudi, and Manipuri, among others. Through an interdisciplinary lens, readers discover how these dance forms are intricately woven into the fabric of Indian literature, mythology, poetry, music, and visual arts. Drawing on ancient texts, scholarly analysis, and contemporary performances, the book illuminates the enduring significance of classical Indian dance as a vibrant expression of spirituality, storytelling, and cultural identity. Whether you're a student of dance, literature, or cultural studies, or simply an enthusiast of Indian arts and traditions, this book offers a captivating journey into the enchanting world of classical Indian dance and its enduring resonance across artistic disciplines.
The Joy of Salsa
Dance into a World of Joy and ConfidenceEmbark on an exhilarating journey with The Joy of Salsa: Unleash Your Confidence, Step by Step, where the thrill of dance meets personal transformation. Enter a vibrant world of rhythm and movement that promises to lift your spirits and boost your confidence.Explore the heart and soul of salsa, as you discover its rich origins and diverse styles in the opening chapters. Whether you're a newbie taking your first step or a seasoned dancer, this book offers a treasure trove of insights and techniques to enhance your journey. Learn the foundational steps and footwork, and feel the rhythm that will guide your every move.Dive deeper into the art of salsa with chapters dedicated to perfecting posture and balance-a critical component for any dancer. Experience the music on a new level, understanding its beats and expressions, and becoming one with its flow. As you advance, unlock the magic of partner work, mastering the subtle art of communication without words.Add your unique flair with styling techniques that will have you spinning and turning with grace and confidence. The book offers practical strategies to overcome common dance fears, empowering you to glide across the dance floor with self-assurance. Structured practice guides and goal-setting advice ensure not just improvement, but true mastery.Experience the joy of salsa in social settings, understanding its culture and etiquette to enrich your interactions and connections. Beyond steps and spins, discover the incredible fitness benefits of salsa, making it a fulfilling workout for body and spirit. Finally, the book invites you to continually expand your skills and embrace salsa as a lifelong journey of joy and growth.
The Dancer's Handbook
The Dancer's Handbook offers a holistic exploration of the dance industry's challenges, authored by dancers intimately familiar with its complexities.
Ethics in Contact Rhetoric
Ethics in Contact Rhetoric re-orients communication theory by centering touch and de-centering symbolic acts. Inspired by MLK's tradition of nonviolent power, a contact orientation highlights the incarnate and immediate ground of communication ethics. Ethical interactions are defined as bio-relational dances arcing steps of nurture, respect, justice, and too often, violence. Centering humanity's physical mutuality is a vital move today. Communication is a thoroughly interactive art, but the West's ancient "instrumental" tradition of rhetoric and its accompanying utilitarian ethic valorize individual agency over joint action. This book re-balances rhetorical theory by enabling critique of embodied relational patterns. Special emphasis is placed on engaging material injustice and discerning the role of rhetoric in social transformation. Critical case studies demonstrate contact rhetoric's rich heuristic and diverse applications.
Dancing on the Fault Lines of History
Dancing on the Fault Lines of History collects essential essays by Susan Manning, one of the founders of critical dance studies, recounting her career writing and rewriting the history of modern dance. Three sets of keywords--gender and sexuality, whiteness and Blackness, nationality and globalization--illuminate modern dance histories from multiple angles, coming together in varied combinations, shifting positions from foreground to background. Among the many artists discussed are Isadora Duncan, Vaslav Nijinsky, Ted Shawn, Helen Tamiris, Katherine Dunham, Jos矇 Lim籀n, Pina Bausch, Reggie Wilson, and Nelisiwe Xaba. Calling for a comparative and transnational historiography, Manning ends with an extended case study of Mary Wigman's multidimensional exchange with artists from Indonesia, India, China, Korea, and Japan. Like the artists at the center of her research, Manning's writing dances on the fault lines of history. Her introduction and annotations to the essays reflect on how and why these keywords became central to her research, revealing the autobiographical resonances of her scholarship as she confronts the cultural politics of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Dancing on the Fault Lines of History
Dancing on the Fault Lines of History collects essential essays by Susan Manning, one of the founders of critical dance studies, recounting her career writing and rewriting the history of modern dance. Three sets of keywords--gender and sexuality, whiteness and Blackness, nationality and globalization--illuminate modern dance histories from multiple angles, coming together in varied combinations, shifting positions from foreground to background. Among the many artists discussed are Isadora Duncan, Vaslav Nijinsky, Ted Shawn, Helen Tamiris, Katherine Dunham, Jos矇 Lim籀n, Pina Bausch, Reggie Wilson, and Nelisiwe Xaba. Calling for a comparative and transnational historiography, Manning ends with an extended case study of Mary Wigman's multidimensional exchange with artists from Indonesia, India, China, Korea, and Japan. Like the artists at the center of her research, Manning's writing dances on the fault lines of history. Her introduction and annotations to the essays reflect on how and why these keywords became central to her research, revealing the autobiographical resonances of her scholarship as she confronts the cultural politics of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Dance and Science in the Long Nineteenth Century
Revealing the interplay and influence of dance and science during an age of colonial expansionBringing together dance and science, two paradigms that explore the nature and possibilities of the body, this volume illuminates the meanings and articulations of dance in nineteenth-century societies. This global collection of studies reveals how the two fields informed each other's development and engaged with dominant European worldviews in a time of unprecedented colonial expansion.The chapters in Dance and Science in the Long Nineteenth Century examine how trends and developments in the performing arts reflected scientific thinking of this era, including the categorization of "types" of bodies and the ranking of cultural and religious beliefs, as well as how dance served as an active site of inquiry where the workings and limits of the human body could be studied. Researchers discuss topics including the influence of plant biology on the aesthetics of ballet, technological advancements in the staging and recording of performances, arguments for the use of Eurhythmics in promoting a stronger "race," and European fascination with Indian dance and yoga.Featuring response essays that put leading scholars in conversation with one another and offer new perspectives, this volume is unique in its geographic scope and its discussion of diverse bodies, cultures, themes, and scientific disciplines. It sheds light on a historical interplay that has shaped many of today's political and cultural realities.
Butoh, as Heard by a Dancer
This book explores the origins of Butoh in postwar Japan through orality and transmission, in conjunction with an embodied research approach.
Mura Dehn
This book tells the relatively unknown story of Mura Dehn (1902- 1987) a white, Jewish dancer from Russia, once deemed among the most beautiful classical dancers in Europe, who emigrated to the United States in the 1930s. For the first time the efforts of Dehn to record, analyse and champion the development of jazz dance in America during the 1930s, 40s and 50s are brought to life. The book celebrates and explores her long-term commitment to supporting and nurturing Black American jazz dancers, and devoting her life to heralding and chronicling its innovators and creators through performance, teaching and film-making. This work includes both first-hand accounts with people who knew and worked with Dehn, including her company manager Allen Blitz, friend Eiko Otake, and notable urban dance scholars such as Sally Sommer; and material from Dehn's archival collection in the New York Public Library. The book offers a flavour of the dance halls, the first places of social-racial integration in America, where jazz was born out of African-American social dances, and gives credence to the growing acceptance of this form of art as equivalent to classical dance and music.
Karbala in the Taʿziyeh Episode, Shiʿi Devotional Drama in Iran
An innovative exploration of the dramatization of the Karbala narrative in the Iranian taʿziyeh, this book provides original insight into the genre's compositional features, and historical development. Drawing from many unpublished manuscripts, its engagement with the plays of the taʿziyeh repertoire is unprecedented.
The Routledge Introduction to Ballet, its Culture and Issues
As an introduction to ballet's history, culture, and meanings, this book draws on the latest ballet scholarship to describe the trajectory of a dance form that has risen to global ubiquity and benefited from many diverse influences along the way.
Humanizing Ballet Pedagogies
In Humanizing Ballet Pedagogies, Jessica Zeller offers a new take on the ballet pedagogy manual, examining how and why ballet pedagogies develop, considering their implications for students and teachers, and proposing processes by which readers can enact humanizing, equitable approaches.
Resistance and Support
Resistance and Support: Contact Improvisation @ 50 is a ground-breaking anthology that collects twenty original writings that elucidate critically important somatic and political perspectives on Contact Improvisation (CI). This form of partner dancing that was started in the United States in 1972, has spread into a vibrant global community in the twenty-first century. Resistance and Support is edited and includes an introduction by veteran CI practitioner and dance studies scholar Ann Cooper Albright. For much of its existence in the twentieth century, Contact Improvisation prided itself on its democratic and egalitarian roots. Jams are open to newcomers, women learned to lift men, and dancing roles were not conventionally gendered in the traditional sense of partnered dancing such as tango or ballroom. These conventions meant that questions of social power were often ignored within the jams and festivals where Contact Improvisation thrives. This thoughtful collection engages issues of inclusion and access through insightful essays written by people whose life experiences are shaped by this extraordinary form of kinaesthetic communication. Chapters trace the stories of CI in China and Taiwan, India, Mexico, Brazil, as well as those in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Some discuss the somatic training that provides a movement basis for the improvisational exchanges between dancers. Others foreground the feminist and queer perspectives on the evolving twenty-first century practice of the form. Several elaborate on the healing, spiritual, or therapeutic aspects of CI, while others explore the mixed ability approaches to the form popularized by Alito Alessi's Dance Ability pedagogy. Like Critical Mass: CI @ 50, the international conference and festival honoring CI's 50th anniversary from which these writings emerged, these essays both celebrate the expansive possibilities and critique some of the exclusionary conventions of this ever-evolving form of communal dance.
Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon
More than 40 works across media, including major ensemble performances, emerging in the afterlife of postmodern dancePhiladelphia-based artist, dancer and choreographer Ralph Lemon (born 1952) is one of the most significant figures to arise from New York's downtown scene in the 1990s. This catalog, published on the occasion of the first US museum exhibition of Lemon's work in movement, film and installation, traces the arc of his ongoing collaborations, which extend far beyond the paradigm of dance. Text by exhibition curators Connie Butler and Thomas Jean Lax is accompanied by essays and contributions by Kevin Beasley, Adrienne Edwards, Saidiya Hartman, Darrell Jones, Ralph Lemon, Okwui Okpokwasili and Kevin Quashie. Featuring a dust jacket that unfolds into a poster, the book includes full-color illustrations of Lemon's artworks and reproductions of his sketches and notations.
Mountain Dance and Hoedown Workshop
A Basic Reference Guide to Appalachian Mountain Square Dance Figures
Creativity in Indian Dance
Heralded as the father of Indian Creative Dance, and India's cultural ambassador, Uday Shankar (1900-1977) was a dancer and choreographer who created a vibrant new Indian dance form without any ethno-regional centricity. Over time, Shankar's art evolved from being a representation of the exotic East, to a narrative of modern India. This book provides a detailed study of Shankar's works in his autumn years (1960-1977), which remain largely un-documented. It discusses the form and content of Shankar's style, and its basic tenets - something hitherto unexplored. It also analyses Rabindranath Tagore and Uday Shankar as path-breakers of the duality in Indian performing arts traditions. The productions explored in detail are Samanya Kshati (1961), Shankar's tour of USA, Canada and Europe in 1962, and India's cultural diplomacy, as well as Prakriti Ananda (1966), Shankar's last tour of USA (1968), his last masterpiece, Shankarscope (1970, 1971 and 1972), together with Shankar's legacy.This book is an essential read for scholars and researchers of dance history, art history, critical theory, artists' biographies, creative arts studies, theatre and Asian performing arts studies as well as students of International Relations theory - primarily those interested in cultural diplomacy and soft power.
Afrikinesis
This volume provides scholars and non-specialists alike, with a roadmap for effectively conducting culturally aware, historically relevant research on African dance and on any dance style that contains African elements.
Embodied Nostalgia
Embodied Nostalgia is a collection of interlocking case studies that focus on how social dance in musical theatre brings forth the dancer on stage as a site of embodied history, cultural memory, and nostalgia, and asks what social dance is doing performatively, dramaturgically, and critically in musical theatre.
Dance, Performance and Visual Art
This collection presents a selection of essays written from a point of view that has dance, movement, or performance at its centre, and examines the intellectual and material relationship to the art form from which they are conceived. The themes that emerge from the authors' contributions signify a desire to explore individual techniques in making art or unravelling the techniques of others within the composition of visual art and its contemporary movement language. Similarly, textual, and pictorial representations depict both antiquated and modern art and all their social aspects of human life. Digitization also remains a strong focus in both dance and its representation in performance contexts and place in social constructs of societies.
Frederick Ashton's Ballets
The second edition of Frederick Ashton's Ballets: Style, Performance, Choreography adds two further ballets to this ground-breaking study of Frederick Ashton's choreography. It not only examines the contribution these ballets made to twentieth century dance art, but also presents a detailed account of Ashton's work and dances, demonstrating his remarkable choreographic and artistic talent. Having danced with the Royal Ballet Company during the years Ashton was Director, author, Geraldine Morris also draws on her years as an academic in the field. As well as highlighting the dances, the book explores the contribution made by Ashton's collaborators, both designers and musicians. Central is the issue of identity and how style can be retained in dance, despite alterations in training. It considers the problem of how the values of ballet training change, thereby affecting contemporary performances of his works. Through eight works Morris examines the various sources that Ashton used, whether they were dances with words, or those influenced by dancers' movement style, jazz dance, abstraction, mysticism, or narrative. With this new material, the second edition makes a significant contribution to dance scholarship.
Undergraduate Research in Dance
Undergraduate Research in Dance: A Guide for Students supplies tools for scaffolding research skills, alongside examples of undergraduate research in dance scholarship. This second edition has been updated throughout for current students, with new chapters on mentoring and dance studies.
The Essence of Me
This book is about: Spirituality, the healing of oneself and the community, and understanding culture and the mind.
A Choreographer's Handbook
The updated and revised edition of A Choreographer's Handbook invites readers to investigate how and why to make a dance performance. Burrows' open and honest prose gives the reader access to a range of principles, exercises, meditations and ideas on choreography that allow artists and dance-makers to find their own aesthetic process.
Reflections of Dance Along the Brahmaputra
This volume brings a critical lens to dance and culture within North East India. Dance for people of North East India, as elsewhere, is also a way of declaring, establishing, celebrating, and asserting humans' relationship with nature.
The Embodiment and Transmission of Ghanaian Kete Royal Dance
This book is an Afrocentric exploration of the royal Indigenous dance known as the Kete dance-music, as an analytical path for reassessing African movement systems in the 21st century. It validates the agency of the Black dancing body as a critical element for the generation and use of Indigenous knowledge systems of the Africans/diaspora and explores critical perspectives on the role dancing plays in the cultural emancipation of African knowledge systems globally.
Beyonc矇 and Beyond
This book identifies and examines three years of Beyonc矇's career as a pop mega star using critical race, feminist, and performance studies methodologies.
Rooted Jazz Dance
Decolonizing contemporary jazz dance practice, this book examines the state of jazz dance theory, pedagogy, and choreography in the twenty-first century, recovering and affirming the lifeblood of jazz in Africanist aesthetics and Black American culture.
Jill Johnston in Motion
Performer, activist, and writer Jill Johnston was a major queer presence in the history of dance and 1970s feminism. She was the first critic to identify postmodernism's arrival in American dance and was a fierce advocate for the importance of lesbians within feminism. In Jill Johnston in Motion, Clare Croft tracks Johnston's entwined innovations and contributions to dance and art criticism and activism. She examines Johnston's journalism and criticism--in particular her Village Voice columns published between 1960 and 1980--and her books of memoir and biography. At the same time, Croft attends to Johnston's appearances as both dancer and audience member and her physical and often spectacular participation at feminist protests. By bringing together Johnston's criticism and activism, her writing and her physicality, Croft emphasizes the effect that the arts, particularly dance, had on Johnston's feminist thinking in the 1970s and traces lesbian feminism's roots in avant-garde art practice.
Jill Johnston in Motion
Performer, activist, and writer Jill Johnston was a major queer presence in the history of dance and 1970s feminism. She was the first critic to identify postmodernism's arrival in American dance and was a fierce advocate for the importance of lesbians within feminism. In Jill Johnston in Motion, Clare Croft tracks Johnston's entwined innovations and contributions to dance and art criticism and activism. She examines Johnston's journalism and criticism--in particular her Village Voice columns published between 1960 and 1980--and her books of memoir and biography. At the same time, Croft attends to Johnston's appearances as both dancer and audience member and her physical and often spectacular participation at feminist protests. By bringing together Johnston's criticism and activism, her writing and her physicality, Croft emphasizes the effect that the arts, particularly dance, had on Johnston's feminist thinking in the 1970s and traces lesbian feminism's roots in avant-garde art practice.
The Essential Jill Johnston Reader
Jill Johnston began the 1960s as an influential dance columnist for the Village Voice and by the start of the next decade she was known as a keen observer of postmodern art and lesbian feminist life who challenged how dance, art, and women can and should be seen. The Essential Jill Johnston Reader collects dozens of pieces of her writing from across her career. These writings--many of which appeared in the Village Voice and the New York Times--survey the breadth of her work, braiding together her thinking, writing, and activism. From personal essays, travel writing, and artist profiles to dance and visual art reviews as well as her infamous series of columns for the Voice in which she came out as a lesbian, these pieces demonstrate the evolution of her philosophies and writing style. Illustrating how Johnston drew on lessons from dance to reconsider what it means to be a woman, this collection brings a fascinating and brilliant voice of American arts criticism, radical feminism, and gay liberation back to contemporary audiences.
Wild Grace
"Opening a door into the rich world of modern dance." Kirkus starred review ⭐"Captivating." Publishers Weekly starred review ⭐"Refreshing." New Statesman"Compelling." Harper's Bazaar"Passionate." Sunday TelegraphThe untold tale of the extraordinary women who drove the modern dance movement, boldly confronting cultural narratives about sex and power. In Wild Grace, Sara Veale profiles nine of the pioneering North American dancers at the heart of this movement. She shows how Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller fearlessly rejected nineteenth-century paternalism and how Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus battled to recenter marginalised histories with Dunham leading America's first major Black dance troupe and Primus breaking down doors as the first Black student at New York's New Dance Group. Each of these dancers redefined the meaning of grace in their art and their lifestyle, conveying vital truths about what it means to walk the world as a woman. Veale brings to life the stories and artistry of these remarkable individuals and reveals how, in their refusal to conform, we can find urgent lessons for today.
Singular Plural Ways of Staging Together
Focusing on staging processes in contemporary dance and art performance creates new opportunities to study creative participation and co-authorship. To gain these new insights, Iris Julian analyses experimental projects initiated by two groups and a single choreographer: Collect-if by Collect-if, Deufert + Plischke and Xavier Le Roy. By exploring nuances of staging work, the concept of singular plural became the analytical guideline and resulted into three research perspectives: theatre studies, sociology and ontological reading (Jean-Luc Nancy, Michaela Ott, Gerald Raunig). This approach makes it possible to look beyond the importance that is often credited to single authorship in the arts.With a foreword by Prof. Dr. Gerald Siegmund.
Passionate Work
Corps de ballet literally means the "body" of the ballet company, and it refers to the group of dancers who are not principals. Another large group of dancers puts together portfolios of work, often across several dance companies. These categories of dancers typically don't have name recognition and yet comprise the majority of professional dancers today. The ways that they stitch together careers, through dedication, grit, and no small amount of skill - and the reasons they have for doing so without the promise of fame or fortune - are telling of broader trends that shape the precarious labor of professional dance, and creative careers more generally. In Passionate Work, dance hobbyist and sociologist, Ruth Horowitz captures their stories. When creative labor is studied, it is often thought of in opposition to more conventional work, and the primary metric that distinguishes them is passion. Professional creatives are not working in the traditional sense because they are following their passion. By tracing the careers of such dancers, Horowitz troubles the binary understanding of passion and work. A career in dance requires both, and approaching her subjects through this lens allows her to explore their strategies for sustaining passion through the ups and downs of a career. Horowitz explores how dancers evaluate the rewards and challenges of a notoriously underpaid, and uncertain profession. Horowitz considers major dimensions of a career in a performing art, documenting each stage in a dancer's life. Above all, she shines a light on the strategies used to achieve a sense of biographical continuity in a world often marked by discontinuity and rupture.
