What is the legacy of Martha Graham and why does it endure? How and why did the philosophy and subsequent canon of Martha Graham flood out into an artistic diaspora that is still a wellspring of inspiration for contemporary artists? How do dancers that have never studied with, or worked under, Martha Graham maintain her vision? All of these questions, and many more, are considered in this fascinating book, authored by one of the Martha Graham Company's ex-principal dancers, which illuminates the ongoing significance of the Martha Graham Dance Company almost 100 years after it was founded. Through doing so, we are offered a study of the history of the Martha Graham Dance Company - the longest-standing modern dance company in America, its international diaspora and the current generation of dancers taking up the mantel. Drawing on extensive interviews conducted for the book, the company's story is told through the experiences, inspirations, motivations and words of performers from Graham's iconic artistic lineage.

The editors of this anthology analyze a broad range of themes and dance styles in order to examine how dance has helped to shape American identity. This volume focuses on dance and its social, cultural, and political constructs. The first volume, The Twentieth Century, explores a variety of subjects: white businessmen in Prescott, Arizona who created a ""Smoki tribe"" that performed ""authentic"" Hopi dances for over seventy years; swing dancing by Japanese-American teens in World War II internment camps; African American jazz dancing in the work of ballet choreographer Ruth Page; dancing in early Hollywood movie musicals; how critics identified ""American"" qualities in the dancing of ballerina Nana Gollner; the politics of dancing with the American flag; English Country Dance as translated into American communities; Bob Fosse's sociopolitical choreography; and early break dancing as Latino political protest.

Breaking is the first and most widely practiced hip-hop dance in the world today, with an estimated one million participants taking part in this dynamic, multifaceted artform. Yet, despite its global reach and over 40 years of existence, historical treatments of the dance have largely neglected the African Americans who founded it. Dancer and scholar Serouj "Midus" Aprahamian offers, for the first time, a detailed look into the African American beginnings of breaking in the Bronx, New York, during the 1970s. Given the pivotal impact the dance had on hip-hop's formation, this book also challenges numerous myths and misconceptions that have permeated studies of hip-hop culture's emergence. Aprahamian draws on untapped archival material, primary interviews, and detailed descriptions of early breaking to bring this buried history to life, with a particular focus on the early aesthetic development of the dance, the institutional settings in which hip-hop was conceived, and the movement's impact on sociocultural conditions in New York throughout the 1970s. By featuring the overlooked first-hand accounts of over 50 founding b-boys and b-girls, this book also shows how indebted breaking is to African American culture and interrogates the disturbing factors behind its historical erasure.

This book explores the co-creative practice of contemporary dancers solely from the point of view of the dancer. It reveals multiple dancing perspectives, drawn from interviews, current writing and evocative accounts from inside the choreographic process, illuminating the myriad ways that dancers contribute to the production of dance culture.

This book sheds light on the fascinating untold story behind what is collectively and disputably called "disco dancing," and the incredible effect that the phenomenon had on America-in New York City and beyond. Disco is a dance and musical style that still influences these art forms today. Many think that disco "died" completely after the 1970s drew to a close, but in actuality people continued dancing in the clubs after the very word "disco" became an anathema. Disco Dance explains why disco was more than just a dance form or a fad, describing many of the clubs-in New York City especially-where the disco subculture thrived. The author examines the origins of disco music, its evolution, and how young people adapted the dance styles of the day to the disco beat, charting how this dance of celebration and rebellion during troubling times became subject to ridicule by the end of the decade. Provides information from interviews with famed disco dancers, the DJs who worked in concert with them, and habitual club goers Contains dancers' playlists and quotes from period musicians Includes archival art and photographs

Employing a cultural theory approach, this book explores the relationship between popular dance and value. It traces the shifting value systems that underpin popular dance scholarship and considers how different dancing communities articulate complex expressions of judgment, significance and worth through their embodied practice.

This book addresses the need for critical scholarship about contemporary dance practices in Ireland. Bringing together key voices from a new wave of scholarship to examine recent practice and research in the field of contemporary dance, it examines the excitingly diverse range of choreographers and works that are transforming Ireland's performance landscape. The first section provides a chronologically-ordered collection of critical essays to ground the reader in some of the most important issues currently at play in contemporary dance in Ireland. The second section then provides an interrogation of individual choreographers' processes. The book traces new choreographic work and trends through a broad array of topics, including somatics in performance, screendance, cultural trauma, dance archives, affect studies, feminist perspectives, choreographic process, the dancer's voice, interdisciplinarity, and pedagogical paradigms.

In the land of samba there is another vibrant culture capturing the attention of urban youth. This compelling account argues that hip hop, while certainly a product of globalized flows of information and technology, is by no means homogenous. Using more than five years of anthropological fieldwork in Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest city, Pardue represents "culture" as generative and thus meaningful as a set of practices. When interpreted in this manner, local hip hoppers become closer to what they claim to be--subjects rather than objects of history and everyday life. In his ethnography, the first in English to look at Brazilian hip hop, Pardue highlights the analytical categories of race, class, gender, and territory.

Theatre and Performance in the Asia-Pacific is an analysis of the theatrical imaginative as it manifests in theatre and performance in Australia, Indonesia, Japan and Singapore. The sites encompass marked differences in language, performance, history and politics, and variations in the solidity and volatility of their imagined worlds. Recognizing these differences, the book explores contrasts in each nation as it identifies with the region and the cultural interconnections that support a regional identity. While the four nations demonstrate degrees of ambivalence and connection to the Asia-Pacific as a region, the project argues that relations to modernity and globalization are less nation-specific. The project articulates a regional configuration of modernity which is multiple, contradictory but nonetheless regional. Each nation has in common the imperative to reconcile with and adapt to European modernity in a way that renders global modernity multiple rather than singular.

This book illuminates the relationship between philosophy and experimental choreographic practice today in the works of leading European choreographers. A discussion of key issues in contemporary performance from the viewpoint of Deleuze, Spinoza and Bergson is accompanied by intricate analyses of seven groundbreaking dance performances.

"Dance Ethnography and Global Perspectives" presents the work of dance scholars whose professional fieldwork spans several continents and includes studies of the dance and movement systems of varied global communities. It offers a selection of dance ethnographies that represent individual approaches to fieldwork through the medium of traditional dance from around the globe - Bali, Croatia, Japan, Mallorca, Okinawa, the Philippines, Serbia, the United Kingdom, and West Africa. This fascinating collection is divided into three parts that represent different theoretical approaches to the study of dance and identity through the methodology of ethnography. With backgrounds in a wide range of disciplines, such as religious studies, social and cultural anthropology, folklore, history, psychosocial work, and tourism, the authors include various media of film and photographs to enrich their methodologies.

This book provides the first critical and contextual study of contemporary and historical dance theatre in Ireland. Since the arrival of the traditional dance spectacular Riverdance in 1994, Irish dance has not only become a topic of global interest, but also a subject of heated debate. The emergence of companies such as CoisCeim Dance Theatre and Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre in the mid-1990s marked an important turning point in Irish dance practice that once again provoked a re-thinking of the perception of the dancing body and its position within Irish performance culture. McGrath's study examines how groundbreaking dance theatre works have tackled some of the most urgent and difficult socio-political and cultural questions in Ireland, and how in doing so they have re-imagined seemingly hermetic narratives of oppression and limiting definitions of 'Irish' corporeality. This study provides a timely reading of these revolutionary moves.

Early hip hop film musicals have either been expunged from cinema history or excoriated in brief passages by critics and other writers. "Hip Hop on Film" reclaims and reexamines productions such as "Breakin'" (1984), " Beat Street" (1984), and "Krush Groove" (1985) in order to illuminate Hollywood's fascinating efforts to incorporate this nascent urban culture into conventional narrative forms. Such films presented musical conventions against the backdrop of graffiti-splattered trains and abandoned tenements in urban communities of color, setting the stage for radical social and political transformations. Hip hop musicals are also part of the broader history of teen cinema, and films such as Charlie Ahearn's "Wild Style" (1983) are here examined alongside other contemporary youth-oriented productions. As suburban teen films banished parents and children to the margins of narrative action, hip hop musicals, by contrast, presented inclusive and unconventional filial groupings that included all members of the neighborhood. These alternative social configurations directly referenced specific urban social problems, which affected the stability of inner city families following diminished governmental assistance in communities of color during the 1980s.

Breakdancing, a central element of hip hop musicals, is also reconsidered. It gained widespread acclaim at the same time that these films entered the theaters, but the nation's newly discovered dance form was embattled--caught between a multitude of institutional entities such as the ballet academy, advertising culture, and dance publications that vied to control its meaning, particularly in relation to delineations of gender. As street-trained breakers were enticed to join the world of professional ballet, this newly forged relationship was recast by dance promoters as a way to invigorate and "remasculinize" European dance, while young women simultaneously critiqued conventional masculinities through an appropriation of breakdance. These multiple and volatile histories influenced the first wave of hip hop films, and even structured the sleeper hit "Flashdance" (1983). This forgotten, ignored, and maligned cinema is not only an important aspect of hip hop history, but is also central to the histories of teen film, the postclassical musical, and even institutional dance. Kimberley Monteyne places these films within the wider context of their cultural antecedents and reconsiders the genre's influence.

Ten international dramaturg-scholars advance proposals that reset notions of agency in contemporary dance creation. Dramaturgy becomes driven by artistic inquiry, distributed among collaborating artists, embedded in improvisation tasks, or weaved through audience engagement, and the dramaturg becomes a facilitator of dramaturgical awareness.

Telling a riveting true story of the emergence and development of an American icon, this book traces swing dancing from its origins to its status as a modern-day art form. From its unlikely origins in the African slave trade, one of the saddest chapters of American history, swing dance emerged as a celebration of the soul. Swing is now recognized around the globe as a joyous partnered dance, uniquely Afro-American in origin and an American treasure. This book examines how the original swing style of the 1920s, the Lindy Hop, branched out and evolved with the changing dynamics of popular culture, paralleling the development of the nation. Swing Dancing covers the dance through the years of minstrelsy, the jazz age, the big band era, bebop, and the decline of partnered dancing in the 1960s. Swing experts and instructors Tamara and Erin Stevens have combined a compelling historic examination of swing dance with an assortment of riveting personal interviews and photographic documentation to create a comprehensive reference book on this important art form. Contains insights from personal interviews with a variety of prominent dancers, scholars, and historians Presents a chronology of the emergence of vernacular American dancing and the development of swing, from colonial times to the present day Includes numerous illustrations and photographs depicting the diverse influences on the genre, from legendary musicians to iconic swing dancers and more Contains a select bibliography of diverse source material, such as books, films, and magazine and newspaper articles Provides a helpful index offering access to names, places, people, and all important subjects

Renowned Korean American modern-dance choreographer Dana Tai Soon Burgess shares his deeply personal hyphenated world and how his multifaceted background drives his prolific art-making in Chino and the Dance of the Butterfly. The memoir traces how his choreographic aesthetic, based on the fluency of dance and the visual arts, was informed by his early years in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This insightful journey delves into an artist's process that is inspired by the intersection of varying cultural perspectives, stories, and experiences. Candid and intelligent, Burgess gives readers the opportunity to experience up close the passion for art and dance that has informed his life.

The Essential Guide to Contemporary Dance Techniques explores the multifaceted learning processes and underlying principles behind the technical skills and abilities of a contemporary dancer. The depth and complexity of this challenging sensorial, intellectual, reflective and creative process is presented with clarity, to support every training dancer in achieving the most from their learning experiences. Insights into three major technical forms: Graham technique, Cunningham technique and Release-based technique, reveal the distinct approaches, processes and experiences possible in contemporary dance training. Essential technical and performance considerations are covered, including: breath; alignment; core activation; connectivity; dynamic qualities of motion; use of the body; use of space; action and finally, relationships to the audience. With personal contributions from respected teachers at top dance institutions, this practical guide offers a unique insight into the expectations and processes of professional training classes as well as the success you can achieve with them. With images from real-life technique classes and dynamic performances, this is an essential companion for all contemporary dance students.

This study focuses on dance as an activist practice in and of itself, across geographical locations and over the course of a century, from 1920 to 2020. Through doing so, it considers how dance has been an empowering agent for political action throughout civilisation. Dance and Activism offers a glimpse of different strategies of mobilizing the human body for good and justice for all, and captures the increasing political activism epitomized by bodies moving on the streets in some of the most turbulent political situations. This has, most recently, undoubtedly been partly owing to the rise of the far-right internationally, which has marked an increase in direct action on the streets. Offering a survey of key events across the century, such as the fall of President Zuma in South Africa; pro-reproductive rights action in Poland and Argentina; and the recent women's marches against Donald Trump's presidency, you will see how dance has become an urgent field of study. Key geographical locations are explored as sites of radical dance - the Lower East Side of New York; Gaza; Syria; Cairo, Iran; Iraq; Johannesburg - to name but a few - and get insights into some of the major figures in the history of dance, including Pearl Primus, Martha Graham, Anna Sokolow and Ahmad Joudah. Crucially, lesser or unknown dancers, who have in some way influenced politics, all over the world are brought into the limelight (the Syrian ballerinas and Hussein Smko, for example). Dance and Activism troubles the boundary between theory and practice, while presenting concrete case studies as a site for robust theoretical analysis.

Instruments of Embodiment draws on fashion theory and the philosophy of embodiment to investigate costuming in contemporary dance. It weaves together philosophical theory and artistic practice by closely analyzing acclaimed works by contemporary choreographers, considering interviews with costume designers, and engaging in practice-as-research. Topics discussed include the historical evolution of contemporary dance costuming, Merce Cunningham's innovative collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg, and costumes used in Ohad Naharin's Virus (2001) and in a ground-breaking Butoh solo by Tatsumi Hijikata. The relationship between dance costuming and high fashion, wearable computing, and the role costume plays in dance reconstruction are also discussed and, along the way, an anarchist materialism is articulated which takes an egalitarian view of artistic collaboration and holds that experimental costume designs facilitate new forms of embodied experience and ways of seeing the body. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars working in performance philosophy, philosophy of embodiment, dance and performance studies, and fashion theory.