From its beginnings as an alternative and dissident form of dance training in the 1960s, Somatics emerged at the end of the twentieth century as one of the most popular and widespread regimens used to educate dancers. It is now found in dance curricula worldwide, helping to shape the look and sensibilities of both dancers and choreographers and thereby influencing much of the dance we see onstage worldwide. One of the first books to examine Somatics in detail and to analyse how and what it teaches in the dance studio, The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training considers how dancers discover and assimilate new ways of moving and also larger cultural values associated with those movements. The book traces the history of Somatics, and it also details how Somatics developed in different locales, engaging with local politics and dance histories so as to develop a distinctive pedagogy that nonetheless shared fundamental concepts with other national and regional contexts. In so doing it shows how dance training can inculcate an embodied politics by guiding and shaping the experience of bodily sensation, constructing forms of reflexive evaluation of bodily action, and summoning bodies into relationship with one another. Throughout, the author focuses on the concept of the natural body and the importance of a natural way of moving as central to the claims that Somatics makes concerning its efficacy and legitimacy.

Appalachian Spring, with music by Aaron Copland and choreography by Martha Graham, counts among the best known American contributions to the global concert hall and stage. In the years since its premiere-as a dance work at the Library of Congress in 1944-it has become one of Copland's most widely performed scores, and the Martha Graham Dance Company still treats it as a signature work. Over the decades, the dance and the music have taken on a range of meanings that have transformed a wartime production into a seemingly timeless expression of American identity, both musically and visually. In this Oxford Keynotes volume, distinguished musicologist Annegret Fauser follows the work from its inception in the midst of World War II to its intersections with contemporary American culture, whether in the form of choreographic reinterpretations or musical ones, as by John Williams, in 2009, for the inauguration of President Barack Obama. A concise and lively introduction to the history of the work, its realization on stage, and its transformations over time, this volume combines deep archival research and cultural interpretations to recount the creation of Appalachian Spring as a collaboration between three creative giants of twentieth-century American art: Graham, Copland, and Isamu Noguchi. Building on past and current scholarship, Fauser critiques the myths that remain associated with the work and its history, including Copland's famous disclaimer that Appalachian Spring had nothing to do with the eponymous Southern mountain region. This simultaneous endeavor in both dance and music studies presents an incisive exploration this work, situating it in various contexts of collaborative and individual creation.

Ungoverning Dance examines the work of progressive contemporary dance artists in continental Europe from the mid 1990s to 2015. Placing this within its historical and political context - that of neoliberalism and austerity - it argues that these artists have developed an ethico-aesthetic approach that uses dance practices as sites of resistance against dominant ideologies, and that their works attest to the persistence of alternative ways of thinking and living. In response to the way that the radical values informing their work are continually under attack from neoliberalism, these artists recognise that they in effect share common pool resources. Thus, while contemporary dance has been turned into a market, they nevertheless value the extent to which it functions as a commons. Work that does this, it argues, ungoverns dance. Theoretically, the book begins with a discussion of dance in relation to neoliberalism and post-Fordism, and then develops an account of ethico-aesthetics in choreography drawing in particular on the work of Emmanuelle Levinas and its adaptation by Maurice Blanchot. It also explores ethics from the point of view of affect theory drawing on the work of Erin Manning and Brian Massumi. These philosophical ideas inform close readings of works from the 1990s and 2000s by two generations of European-based dance artists: that of Jerome Bel, Jonathan Burrows, La Ribot, and Xavier Le Roy who began showing work in the 1990s; and that of artists who emerged in the 2000s including Fabian Barba, Faustin Linyekula, Ivana Muller, and Nikolina Pristas. Topics examined include dance and precarious life, choreographing friendship, re-performance, the virtual in dance, and a dancer's experience of the Egyptian revolution. Ungoverning Dance proposes new ways of understanding recent contemporary European dance works by making connections with their social, political, and theoretical contexts.

Playable Bodies investigates what happens when machines teach humans to dance. Dance video games work as engines of humor, shame, trust, and intimacy, urging players to dance like nobody's watching-while being tracked by motion-sensing interfaces in their living rooms. The chart-topping dance game franchises Just Dance and Dance Central transform players' experiences of popular music, invite experimentation with gendered and racialized movement styles, and present new possibilities for teaching, learning, and archiving choreography. Author Kiri Miller shows how these games teach players to regard their own bodies as both interfaces and avatars, and how a convergence of choreography and programming code is driving a new wave of full-body virtual-reality media experiences. Drawing on five years of ethnographic research with players, game designers, and choreographers, Playable Bodies situates dance games in a media ecology that includes the larger game industry, viral music videos, reality TV competitions, marketing campaigns, consumer reviews, social media discourse, and emerging surveillance technologies. Miller tracks the circulation of dance gameplay and related "body projects" across media platforms to reveal how dance games function as "intimate media," configuring new relationships among humans, interfaces, music and dance repertoires, and social media practices.

In the 1920s and 30s, musicians from Latin America and the Caribbean were flocking to New York, lured by the burgeoning recording studios and lucrative entertainment venues. In the late 1940s and 50s, the big-band mambo dance scene at the famed Palladium Ballroom was the stuff of legend, while modern-day music history was being made as the masters of Afro-Cuban and jazz idiom conspired to create Cubop, the first incarnation of Latin jazz. Then, in the 1960s, as the Latino population came to exceed a million strong, a new generation of New York Latinos, mostly Puerto Ricans born and raised in the city, went on to create the music that came to be called salsa, which continues to enjoy avid popularity around the world. And now, the children of the mambo and salsa generation are contributing to the making of hip hop and reviving ancestral Afro-Caribbean forms like Cuban rumba, Puerto Rican bomba, and Dominican palo. Salsa Rising provides the first full-length historical account of Latin Music in this city guided by close critical attention to issues of tradition and experimentation, authenticity and dilution, and the often clashing roles of cultural communities and the commercial recording industry in the shaping of musical practices and tastes. It is a history not only of the music, the changing styles and practices, the innovators, venues and songs, but also of the music as part of the larger social history, ranging from immigration and urban history, to the formation of communities, to issues of colonialism, race and class as they bear on and are revealed by the trajectory of the music. Author Juan Flores brings a wide range of people in the New York Latin music field into his work, including musicians, producers, arrangers, collectors, journalists, and lay and academic scholars, enriching Salsa Rising with a unique level of engagement with and interest in Latin American communities and musicians themselves.

Dance on its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies anthologizes a wide range of subjects examined from dance-centered methodologies: modes of research that are emergent, based in relevant systems of movement analysis, use primary sources, and rely on critical, informed observation of movement. The anthology fills a gap in current scholarship by emphasizing dance history and core disciplinary knowledge rather than theories imported from disciplines outside dance. Individual chapters serve as case studies that are further organized into three categories of significant dance activity: performance and reconstruction, pedagogy and choreographic process, and notational and other written forms that analyze and document dance. The breadth of the content reflects the richness and vibrancy of the dance field; each deeply informed examination serves as a window opening onto the larger world of dance. Conceptually, each chapter also raises concerns and questions that point to broadly inclusive methodological applications. Engaging and insightful, Dance on its Own Terms represents a major contribution to research on dance.

For more than two decades, le hip hop has shown France's "other" face: danced by minorities associated with immigration and the suburbs, it has channeled rage against racism and unequal opportunity and offered a movement vocabulary for the expression of the multicultural difference that challenges the universalist discourse of the Republic. French hip-hoppers subscribe to black U.S. culture to articulate their own difference but their mouv' developed differently, championed by a Socialist cultural policy as part of the patrimoine culturel, instituted as a pedagogy and supported as an art of the banlieue. In the multicultural mix of "Arabic" North African, African and Asian forms circulating with classical and contemporary dance performance in France, if hip hop is positioned as a civic discourse, and hip hop dancer as legitimate employment, it is because beyond this political recuperation, it is a figural language in which dancers express themselves differently, figure themselves as something or someone else. French hip hop develops into concert dance not through the familiar model of a culture industry, but within a Republic of Culture; it nuances an "Anglo-Saxon" model of identity politics with a "francophone" post-colonial identity poetics and grants its dancers the statut civil of artists, technicians who develop and transmit body-based knowledge. This book- the first in English to introduce readers to the French mouv' -analyzes the choreographic development of hip hop into la danse urbaine, touring on national and international stages, as hip hoppeurs move beyond the banlieue, figuring new forms within the mobility brought by new media and global migration.

Initially branching out of the European contradance tradition, the danzon first emerged as a distinct form of music and dance among black performers in nineteenth-century Cuba. By the early twentieth-century, it had exploded in popularity throughout the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean basin. A fundamentally hybrid music and dance complex, it reflects the fusion of European and African elements and had a strong influence on the development of later Latin dance traditions as well as early jazz in New Orleans. Danzon: Circum-Caribbean Dialogues in Music and Dance studies the emergence, hemisphere-wide influence, and historical and contemporary significance of this music and dance phenomenon.
Co-authors Alejandro L. Madrid and Robin D. Moore take an ethnomusicological, historical, and critical approach to the processes of appropriation of the danzon in new contexts, its changing meanings over time, and its relationship to other musical forms. Delving into its long history of controversial popularization, stylistic development, glorification, decay, and rebirth in a continuous transnational dialogue between Cuba and Mexico as well as New Orleans, the authors explore the production, consumption, and transformation of this Afro-diasporic performance complex in relation to global and local ideological discourses. By focusing on interactions across this entire region as well as specific local scenes, Madrid and Moore underscore the extent of cultural movement and exchange within the Americas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, and are thereby able to analyze the danzon, the dance scenes it has generated, and the various discourses of identification surrounding it as elements in broader regional processes. Danzon is a significant addition to the literature on Latin American music, dance, and expressive culture; it is essential reading for scholars, students, and fans of this music alike."

In Shapes of American Ballet: Teachers and Training before Balanchine, Jessica Zeller introduces the first few decades of the twentieth century as an often overlooked, yet critical period for ballet's growth in America. While George Balanchine is often considered the sole creator of American ballet, numerous European and Russian emigres had been working for decades to build a national ballet with an American identity. These pedagogues and others like them played critical yet largely unacknowledged roles in American ballet's development. Despite their prestigious ballet pedigrees, the dance field's exhaustive focus on Balanchine has led to the neglect of their work during the first few decades of the century, and in this light, this book offers a new perspective on American ballet during the period immediately prior to Balanchine's arrival. Zeller uses hundreds of rare archival documents to illuminate the pedagogies of several significant European and Russian teachers who worked in New York City. Bringing these contributions into the broader history of American ballet recasts American ballet's identity as diverse-comprised of numerous Euro-Russian and American elements, as opposed to the work of one individual. This new account of early twentieth century American ballet is situated against a bustling New York City backdrop, where mass immigration through Ellis Island brought the ballet from European and Russian opera houses into contact with a variety of American forms and sensibilities. Ballet from celebrated Euro-Russian lineages was performed in vaudeville and blended with American popular dance styles, and it developed new characteristics as it responded to the American economy. Shapes of American Ballet delves into ballet's struggle to define itself during this rich early twentieth century period, and it sheds new light on ballet's development of an American identity before Balanchine.

While Jews are commonly referred to as the "people of the book," American Jewish choreographers have consistently turned to dance as a means to articulate personal and collective identities; tangle with stereotypes; advance social and political agendas; and imagine new possibilities for themselves as individuals, artists, and Jews. Dancing Jewish delineates this rich history, demonstrating that Jewish choreographers have not only been vital contributors to American modern and postmodern dance, but that they have also played a critical and unacknowledged role in the history of Jews in the United States. By examining the role dance has played in the struggle between Jewish identification and integration into American life, the book moves across disciplinary boundaries to show how cultural identity, nationality, ethnicity, and gender are formed and performed through the body and its motions. A dancer and choreographer, as well as an historian, Rebecca Rossen offers evocative analyses of dances while asserting the importance of embodied methodologies to academic research. Featuring over fifty images, a companion website, and key works from 1930 to 2005 by a wide range of artists-including David Dorfman, Dan Froot, David Gordon, Hadassah, Margaret Jenkins, Pauline Koner, Dvora Lapson, Liz Lerman, Sophie Maslow, Anna Sokolow, and Benjamin Zemach-Dancing Jewish offers a comprehensive framework for interpreting performance and establishes dance as a crucial site in which American Jews have grappled with cultural belonging, personal and collective histories, and the values that bind and pull them apart.

Arguably the world's most popular partnered social dance form, salsa's significance extends well beyond the Latino communities which gave birth to it. The growing international and cross-cultural appeal of this Latin dance form, which celebrates its mixed origins in the Caribbean and in Spanish Harlem, offers a rich site for examining issues of cultural hybridity and commodification in the context of global migration. Salsa consists of countless dance dialects enjoyed by varied communities in different locales. In short, there is not one dance called salsa, but many. Spinning Mambo into Salsa, a history of salsa dance, focuses on its evolution in three major hubs for international commercial export-New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. The book examines how commercialized salsa dance in the 1990s departed from earlier practices of Latin dance, especially 1950s mambo. Topics covered include generational differences between Palladium Era mambo and modern salsa; mid-century antecedents to modern salsa in Cuba and Puerto Rico; tension between salsa as commercial vs. cultural practice; regional differences in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami; the role of the Web in salsa commerce; and adaptations of social Latin dance for stage performance. Throughout the book, salsa dance history is linked to histories of salsa music, exposing how increased separation of the dance from its musical inspiration has precipitated major shifts in Latin dance practice. As a whole, the book dispels the belief that one version is more authentic than another by showing how competing styles came into existence and contention. Based on over 100 oral history interviews, archival research, ethnographic participant observation, and analysis of Web content and commerce, the book is rich with quotes from practitioners and detailed movement description.

Popular styles of electronic dance music are pervasively mediated by technology, not only within production but also in performance. The most familiar performance format in this style, the DJ set, is created with turntables, headphones, twelve-inch vinyl records, and a mixing board. Going beyond simply playing other people's records, DJs select, combine, and manipulate different parts of records to form new compositions that differ substantially from their source materials. In recent years, the "laptop set" has become equally common; in this type of performance, musicians use computers and specialized software to transform and reconfigure their own precomposed sounds. Both types of performance are largely improvised, evolving in response to the demands of a particular situation through interaction with a dancing audience. Within performance, musicians make numerous spontaneous decisions about variables such as which sounds they will play, when they will play them, and how they will be combined with other sounds. Yet the elements that constitute these improvisations are also fixed in certain fundamental ways: performances are fashioned from patterns or tracks recorded beforehand, and in the case of DJ sets, these elements are also physical objects (vinyl records). In Playing with Something that Runs, author Mark J. Butler explores these improvised performances, revealing the ways in which musicians utilize seemingly invariable prerecorded elements to create dynamic, real-time improvisations. Based on extensive interviews with musicians in their studios, as well as in-depth studies of particular mediums of performance, including both DJ and laptop sets, Butler explores the ways in which technologies, both material and musical, are used in performance and improvisation in order to make these transformations possible. An illuminating look at the world of popular electronic-music performance, Playing with Something that Runs is an indispensable resource for electronic dance musicians and fans as well as scholars and students of popular music.

Musical Intimacies and Indigenous Imaginaries explores several styles performed in the vital aboriginal musical scene in the western Canadian province of Manitoba, focusing on fiddling, country music, Christian hymnody, and step dancing. In considering these genres and the contexts in which they are performed, author Byron Dueck outlines a compelling theory of musical publics, examines the complex, overlapping social orientations of contemporary musicians, and shows how music and dance play a central role in a distinctive indigenous public culture.
Dueck considers a wide range of contemporary aboriginal performances and venues--urban and rural, secular and sacred, large and small. Such gatherings create opportunities for the expression of distinctive modes of northern Algonquian sociability and for the creative extension of indigenous publicness. In examining these interstitial sites--at once places of intimate interaction and spaces oriented to imagined audiences--this volume considers how Manitoban aboriginal musicians engage with audiences both immediate and unknown; how they negotiate the possibilities mass mediation affords; and how, in doing so, they extend and elaborate indigenous sociability.
Musical Intimacies brings theories of public culture from anthropology and literary criticism into musicological and ethnomusicological discussions while introducing productive new ways of understanding North American indigenous engagement with mass mediation. It is a unique work that will appeal to students and scholars of popular music, musicology, music theory, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. It will be necessary reading for students of American ethnomusicology, First Nations and Native American studies, and Canadian music studies.

The relationship between the practice of dance and the technologies of representation have excited artists since the advent of film. Dancers, choreographers, and directors are increasingly drawn to screendance, the practice of capturing dance as a moving image mediated by a camera. While the interest in screendance has grown in importance and influence amongst artists, it has until now flown under the academic radar. Emmy-nominated director and auteur Douglas Rosenberg's groundbreaking book considers screendance as both a visual art form as well as an extension of modern and post-modern dance without drawing artificial boundaries between the two. Both a history and a critical framework, Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image is a new and important look at the subject. As he reconstructs the history and influences of screendance, Rosenberg presents a theoretical guide to navigating the boundaries of an inherently collaborative art form. Drawing on psycho-analytic, literary, materialist, queer, and feminist modes of analysis, Rosenberg explores the relationships between camera and subject, director and dancer, and the ephemeral nature of dance and the fixed nature of film. This interdisciplinary approach allows for a broader discussion of issues of hybridity and mediatized representation as they apply to dance on film. Rosenberg also discusses the audiences and venues of screendance and the tensions between commercial and fine-art cultures that the form has confronted in recent years. The surge of screendance festivals and courses at universities around the world has exposed the friction that exists between art, which is generally curated, and dance, which is generally programmed. Rosenberg explores the cultural implications of both methods of reaching audiences, and ultimately calls for a radical new way of thinking of both dance and film that engages with critical issues rather than simple advocacy.

Tandem Dances: Choreographing Immersive Performance is the first book to propose dance and choreography as frames through which to examine immersive theatre, more broadly known as immersive performance. Indicative of a larger renaissance in storytelling during the digital age, immersive performance is influenced by emerging computer technologies, such as virtual reality and advances in video-gaming, as well as increased interest in new forms of experiential entertainment. The idea of tandemness - suggesting motion that is achieved by two bodies working together and acting in conjunction with one another - is critical throughout the book. Author Julia M. Ritter persuasively argues that practitioners of immersive productions deploy choreography as a structural mechanism to mobilize the bodies of cast and audience members to perform together. Furthermore, choreography is contextualized as an effective tool for facilitating audience participation towards immersion as an affect. Through a focus on Western dance histories, theories, and practices, Ritter's close choreographic analysis of immersive productions, along with unique insights from choreographers, directors, performers, and spectators, enlivens discourse across dramaturgy, kinesthesia, affect, and co-authorship. By foregrounding the choreographic in order to examine its specific impact on the evolution of immersive theater, Tandem Dances explores choreography as a discursive domain that is fundamentally related to creative practice, agendas of power and control, and concomitant issues of freedom and agency.

On Site: Methods for Site-Specific Performance Creation is a practical book for artists and students at all levels who create or are learning to create making sited dance works. Author Stephan Koplowitz covers specific, hands-on strategies for an array of issues to consider before, during, and after embarking upon a project, including site selection, procuring permits, designing the audience experience, researching and exploring a site for inspiration and content, differences in urban and natural environments, definitions of key production roles, building effective collaborations with artists, and techniques to generate site-inspired production elements such as sound/music, costumes, lighting, and media. He also offers helpful chapters on project budgeting, contract negotiation, fundraising, marketing, documentation, and assessment. Based on the author's career spanning over 30 years of site-specific creation, the book also includes the voices of over 24 other artists, producers, and writers who share their perspectives and experiences on the many topics covered. A guide designed to make site work practical, intentional, and attainable, On Site will become a well-worn reference for anyone interested in the creative process and discovering the power of site-specific works.

From the condemnation of protest to skepticism of religious ecstasy, radical movement has been defined by freedoms and restrictions relative to class conflict, national policy, and colonialism. In this book, author Kelina Gotman examines choreographies of unrest, rethinking the modern formation of choreomania, a fantastical concept across scientific disciplines used to designate the spontaneous and uncontrolled movements of crowds. In these misformations of body politics, prejudices against spontaneity unravel, suggesting widespread anxieties about impulsiveness and irregularity. In tandem with dialogues of the erratic, Gotman makes use of histories of nineteenth-century control which identify the period as one of increasing regimentation. As she notes, constraints on movement signal constraints on political power and agency and on individuals' capacity to shift their allegiances, inhabiting more hospitable terrains. In each chapter, Gotman confronts the many ways choreomania functions as an extension of colonialism, dismissing expressive bodies as mentally and physically infected others. Through her research, Gotman unearths the many instances of choreomania that represent collective efforts to escape social tyranny inflicted by the upper class.

In Kinesthetic City, author SanSan Kwan explores the contentious nature of Chineseness in diaspora through the lens of moving bodies as they relate to place, time, and identity. She locates her study in five Chinese urban sites--Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, New York's Chinatown, and the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles--at momentous historical turning points to parse out key similarities and differences in the construction of Chineseness. The moving bodies she considers are not only those in performances by some of the most well-known Chinese dance companies in these cities, but also her own as she navigates urban Chinese spaces.
By focusing primarily on kinesthesia--the body's awareness of motion--to gather information rather than more traditional modes of sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste, she highlights the importance of motion in the determination of space. In examining in these specific places at these precise historical moments, Kwan illuminates how moving bodies contribute to the production of those places and those moments. For Kwan, Chinese communities in diaspora provide particularly salient examples of how when and where our bodies are help to determine who we are. Whether engaged in otherwise unremarkable walking or in highly choreographed acts of political protest, human movement exists in dialogue with the kinesthetic of these city spaces, helping Chinese communities make meaning of themselves away from mainland China.
As a whole, Kinesthetic City offers dance studies ways to extend movement analysis to study not only concert, folk or social dance, but also quotidian movement and urban flow.

In Choreographing in Color, J. Lorenzo Perillo investigates the development of Filipino popular dance and performance since the late 20th century. Drawing from nearly two decades of ethnography, choreographic analysis, and community engagement with artists, choreographers, and organizers, Perillo shifts attention away from the predominant Philippine neoliberal and U.S. imperialist emphasis on Filipinos as superb mimics, heroic migrants, model minorities, subservient wives, and natural dancers and instead asks: what does it mean for Filipinos to navigate the violent forces of empire and neoliberalism with street dance and Hip-Hop? Employing critical race, feminist, and performance studies, Perillo analyzes the conditions of possibility that gave rise to Filipino dance phenomena across viral, migrant, theatrical, competitive, and diplomatic performance in the Philippines and diaspora. Advocating for serious engagements with the dancing body, Perillo rethinks a staple of Hip-Hop's regulation, the "euphemism," as a mode of social critique for understanding how folks have engaged with both racial histories of colonialism and gendered labor migration. Figures of euphemism - the zombie, hero, robot, and judge - constitute a way of seeing Filipino Hip-Hop as contiguous with a multi-racial repertoire of imperial crossing, thus uncovering the ways Black dance intersects Filipino racialization and reframing the ongoing, contested underdog relationship between Filipinos and U.S. global power. Choreographing in Color therefore reveals how the Filipino dancing body has come to be, paradoxically, both globally recognized and indiscernible.

Choreographing Copyright provides a historical and cultural analysis of U.S.-based dance-makers' investment in intellectual property rights. Although federal copyright law in the U.S. did not recognize choreography as a protectable class prior to the 1976 Copyright Act, efforts to win copyright protection for dance began eight decades earlier. In a series of case studies stretching from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, the book reconstructs those efforts and teases out their raced and gendered politics. Rather than chart a narrative of progress, the book shows how dancers working in a range of genres have embraced intellectual property rights as a means to both consolidate and contest racial and gendered power. A number of the artists featured in Choreographing Copyright are well-known white figures in the history of American dance, including modern dancers Loie Fuller, Hanya Holm, and Martha Graham, and ballet artists Agnes de Mille and George Balanchine. But the book also uncovers a host of marginalized figures - from the South Asian dancer Mohammed Ismail, to the African American pantomimist Johnny Hudgins, to the African American blues singer Alberta Hunter, to the white burlesque dancer Faith Dane - who were equally interested in positioning themselves as subjects rather than objects of property, as possessive individuals rather than exchangeable commodities. Choreographic copyright, the book argues, has been a site for the reinforcement of gendered white privilege as well as for challenges to it. Drawing on critical race and feminist theories and on cultural studies of copyright, Choreographing Copyright offers fresh insight into such issues as: the raced and gendered hierarchies that govern the theatrical marketplace, white women's historically contingent relationship to property rights, legacies of ownership of black bodies and appropriation of non-white labor, and the tension between dance's ephemerality and its reproducibility.

This book explores the complex relationship between literature and dance in the era of modernism. During this period an unprecedented dialogue between the two art forms took place, based on a common aesthetics initiated by contemporary discussions of the body and gender, language, formal experimentation, primitivism, anthropology, and modern technologies such as photography, film, and mechanisation. The book traces the origins of this relationship to the philosophical antecedents of modernism in the nineteenth century and examines experimentation in both art forms. The book investigates dance's impact on the modernists' critique of language and shows the importance to writers of choreographic innovations by dancers of the fin de siecle, of the Ballets Russes, and of European and American experimentalists in non-balletic forms of modern dance. A reciprocal relationship occurs with choreographic use of literary text. Dance and literature meet at this time at the site of formal experiments in narrative, drama, and poetics, and their relationship contributes to common aesthetic modes such as symbolism, primitivism, expressionism, and constructivism. Focussing on the first half of the twentieth century, the book locates these transactions in a transatlantic field, giving weight to both European and American contexts and illustrating the importance of dance as a conduit of modernist preoccupations in Europe and the US through patterns of influence and exchange. Chapters explore the close interrelationships of writers and choreographers of this period including Mallarme, Nietzsche, Yeats, Conrad, Woolf, Lawrence, Pound, Eliot, and Beckett, Fuller, Duncan, Fokine, Nijinsky, Massine, Nijinska, Balanchine, Tudor, Laban, Wigman, Graham, and Humphrey, and recover radical experiments by neglected writers and choreographers from David Garnett and Esther Forbes to Andree Howard and Oskar Schlemmer.

In Landscape of the Now, author Kent De Spain takes readers on a deep journey into the underlying processes and structures of postmodern movement improvisation. Based on a series of interviews with master teachers who have developed unique approaches that are taught around the world - Steve Paxton, Simone Forti, Lisa Nelson, Deborah Hay, Nancy Stark Smith, Barbara Dilley, Anna Halprin, and Ruth Zaporah - this book offers the rare opportunity to find some clarity in what is often a complex and confusing experience. After more than 20 years of research, De Spain has created an extensive list of questions that explore issues that arise for the improviser in practice and performance as well as resources that influence movements and choices. Answers to these questions are placed side by side to create dialog and depth of understanding, and to see the range of possible approaches experienced improvisers might explore. In its nineteen chapters, Landscape of the Now delves into issues like the influence of an audience on an improviser's choices or how performers "track" and use their experience of the moment. The book also looks at the role of cognitive skills, memory, space, emotion, and the senses. One chapter offers a rare opportunity for an honest discussion of the role of various forms of spirituality in what is seen as a secular dance form. Whether read from cover to cover or pulled apart and explored a subject at a time, Landscape of the Now offers the reader a kind of map into the mysterious realm of human creativity, and the wisdom and experience of artists who have spent a lifetime exploring it.

Tracing Tangueros offers an inside view of Argentine tango music in the context of the growth and development of the art form's instrumental and stylistic innovations. Rather than perpetuating the glamorous worldwide conceptions that often only reflect the tango that left Argentina nearly 100 years ago, authors Kacey Link and Kristin Wendland trace tango's historical and stylistic musical trajectory in Argentina, beginning with the guardia nueva's crystallization of the genre in the 1920s, moving through tango's Golden Age (1925-1955), and culminating with the "Music of Buenos Aires" today. Through the transmission, discussion, examination, and analysis of primary sources currently unavailable outside of Argentina, including scores, manuals of style, archival audio/video recordings, and live video footage of performances and demonstrations, Link and Wendland frame and define Argentine tango music as a distinct expression possessing its own musical legacy and characteristic musical elements. Beginning by establishing a broad framework of the tango art form, the book proceeds to move through twelve in-depth profiles of representative tangueros (tango musicians) within the genre's historical and stylistic trajectory. Through this focused examination of tangueros and their music, Link and Wendland show how the dynamic Argentine tango grows from one tanguero linked to another, and how the composition techniques and performance practices of each generation are informed by that of the past.

Amidst the growing forums of kinky Jews, orthodox drag queens, and Jewish geisha girls, we find today's sexy Jewess in a host of reflexive plays with sexed-up self-display. A social phantasm with real legs, she moves boldly between neo-burlesque striptease, comedy television, ballet movies, and progressive porn to construct the 21st Century Jewish American woman through charisma and comic craft, in-your-face antics, and offensive charm. Her image redresses longstanding stereotypes of the hag, the Jewish mother, and Jewish American princess that have demeaned the Jewish woman as overly demanding, inappropriate, and unattractive across the 20th century, even as Jews assimilated into the American mainstream. But why does "sexy" work to update tropes of the Jewish woman? And how does sex link to humor in order for this update to work? Entangling questions of sexiness to race, gender, and class, The Case of the Sexy Jewess frames an embodied joke-work genre that is most often, but not always meant to be funny. In a contemporary period after the thrusts of assimilation and women's liberation movements, performances usher in new versions of old scripts with ranging consequences. At the core is the recuperative performance of identity through impersonation, and the question of its radical or conservative potential. Appropriating, re-appropriating, and mis-appropriating identity material within and beyond their midst, Sexy Jewess artists play up the failed logic of representation by mocking identity categories altogether. They act as comic chameleons, morphing between margin and center in countless number of charged caricatures. Embodying ethnic and gender positions as always already on the edge while ever more in the middle, contemporary Jewish female performers extend a comic tradition in new contexts, mobilizing progressive discourses from positions of newfound race and gender privilege.

The ancient world served as an unconventional source of inspiration for a generation of modernists. Drawing on examples from literature, dance, photography, and film, Modernism's Mythic Pose argues that a strain of antimodern-classicism permeates modernist celebrations of novelty, shock, and technology.
The touchstone of Preston's study is Delsartism--the popular transnational movement which promoted mythic statue--posing, poetic recitation, and other hybrid solo performances for health and spiritual development. Derived from nineteenth-century acting theorist Francois Delsarte and largely organized by women, Delsartism shaped modernist performances, genres, and ideas of gender. Even Ezra Pound, a famous promoter of the "new," made ancient figures speak in the "old" genre of the dramatic monologue and performed public recitations. Recovering precedents in nineteenth-century popular entertainments and Delsartism's hybrid performances, this book considers the canonical modernists Pound and T. S. Eliot, lesser-known poets like Charlotte Mew, the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, Isadora Duncan the international dance star, and H.D. as poet and film actor.
Preston's interdisciplinary engagement with performance, poetics, modern dance, and silent film demonstrates that studies of modernism often overemphasize breaks with the past. Modernism also posed myth in an ambivalent relationship to modernity, a halt in the march of progress that could function as escapism, skeptical critique, or a figure for the death of gods and civilizations."