Focusing on visual approaches to performance in global cultural contexts, Perspectives in Motion explores the work of Adrienne L. Kaeppler, a pioneering researcher who has made a number of interdisciplinary contributions over five decades to dance and performance studies. Through a diverse range of case studies from Oceania, Asia, and Europe, and interdisciplinary approaches, this edited collection offers new critical and ethnographic frameworks for understanding and experiencing practices of music and dance across the globe.

This book renews thinking about the moving body by drawing on dance practice and performance from across the world. Eighteen internationally recognised scholars show how dance can challenge our thoughts and feelings about our own and other cultures, our emotions and prejudices, and our sense of public and private space. In so doing, they offer a multi-layered response to ideas of affect and emotion, culture and politics, and ultimately, the place of dance and art itself within society. The chapters in this collection arise from a number of different political and historical contexts. By teasing out their detail and situating dance within them, art is given a political charge. That charge is informed by the work of Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Ranciere and Luce Irigaray as well as their forebears such as Spinoza, Plato and Freud. Taken together, Choreography and Corporeality: RELAY in Motion puts thought into motion, without forgetting its origins in the social world.

* Interdisciplinary book that weaves together ideas from psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and dance. * Considers how movement is central to our sense of reality, our sense of self, and our relationships with others and the surrounding world. * Accessibly written book that foregrounds the author's voice and experiences

This study is the first monograph on the work of French choreographer Jerome Bel, following his artistic trajectory from the beginning of his career as a choreographer in 1994 to his most recent piece in 2016. It contains an overview and in-depth analysis of all of his choreographies, from Nom donne par l'auteur to Disabled Theatre, and provides a theoretical reflection on their theatrical nature. Bel has developed a singular discourse on dance that has often been labelled 'conceptual'. By reducing the stage elements in his performances to a minimum, his work explores the implications of dance as an art form that has, since the heyday of modernism, based its guiding principles on the laws of nature. Bel addresses the question of power relations in dance by working through the questions of authorship and various forms of subjectivity dance produces. Offering a unique opportunity to ground seemingly abstract academic theories in a specific embodied artistic practice, this study explores the intersection between artistic practice and theory.

Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow illustrates the ways in which Sokolow's choreography circulated American modernism among Jewish and communist channels of the international Left from the 1930s-1960s in the United States, Mexico, and Israel. Drawing upon extensive archival materials, interviews, and theories from dance, Jewish, and gender studies, this book illuminates Sokolow's statements for workers' rights, anti-racism, and the human condition through her choreography for social change alongside her dancing and teaching for Martha Graham. Tracing a catalog of dances with her companies Dance Unit, La Paloma Azul, Lyric Theatre, and Anna Sokolow Dance Company, along with presenters and companies the Negro Cultural Committee, New York State Committee for the Communist Party, Federal Theatre Project, Nuevo Grupo Mexicano de Clasicas y Modernas, and Inbal Dance Theater, this book highlights Sokolow's work in conjunction with developments in ethnic definitions, diaspora, and nationalism in the US, Mexico, and Israel.

This collection of articles by Susan W. Stinson, organized thematically and chronologically by the author, reveals the evolution of the field of arts education in general and dance education in particular, through narrative and critical reflections by this unique scholar and a few co-authors. It also includes contextual insights not available elsewhere. The author's pioneering embodied research work in arts and dance education continues to be relevant to researchers today. The selected chapters and articles were predominantly previously published in a variety of journals, conference proceedings and books between 1985 and the present. Each section is preceded by an introduction and the author has written a post scriptum for each article to offer a commentary or response to the article from the current perspective.

Music in 17th and early 18th century Italy was wonderfully rich and varied: in theatrical and secular vocal chamber music alone, we saw the rise of the solo song and cantata, and the birth and growth of opera, all establishing important new structural and expressive paradigms. But this was also a complex time of uncertainty and change, as 'old' and 'new' interacted in subtle and often surprising ways. There is still much to document, explore and explain in terms of composers and repertories and their multi-layered contexts. This collection of essays by European, British and American musicologists seeks to consolidate the recent growth interest in seventeenth century studies. It includes discussions of leading composers (d'India, Monteverdi, Rovetta, Steffani, Albinoni, Vivaldi and Handel), repertories (chamber laments, staged balli and operatic mad-scenes), geographical issues (the arrival of Neapolitan opera in Venice), institutional contexts, and iconography. Inspiration for the book was drawn from the poineering research of Nigel Fortune, to whom the volume is dedicated on his 70th birthday.

This essential pocket guide to this enduringly popular art, is a perfect introduction to over eighty of the most performed ballets today. Spanning nearly two centuries of classical dancing, this indispensable book begins in the Romantic era of the 1830s, moves through the great Tchaikovskly ballets of Tsarist St Petersburg, to the inspirational work of Diaghilev at the beginning of the twentieth century and the luminous neo-classicism of Balanchine. Ashton and Macmillan are covered in depth, and the most recent ground-breaking work brings us up to the present day.

The effort to win federal copyright protection for dance choreography in the United States was a simultaneously racialized and gendered contest. Copyright and choreography, particularly as tied with whiteness, have a refractory history. This book examines the evolution of choreographic works from being federally non-copyrightable, unless they partook of dramatic or narrative structures, to becoming a category of works potentially copyrightable under the 1976 Copyright Act. Crucial to this evolution is the development of whiteness as status property, both as an aesthetic and cultural force and a legally accepted and protected form of property. The choreographic inheritances of Loie Fuller, George Balanchine, and Martha Graham are particularly important to map because these constitute crucial sites upon which negotiations on how to package bodies of both choreographers and dancers - as racialized, sexualized, nationalized, and classed - are staged, reflective of larger social, political, and cultural tensions.

Performance generating systems are systematic and task-based dramaturgies that generate performance for or with an audience. In dance, such systems differ in ways that matter from more closed choreographed scores and more open forms of structured improvisation. Dancers performing within these systems draw on predefined and limited sources while working on specific tasks within constraining rules. The generating components of the systems provide boundaries that enable the performance to self-organize into iteratively shifting patterns instead of becoming repetitive or chaotic. This book identifies the generating components and dynamics of these works and the kinds of dramaturgical agency they enable. It explains how the systems of these creations affect the perception, cognition and learning of dancers and why that is a central part of how they work. It also examines how the combined dramaturgical and psychological effects of the systems performatively address individual and social conditions of trauma that otherwise tend to remain unchangeable and negatively impact the human capacity to learn, relate and adapt. The book provides analytical frameworks and practical insights for those who wish to study or apply performance generating systems in dance within the fields of choreography and dance dramaturgy, dance education, community dance or dance psychology. Featured cases offer unique insight into systems created by Deborah Hay and Christopher House, William Forsythe, Ame Henderson, Karen Kaeja and Lee Su-Feh.

This book addresses the mind-body dichotomy in movement and dance. This book includes a description of the often-forgotten kinesthetic sense, body awareness, somatic practices, body-based way of thinking, mental imagery, nonverbal communication, human empathy, and symbol systems, what occurs in the brain during learning, and why and how movement and dance should be part of school curricula. This exploration arguers that becoming more aware of bodily sensations serves as a basis for knowing, communicating, learning, and teaching through movement and dance. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students interested in teaching methodology and for courses in physical education, dance, and education.

Politics as Public Art presents a keystone collection that pursues new frameworks for a critical understanding of the relationship between public art and protest movements through the utilization of socially engaged and choreopolitical approaches. This anthology draws from a unique combination of interdisciplinary scholarship and activism where it integrates geographically rich perspectives from political and grassroots community contexts spanning the United States, Europe, Australia, and Southeastern Africa. The volume questions, and reimagines, not only how public art practice can be integral to politics, including forms of surveillance and control of bodily movement. It also probes into how political participation itself can be construed as a form of public artmaking for radical social change and just worlds. This collection advocates for scholar-activist inquiry into how socially engaged public art practices can pave the way for thinking through-and working toward-championing more inclusive futures and, as such, choreographing greater intersectional justice. This book provides a wide appeal to audiences across humanities and social science scholarship, arts practice, and activism seeking conceptual and empirically informed tools for moving from public art and choreopolitical theory into modes of praxis: critical reflection and action.

Politics as Public Art presents a keystone collection that pursues new frameworks for a critical understanding of the relationship between public art and protest movements through the utilization of socially engaged and choreopolitical approaches. This anthology draws from a unique combination of interdisciplinary scholarship and activism where it integrates geographically rich perspectives from political and grassroots community contexts spanning the United States, Europe, Australia, and Southeastern Africa. The volume questions, and reimagines, not only how public art practice can be integral to politics, including forms of surveillance and control of bodily movement. It also probes into how political participation itself can be construed as a form of public artmaking for radical social change and just worlds. This collection advocates for scholar-activist inquiry into how socially engaged public art practices can pave the way for thinking through-and working toward-championing more inclusive futures and, as such, choreographing greater intersectional justice. This book provides a wide appeal to audiences across humanities and social science scholarship, arts practice, and activism seeking conceptual and empirically informed tools for moving from public art and choreopolitical theory into modes of praxis: critical reflection and action.

This book provides a practical introduction to researching and performing early Anglo-American secular music and dance with attention to their place in society. Supporting growing interest among scholars and performers spanning numerous disciplines, this book contributes quality new scholarship to spur further research on this overshadowed period of American music and dance. Organized in three parts, the chapters offer methodological and interpretative guidance and model varied approaches to contemporary scholarship. The first part introduces important bibliographic tools and models their use in focused examinations of individual objects of material musical culture. The second part illustrates methods of situating dance and its music in early American society as relevant to scholars working in multiple disciplines. The third part examines contemporary performance of early American music and dance from three distinct perspectives ranging from ethnomusicological fieldwork and phenomenology to the theatrical stage. Dedicated to scholar Kate Van Winkle Keller, this volume builds on her legacy of foundational contributions to the study of early American secular music, dance, and society. It provides an essential resource for all those researching and performing music and dance from the revolutionary era through the early nineteenth century.

This book presents an engaging sociological investigation into how gender is negotiated and performed in ballroom and Latin dancing that draws on extensive ethnographic research, as well as the author's own experience as a dancer. It explores the key factors underpinning the popularity of this leisure activity and highlights what this reveals more broadly about the nature of gender roles at the current time. The author begins with an overview of its rich social history and shifting class status, establishing the context within which contemporary masculinities and femininities in this community are explored. Real and imagined gendered traditions are examined across a range of dancer experiences that follows the trajectory of a typical learner: from finding a partner, attending lessons and forming networks, through to taking part in competitions. The analysis of these narratives creates a nuanced picture of a dance culture that is empowering, yet also highly consumerist and image-conscious; a highly ritualised set of practices that both reinstate and transgress gender roles. This innovative contribution to the feminist leisure literature will appeal to students and scholars of anthropology, dance, sport, gender, cultural and media studies.

Across spatial, bodily, and ethical domains, music and dance both emerge from and give rise to intimate collaboration. This theoretically rich collection takes an ethnographic approach to understanding the collective dimension of sound and movement in everyday life, drawing on genres and practices in contexts as diverse as Japanese shakuhachi playing, Peruvian huayno, and the Greek goth scene. Highlighting the sheer physicality of the ethnographic encounter, as well as the forms of sociality that gradually emerge between self and other, each contribution demonstrates how dance and music open up pathways and give shape to life trajectories that are neither predetermined nor teleological, but generative.

This book is an ethnographic case study of Sufi ritual practice and embodied experience amongst female members of the Naqshbandi community. Drawing on fieldwork in Cape Town, South Africa, and Lefke, Cyprus (2013/2014), the author examines women's experiences within a particular performance of Sufi tradition. The focus is on the ritual named hadra, involving the recital of sacred texts, music, and body movement, where the goal is for the individual to reach a state of intimacy with God. The volume considers Sufi practice as a form of embodied cultural behavior, religious identity, and selfhood construction. It explains how Muslim women's participation in hadra ritual life reflects religious and cultural ideas about the body, the body's movement, and embodied selfhood expression within the ritual experience. Sufi Women, Ritual Embodiment and the 'Self' engages with studies in Sufism, symbolic anthropology, ethnography, dance, and somatic studies. Contributing to discussions of religion, gender, and the body, the book will be of interest to scholars from anthropology, sociology, religious ritual studies, Sufism and gender studies, and performance studies.

Includes an international and multidisciplinary list of contributors.

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.

This book examines the performance of Bauls, 'folk' performers from Bengal, in the context of a rapidly globalizing Indian economy and against the backdrop of extreme nationalistic discourses. Recognizing their scope beyond the musical and cultural realm, Sukanya Chakrabarti engages in discussing the subversive and transformational potency of Bauls and their performances. In-Between Worlds argues that the Bauls through their musical, spiritual, and cultural performances offer 'joy' and 'spirituality,' thus making space for what Dr. Ambedkar in his famous 1942 speech had identified as 'reclamation of human personality'. Chakrabarti destabilizes the category of 'folk' as a fixed classification or an origin point, and fractures homogeneous historical representations of the Baul as a 'folk' performer and a wandering mendicant exposing the complex heterogeneity that characterizes this group. Establishing 'folk-ness' as a performance category, and 'folk festivals' as sites of performing 'folk-ness,' contributing to a heritage industry that thrives on imagined and recreated nostalgia, Chakrabarti examines different sites that produce varied performative identities of Bauls, probing the limits of such categories while simultaneously advocating for polyvocality and multifocality. While this project has grounded itself firmly in performance studies, it has borrowed extensively from fields of postcolonial studies and subaltern histories, literature, ethnography and ethnomusicology, and cosmopolitan studies.

This book locates the philosophy of Ubuntu as the undergirding framework for indigenous dance pedagogies in local communities in Uganda. Through critical examination of the reflections and practices of selected local dance teachers, the volume reveals how issues of inclusion, belonging, and agency are negotiated through a creatively complex interplay between individuality and communality. The analysis frames pedagogies as sites where reflective thought and kinaesthetic practice converge to facilitate ever-evolving individual imagination and community innovations.

A Sourcebook of Performance Labor presents the views and experiences of collaborators in other artists' works. This book reorients well-known works of contemporary performance and social practice around the workers who have shaped, enacted, and supported them. It emerges from perspectives on maintenance, care, affective labor, and the knowledges created and preserved through gesture and intersubjectivity. This compilation of interviews is filled with the voices of collaborators in notable works attributed to established contemporary artists, including Francis Alys, Tania Bruguera, Suzanne Lacy, Ernesto Pujol, Asad Raza, Dread Scott, and Tino Sehgal. In the spirit of the artworks under discussion, this book reinvests in the possibilities for art as a collective effort to explore new ways of finding ourselves in others and others in ourselves. The Sourcebook collection is a contribution for further theorizing a largely unaddressed perspective in contemporary art. This collection will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance studies and art history.

Dance, Ageing and Collaborative Arts-Based Research contributes a critical and comprehensive perspective on the role of the arts -specifically dance - in enhancing the lives of older people. The book focuses on the development of an innovative arts-based program for older adults and the collaborative process of exploring and understanding its impact in relation to ageing, social inclusion, and care. It offers a wide audience of readers a richer understanding of the role of the arts in ageing and life enrichment, critical contributions to theories of ageing and care, specific approaches to arts-based collaborative research, and an exploration of the impact of Sharing Dance from the perspective of older adults, artists, researchers, and community leaders. Given the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of this book, it will be of interest across health, social science, and humanities disciplines, including gerontology, sociology, psychology, geography, nursing, social work, and performing arts. Licence line: Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.