A history of dance's pathologization may startle readers who find in dance performance grace, discipline, geometry, poetry, and the body's transcendence of itself. Exploring dance's historical links to the medical and scientific connotations of a "pathology," this book asks what has subtended the idealization of dance in the West. It investigates the nineteenth-century response, in the intersections of dance, literature, and medicine, to the complex and long-standing connections between illness, madness, poetry, and performance.
In the nineteenth century, medicine becomes a major cultural index to measure the body's meanings. As a particularly performative form of madness, nineteenth-century hysteria preserved the traditional connection to dance in medical descriptions of "choreas." In its withholding of speech and its use of body code, dance, like hysteria, functions as a form of symptomatic expression.
Yet by working like a symptom, dance performance can also be read as a commentary on symptomatology and as a condition of possibility for such alternative approaches to mental illness as psychoanalysis. By redeeming as art what is "lost" in hysteria, dance expresses non-hysterically what only hysteria had been able to express: the somatic translation of idea, the physicalization of meaning.
Medicine's discovery of "idea" manifesting itself in the body in mental illness strikingly parallels a literary fascination with the ability of nineteenth-century dance to manifest "idea," suggesting that the evolution of medical thinking about mind-body relations as they malfunction in madness, as well as changes in the cultural reception of danced representations of these relations, might be paradigmatic shifts caused by the same cultural factors: concern about the body as a site of meaning and about vision as a theater of knowledge.

Both Buddhism and dance invite the practitioner into present-moment embodiment. The rise of Western Buddhism, sacred dance and dance/movement therapy, along with the mindfulness meditation boom, has created opportunities for Buddhism to inform dance aesthetics and for Buddhist practice to be shaped by dance. This collection of new essays documents the innovative work being done at the intersection of Buddhism and dance. The contributors-scholars, choreographers and Buddhist masters-discuss movement, performance, ritual and theory, among other topics. The final section provides a variety of guided practices.

Sexuality is a difficult topic for all educators. Dance teachers and educators are not immune to these educational challenges, especially given the large number of children, adolescents, and young adults who pursue dance study and performance. Most troubling is the lack of serious discourse in dance education and the development of educative strategies to promote healthy sexuality and empowered gender identities in proactive ways. This volume, focused on sexuality, gender, and identity in dance education, expands this developing area of study and investigates diverse perspectives from public schools, private sector dance studios and schools, as well as college and university dance programs. By openly bringing issues of sexuality and gender to the forefront of dance education and training, this book straightforwardly addresses critical challenges for engaged educators interested in age appropriate content, theme and costume; the hyper-sexualization of children and adolescents; sexual orientation and homophobia; the hidden curriculum of sexuality and gender; sexual identity; the impact of contemporary culture; and mass media, and sexual exploitation. The original research provides a frank discussion, highlighting practical applications and offering insights and recommendations for today's educational environment in dance. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Dance Education.

Originally a royal court dance, baakisimba asserted the authority of the king as the head of Baganda society. After the abolition of kingship in 1967, baakisimba dance began to be performed in other contexts, with women sometimes playing the accompanying drums-traditionally a man's role-and with men occasionally performing the dance.
Sylivia Nannyonga-Tamusuza argues that the music and dance of the Baganda people are not simply reflective of culture; baakisimba participates in the construction of social relations, and helps determine how these relations shape the performing arts. Integrating a study of foregrounds the conceptualization of gender as a time-specific cultural phenomenon. Illuminating the complex relationship between baakisimba and Baganda culture, this path breaking volume bridges the gaps in previous scholarship that integrates music and dance in ethnomusicological scholarship.

This broad-based collection of essays is an introduction both to the concerns of contemporary folklore scholarship and to the variety of forms that folk performance has taken throughout English history. Combining case studies of specific folk practices with discussion of the various different lenses through which they have been viewed since becoming the subject of concerted study in Victorian times, this book builds on the latest work in an ever-growing body of contemporary folklore scholarship. Many of the contributing scholars are also practicing performers and bring experience and understanding of performance to their analyses and critiques. Chapters range across the spectrum of folk song, music, drama and dance, but maintain a focus on the key defining characteristics of folk performance - custom and tradition - in a full range of performances, from carol singing and sword dancing to playground rhymes and mummers' plays. As well as being an essential reference for folklorists and scholars of traditional performance and local history, this is a valuable resource for readers in all disciplines of dance, drama, song and music whose work coincides with English folk traditions.

A transdisciplinary approach to practice-as-research, complete with its own elaborate theory of practice and a set of four multi-year-performance research projects through which the theory plays out. Its methodology is at times ethnographic as Henry Daniel deftly inserts himself and his Caribbean West African ancestry into a series of complex cortical and geographic maps, which become choreographic in every sense of the term. The central argument in the book is based on a claim that human beings are cognitively embodied through their own lived experiences of movement through space and time; the spaces we inhabit and the practices we engage in are documented through cortical and cartographic maps. In short, as we inhabit and move through spaces our brains organise our experiences into unique cortical and spatial maps, which eventually determine how we see and deal with, i.e., 'become' subjects in a world that we also help create. The argument is that through performance, as a re-cognising and re-membering of these movements, we can claim the knowledge that is in the body as well as in the spaces through which it travels. To demonstrate how the brain organises our experiences of the world according to cartographic (graphically mapping procedures) and cortical (motor, sensory and visual functions) mapping and exploring the impact of this mapping to choreographic practice, considering how maps might be disrupted or altered by change of circumstances. This is illustrated through scientific, creative and reflective approaches to exploring neurological process of embodied experiences, as well as the analysis of projects that have utilized this practice thus far. Audience will include Dance and Performance Studies Scholars; Dancers and Choreographers; Undergraduate and Advanced Students; Researchers

The language of the body is a central text in the study of flamenco on the global stage. From the records of the Inquisition, to 16th century literature, to European travel diaries, the Spanish dancer beguiles and fascinates. The word flamenco evokes the body of a sensuous and rebellious woman-the bailaora-whose lascivious movements seduce the audience, only to reject their invasive gaze with a stomp of defiance. The flamenco dancer's body is an agent of ideological resistance, conveying a desire for subjectivity and autonomy and implying deeply held ideas about history, national identity, femininity and masculinity. This collection of new essays by flamenco historians, critics and cultural theorists provides an overview of flamenco scholarship, illuminating flamenco's narrative and addressing some of the stereotypes that exist in flamenco studies. The contributors bring new information into flamenco's chronology, offer fresh perspectives on age-old themes and suggest new paradigms for flamenco as a cultural practice.

Moving Sites explores site-specific dance practice through a combination of analytical essays and practitioner accounts of their working processes. In offering this joint effort of theory and practice, it aims to provide dance academics, students and practitioners with a series of discussions that shed light both on approaches to making this type of dance practice, and evaluating and reflecting on it. The edited volume combines critical thinking from a range of perspectives including commentary and observation from the fields of dance studies, human geography and spatial theory in order to present interdisciplinary discourse and a range of critical and practice-led lenses through which this type of work can be considered and explored. In so doing, this book addresses the following questions: * How do choreographers make site-specific dance performance? * What occurs when a moving body engages with site, place and environment? * How might we interpret, analyse and evaluate this type of dance practice through a range of theoretical lenses? * How can this type of practice inform wider discussions of embodiment, site, space, place and environment? This innovative and exciting book seeks to move beyond description and discussion of site-specific dance as a spectacle or novelty and considers site-dance as a valid and vital form of contemporary dance practice that explores, reflects, disrupts, contests and develops understandings and practices of inhabiting and engaging with a range of sites and environments. Dr Victoria Hunter is Senior Lecturer in Dance at the University of Chichester.

This book provides an engaging and contextualised insight into a South African township-based arts centre that has survived the vicissitudes of steady militarisation in townships during some of the worst years of apartheid as well as the exhilaration of a new democratic policy while attempting to circumnavigate different policies and funding dispensations.

Sibikwa provides arts centres across the world and especially those in decolonising countries with strategies for survival in tumultuous times. This multi-disciplinary book maps and co-ordinates wider historical, political, and social contextual concerns and events with matters specific to a community-based east of Johannesburg and provides an exploration and analysis by experts of authentic theatre-making and performance, dance, indigenous music, arts in education and NGO governance. It has contemporary significance and raises important questions regarding inclusivity and transformation, the function and future of arts centres, community-based applied arts practices, creativity, and international partnerships.

This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance, indigenous music, dance, and South African history.

Table of Contents

List of contributors

Acknowledgements

　

PART 1

Chapter 1. The Political is Personal: Smal Ndaba and Phyllis Klotz in Thumbnail Portraits of Origins and Orientations

Sarah Roberts

Chapter 2. Founding Sibikwa: A Professional Partnership Tempered in the Forge of Apartheid’s Final Years

Sarah Roberts

Chapter 3. Democracy, the First Decade: The Mandela-Mbeki Years (1994-2005)

Sarah Roberts

Chapter 4. The Trouble with Freedom: Mbeki’s Dream of an African Renaissance, Nation-building and Issues Surrounding HIV/AIDS in South Africa

Sarah Roberts

Chapter 5. Issues of Governance, Policy, Delivery, and Accountability Escalate: Sibikwa Responds to Developments in Arts and Culture Policy Documents and with Theatre-in-Education Projects

Sarah Roberts

　

Chapter 6. The Struggle for Social Justice in Confronting Gender-based Violence and Srategies of Intensifying an African Cultural Heritage as the Project Moves into the Future

Sarah Roberts

Appendix :1 A Chronology of Major Political Events, Cultural Developments and Sibikwa Plays

PART II

Chapter 7.Governance of Sibikwa Arts Centre: A Reflection on the Agility, Progress, and Longevity of the Organisation

Munyaradzi Chatikobo and Caryn Green

Chapter 8. Sibikwa’s Educational Programmes

Vanessa Bower and Hazel Barnes

Appendix 2: A Chronology of Educational and Vocational Training Programmes

Chapter 9. Living Proof: Thirty Years of Sibikwa’s Theatre Productions

Sarah Roberts

Appendix 3: A Chronology of Sibikwa Productions

Chapter 10. Celebrating Sibikwa’s Legacy of Dance and Physical Theatre from Community to Professional Dance Development

Clare Craighead and Lliane Loots

Appendix 4: A Chronology of Sibikwa Dance Company Productions and Festivals

Chapter 11. Keeping the African Sound Relevant

Evans Netshivhambe

Appendix 5: A Chronology of Sibikwa’s Music History

Chapter 12. Framing the Intersectional Gender Politics of the Sibikwa Legacy

Lliane Loots

Appendix 6- A Chronology of Gender Based Productions, Festivals and Training

Index

List of Contributors

Phyllis Klotz is the artistic director and co-founder of the Sibikwa Arts Centre in Benoni and has been at the forefront of arts training and development for youth for over 40 years. Her work has always been focused on the empowerment of young black females. She has been and still is involved in developmental theatre and arts education and is recognised as an expert in the development of community arts centres. She is the recipient of several awards for her contribution to South African theatre and has directed and co-written the seminal theatre piece, You Strike a Woman, You Strike a Rock. She has served on boards of the National Arts Council, State Theatre, CATHSSETA and the Market Theatre. She is also the recipient of the Naledi Lifetime Achievement Award.

Smal Ndaba is the co-founder and managing director of the Sibikwa Arts Centre; as an actor, playwright and director he has toured all over Southern Africa, the USA and Europe and has gained both national and international recognition for his work. He has initiated arts programmes to assist street children and juvenile prisoners; he assists South African and Mozambican community arts centres to build capacity. The majority of plays directed and written by Smal, focus on community issues. Smal has over 30 years’ experience working in the community arts and imparts his knowledge frequently through conducting workshops in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana and the USA. He is joint winner of the Naledi Lifetime Achievement Award 2005 with co-director Phyllis Klotz.

Prof Hazel Barnes is retired head of the Drama and Performance Studies Programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg campus where she lectured, researched, performed and directed theatre and also developed the applied drama and theatre option. She was the university orator for a number of years and also assistant Dean. Since retirement she has been a Mellon visiting scholar at the University of Cape Town and visiting lecturer and chair of the research committee of the Drama for Life Programme University of the Witwatersrand. She has written on the use of applied drama with the deaf, for reconciliation and trauma recovery, and on the work of South African playwrights, Greig Coetzee, whose plays she has anthologised, and Mandla Mothwe.

Vanessa Bower studied English and Speech & Drama and taught at various institutions in Cape Town. In 1998 she joined the staff of Sibikwa Community Theatre Project, where she facilitated teacher training programmes for seven years. She was later involved in the Learnership Programmes and subsequently trained a number of artists in arts facilitation at Sibikwa, in preparation for the Artists in Schools Programme. She has published a book on Assessment of Arts & Culture and has produced Creative Arts teacher support manuals for the Gauteng Department of Education. She has also provided training in Workplace Communications.

Munyaradzi Chatikobo is a Lecturer in Drama for Life and Cultural Policy and Management in the Wits School of Arts. He has considerable experience in Cultural Leadership and Arts Management training. His academic and research interests are in Cultural Policy and Management which includes Community Arts, Culture and Development, Cultural and Creative Industries, Culture and Diplomacy as well as Social and Cultural Entrepreneurship. He is a board member for Nhimbe Trust and CHIPAWO Trust in Zimbabwe. He is also a Non-Executive Director of Andani.Africa. He is a registered PhD candidate in the Wits School of Arts and his area of study is Cultural Policy and Community Theatre in South Africa. In 2018 he teamed up with Avril Joffe, Johanna Mavhungu and Annabell Lebethe to author a book chapter on Cultural Governance in South Africa. The chapter appears in a book edited by Ian W King and Annick Schramme titled Cultural Governance in the Global Context; An International Perspective on Arts Organisations (Palgrave).

Clare Craighead has been the company manager to Flatfoot Dance Company for the past 15 years. She holds an MA degree in Drama and Performance Studies from UKZN and has published in Critical Arts, South African Theatre Journal, South African Dance Journal and Agenda: A Journal of Feminist Media. Craighead spearheaded and continues to facilitate the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Festival’s graduate writing residency programme. "JOMBA! KHULUMA". which is an intensive platform that takes graduate students - under festival conditions - through the rigours of reviewing and critically engaging dance. She has also been a contract lecturer/tutor to UKZN’s Drama and Performance Studies and Gender Studies Programmes and has a long-standing position as a moderator for Embury Institute for Education’s "Education and Diversity" module. Currently she is working as a lecturer at Durban University of Technology’s Drama and Production Studies Department.

Dr Lliane Loots holds the position of Lecturer in the Drama and Performance Studies Programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She has a MA degree in Gender Studies and completed her PhD in 2018 looking at contemporary dance/performance histories on the African continent. As an artist/scholar her PhD research is framed within an ethnographic and autoethnographic paradigm with a focus on narrative as methodology. Loots has published widely within this area of academic/praxis enquiry. Loots holds the founding position of Artistic Director for UKZN’s Centre for Creative Arts annual international JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience – a festival that turns 23 in 2021. She has recently completed a 3-year stretch on the National Arts Festival’s Artistic Committee for dance. Loots founded Flatfoot Dance Company as a professional dance company in 2003 when it grew out of a dance training programme that originally began in 1994. As the artistic director and resident choreographer for Flatfoot, she has won numerous national choreographic awards and commissions and has travelled extensively in Europe, America and within the African continent with her dance work. Loots was awarded the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters) by the French government in 2017 for her work in the South African dance sector.

Dr Evans Netshivhambe (ORCiD: 0000-0003-0362-4110) is a young South African composer lecturing in African music at the University of Pretoria with an interest in African music identity through African art composition. His PhD in African music composition incorporates Venda rhythmic elements into African art music, exploring a new 'sound world' through composition. He is currently a lecturer in African music studies, at the University of Pretoria. In 2008, Evans was awarded third prize in a choral music competition held by the Southern African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO), which showcased 20th century choral music style. He also received three commissions from the SAMRO Foundation (in 2010, 2011 and 2012 respectively).

Dr Sarah Roberts’(ORCiD:0000-0002-4383-4668) areer synthesises professional practice with a commitment to education, development and scholarship. Recently retired from the University of the Witwatersrand, where she was an Associate Professor, she has developed and implemented a range of undergraduate courses in cultural studies, performance and design in the Division of Theatre and Performance. Her focus on developing improvisation skills and the agency of actors as an ensemble is documented in publications in the Journal of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa and the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English. A multi-award-winning professional production designer, her portfolio includes significant productions emerging from South Africa since 1985 including designing the stage for the Union Building Gardens for President Nelson Mandela’s inauguration in addition to landmark productions across the spectrum of musical theatre, contemporary dance and drama, including Sarafina!, Sophiatown andNothing But the Truth. These productions, including a significant number of Sibikwa productions over the span of thirty years, have been feted nationally and internationally. One of the original Board members of Sibikwa at its inception, she served as a trustee for the project for ten years and has since continued to be closely associated with a range of Sibikwa projects, productions and conferences.

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Dance in TV advertisements has long been familiar to Americans as a silhouette dancing against a colored screen, exhibiting moves from air guitar to breakdance tricks, all in service of selling the latest Apple product. But as author Colleen T. Dunagan shows in Consuming Dance, the advertising industry used dance to market items long before iPods. In this book, Dunagan lays out a comprehensive history and analysis of dance commercials to demonstrate the ways in which the form articulates with, informs, and reflects U.S. culture. In doing so, she examines dance commercials as cultural products, looking at the ways in which dance engages with television, film, and advertising in the production of cultural meaning. Throughout the book, Dunagan interweaves semiotics, choreographic analysis, cultural studies, and critical theory in an examination of contemporary dance commercials while placing the analysis within a historical context. She draws upon connections between individual dance-commercials and the discursive and production histories to provide a thorough look into brand identity and advertising's role in constructing social identities.

This book analyses the world-renowned Belgian choreographer's key approaches and dramaturgical strategies through selected case studies from his oeuvre between 2000 and 2010, from Rien de Rien to Babel(words). It investigates Cherkaoui's choreographic and dramaturgic interventions in debates on the nation, culture, religion and language, by emphasising the transcultural, transreligious and geopolitical dimensions of the dialogues and exchanges he explored during this initial decade. Engaged spectatorship refers to the ongoing thinking, talking, research and writing that the spectator is invited to do in order to fulfil the work's macro-dramaturgical potential to resist nationalism, populism and religious fundamentalism. The book meticulously explores Cherkaoui's rich, multi-layered theatrical imagery and aural landscapes to demonstrate the agile and ever-shifting interpretive acts the works elicit from their audiences. Offering a full-length analysis of Cherkaoui's work, the book is essential reading for students, researchers, practitioners and Cherkaoui fans.

How might spoken words be translated into choreography? This book addresses the field of verbatim dance-theatre, around which there is currently limited existing scholarly writing. Grounded in extensive research, the project combines dance studies and performance studies theory, detailed analysis of professional choreographic work and examples of experimental practice to then employ the framework of translation studies in order to consider what a focus on movement and an attempt to dance/move other people's words can offer to the field of verbatim theatre. It investigates ways to understand, articulate and engage in the process of choreographing movement as a response to verbatim spoken language. It is directed at an international audience of dance studies scholars, theatre and performance studies scholars and dance-theatre practitioners, and it would be appropriate reading material for undergraduate students seeking to develop their understanding of choreographic processes that use written/spoken text as a starting point and graduate students working in the area of adaptation, verbatim theatre, physical theatre or devised theatre.

Dance has the power to change the lives of young people. It is a force in shaping identity, affirming culture and exploring heritage in an increasingly borderless world. Creative and empowering pedagogies are driving curriculum development worldwide where the movement of peoples and cultures generates new challenges and possibilities for dance education in multiple contexts. In Dance Education around the World: Perspectives on Dance, Young People and Change, writers across the globe come together to reflect, comment on and share their expertise and experiences. The settings are drawn from a spectrum of countries with contributions from Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Asia, the Pacific and Africa giving insights and fresh perspectives into contrasting ideas, philosophies and approaches to dance education from Egypt to Ghana, Brazil to Finland, Jamaica to the Netherlands, the UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand and more. This volume offers chapters and narratives on: Curriculum developments worldwide Empowering communities through dance Embodiment and creativity in dance teaching Exploring and assessing learning in dance as artistic practice Imagined futures for dance education Reflection, evaluation, analysis and documentation are key to the evolving ecology of dance education and research involving individuals, communities and nations. Dance Education around the World: Perspectives on Dance, Young People and Change provides a great resource for dance educators, practitioners and researchers, and pushes for the furtherance of dance education around the world. Charlotte Svendler Nielsen is Assistant professor and head of educational studies at the Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports, research group Body, Learning and Identity, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Stephanie Burridge lectures at Lasalle College of the Arts and Singapore Management University, and is the series editor for Routledge Celebrating Dance in Asia and the Pacific.

This edited collection charts the development of contemporary dance in Central and Eastern Europe since the literal and symbolic revolutions of 1989. Central Europe and the former Soviet Bloc countries were a major presence in dance - particularly theatrical dance - throughout the twentieth century. With the fragmentation of traditional structures in the final decade of the century came a range of aesthetic and ideological responses from dance practitioners. These ranged from attempts to reform classical ballet to struggles for autonomy from the state, and the nature of each was influenced by a set of contexts and circumstances particular to each country. Each contribution covers the strategies of a different country's dance practitioners, using a similar structure in order to invite comparisons. In general, they address: Historical context, showing the roots of contemporary dance forms The socio-political climates that influenced emerging companies and forms The relationships between aesthetic exploration and institutional patronage The practitioners who were central to the development of dance in each country A diagnosis of the current state of the art and how it has come about The book's main through-line is the concept of community, and how all of the different approaches that it documents have in some way engaged with this notion, consciously or otherwise. This can take the form of oppositional relationships, institutional formations, or literally, in identifiable communities of dancers and choreographers.

This anthology negotiates the influential, yet silent educational presence of spiritualities within the field of somatic movement dance education internationally. The expressive and integral nature of spiritual experience remains academically undefined and peripheral to our understanding of creative practice. Lack of theoretical rigour, as well as a lack of a substantive definitional and methodological competency, has resulted in spirituality being marginalised. To date, important questions about how diverse spiritualities shape professional practice in the somatic movement and dance arts remain unanswered. This cutting-edge collection fills that void, providing greater creative and discursive clarity.

Kathak, the classical dance of North India, combines virtuosic footwork and dazzling spins with subtle pantomime and soft gestures. As a global practice and one of India's cultural markers, kathak dance is often presented as heir to an ancient Hindu devotional tradition in which men called Kathakas danced and told stories in temples. The dance's repertoire and movement vocabulary, however, tell a different story of syncretic origins and hybrid history - it is a dance that is both Muslim and Hindu, both devotional and entertaining, and both male and female. Kathak's multiple roots can be found in rural theatre, embodied rhythmic repertoire, and courtesan performance practice, and its history is inextricable from the history of empire, colonialism, and independence in India. Through an analysis both broad and deep of primary and secondary sources, ethnography, iconography and current performance practice, Margaret Walker undertakes a critical approach to the history of kathak dance and presents new data about hereditary performing artists, gendered contexts and practices, and postcolonial cultural reclamation. The account that emerges places kathak and the Kathaks firmly into the living context of North Indian performing arts.

This book argues that contemporary dance, imagined to have a global belonging, is vitiated by euro-white constructions of risk and currency that remain at its core. Differently, the book reimagines contemporary dance along a "South-South" axis, as a poly-centric, justice-oriented, aesthetic-temporal category, with intersectional understandings of difference as a central organizing principle. Placing alterity and heat, generated via multiple pathways, at its center, it foregrounds the work of South-South artists, who push against constructions of "tradition" and white-centered aesthetic imperatives, to reinvent their choreographic toolkit and respond to urgent questions of their times. In recasting the grounds for a different "global stage," the argument widens its scope to indicate how dance-making both indexes current contextual inequities and broader relations of social, economic, political, and cultural power, and inaugurates future dimensions of justice. Winner of the 2022 Oscar G. Brockett Prize for Dance Research

The Nazis burned books and banned much modern art. However, few people know the fascinating story of German modern dance, which was the great exception. Modern expressive dance found favor with the regime and especially with the infamous Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda. How modern artists collaborated with Nazism reveals an important aspect of modernism, uncovers the bizarre bureaucracy which controlled culture and tells the histories of great figures who became enthusiastic Nazis and lied about it later. The book offers three perspectives: the dancer Lilian Karina writes her very vivid personal story of dancing in interwar Germany; the dance historian Marion Kant gives a systematic account of the interaction of modern dance and the totalitarian state, and a documentary appendix provides a glimpse into the twisted reality created by Nazi racism, pedantic bureaucrats and artistic ambition.

In this engaging memoir, Robert Rand tells the tale of how through dancing he helped free himself from the grip of panic disorder. Rand was a serious, shy, and intense scholar who had achieved national recognition in a career in writing and radio production. In the midst of his success, panic attacks overwhelmed him. For more than two years, he suffered their debilitating effects; the disease flattened his spirits and stripped him of self-confidence. Then he discovered social dancing, and in particular Cajun and zydeco dance and music. Dancing became a cathartic and liberating endeavor, helping him beat back his panic disorder to discover a world of passion and romance and to gain control of his life.

Improvisation is a performance practice that animates and activates diverse energies of inspiration, critique, and invention. In recent years it has coalesced into an exciting and innovative new field of interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry, becoming a cornerstone of both practical and theoretical approaches to performance."

The Improvisation Studies Reader" draws together the works of key artists and thinkers from a range of disciplines, including theatre, music, literature, film, and dance. Divided by keywords into eight sections, this book bridges the gaps between these fields. The book includes case studies, exercises, graphic scores and poems in order to produce a teaching and research resource that identifies central themes in improvisation studies. The sections include:

• Listening
• Trust/Risk
• Flow
• Dissonance
• Responsibility
• Liveness
• Surprise
• Hope

Each section of the Reader is introduced by a newly commissioned think piece by a key figure in the field, which opens up research questions reflecting on the keyword in question.

By placing key theoretical and classic texts in conversation with cutting-edge research and artists statements, this book answers the urgent questions facing improvising artists and theorists in the mediatized Twenty-First Century. "

This edited collection charts the development of contemporary dance in Central and Eastern Europe since the literal and symbolic revolutions of 1989. Central Europe and the former Soviet Bloc countries were a major presence in dance - particularly theatrical dance - throughout the twentieth century. With the fragmentation of traditional structures in the final decade of the century came a range of aesthetic and ideological responses from dance practitioners. These ranged from attempts to reform classical ballet to struggles for autonomy from the state, and the nature of each was influenced by a set of contexts and circumstances particular to each country. Each contribution covers the strategies of a different country's dance practitioners, using a similar structure in order to invite comparisons. In general, they address: Historical context, showing the roots of contemporary dance forms The socio-political climates that influenced emerging companies and forms The relationships between aesthetic exploration and institutional patronage The practitioners who were central to the development of dance in each country A diagnosis of the current state of the art and how it has come about The book's main through-line is the concept of community, and how all of the different approaches that it documents have in some way engaged with this notion, consciously or otherwise. This can take the form of oppositional relationships, institutional formations, or literally, in identifiable communities of dancers and choreographers.

Unlike collections of essays which focus on a single century or whose authors are drawn from a single discipline, this collection reflects the myriad performance options available to London audiences, offering readers a composite portrait of the music, drama, and dance productions that characterized this rich period. Just as the performing arts were deeply interrelated, the essays presented here, by scholars from a range of fields, engage in dialogue with others in the volume. The opening section examines a famous series of 1701 performances based on the competition between composers to set William Congreve's masque The Judgment of Paris to music. The essays in the central section (the 'mainpiece') showcase performers and productions on the London stage from a variety of perspectives, including English 'tastes' in art and music, the use of dance, the depiction of madness and masculinity in both spoken and musical performances, and genres and modes in the context of contemporary criticism and theatrical practice. A brief afterpiece looks at comic pieces in relation to satire, parody and homage. By bringing together work by scholars of music, dance, and drama, this cross-disciplinary collection illuminates the interconnecting strands that shaped a vibrant theatrical world.

Celebrating the diversity of dance across the South Pacific, this volume studies the various experiences, motivations and aims for dance, emerging from the voices of dance professionals in the islands. In particular, it focuses on the interplay of cultures and pathways of migration as people move across the region discovering new routes and connections.

Dance has been connected to the practices and ideologies that have shaped notions of a Nordic region for more than a century and it is ingrained into the culture and society of the region. This book investigates different dance phenomena that have either engaged with or dismantled notions of Nordicness. Looking to the motion of dancers and dance forms between different locations, organizations and networks of individuals, its authors discuss social dancing, as well as historical processes associated with collaborations in folk dance and theatre dance. They consider how similarities and differences between the Nordic countries may be discerned, for instance in patterns of reception at the arrival of dance forms from outside the Nordic countries - and vice versa, how dance from the Nordic countries is received in other parts of the world, as seen for example in the Nordic Cool Festival at the Kennedy Centre in 2013. The book opens a rare window into Nordic culture seen through the prism of dance. While it grants the reader new insights into the critical role of dance in the formation and imagining of a region, it also raises questions about the interplay between dance practices and politics.