Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century offers a new interpretation of European modernist dance by addressing it as guiding medium in a vibrant field of gestural culture that ranged across art and philosophy. Taking further Cornelius Castoriadis's concept of the social imaginary, it explores this imaginary's embodied forms. Close readings of dances, photographs, and literary texts are juxtaposed with discussions of gestural theory by thinkers including Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, and Aby Warburg. Choreographic gesture is defined as a force of intermittency that creates a new theoretical status of dance. Author Lucia Ruprecht shows how this also bears on contemporary theory. She shifts emphasis from Giorgio Agamben's preoccupation with gestural mediality to Jacques Ranciere's multiplicity of proliferating, singular gestures, arguing for their ethical and political relevance. Mobilizing dance history and movement analysis, Ruprecht highlights the critical impact of works by choreographers such as Vaslav Nijinsky, Jo Mihaly, and Alexander and Clotilde Sakharoff. She also offers choreographic readings of Franz Kafka and Alfred Doeblin. Gestural Imaginaries proposes that modernist dance conducts a gestural revolution which enacts but also exceeds the insights of past and present cultural theory. It makes a case for archive-based, cross-medial, and critically informed dance studies, transnational German studies, and the theoretical potential of performance itself.

Dance, Music and Cultures of Decolonisation in the Indian Diaspora provides fascinating examples of dance and music projects across the Indian Diaspora to highlight that decolonisation is a creative process, as well as a historical and political one. The book analyses creative processes in decolonising projects, illustrating how dance and music across the Indian Diaspora articulate socio-political aspirations in the wake of thinkers such as Gandhi and Ambedkar. It presents a wide range of examples: post-apartheid practices and experiences in a South African dance company, contestations over national identity politics in Trinidadian music competitions, essentialist and assimilationist strategies in a British dance competition, the new musical creativity of second-generation British-Tamil performers, Indian classical dance projects of reform and British multiculturalism, feminist intercultural performances in Australia, and performance re-enactments of museum exhibits that critically examine the past. Key topics under discussion include postcolonial contestations, decolonising scholarship, dialogic pedagogies and intellectual responsibility. The book critically reflects on decolonising aims around respect, equality and the colonial past's redress as expressed through performing arts projects. Presenting richly detailed case studies that underline the need to examine creative processes in the cultures of decolonisation, Dance, Music and Cultures of Decolonisation in the Indian Diaspora will be of great interest to scholars of South Asian Studies, Diaspora Studies, Performing Arts Studies and Anthropology. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of South Asian Diaspora.

Presenting for the first time Akim Volynsky's (1861-1926) pre-balletic writings on Leonardo da Vinci, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Otto Weininger, and on such illustrious personalities as Zinaida Gippius, Ida Rubinstein, and Lou Andreas-Salome, And Then Came Dance provides new insight into the origins of Volynsky's life-altering journey to become Russia's foremost ballet critic. A man for whom the realm of art was largely female in form and whose all-encompassing image of woman constituted the crux of his aesthetic contemplation that crossed over into the personal and libidinal, Volynsky looks ahead to another Petersburg-bred high priest of classical dance, George Balanchine. With an undeniable proclivity toward ballet's female component, Volynsky's dance writings, illuminated by examples of his earlier gendered criticism, invite speculation on how truly ground-breaking and forward-looking this critic is.

Focusing on some of the best-known and most visible stage plays and dance performances of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, Penny Farfan's interdisciplinary study demonstrates that queer performance was integral to and productive of modernism, that queer modernist performance played a key role in the historical emergence of modern sexual identities, and that it anticipated, and was in a sense foundational to, the insights of contemporary queer modernist studies. Chapters on works from Vaslav Nijinsky's Afternoon of a Faun to Noel Coward's Private Lives highlight manifestations of and suggest ways of reading queer modernist performance. Together, these case studies clarify aspects of both the queer and the modernist, and how their co-productive intersection was articulated in and through performance on the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century stage. Performing Queer Modernism thus contributes to an expanded understanding of modernism across a range of performance genres, the central role of performance within modernism more generally, and the integral relation between performance history and the history of sexuality. It also contributes to the ongoing transformation of the field of modernist studies, in which drama and performance remain under-represented, and to revisionist historiographies that approach modernist performance through feminist and queer critical perspectives and interdisciplinary frameworks and that consider how formally innovative as well as more conventional works collectively engaged with modernity, at once reflecting and contributing to historical change in the domains of gender and sexuality.

This is a story of a young girl from a small town with a big dream that took her to Juilliard, Broadway, summer stock, the stage of the Metropolitan Opera and the Santa Fe Opera, and introduced her to her husband William Zeckendorf Jr. Her memoir overflows with the glamour of a life lived among the famous figures of mid-century New York society and the grit necessary to succeed in the professional world of dance. Fascinated by art and architecture, the vivacious ballerina Nancy Zeckendorf became a formidable development partner with her husband and a philanthropic leader in the performing arts - her fundraising ability is an art form unto itself. "I love hardware stores and tools," she said of her common-sense approach to construction projects. Indeed, Nancy was a guiding force in the expansion of the Santa Fe Opera, the Lensic Performing Arts Center, and the premier community of Los Miradores where she lives now in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

This collaboration between artists, choreographers, researchers, experimental psychologists and cognitive scientists investigates ways in which choreographers and performers make innovative, expressive movement, and audiences interpret what may well be a previously unmapped experience. ""Thinking in Four Dimensions"" is the first book to address the cognitive processes that underpin the creation of new works of contemporary dance. With case studies including data gathered from dance audiences as well as psychological analysis of new dance works, plus interviews with artists and video of performance pieces, ""Thinking in Four Dimensions"" is a unique package. ""Thinking in Four Dimensions"" is available in two formats. The e-book version incorporates text, full-colour images and video, which gives access to unique footage of choreographers and performers creating important new Australian dance works. The d-book is a print-on-demand version of the text with black and white images. This exciting collection of essays suggests that dance-making can be a form of imaginative enquiry - a thinking in time and space - both for those who perform it, and for those who watch.

The topic of sport psychology is hardly new-but Essentials of Dance Psychology applies it to dance in a way that sets it apart from all other sport psychology texts available to dance students, instructors, and professionals. Through Essentials of Dance Psychology, readers will come to understand why dancers think and behave as they do and how to design healthy, creative dance environments that lead to both well-being and optimal performance. The book is built on a foundation of evidence from dance and sport psychology research, with applied experiences used as examples throughout. Where appropriate, evidence from other areas of psychology-for example, cognitive behavioral therapy-is used. A thorough coverage of topics relevant to dancers, teachers, and others working to support dancers is included, making the book suitable for one slightly longer course or two short courses in introductory dance psychology. The book is organized into four parts. Part I delves into dancers' individual differences, examining how personality, perfectionism, self-esteem, self-confidence, and anxiety factor into performance and well-being. Part II explores topics related to dance-specific characteristics such as motivation, attentional focus, and creativity. In part III, readers learn about a range of psychological skills, including mindfulness, goal setting, self-regulation, and imagery. Part IV examines topics related to dance environments and challenges, zeroing in on the social aspects of teaching and learning dance, the challenges of talent identification and development, injuries, body image, and disordered eating. Student-friendly textbook features in each chapter include the following: Relevant definitions A case study that shows how the chapter's topics can be expressed or experienced in practice One or more Get Practical exercises, which prompt readers to apply or reflect on the chapter's concepts (These exercises come with either downloadable worksheets or audio, delivered through HKPropel Access.) A roundup of further research needed in each content area, which can inspire research projects for students and professionals alike Key points to reinforce the learning, with particular emphasis on applications Materials available through HKPropel Access include downloadable worksheets, three audio files with guided exercises, vocabulary study aids, lettering art, and two goal-setting templates. In addition, an instructor pack provides chapter summaries, a course outline, a test bank, and a PowerPoint presentation package. Essentials of Dance Psychology offers readers the opportunity to understand sport psychology from the vantage point of a dancer. The text will help develop dance teachers who are able to inspire and sustain high levels of performance and psychological health among dancers. It will also help other professionals who work with dancers to implement evidence-based practices that enhance and sustain dancers' lives and careers. Note: A code for accessing HKPropel is included with all new print books.

Dancing in the Muddy Temple traces ingredients for an embodied spirituality based in movement and embedded in the land. Drawing from nature immersion, dance, anthropology, and shamanism, Eline Kieft explores improvised movement as a pathway to insight, healing, transformation, and direct interaction with source. This inspiring book offers an intricate road map to explore and strengthen the interwovenness of various layers of self, surroundings, and the sacred. Kieft seamlessly moves between her personal, professional, and academic background, creating an unusual scholarship in which bodily and autobiographical narrative are neatly interwoven with interdisciplinary literature. The work crosses boundaries between cognition and intuition; matter and spirit. Its uniqueness lies in a radical integration of theory and practice, which brings an aliveness to the material that stirs an inquisitive desire to move. Its language inspires confidence and creates a safe space for personal inquiry into a rich and complex territory. This book provides a much-needed medicine for scholars and seekers, dreamers and dancers, philosophers, and artists at a time when the earth and its human and other-than-human-people are hurting. It skillfully distills tools for a practical spirituality of the everyday that explores what it means to be an embodied human on this planet.

Moving Otherwise examines how contemporary dance practices in Buenos Aires, Argentina enacted politics within climates of political and economic violence from the mid-1960s to the mid-2010s. From the repression of military dictatorships to the precarity of economic crises, contemporary dancers and audiences consistently responded to and reimagined the everyday choreographies that have accompanied Argentina's volatile political history. The titular concept, "moving otherwise" names how both concert dance and its off-stage practice and consumption offer alternatives to and modes to critique the patterns of movement and bodily comportment that shape everyday life in contexts marked by violence. Drawing on archival research based in institutional and private collections, over fifty interviews with dancers and choreographers, and the author's embodied experiences as a collaborator and performer with active groups, the book analyzes how a wide range of practices moved otherwise, including concert works, community dance initiatives, and the everyday labor that animates dance. It demonstrates how these diverse practices represent, resist, and remember violence and engender new forms of social mobilization on and off the theatrical stage. As the first book length critical study of Argentine contemporary dance, it introduces a breadth of choreographers to an English speaking audience, including Ana Kamien, Susana Zimmermann, Estela Maris, Alejandro Cervera, Renate Schottelius, Susana Tambutti, Silvia Hodgers, and Silvia Vladimivsky. It also considers previously undocumented aspects of Argentine dance history, including crossings between contemporary dancers and 1970s leftist political militancy, Argentine dance labor movements, political protest, and the prominence of tango themes in contemporary dance works that address the memory of political violence. Contemporary dance, the book demonstrates, has a rich and diverse history of political engagement in Argentina.

This volume provides new, ground-breaking perspectives on the globally renowned work of the Tanztheater Wuppertal and its iconic founder and artistic director, Pina Bausch. The company's performances, how it developed its productions, the global transfer of its choreographic material and the reactions of audiences and critics are explained as complex, interdependent and reciprocal processes of translation. This is the first book to focus on the artistic research conducted for the Tanztheater's international coproductions and features extensive interviews with dancers, collaborators and spectators and provides first-hand ethnographic insights into the work process. By introducing the praxeology of translation as a key methodological concept for dance research, Gabriele Klein argues that Pina Bausch's lasting legacy is defined by an entanglement of temporalities that challenges the notion of contemporaneity.

From southern Greece to northern Russia, people have long believed in female spirits, bringers of fertility, who spend their nights and days dancing in the fields and forests. So appealing were these spirit-maidens that they also took up residence in nineteenth-century Romantic literature. Archaeologist and linguist by profession, folk dancer by avocation, Elizabeth Wayland Barber has sleuthed through ethnographic lore and archaeological reports of east and southeast Europe, translating enchanting folktales about these dancing goddesses as well as eyewitness accounts of traditional rituals texts that offer new perspectives on dance in agrarian society. She then traces these goddesses and their dances back through the Romans and Greeks to the first farmers of Europe. Along the way, she locates the origins of many customs, including coloring Easter eggs and throwing rice at the bride. The result is a detective story like no other and a joyful reminder of the human need to dance."

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment brings together a cross-section of artists and scholars engaged with the phenomenon of reenactment in dance from a practical and theoretical standpoint. Synthesizing myriad views on danced reenactment and the manner in which this branch of choreographic performance intersects with important cultural concerns around appropriation this Handbook addresses originality, plagiarism, historicity, and spatiality as it relates to cultural geography. Others topics treated include transmission as a heuristic device, the notion of the archive as it relates to dance and as it is frequently contrasted with embodied cultural memory, pedagogy, theory of history, reconstruction as a methodology, testimony and witnessing, theories of history as narrative and the impact of dance on modernist literature, and relations of reenactment to historical knowledge and new media.

"The first time I saw Sharmila practicing yoga, I was amazed. Her ability to control her body with awe-inspiring precision was mysterious. Her quiet and powerful concentration makes her slowly evolving, rock solid shapes appear like sculpture. By uniting the rich heritage of dance, martial arts and yoga in an unforeseen way, Sharmila is guiding performance into new territory."--Karole Armitage.

The tango is easily the most iconic dance of the twentieth century and now of the twenty-first. This historical text peels back the propaganda that characterizes the dance, revealing both its true nature and that of the culture that created it. Topics covered include the tango's earliest origins, the sexualization of the dance, its place in Argentinian culture, and the mythological prohibition against it. This work explores the tango's unparalleled popularity, finding in it the irreducible universal: our common humanity and our creative solidarity.

Based on new archival research, this book uniquely presents a fresh interrogation of how, among London's fashionable society, dancing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was variously a means of social modelling, change, conformity and creative individual expression.

This book includes both a description and a discussion of the methods used by Kanriye Fujima, a member of the Fujima school of Japan, to teach Nihon Buyon to primarily Japanese-Americans. Sellers-Young discusses Fujima's life as a teacher in three Pacific Northwest communities, providing an explanation of her teaching processes and contexts of performances. Incorporating the themes and images associated with the pieces, Sellers-Young discusses Fujima's vital role in the maintenance of specific Japanese cultural values. Contents: Preface; Becoming a Student; Kanriye Fujima's Life and Traditional Japanese Dance Theatre; The Movement and Its Aesthetic Base; The Students; The Studio: The Process of Teaching; The Performance Elements; Contexts of Performance; Nihon Buyo: From Japan to the Pacific Northwest; Appendices: The Dances and Program Notes of Fujinami-Kai; The Ten Most Taught Dances in Each Age Category; References; List of Illustrations; Tables and Charts.

There is no archive or museum of human movement, no place where choreographies can be collected and conserved in pristine form. The central consequence of this is the incapacity of philosophy and aesthetics to think of dance as a positive and empirical art. In the eyes of philosophers, dance refers to a space other than art, considered both more frivolous and more fundamental than the artwork without ever quite attaining the status of a work. Unworking Choreography develops this idea and postulates an unworking as evidenced by a conspicuous absence of references to actual choreographic works within philosophical accounts of dance; the late development and partial dominance of the notion of the work in dance in contrast to other art forms such as painting, music, and theatre; the difficulties in identifying dance works given a lack of scores and an apparent resistance within the art form to the possibility of notation; and the questioning of ends of dance in contemporary practice and the relativisation of the very idea that dance artistic or choreographic processes aim at work production.

Surveying the state of American ballet in a 1913 issue of Clure's Magazine, author Willa Cather reported that few girls expressed any interest in taking ballet class and that those who did were hard-pressed to find anything other than dingy studios and imperious teachers. One hundred years later, ballet is everywhere. There are ballet companies large and small across the United States; ballet is commonly featured in film, television, literature, and on social media; professional ballet dancers are spokespeople for all kinds of products; nail polish companies market colors like "Ballet Slippers" and "Prima Ballerina;" and, most importantly, millions of American children have taken ballet class. Beginning with the arrival of Russian dancers like Anna Pavlova, who first toured the United States on the eve of World War I, Ballet Class: An American History explores the growth of ballet from an ancillary part of nineteenth-century musical theater, opera, and vaudeville to the quintessential extracurricular activity it is today, pursued by countless children nationwide and an integral part of twentieth-century American childhood across borders of gender, class, race, and sexuality. A social history, Ballet Class takes a new approach to the very popular subject of ballet and helps ground an art form often perceived to be elite in the experiences of regular, everyday people who spent time in barre-lined studios across the United States. Drawing on a wide variety of materials, including children's books, memoirs by professional dancers and choreographers, pedagogy manuals, and dance periodicals, in addition to archival collections and oral histories, this pathbreaking study provides a deeply-researched national perspective on the history and significance of recreational ballet class in the United States and its influence on many facets of children's lives, including gender norms, consumerism, body image, children's literature, extracurricular activities, and popular culture.

How does structural economic change look and feel? How are such changes normalized? Who represents hope? Who are the cautionary tales? Unfinished Business argues that U.S. deindustrialization cannot be understood apart from issues of race, and specifically apart from images of, and works by and about African Americans that represent or resist normative or aberrant relationships to work and capital in transitional times. It insists that Michael Jackson's performances and coverage of his life, plays featuring Detroit, plans for the city's postindustrial revitalization, and Detroit installations The Heidelberg Project and Mobile Homestead have something valuable to teach us about three decades of structural economic transition in the U.S., particularly on the changing nature of work and capitalism between the mid-1980s and 2016. Jackson and Detroit offer examples of the racialization of deindustrialization, how it operates as structures of feeling and as representations as well as a shift in the dominant mode of production, and how industrialization's successor mode, financialization, uses imagery both very similar to and very different from its predecessor.

From the vaudeville gyrations of New York Giants star pitchers Rube Marquard and Christy Mathewson, to Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra as hoofing infielders in Take Me Out to the Ball Game, to the stage and screen versions of Damn Yankees, the connection between baseball and dance is an intimate, perhaps surprising one. Covering more than a century of dancing ballplayers and baseball-inspired dance, this entertaining study examines the connection in film and television, in theatrical productions and in choreography created for some of the greatest dancers and dance companies in the world.

Training in somatic techniques-- holistic body-centered movement that promotes psycho-physical awareness and well-being--provides an effective means of improving dance students' efficiency and ease of movement. However, dance educators do not always have the resources to incorporate this knowledge into their classes. This volume explains the importance of somatics, introduces fundamental somatic principles that are central to the dance technique class, and offers tips on incorporating these principles into a dance curriculum. The authors demystify somatic thinking by explaining the processes in terms of current scientific research. By presenting both a philosophical approach to teaching as well as practical instruction tools, this work provides a valuable guide to somatics for dance teachers of any style or level.

Ballet is a detailed guide to creative practice and performance. Compiled by ten leading practitioners, each chapter focuses on an aspect of ballet as a performing art. Together they outline a journey from the underpinning principles of ballet, through an appreciation of different styles and schooling, into the dance studio for practice in class and beyond. With additional insights from highly acclaimed dancers, choreographers and teachers, this practical guide offers advice on fundamental and advanced training and creative development. As well as providing information from dance science research into training well-being, this book supports the individual dancer in their artistic growth, offering strategies for exploration and discovery. Topics include: principles, styles and schooling of classical ballet; fundamental technique and advanced expression; developing versatility and creative thinking; advice on injury management, nutrition and lifestyle; choreography and music and, finally, best practice in the rehearsal studio is covered. 'A wonderfully accessible and comprehensive resource about the individual disciplines involved in ballet.' Leanne Benjamin OBE, former Principal of The Royal Ballet and international coach

Tracing the African American dance from the Diaspora to the dance floor, this book covers a social history germane not only to the African American experience, but also to the global experience of laborers who learn lessons from hip hop dance. Examining hip hop dance as text, as commentary, and as a function of identity construction within the confines of consumerism, the book draws on popular cultural images from films, commercials, and dance studios. A bibliography, discography, and filmography are included.