Folk performances reflect the life-worlds of a vast section of subaltern communities in India. What is the philosophy that drives these performances, the vision that enables as well as enslaves these communities to present what they feel, think, imagine, and want to see? Can such performances challenge social hierarchies and ensure justice in a caste-ridden society? In Cultural Labour, the author studies bhuiyan puja (landworship), bidesia (theatre of migrant labourers), Reshma-Chuharmal (Dalit ballads), dugola (singing duels) from Bihar, and the songs and performances of Gaddar, who was associated with Jana Natya Mandali, Telangana: he examines various ways in which meanings and behaviour are engendered in communities through rituals, theatre, and enactments. Focusing on various motifs of landscape, materiality, and performance, the author looks at the relationship between culture and labour in its immediate contexts. Based on an extensive ethnography and the author's own life experience as a member of such a community, the book offers a new conceptual framework to understand the politics and aesthetics of folk performance in the light of contemporary theories of theatre and performance studies.

An expert explains and analyzes the beloved art form An iconic symbol of Spain, flamenco has become a global phenomenon. Peter Manuel offers English-language readers a rare portrait of the music’s history, styles, and cultural impact. Beginning with flamenco’s Moorish and Roma influences, Manuel follows the music’s evolution through its consolidation in the mid-1800s and on to the vibrant contemporary scene. An investigation of flamenco’s major song-types looks at rhythm and compás, guitar technique, and many other aspects of the music while Manuel’s description and analysis of the repertoire range from soleares and bulerías to tangos. His overview of contemporary flamenco culture provides insight into issues that surround the music, including globalization, gender dynamics, notions of ownership, and the ongoing debates on purity versus innovation and the relative roles played by Gitanos and non-Gitanos. Multifaceted and entertaining, Flamenco Music is an in-depth study of the indelible art form that inspires enthusiasts and practitioners around the world.

The object of the present work is to develop a method for a structural analysis of European chain and round dance patterns with a view to establishing a categorisation of these dances according to their basic step patterns. This attempt has never been made before as surprisingly few works have been published on this subject. The first of the three volumes contains an introduction to chain and round dances in Europe and describes the collected data used for the analysis. The second volume explains how to read the catalogues and presents the groupings of the material. The third volume contains the complete material as tables and examples. The study concludes that a series of main categories can be established on the basis of the theoretical models suggested here.

Since 1990, thousands of Hungarians have vacationed at summer camps devoted to Hungarian folk dance in the Transylvanian villages of neighboring Romania. This folk tourism and connected everyday practices of folk dance revival take place against the backdrop of an increasingly nationalist political environment in Hungary. In Movement of the People, Mary N. Taylor takes readers inside the folk revival movement known as dancehouse (tanchaz) that sustains myriad events where folk dance is central and championed by international enthusiasts and UNESCO. Contextualizing tanchaz in a deeper history of populism and nationalism, Taylor examines the movement's emergence in 1970s socialist institutions, its transformation through the postsocialist period, and its recent recognition by UNESCO as a best practice of heritage preservation. Approaching the populist and popular practices of folk revival as a form of national cultivation, Movement of the People interrogates the everyday practices, relationships, institutional contexts, and ideologies that contribute to the making of Hungary's future, as well as its past.

Chile had long forgotten about the existence of the country's Black population when, in 2003, the music and dance called the tumbe carnaval appeared on the streets of the city of Arica. Featuring turbaned dancers accompanied by a lively rhythm played on hide-head drums, the tumbe resonated with cosmopolitan images of what the African Diaspora looks like, and so helped bring attention to a community seeking legal recognition from the Chilean government which denied its existence. Tumbe carnaval, however, was not the only type of music and dance that Afro-Chileans have participated in and identified with over the years. In Styling Blackness in Chile, Juan Eduardo Wolf explores the multiple ways that Black individuals in Arica have performed music and dance to frame their Blackness in relationship to other groups of performers-a process he calls styling. Combining ethnography and semiotic analysis, Wolf illustrates how styling Blackness as Criollo, Moreno, and Indigena through genres like the baile de tierra, morenos de paso, and caporales simultaneously offered individuals alternative ways of identifying and contributed to the invisibility of Afro-descendants in Chilean society. While the styling of the tumbe as Afro-descendant helped make Chile's Black community visible once again, Wolf also notes that its success raises issues of representation as more people begin to perform the genre in ways that resonate less with local cultural memory and Afro-Chilean activists' goals. At a moment when Chile's government continues to discuss whether to recognize the Afro-Chilean population and Chilean society struggles to come to terms with an increase in Latin American Afro-descendant immigrants, Wolf's book raises awareness of Blackness in Chile and the variety of Black music-dance throughout the African Diaspora, while also providing tools that ethnomusicologists and other scholars of expressive culture can use to study the role of music-dance in other cultural contexts.

This book is a study of Salpuri-Chum, a traditional Korean dance for expelling evil spirits. The authors explore the origins and practice of Salpuri-Chum. The ancient Korean people viewed their misfortunes as coming from evil spirits; therefore, they wanted to expel the evil spirits to recover their happiness. The music for Salpuri-Chum is called Sinawi rhythm. It has no sheet music and lacks the concept of metronomic technique. In this rhythm, the dancer becomes a conductor. Salpuri-Chum is an artistic performance that resolves the people's sorrow. In many cases, it is a form of sublimation. It is also an effort to transform the pain of reality into beauty, based on the Korean people's characteristic merriment. It presents itself, then, as a form of immanence. Moreover, Salpuri-Chum is unique in its use of a piece of white fabric. The fabric, as a symbol of the Korean people's ego ideal, signifies Salpuri-Chum's focus as a dance for resolving their misfortunes.

Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art is a provocative look at capoeira, a demanding acrobatic art that combines dance, ritual, music, and fighting style. First created by slaves, freedmen, and gang members, capoeira is a study in contrasts that integrates African-descended rhythms and flowing dance steps with hard lessons from the street. According to veteran teachers, capoeira will transform novices, instilling in them a sense of malicia, or "cunning," and changing how they walk, hear, and interact.
Learning Capoeira is an ethnographic study based on author Greg Downey's extensive research about capoeira and more than ten years of apprenticeship. It looks at lessons from traditional capoeira teachers in Salvador, Brazil, capturing the spoken and unspoken ways in which they pass on the art to future generations. Downey explores how bodily training can affect players' perceptions and social interactions, both within the circular roda, the "ring" where the game takes place, as well as outside it, in their daily lives. He brings together an experience-centered, phenomenological analysis of the art with recent discoveries in psychology and the neurosciences about the effects of physical education on perception. The text is enhanced by more than twenty photos of capoeira sessions, many taken by veteran teacher, Mestre Cobra Mansa.
Learning Capoeira breaks from many contemporary trends in cultural studies of all sorts, looking at practice, education, music, nonverbal communication, perception, and interaction. It will be of interest to students of African Diaspora culture, performance, sport, and anthropology. For anyone who has wondered how physical training affects our perceptions, this close study of capoeira will open new avenues for understanding how culture shapes the ways we carry ourselves and see the world.

Dance marathons were a phenomenally popular fad during the manic 1920s and depressive 1930s. What began as a craze soon developed into a money-making business which lasted 30 years. Some 20,000 contestants and show personnel participated in these events; audiences, the majority women, totalled in the millions. "A Poor Man's Nightclub," dance marathons were the dog-end of American show business, a bastard form of entertainment which borrowed from vaudeville, burlesque, night club acts and sports.