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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Dance > General
Flexible Bodies honors the lives and labor of British South Asian dancers and celebrates their contributions to a distinct and dynamic sector of British dance. Drawing on expertise gained from over seven years dancing in Britain, author Anusha Kedhar presents a multifaceted picture of British South Asian dance as its own distinctive genre.Analyzing dance works, dance films, rehearsals, and touring - alongside immigration policy, arts funding initiatives, and global economic conditions - Flexible Bodies traces shifts in British South Asian dance from 1990s "Cool Britannia" multiculturalism to fallout from the 2008 global financial crisis and, more recently, the anti-immigration rhetoric leading up to the Brexit referendum in 2016. Kedhar draws on over a decade of interviews and conversations with dancers in Britain as well as in-depth choreographic analysis of major dance works to reveal the creative ways in which British South Asian dancers negotiate neoliberal, multicultural dance markets through an array of flexible bodily practices. Providing a new, critical dance studies lens through which to view the precarious economic, racial, national, and legal positions of South Asians in Britain,Flexible Bodies ultimately argues for centering dance labor in studies of neoliberalism.
This is a beginner's guide to choreography. Everything you need on one DVD! For the first time, stage choreography has been simplified so any beginner can visually learn all the essentials in one viewing! This DVD and workbook set makes a superb toolkit for building confidence in untrained dancers and teaching them the basics they need to participate in a choreographed dance number for any musical show. A convenient interactive menu of nine sections allows the user to see the step-by-step action over and over again as needed. The DVD shows inexperienced teens doing musical counting in action to fit both simple and advanced dance routines and musical styles. Dancer/narrator Adrea Gibs demonstrates how to add style to any dance pattern with body and hand movements. She defines the action of fun dance steps from the Charleston to the Shim Sham. An incomparable resource for creating an endless number of choreographic combinations. 45-minute DVD with workbook.
"This is an urgently needed book - as the question of choreographing behavior enters into realms outside of the aesthetic domains of theatrical dance, Susan Foster writes a thoroughly compelling argument." - Andre Lepecki, New York University "May well prove to be one of Susan Foster's most important works." - Ramsay Burt, De Montford University, UK What do we feel when we watch dancing? Do we "dance along" inwardly? Do we sense what the dancer's body is feeling? Do we imagine what it might feel like to perform those same moves? If we do, how do these responses influence how we experience dancing and how we derive significance from it? Choreographing Empathy challenges the idea of a direct psychophysical connection between the body of a dancer and that of their observer. In this groundbreaking investigation, Susan Foster argues that the connection is in fact highly mediated and influenced by ever-changing sociocultural mores. Foster examines the relationships between three central components in the experience of watching a dance - the choreography, the kinesthetic sensations it puts forward, and the empathetic connection that it proposes to viewers. Tracing the changing definitions of choreography, kinesthesia, and empathy from the 1700s to the present day, she shows how the observation, study, and discussion of dance have changed over time. Understanding this development is key to understanding corporeality and its involvement in the body politic.
Before "Fred and Ginger," there was "Fred and Adele," a show-business partnership and cultural sensation like no other. In our celebrity-saturated era, it's hard to comprehend what a genuine phenomenon these two siblings from Omaha were. At the height of their success in the mid-1920s, the Astaires seemed to define the Jazz Age. They were Gershwin's music in motion, a fascinating pair who wove spellbinding rhythms in song and dance. In this book, the first comprehensive study of their theatrical career together, Kathleen Riley traces the Astaires' rise to fame from humble midwestern origins and early days as child performers on small-time vaudeville stages (where Fred, fatefully, first donned top hat and tails) to their 1917 debut on Broadway to star billings on both sides of the Atlantic. They became ambassadors of an art form they helped to revolutionize, adored by audiences, feted by royalty, and courted socially by elites everywhere they went. From the start, Adele was the more natural performer, spontaneous, funny, and self-possessed, while Fred had to hone his trademark timing and elegance through endless hours of rehearsal, a disciplined regimen that Adele loathed. Ultimately, Fred's dancing expertise surpassed his sister's, and their paths diverged: Adele married into British aristocracy, and Fred headed for Hollywood. The Astaires examines in depth the extraordinary story of this great brother-sister team, with full attention to its historical and theatrical context. It is not merely an account of the first part of Fred's long and illustrious career but one with its own significance. Born at the close of the 1800s, Fred and Adele grew up together with the new century, and when they reached superstardom during the interwar years, they shone as an affirmation of life and hope amid a prevailing crisis of faith and identity.
The Bloomsbury Companion to Dance Studies brings together leading international dance scholars in this single collection to provide a vivid picture of the state of contemporary dance research. The book commences with an introduction that privileges dancing as both a site of knowledge formation and a methodological approach, followed by a provocative overview of the methods and problems that dance studies currently faces as an established disciplinary field. The volume contains eleven core chapters that each map out a specific area of inquiry: Dance Pedagogy, Practice-As-Research, Dance and Politics, Dance and Identity, Dance Science, Screendance, Dance Ethnography, Popular Dance, Dance History, Dance and Philosophy, and Digital Dance. Although these sub-disciplinary domains do not fully capture the dynamic ways in which dance scholars work across multiple positions and perspectives, they reflect the major interests and innovations around which dance studies has organized its teaching and research. Therefore each author speaks to the labels, methods, issues and histories of each given category, while also exemplifying this scholarship in action. The dances under investigation range from experimental conceptual concert dance through to underground street dance practices, and the geographic reach encompasses dance-making from Europe, North and South America, the Caribbean and Asia. The book ends with a chapter that looks ahead to new directions in dance scholarship, in addition to an annotated bibliography and list of key concepts. The volume is an essential guide for students and scholars interested in the creative and critical approaches that dance studies can offer.
First full-scale thematic analysis of Pina Bausch's Tanztheater, critically evaluating the impact of modernist theatre on her choreographic method This book presents a new reading of Pina Bausch's dance theatre, orienting it within an international legacy of performance practice. The discussion considers not only the influence of German and American modern dance on Bausch's work but, crucially, interrogates parallels with modernist and postdramatic theatre (including Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Jerzy Grotowski, and Robert Wilson), the influence of which has been largely neglected in existing studies of her oeuvre. Pina Bausch's Dance Theatre provides a wide-ranging study of Bausch's aesthetic and methods of practice, with case studies ranging from the beginning of her career to her final choreographies. Key Features The first full-scale study interrogating the relationship between Bausch's Tanztheater and modernist theatre practice, structured around a chronological framework of case study choreographies A new theorisation of the development of Bausch's oeuvre, locating her approach in a broader context of intercultural artistic exchange in the post-WWII period Draws on literary and theatre theory to form an interdisciplinary methodology for understanding and interrogating Bausch's oeuvre Based on extensive archival research and a specialised knowledge of the evolution of modern dance
Anne Bean: Self Etc. is the first major monograph about the performance work of artist Anne Bean, a noted international figure who has been working actively since the 1960s. Part of the Intellect Live series, co-published with the Live Art Development Agency, this book includes extensive visual documentation of Bean's performances, critical essays by leading scholars of art and performance and a series of new visual essays by the artist. Additional contributions include documentation of collaborations with influential artists, such as Bean's Drawn Conversations, made at Franklin Furnace, New York, in collaboration with Harry Kipper, Karen Finley, Kim Jones and Fiona Templeton; and TAPS: Improvisations with Paul Burwell, involving numerous artists, including Paul McCarthy, Steven Berkoff, Evan Parker, Brian Catling, Carlyle Reedy, Rose English, David Toop, Lol Coxhill, Jacky Lansley and Maggie Nicols. Lavishly illustrated and including previously unseen images, Anne Bean explores and expands the nature, form and contexts that artistic collaboration can take.
Jamaican dancehall has long been one of the most vital and
influential cultural and artistic forces within contemporary global
music. "Wake the Town and Tell the People" presents, for the first
time, a lively, nuanced, and comprehensive view of this musical and
cultural phenomenon: its growth and historical role within Jamaican
society, its economy of star making, its technology of production,
its performative practices, and its capacity to channel political
beliefs through popular culture in ways that are urgent, tangible,
and lasting.
How is the politics of Blackness figured in the flamenco dancing body? What does flamenco dance tell us about the construction of race in the Atlantic world? Sonidos Negros traces how, in the span between 1492 and 1933, the vanquished Moor became Black, and how this figure, enacted in terms of a minstrelized Gitano, paradoxically came to represent Spain itself. The imagined Gypsy about which flamenco imagery turns dances on a knife's edge delineating Christian and non-Christian, White and Black worlds. This figure's subversive teetering undermines Spain's symbolic linkage of religion with race, a prime weapon of conquest. Flamenco's Sonidos Negros live in this precarious balance, amid the purposeful confusion and ruckus cloaking embodied resistance, the lament for what has been lost, and the values and aspirations of those rendered imperceptible by enslavement and colonization.
How does structural economic change look and feel? How are such changes normalized? How are these trends represented in movement, in performance, and in culture? Looking at Detroit's postindustrial revitalization, The Heidelberg Project, and Michael Jackson's many performances, Unfinished Business argues that U.S. deindustrialization cannot be separated from issues of race, specifically from choreographed movements of African Americans that represent or resist normative or aberrant relationships to work and capital in transitional times. Presenting Jackson and Detroit as material entities with specific histories and as representations with uncanny persistence, the book divulges invaluable lessons on 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 these economic changes, how they operate as structures of feeling and representations as well as shifts 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.
When political protest is read as epidemic madness, religious ecstasy as nervous disease, and angular dance moves as dark and uncouth, the disorder being described is choreomania. At once a catchall term to denote spontaneous gestures and the unruly movements of crowds, choreomania emerged in the nineteenth century at a time of heightened class conflict, nationalist policy, and colonial rule. In this book, author Kelina Gotman examines these choreographies of unrest, rethinking the modern formation of the choreomania concept as it moved across scientific and social scientific disciplines. Reading archives describing dramatic misformationsof bodies and body politicsshe shows how prejudices against expressivity unravel, in turn revealing widespread anxieties about demonstrative agitation. This history of the fitful body complements stories of nineteenth-century discipline and regimentation. As she notes, constraints on movement imply constraints on political power and agency. In each chapter, Gotman confronts the many ways choreomania works as an extension of discourses shaping colonialist orientalism, which alternately depict riotous bodies as dangerously infected others, and as curious bacchanalian remains. Through her research, Gotman also shows how beneath the radar of this colonial discourse, men and women gathered together to repossess on their terms the gestures of social revolt.
This is an epic tale; a fantasy replete with grand romances and countless avenues leading to divine love. Venture through diverse time perspectives and complex mythologies of the gods in this multidimensional drama, inspired by ancient Asian principles. The Gold Lotus is a dance in written form; a saga with a rhythmic delivery that will transport you through intricate plots, legendary wars, unsettling separations and passionate love, unbound. Manifested in a time of darkness and war, the celestial being Kanu prepares for a journey brought on by Muniji, the minstrel saint, to face a destiny that stands between destruction and salvation. Weaving through the ways of love and power, the almighty Kanu will learn to become the saviour of his heavenly kingdom while discovering the deepest desires of the heart and defeating evil - both within and without. As the heavenly kingdom yearns for its saviour, a formidable and broken God of War comes to battle with an unpredictable foe that has bested the mightiest of warriors before him: finding the lost love capable of fulfilling the void in his heart. What (or who) he finds as the answer proves to be a riddle never before encountered by the revered warrior. Alongside Kanu and a kingdom of mystical beings that oversee the forces of existence, the celestial war for balance is far from won and the stakes grow higher with every heartbeat.
Katrina Hazzard-Gordon offers the first analysis of the development of the jook-an underground cultural institution created by the black working class-together with other dance arenas in African-American culture. Beginning with the effects of African slaves' middle passage experience on their traditional dances, she traces the unique and virtually autonomous dance culture that developed in the rural South. Like the blues, these secular dance forms and institutions were brought north and urbanized by migrating blacks. In northern cities, some aspects of black dance became integrated into white culture and commercialized. Focusing on ten African-American dance arenas from the period of enslavement to the mid-twentieth century, this book explores the jooks, honky-tonks, rent parties, and after-hours joints as well as the licensed membership clubs, dance halls, cabarets, and the dances of the black elite. Jook houses emerged during the Reconstruction era and can be viewed as a cultural response to freedom. In the jook, Hazzard-Gordon explains, an immeasurable amount of core black culture including food, language, community fellowship, mate selection, music, and dance found a sanctuary of expression when no other secular institution flourished among the folk. The jook and its various derivative forms have provided both entertainment and an economic alternative (such as illegal lotteries and numbers) to people excluded from the dominant economy. Dances like the Charleston, shimmy, snake hips, funky butt, twist, and slow drag originated in the jooks; some can be traced back to Africa. Social dancing links black Americans to their African past more strongly than any other aspect of their culture. Citing the significance of dance in the African-American psyche, this study explores the establishments that nurtured ancestral as well as communal links for African-Americans, vividly describing black dances, formal rituals, such as debutante balls, and the influence of black dance on white culture.
This second volume of John Froy's memoir, a sequel to his childhood story in 70 Waterloo Road, takes us from Italy to Reading University and Falmouth School of Art with many twists and turns between. The memoir chronicles the life of an art student in the 70s: a time of great experiment and change; the figurative/abstract divide in painting and sculpture; the new photography, film and Happenings. And in the gaps, while extricating himself from the family home, being a volunteer archaeologist in Assisi, an osprey warden in Scotland, a London bedsit and dead-end job, a Wiltshire valley idyll and landscape painting in a caravan through a Cornish winter. 'Things may come and things may go, but the art school dance goes on for ever.' (Pete Brown, 1970)
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.
"Ballet inspires me. Human beings have the capacity to express themselves through many art forms, but when it comes to dance - and especially classical modern ballet - I am always amazed by that unbelievably elevated form of expression. It's so precise and so incredibly skilled; I admire that enormously." - Photographer and filmmaker Erwin Olaf "The fact that the photographer is looking through the camera lens means they have a different perspective from looking directly at the figure. That is voyeuristic. The camera can do something that the audience member can't: zooming in for a close-up." - Choreographer Hans van Manen The grand master of Dutch dance, Hans van Manen, celebrates his 90th birthday this year. That has given rise to international celebrations by leading ballet companies with the Hans van Manen festival from 8 to 29 June 2022, the exclusive publication Dance in Close-Up and the exhibition of the same name in Galerie Ron Mandos in Amsterdam from 19 June to 17 July 2022. From the 1970s to the 1990s, Hans van Manen was not only one of the world's leading choreographers, but also an internationally acclaimed photographer. It was during this period that the then very young photographer Erwin Olaf met the famed artist, who immediately took him under his wing and introduced him to the world of the visual arts and studio photography. This book celebrates their 40 years of friendship, with a photo series in which Van Manen directs moments from his choreographic career, recorded with the utmost precision by Erwin Olaf. With text contributions from the authors Nina Siegal and Michael James Gardner.
In August 1960, Anna Halprin taught an experimental workshop attended by Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer (along with Trisha Brown and other soon-to-be important artists) on her dance deck on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais, north of San Francisco. Within two years, Forti's conceptually forceful Dance Constructions had premiered in Yoko Ono's loft and Rainer had cofounded the groundbreaking Judson Dance Theater. Radical Bodies reunites Halprin, Forti, and Rainer for the first time inmore than fifty-five years. Dance was a fundamental part of the art world in the 1960s, the most volatile decade in American art, offering a radical image of bodily presence in a moment of revolutionary change. Halprin, Forti, and Rainer-all with Jewish roots-found themselves at the epicenter of this upheaval. Each, in her own tenacious, humorous, and critical way, created a radicalized vision for dance, dance making, and, ultimately, for music and the visual arts. Placing the body and performance at the center of debate, each developed corporeal languages and methodologies that continue to influence choreographers and visual artists around the world to the present day, enabling a critical practice that reinserts social and political issues into postmodern dance and art. Published in association with the Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara. Exhibition dates: Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara: January 17-April 30, 2017 New York Public Library for the Performing Arts: May 24-September 16, 2017 Events: Pillowtalks, Jacob's Pillow, Becket, MA: July 1, 2017
Playable Bodies investigates what happens when machines teach humans to dance. Dance video games work as engines of humor, shame, trust, and intimacy, urging players to dance like nobody's watching-while being tracked by motion-sensing interfaces in their living rooms. The chart-topping dance game franchises Just Dance and Dance Central transform players' experiences of popular music, invite experimentation with gendered and racialized movement styles, and present new possibilities for teaching, learning, and archiving choreography. Author Kiri Miller shows how these games teach players to regard their own bodies as both interfaces and avatars, and how a convergence of choreography and programming code is driving a new wave of full-body virtual-reality media experiences. Drawing on five years of ethnographic research with players, game designers, and choreographers, Playable Bodies situates dance games in a media ecology that includes the larger game industry, viral music videos, reality TV competitions, marketing campaigns, consumer reviews, social media discourse, and emerging surveillance technologies. Miller tracks the circulation of dance gameplay and related "body projects" across media platforms to reveal how dance games function as "intimate media," configuring new relationships among humans, interfaces, music and dance repertoires, and social media practices.
Since its 1998 publication, the International Encyclopedia of Dance has been the definitive source on this expressive art form, documenting all types of dance around the world and throughout history. Now available in an affordable, attractive paperback edition, this indispensable reference makes a stunning addition to the small library. It is now also available as an e-reference text from Oxford's Digital Reference Shelf. In six volumes, the Encyclopedia offers authoritative coverage of the full spectrum of dance, including theatrical, ritual dance-drama, folk, traditional, ethnic, and social dance. Extensive historical and cultural overviews of many nations appear along with articles on specific dance forms, music and costumes, performances, biographies of dancers and choreographers, and much more. The set features nearly 2,000 alphabetically arranged articles, an exhaustive index, full cross-references, and more than 2,300 illustrations. Amazing in its scope and dazzling in its diversity, the Encyclopedia is like no other reference work on dance. Accessibly written and arranged for use by a wide audience, it is essential for academic and public libraries, and every arts and humanities aficionado.
The mystery of the body in motion. The surprise of seeing what seems impossible. And the pure, joyful optimism of it all. "Dancers Among Us" presents one thrilling photograph after another of dancers leaping, spinning, lifting, kicking - but in the midst of daily life: on the beach, at a construction site, in a library, a restaurant, a park. With each image the reader feels buoyed up, eager to see the next bit of magic. Photographer Jordan Matter started his Dancers Among Us Project by asking a member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company to dance for him in a place where dance is unexpected. So, dressed in a commuter's suit and tie, the dancer flew across a Times Square subway platform. And in that image Matter found what he'd been searching for: a way to express the feeling of being fully alive in the moment, unself-conscious, present. Organized around themes of work, play, love, exploration, dreaming, and more, "Dancers Among Us" celebrates life in a way that's fresh, surprising, original, universal. There's no photo-shopping here, no trampolines, no gimmicks, no tricks. Just a photographer, his vision, and the serendipity of what happens when the shutter clicks.
Der judische Tanz- und Theaterkritiker Artur Michel gehoerte zu den kenntnis- und einflussreichsten Tanzberichterstattern der Weimarer Republik. In diesem Band ist sein Hauptwerk - die Tanzkritiken aus der Vossischen Zeitung zwischen 1922 und 1934 - abgedruckt. Es liest sich als eine spannende und ausserst lebendige Tanzgeschichte des modernen kunstlerischen Tanzes in Europa. Artur Michel entwickelte ab 1922 in der Vossischen Zeitung systematisch die Tanzkritik. Er engagierte sich fur den modernen kunstlerischen Buhnentanz und trat damit den Freunden des klassischen Balletts kampferisch entgegen. Sein Idol war Mary Wigman. Ihre Auffassungen eines "absoluten Tanzes" unterstutzte er nach Kraften. Die Vossische Zeitung war eine der wichtigsten uberregionalen Berliner Tageszeitungen. Sie galt als Sprachrohr des liberalen Burgertums. Als das Blatt 1934 aus Protest gegen die von den Nationalsozialisten gleichgeschaltete Presse sein Erscheinen einstellte, verlor Michel sein wichtigstes Publikationsorgan. Erst 1941 erkannte er, dass er in Nazi-Deutschland nicht mehr sicher leben konnte und floh in letzter Minute auf abenteuerlichem Weg nach New York. Bis zu seinem Tod im Jahr 1946 schrieb er nunmehr in der deutsch-judischen Emigrantenzeitschrift Aufbau uber den modernen kunstlerischen Tanz in den USA.
This book is a collection of essays that capture the artistic voices at play during a staging process. Situating familiar practices such as reimagining, reenactment and recreation alongside the related and often intersecting processes of transmission, translation and transformation, it features deep insights into selected dances from directors, performers, and close associates of choreographers. The breadth of practice on offer illustrates the capacity of dance as a medium to adapt successfully to diverse approaches and, further, that there is a growing appetite amongst audiences for seeing dances from the near and far past. This study spans a century, from Rudolf Laban's Dancing Drumstick (1913) to Robert Cohan's Sigh (2015), and examines works by Mary Wigman, Madge Atkinson (Natural Movement), Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham, Yvonne Rainer and Rosemary Butcher, an eclectic mix that crosses time and borders.
This is a book about collaboration in the arts, which explores how working together seems to achieve more than the sum of the parts. It introduces ideas from economics to conceptualize notions of externalities, complementarity, and emergence, and playfully explores collaborative structures such as the swarm, the crowd, the flock, and the network. It uses up-to-date thinking about Wikinomics, Postcapitalism, and Biopolitics, underpinned by ideas from Foucault, Bourriaud, and Hardt and Negri. In a series of thought-provoking case studies, the authors consider creative practices in theatre, music and film. They explore work by artists such as Gob Squad, Eric Whitacre, Dries Verhoeven, Pete Wyer, and Tino Seghal, and encounter both live and online collaborative possibilities in fascinating discussions of Craigslist and crowdfunding at the Edinburgh Festival. What is revealed is that the introduction of Web 2.0 has enabled a new paradigm of artistic practice to emerge, in which participatory encounters, collaboration, and online dialogue become key creative drivers. Written itself as a collaborative project between Karen Savage and Dominic Symonds, this is a strikingly original take on the economics of working together. |
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