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.

Dancing across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos focuses specifically on Mexican dance practices on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. The essays explore various types of Mexican popular and traditional dances and address questions of authenticity, aesthetics, identity, interpretation, and research methodologies in dance performance. Contributors include not only noted scholars from a variety of disciplines but also several dance practitioners who reflect on their engagement with dance and reveal subtexts of dance culture. Capturing dance as a living expression, the volume's ethnographic approach highlights the importance of the cultural and social contexts in which dances are practiced. Contributors are Norma E. Cantu, Susan Cashion, Maria Teresa Cesena, Xochitl C. Chavez, Adriana Cruz-Manjarrez, Renee de la Torre Castellanos, Peter J. Garcia, Rudy F. Garcia, Chris Goertzen, Martha Gonzalez, Elisa Diana Huerta, Sydney Hutchinson, Marie "Keta" Miranda, Olga Najera-Ramirez, Shakina Nayfack, Russell Rodriguez, Brenda M. Romero, Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter, Jose Sanchez Jimenez, and Alberto Zarate Rosales.

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.

What is dance, as seen from a philosopher's point of view? Why has dance played little part in traditional philosophies of the arts? And why do these philosophies of the arts take the form they do? The distinguished aesthetician Francis Sparshott subjects these questions to a thorough examination that takes into account all forms and aspects of dance, in art and in life, and brings them within the scope of a single discussion. By showing what is involved in deciding whether something is or is not dance, and by displaying the diversity of ways in which dance can be found meaningful, he provides a new sort of background for dance aesthetics and dance criticism. At the same time he makes a far-reaching contribution to the methodology of the philosophy of art and practice. In a witty and personal style that will be familiar to readers of his earlier books, Professor Sparshott makes a distinction between dance and its neighbors (such as work, sports, and games) and points out that it is more profoundly connected to questions of self-knowledge than the other arts. Dance differs from any of the fine arts in that it can be seen, not as the manipulation of a medium, but as self-transformation. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image examines the choreographic in cinema - the way choreographic elements inform cinematic operations in dancefilm. It traces the history of the form from some of its earliest manifestations in the silent film era, through the historic avant-garde, musicals and music videos to contemporary experimental short dancefilms. In so doing it also examines some of the most significant collaborations between dancers, choreographers, and filmmakers.
The book also sets out to examine and rethink the parameters of dancefilm and thereby re-conceive the relations between dance and cinema. Dancefilm is understood as a modality that challenges familiar models of cinematic motion through its relation to the body, movement and time, instigating new categories of filmic performance and creating spectatorial experiences that are grounded in the somatic. Drawing on debates in both film theory (in particular ideas of gesture, the close up, and affect) and dance theory (concepts such as radical phrasing, the gestural anacrusis and somatic intelligence) and bringing these two fields into dialogue, the book argues that the combination of dance and film produces cine-choreographic practices that are specific to the dancefilm form. The book thus presents new models of cinematic movement that are both historically informed and thoroughly interdisciplinary.

This book is an international anthology about dance seen as a world of dreams, ideals or paradises lost - a place where identity and reality are at stake. Through essays, interviews, and analytical reflections, such diverse subjects are treated as Bournonville's ideal of a critic, Nijinsky's faun versus the romantic dream of elusive women, the broken marriage between music and dance, dancing as an erotic motif in the paintings of the Danish Golden Age, and the beast in dance from Swan Lake to butoh.

Elizabeth Streb has been testing the potential of the human body since childhood. Can she fly? Can she run up walls? Can she break through glass? How fast can she go? With clarity and humor--and with a world-class dance troupe called STREB--she continues to investigate what real movement is and has come to these conclusions: It's off the ground! It creates impact! It hurts trying to stop it! In this pathbreaking book, Streb combines memoir and analysis to convey how she became an extreme action dancer/choreographer, developing a form of movement that's more NASCAR than modern dance; more boxing than ballet.

Once called the Evel Knievel of dance, Elizabeth Streb intertwines the disciplines of dance, athletics, rodeo, the circus, and Hollywood stunt-work. She founded STREB in 1985, which performs internationally in theaters, museums, and town squares. She established S.L.A.M. (STREB Lab for Action Mechanics) in 2003, a factory space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which produces a cottage industry of extreme action performances and invites everyday people to wonder about movement, gravity, and flight.

Actor, playwright, and author Anna Deveare Smith is performing her latest play Let Me Down Easy off-Broadway, and she appears on Showtime's Nurse Jackie.

"Tomko blazes a new trail in dance scholarship by interconnecting U.S. History and dance studies.... the first to argue successfully that middle-class U.S. women promoted a new dance practice to manage industrial changes, crowded urban living, massive immigration, and interchange and repositioning among different classes." Choice

From salons to dance halls to settlement houses, new dance practices at the turn of the century became a vehicle for expressing cultural issues and negotiating matters of gender. By examining master narratives of modern dance history, this provocative and insightful book demonstrates the cultural agency of Progressive-era dance practices."

When it was first published in Germany in 1995, Poetics of Dance was already seen as a path-breaking publication, the first to explore the relationships between the birth of modern dance, new developments in the visual arts, and the renewal of literature and drama in the form of avant-garde theatrical and movement productions of the early twentieth-century. Author Gabriele Brandstetter established in this book not only a relation between dance and critical theory, but in fact a full interdisciplinary methodology that quickly found foothold with other areas of research within dance studies. The book looks at dance at the beginnings of the 20th century, the time during which modern dance first began to make its radical departure from the aesthetics of classical ballet. Brandstetter traces modern dance's connection to new innovations and trends in visual and literary arts to argue that modern dance is in fact the preeminent symbol of modernity. As Brandstetter demonstrates, the aesthetic renewal of dance vocabulary which was pursued by modern dancers on both sides of the Atlantic - Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller, Valeska Gert and Oskar Schlemmer, Vaslav Nijinsky and Michel Fokine - unfurled itself in new ideas about gender and subjectivity in the arts more generally, thus reflecting the modern experience of life and the self-understanding of the individual as an individual. As a whole, the book makes an important contribution to the theory of modernity.

First full-scale thematic analysis of Pina Bausch's 'Tanztheater', critically evaluating the impact of modernist theatre on her choreographic methodThis 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 FeaturesThe first full-scale study interrogating the relationship between Bausch's 'Tanztheater' and modernist theatre practice, structured around a chronological framework of case study choreographiesA new theorisation of the development of Bausch's oeuvre, locating her approach in a broader context of intercultural artistic exchange in the post-WWII periodDraws on literary and theatre theory to form an interdisciplinary methodology for understanding and interrogating Bausch's oeuvreBased on extensive archival research and a specialised knowledge of the evolution of modern dance

A landmark examination of the art and artists inspired by American dance from 1830 to 1960 As an enduring wellspring of creativity for many artists throughout history, dance has provided a visual language to express such themes as the bonds of community, the allure of the exotic, and the pleasures of the body. This book is the first major investigation of the visual arts related to American dance, offering an unprecedented, interdisciplinary overview of dance-inspired works from 1830 to 1960. Fourteen essays by renowned historians of art and dance analyze the ways dance influenced many of America's most prominent artists, including George Caleb Bingham, William Sidney Mount, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Cecilia Beaux, Isamu Noguchi, Aaron Douglas, Malvina Hoffman, Edward Steichen, Arthur Davies, William Johnson, and Joseph Cornell. The artists did not merely represent dance, they were inspired to think about how Americans move, present themselves to one another, and experience time. Their artwork, in turn, affords insights into the cultural, social, and political moments in which it was created. For some artists, dance informed even the way they applied paint to canvas, carved a sculpture, or framed a photograph. Richly illustrated, the book includes depictions of Irish-American jigs, African-American cakewalkers, and Spanish-American fandangos, among others, and demonstrates how dance offers a means for communicating through an aesthetic, static form. Distributed for the Detroit Institute of Arts Exhibition Schedule: Detroit Institute of Arts (03/20/16-06/12/16) Denver Art Museum (07/10/16-10/02/16) Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (10/22/16-01/16/17)

What is the essence of "black" dance in America, and what is the black dancing body? To answer these question, Brenda Dixon Gottschild charts an unorthodox history by mapping the geography of the black dancing body and showing its central place in our culture. From feet to buttocks, hair, skin, face and beyond to soul and spirit, the author explores the endeavors, ordeals and triumphs of this body with some of the major dancers and choreographers of our time--Fernando Bujones, Brenda Bufalino, Trisha Brown, Garth Fagan, Rennie Harris, Bill T. Jones, Ralph Lemon, Susanne Linke, Meredith Monk and a cadre of their esteemed colleagues. Since race and color are usually taboo subjects in the dance world, what the author finds out is sure to cause controversy and turn heads. Written by one of the foremost American dance critics of our day, "The Black Dancing Body" is a key to the ineffable rhythms and movement of dance in America.

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.