This book focuses on the myriad ways that people collectively remember or forget shared pasts through popular dance. In dance classes, nightclubs, family celebrations, tourist performances, on television, film, music video and the internet, cultural memories are shared and transformed by dancing bodies adapting yesterday's steps to today's concerns. The book gathers emerging and seasoned scholarly voices from a wide range of geographical and disciplinary perspectives to discuss cultural remembering and forgetting in diverse popular dance contexts. The contributors ask: how are Afro-diasporic memories invoked in popular dance classes? How are popular dance genealogies manipulated and reclaimed? What is at stake for the nation in the nationalizing of folk and popular dances? And how does mediated dancing transmit memory as feelings or affects? The book reveals popular dance to be vital to cultural processes of remembering and forgetting, allowing participants to pivot between alternative pasts, presents and futures.

"Peter has brilliantly put into words what I have felt my whole dancing life: that the power of dance can liberate and change all our lives." Darcey Bussell Humans are born to dance. And in today's sedentary world, we would all benefit from doing more of it. Science shows that just ten minutes of dancing provides a thorough work out for the body and brain, raising the heartbeat to cause a release of feel-good endorphins, connecting us to our emotions and reducing our stress levels. Dancing quite simply makes us feel more alive. Dr Peter Lovatt, a former professional dancer turned dance psychologist, has spent the past two decades studying why we dance and what it does for us, and is on a personal mission to make dancing as natural an activity in our daily lives as walking or drinking coffee. Filled with fascinating case studies from his research as well as great stories from dance history, The Dance Cure will inspire even those who think they "can't dance" to turn the music on, get up on the floor and dance themselves happy.

In Choreographing Agonism, author Goran Petrovic Lotina offers new insight into the connections between politics and performance. Exploring the political and philosophical roots of a number of recent leftist civil movements, Petrovic Lotina forcefully argues for a re-imagining of artistic performance as an instrument of democracy capable of contesting a dominant politics. Inspired by post-Marxist theories of discourse theory, hegemony, conflict, and pluralism, and using tension as a guiding philosophical, political, and artistic force, the book expands the politico-philosophical debate on theories of performance. It offers both scholars and practitioners of performance a thought-provoking analysis of the ways in which artistic performance can be viewed politically as 'agonistic choreo-political practice,' a powerful strategy for mobilising alternative ways of living together and invigorating democracy. Choreographing Agonism makes a bold and innovative contribution to the discussion of political and philosophical thought in the field of Performance Studies.

This book offers new ways of thinking about dance-related artworks that have taken place in galleries, museums and biennales over the past two decades as part of the choreographic turn. It focuses on the concept of intersubjectivity and theorises about what happens when subjects meet within a performance artwork. The resulting relations are crucial to instances of performance art in which embodied subjects engage as spectators, participants and performers in orchestrated art events. Choreographing Intersubjectivity in Performance Art deploys a multi-disciplinary approach across dance choreography and evolving manifestations of performance art. An innovative, overarching concept of choreography sustains the idea that intersubjectivity evolves through places, spaces, performance and spectatorship. Drawing upon international examples, the book introduces readers to performance art from the South Pacific and the complexities of de-colonising choreography. Artists Tino Sehgal, Xavier Le Roy, Jordan Wolfson, Alicia Frankovich and Shigeyuki Kihara are discussed.

Dancing Women: Female Bodies Onstage is a spectacular and timely contribution to dance history, recasting canonical dance since the early nineteenth century in terms of a feminist perspective. Setting the creation of specific dances in socio-political and cultural contexts, Sally Banes shows that choreographers have created representations of women that are shaped by - and that in part shape - society's continuing debates about sexuality and female identity.
Broad in its scope and compelling in its argument Dancing Women:
* provides a series of re-readings of the canon, from Romantic and Russian Imperial ballet to contemporary ballet and modern dance
* investigates the gaps between plot and performance that create sexual and gendered meanings
* examines how women's agency is created in dance through aspects of choreographic structure and style
* analyzes a range of women's images - including brides, mistresses, mothers, sisters, witches, wraiths, enchanted princesses, peasants, revolutionaries, cowgirls, scientists, and athletes - as well as the creation of various women's communities on the dance stage
* suggests approaches to issues of gender in postmodern dance
Using an interpretive strategy different from that of other feminist dance historians, who have stressed either victimization or celebration of women, Banes finds a much more complex range of cultural representations of gender identities.

Dancing Bahia is an edited collection that draws together the work of leading scholars, artists and dance activists from Brazil, Canada and the United States to examine the particular ways in which dance has responded to sociopolitical notions of race and community, resisting stereotypes and redefining African Diaspora and Afro-Brazilian traditions.

Kinaesthesia and Visual Self-reflection in Contemporary Dance features interviews with UK-based professional-level contemporary, ballet, hip hop, and breaking dancers and cross-disciplinary explication of kinaesthesia and visual self-reflection discourses. Expanding on the concept of a 'kinaesthetic mode of attention' leads to discussion of some of the key values and practices which nurture and develop this mode in contemporary dance. Zooming in on entanglements with video self-images in dance practice provides further insights regarding kinaesthesia's historicised polarisation with the visual. It thus provides opportunities to dwell on and reconsider reflections, opening up to a set of playful yet disruptive diffractions inherent in the process of becoming a contemporary dancer, particularly amongst an increasingly complex landscape of visual and theoretical technologies.

This book examines men, masculinities and sexualities in Western theatrical dance, offering insights into the processes, actions and interactions that occur in dance institutions around gender-transgressive acts, and the factors that set limits to transgression. This text uses interview and observation data to analyze the conditions that encourage some boys and young men to become involved in this widely unconventional activity, and the ways through which they negotiate the gendered and sexual attachments of their professional identity. Most importantly, the book analyzes the opportunities male dancers find to develop a reflexive habitus, engage in gender transgressive acts and experiment with their sexuality. At the same time, it approaches gender and sexuality as embodied, and therefore as parts of identity that are not as easily amendable. This book will be of interest to scholars in Gender and Sexuality Studies as well as Dance and Performance Studies.

This detailed portrait of George Balanchine presents new approaches to his choreography. The book examines Balanchine from diverse perspectives and discusses unexplored aspects of his work, such as the notion of Balanchine as an architect, and his experiments with the African-American dance tradition. The articles complement and reinforce each other, taking interdisciplinary perspectives and encouraging a reexamination of, and expansion of, existing opinions.

How does the moving, dancing body engage with the materials, textures, atmospheres, and affects of the sites through which we move and in which we live, work and play? How might embodied movement practice explore some of these relations and bring us closer to the complexities of sites and lived environments? This book brings together perspectives from site dance, phenomenology, and new materialism to explore and develop how 'site-based body practice' can be employed to explore synergies between material bodies and material sites. Employing practice-as-research strategies, scores, tasks and exercises the book presents a number of suggestions for engaging with sites through the moving body and offers critical reflection on the potential enmeshments and entanglements that emerge as a result. The theoretical discussions and practical explorations presented will appeal to researchers, movement practitioners, artists, academics and individuals interested in exploring their lived environments through the moving body and the entangled human-nonhuman relations that emerge as a result.

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

From the trolley scene in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers's last dance on the silver screen (The Barkleys of Broadway, 1949) to Judy Garland's timeless, tuxedo-clad performance of "Get Happy" (Summer Stock, 1950), Charles Walters staged the iconic musical sequences of Hollywood's golden age. During his career, this Academy Award--nominated director and choreographer showcased the talents of stars such as Gene Kelly, Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds, and Frank Sinatra. However, despite his many critical and commercial triumphs, Walters's name often goes unrecognized today.

In the first full-length biography of Walters, Brent Phillips chronicles the artist's career, from his days as a featured Broadway performer and prot?g? of theater legend Robert Alton to his successes at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He takes readers behind the scenes of many of the studio's most beloved musicals, including Easter Parade (1948), Lili (1953), High Society (1956), and The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964). In addition, Phillips recounts Walters's associations with Lucille Ball, Joan Crawford, and Gloria Swanson, examines the director's uncredited work on several films, including the blockbuster Gigi (1958), and discusses his contributions to musical theater and American popular culture.

This revealing book also considers Walters's personal life and explores how he navigated the industry as an openly gay man. Drawing on unpublished oral histories, correspondence, and new interviews, this biography offers an entertaining and important new look at an exciting era in Hollywood history.

This interdisciplinary book brings together essays that consider how the body enacts social and cultural rituals in relation to objects, spaces, and the everyday, and how these are questioned, explored, and problematised through, and translated into dance, art, and performance. The chapters are written by significant artists and scholars and consider practices from various locations, including Central and Western Europe, Mexico, and the United States. The authors build on dialogues between, for example, philosophy and museum studies, and memory studies and post-humanism, and engage with a wide range of theory from phenomenology to relational aesthetics to New Materialism. Thus this book represents a unique collection that together considers the continuum between everyday and cultural life, and how rituals and memories are inscribed onto our being. It will be of interest to scholars and practitioners, students and teachers, and particularly those who are curious about the intersections between arts disciplines.

This book strives to unmask the racial inequity at the root of the emergence of modern physical culture systems in the US Progressive Era (1890s-1920s). This book focuses on physical culture - systematic, non-competitive exercise performed under the direction of an expert - because tracing how people practiced physical culture in the Progressive Era, especially middle- and upper-class white women, reveals how modes of popular performance, institutional regulation, and ideologies of individualism and motherhood combined to sublimate whiteness beneath the veneer of liberal progressivism and reform. The sites in this book give the fullest picture of the different strata of physical culture for white women during that time and demonstrate the unracialization of whiteness through physical culture practices. By illuminating the ways in which whiteness in the US became a default identity category absorbed into the "universal" ideals of culture, arts, and sciences, the author shows how physical culture circulated as a popular performance form with its own conventions, audience, and promised profitability. Finally, the chapters reveal troubling connections between the daily habits physical culturists promoted and the eugenics movement's drive towards more reproductively efficient white bodies. By examining these written, visual, and embodied texts, the author insists on a closer scrutiny of the implicit whiteness of physical culture and forwards it as a crucial site of analysis for performance scholars interested in how corporeality is marshaled by and able to contest local and global systems of power.

This book explores the potential of movement as a means of eliciting conflict transformation and unfolding peace at the intrapersonal and relational levels. It examines how peace and dance have been related in different cultures and investigates embodied ways to creatively tap the energies of conflicts, inspiring possibilities of transformation and new dynamics in relationships. Drawing on Wolfgang Dietrich's Many Peaces theory, the book discusses how different expressions of dance have been connected to different interpretations of peace and strategies for transformation. Delving into elicitive approaches to conflict transformation, the book develops an innovative framework for applying movement as an elicitive method, which it vividly presents through the author's own experiences and interviews with participants in workshops. Given its scope, the book will appeal to scholars, practitioners and artists working at the nexus of peace, conflict transformation and the arts.

This book traces an engagement between intercultural dance company Marrugeku and unceded lands of the Yawuru, Bunuba, and Nyikina in the north west of Australia. In the face of colonial legacies and extractive capitalism, it examines how Indigenous ontologies bring ecological thought to dance through an entangled web of attachments to people, species, geologies, political histories, and land. Following choreographic interactions across the multiple subject positions of Indigenous, settler, and European artists between 2012-2016 the book closely examines projects such as Yawuru/Bardi dancer and choreographer Dalisa Pigram's solo Gudirr Gudirr (2013) and the multimedia work Cut the Sky (2015). Dance in Contested Land reveals how emergent intercultural dramaturgies can mediate dance and land to revision and reorientate kinetics, emotion, and responsibilities through sites of Indigenous resurgence and experimentation.

This book locates the philosophy of Ubuntu as the undergirding framework for indigenous dance pedagogies in local communities in Uganda. Through critical examination of the reflections and practices of selected local dance teachers, the volume reveals how issues of inclusion, belonging, and agency are negotiated through a creatively complex interplay between individuality and communality. The analysis frames pedagogies as sites where reflective thought and kinaesthetic practice converge to facilitate ever-evolving individual imagination and community innovations.

This book offers a set of eleven discipline-specific chapters from across the arts, humanities, psychology, and medicine. Each contributor considers the creative potential of error and/or ambiguity, defining these terms in the particular context of that discipline and exploring their values and applications. Themes include error in choreography, poetry, media art, healthcare, psychology, critical typography and mixed reality performance. The book emerges from a core question of how dance research and HCI can inform each other through consideration of error, ambiguity and 'messiness' as methodological tools. The digital age had heralded the possibility that error could be eradicated by the logic of computers but several chapters focus on glitch in arts practices that exploit errors in computer programmes, or even create programmes specifically to produce errors. Together, the chapters explore how error can take us somewhere different or somewhere new, to develop a new, more interesting way of working.

"'Irmgard Bartenieff has a profound knowledge of the human body and how it moves. I am delighted that this will now be made available to many more people.'." -- George Balanchine of Director, New York City Ballet "'Irmgard Bartenieff's pioneering work in the multiple applications of Labananalysis has had a transforming influence on many areas of movement training. Her careful and detailed development of the spatial principles into active corrective work has illuminated and altered the training of people as varied as dancers, choreographers, physical therapists, movement and dance therapists, and psychotherapists. Anthropologists and non-verbal communication researchers have found their world view necessarily altered by her fundamental innovations. The field of body/mind work will need to adapt to include her clear working through of basic principles.'." -- Kayla Kazahn Zalk of President, American Dance Guild

This transdisciplinary study scientifically reports the way the established contemporary dance sector in Europe operates from a micro-perspective. It provides a dance scholarly and sociological interpretation of its mechanisms by coupling qualitative data (interview material, observations, logbooks, and dance performances) to theoretical insights. The book uncovers the sometimes contradicting mechanisms related to the precarious project-oriented labor and art market that determine the working and living conditions of contemporary dance artists in Europe's dance capitals Brussels and Berlin. In addition, it examines how these working and living conditions affect the work process and outcome. From a sociological perspective, the book engages with the relevant contemporary social issue of precarity and this within the much-at-risk professional group of contemporary dance artists. In this regard, the research brings novelty within the subject area, particularly by employing a unique methodological approach. Although the research is initially set up in a specific geographical context and within a specific research population, the book offers insights into issues that affect our neoliberal society at large. The research findings show potential to make a relevant contribution with regards to precarity within dance studies and performance studies, but also labor studies and cultural sociology.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of electronic dance music (EDM) and club culture. To do so, it interlinks a broad range of disciplines, revealing their (at times vastly) differing standpoints on the same subject. Scholars from such diverse fields as cultural studies, economics, linguistics, media studies, musicology, philosophy, and sociology share their perspectives. In addition, the book features articles by practitioners who have been active on the EDM scene for many years and discuss issues like gender and diversity problems in general, and the effects of gentrification on club culture in Berlin. Although the book's main focus is on Berlin, one of the key centers of EDM and club culture, its findings can also be applied to other hotspots. Though primarily intended for researchers and students, the book will benefit all readers interested in obtaining an interdisciplinary overview of research on electronic dance music.

This book is the first to consider contemporary African dance theatre aesthetics in the context of phenomenology, whiteness, and the gaze. Rather than a discussion of African dance per se, the author challenges hegemonic perceptions of contemporary African dance theatre to interrogate the extent to which white supremacy and privilege weave through capitalist necropolitics and determine our perception of contemporary African dance theatre today. Multiple aesthetic strategies are discussed throughout the book to account for the affective experience of 'un-suturing' that touches white spectatorship and colonial guilt at their core. The critical analysis covers a broad range of dance choreography by artists from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, South Africa, Canada, Europe, and the US as they travel, create, and show their works internationally to global audiences to contest racial divides and white supremacist politics.

This book provides insight into how flamenco travels, the forms it assumes in new locales, and the reciprocal effects on the original scene. Utilising a postnational approach to cultural identity, Martin explores the role of non-native culture brokers in cultural transmission. This concept, referred to as 'cosmopolitan human hubs', builds on Kiwan and Meinhof's 'hubs' theory of network migration to move cultural migration and globalisation studies forwards. Martin outlines a post-globalisation flamenco culture through analysis of ethnographic research carried out in the UK, Sevilla and Madrid. Insight into these glocal scenes characterises flamenco as a historically globalized art complex, represented in various hubs around the world. This alternative approach to music migration and globalisation studies will be of interest to students and scholars across leisure studies, musicology, sociology and anthropology.

This book renews thinking about the moving body by drawing on dance practice and performance from across the world. Eighteen internationally recognised scholars show how dance can challenge our thoughts and feelings about our own and other cultures, our emotions and prejudices, and our sense of public and private space. In so doing, they offer a multi-layered response to ideas of affect and emotion, culture and politics, and ultimately, the place of dance and art itself within society. The chapters in this collection arise from a number of different political and historical contexts. By teasing out their detail and situating dance within them, art is given a political charge. That charge is informed by the work of Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Ranciere and Luce Irigaray as well as their forebears such as Spinoza, Plato and Freud. Taken together, Choreography and Corporeality: RELAY in Motion puts thought into motion, without forgetting its origins in the social world.

This book investigates how Pragmatist philosophy as a philosophical method contributes to the understanding and practice of interdisciplinary dance research. It uses the author's own practice-based research project, Later Rain, to illustrate this. Later Rain is a post-dramatic dance theater work that engages primarily with issues in the philosophy of religion and socio-political philosophy. It focuses on ecstatic states that arise in Appalachian charismatic Pentecostal church services, states characterized by dancing, paroxysms, shouting, and speaking in tongues (glossolalia). Research for this work is interdisciplinary as it draws on studio practice, ethnographic field work, cultural history, Pentecostal history and theology, folk aesthetics, anthropological understandings of ecstatic religious rituals, and dance history regarding acclaimed works that have sought to present aspects of religious ecstasy on stage; Doris Humphrey's The Shakers (1931), Mark Godden's Angels in the Architecture (2012), Martha Clarke's Angel Reapers (2015) and Ralph Lemon's Geography trilogy (2005). The project thereby demonstrates a process model of dance philosophy, showing how philosophy and dance artistry intertwine in a specific creative process.