What does it take to cross a border, and what does it take to belong? Sandra Noeth examines the entangled experiences of borders and of collectivity through the perspective of bodies. By dramaturgical analyses of contemporary artistic work from Lebanon and Palestine, Noeth shows how borders and collectivity are constructed and negotiated through performative, corporeal, movement-based, and sensory strategies and processes. This interdisciplinary study is made urgent by social and political transformations across the Middle East and beyond from 2010 onwards. It puts to the fore the residual, body-bound structural effects of borders and of collectivity and proceeds to develop notions of agency and responsibility that are immanently bound to bodies in relation.

For more than five decades, Twyla Tharp has been a phenomenon in American dance, a choreographer who not only broke the rules but refused to repeat her own successes. Tharp has made movies, television specials, and nearly one hundred riveting dance works. Her dance show Movin' Out ran on Broadway for three years and won Tharp a Tony award for Best Choreography.Howling Near Heaven is the only in-depth study of Twyla Tharp's unique, restless creativity. This second edition features a new forward that brings the account of Tharp's work up to date and discusses how dance and dance-making in the United States have changed in recent years. This is the story of a choreographer who refused to be pigeonholed and the dancers who accompanied her as she sped across the frontiers of dance.

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.

In "Agency and Embodiment," Carrie Noland examines the ways in which culture is both embodied and challenged through the corporeal performance of gestures. Arguing against the constructivist metaphor of bodily inscription dominant since Foucault, Noland maintains that kinesthetic experience, produced by acts of embodied gesturing, places pressure on the conditioning a body receives, encouraging variations in cultural practice that cannot otherwise be explained.

Drawing on work in disciplines as diverse as dance and movement theory, phenomenology, cognitive science, and literary criticism, Noland argues that kinesthesia feeling the body move encourages experiment, modification, and, at times, rejection of the routine. Noland privileges corporeal performance and the sensory experience it affords in order to find a way beyond constructivist theory s inability to produce a convincing account of agency. She observes that despite the impact of social conditioning, human beings continue to invent surprising new ways of altering the inscribed behaviors they are called on to perform. Through lucid close readings of Marcel Mauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Bill Viola, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Henri Michaux, Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Derrida, and contemporary digital artist Camille Utterback, Noland illustrates her provocative thesis, addressing issues of concern to scholars in critical theory, performance studies, anthropology, and visual studies.

Because dance materializes through and for people, because we learn to dance from others and often present dance to others, the moment of its transmission is one of dance's central and defining features. Valuing Dance looks at the occasion when dancing passes from one person to another as an act of exchange, one that is redolent with symbolic meanings, including those associated with its history and all the labor that has gone into its making. It examines two ways that dance can be exchanged, as commodity and as gift, reflecting on how each establishes dance's relative worth and merit differently. When and why do we give dance? Where and to whom do we sell it? How are such acts of exchange rationalized and justified? Valuing Dance poses these questions in order to contribute to a conversation around what dance is, what it does, and why it matters.

Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration explores global relationality within the realm of intercultural collaboration in contemporary dance. Author SanSan Kwan looks specifically at duets, focusing on "East" "West" pairings, and how dance artists from different cultural and movement backgrounds -Asia, the Asian diaspora, Europe, and the United States; trained in contemporary dance, hip hop, flamenco, Thai classical dance, kabuki, and butoh - find ways to collaborate. Kwan acknowledges the forces of dissension, prejudice, and violence present in any contact zone, but ultimately asserts that choreographic invention across difference can be an act of love in the face of loss and serve as a model for difficult, imaginative, compassionate global affiliation. Love Dances contends that the practice and performance of dance serves as a revelatory site for working across culture. Body-to-body interaction on the stage carries the potential to model everyday encounters across difference in the world.

In Dance for Sports, author, choreographer, and dance instructor Margo Apostolos offers a new training approach for athletes and coaches that synthesizes common techniques between athletics and dance. By utilizing this approach, in- and off-season athletes can improve efficiency and relaxation. Throughout the book, Apostolos shows the potential exchange between sport and dance in exercises that focus on overlapping physical components of both practices including flexibility, strength, coordination, agility, balance, and timing. She also demonstrates how dance serves sport as a cross training activity with additional opportunities for athletes to explore creativity, improvisation, and mindfulness. Discussion with athletes from several sports interweaves each chapter to expand the learning process and offer useful anecdotes. Based upon the author's decades-long career and extensive experience with athletes and coaches in sports from basketball to swimming to track and field, Dance for Sports provides a fully integrative guide for students and instructors alike.

Risk, Failure, Play illuminates the many ways in which competitive martial arts differentiate themselves from violence. Presented from the perspective of a dancer and writer, this book takes readers through the politics of everyday life as experienced through training in a range of martial arts practices such as jeet kune do, Brazilian jiu jitsu, kickboxing, Filipino martial arts, and empowerment self-defense. Author Janet OaShea shows how play gives us the ability to manage difficult realities with intelligence and demonstrates that physical play, with its immediacy and heightened risk, is particularly effective at accomplishing this task. Risk, Failure, Play also demonstrates the many ways in which physical recreation allows us to manage the complexities of our current social reality. Risk, Failure, Play intertwines personal experience with phenomenology, social psychology, dance studies, performance studies, as well as theories of play and competition in order to produce insights on pleasure, mastery, vulnerability, pain, agency, individual identity, and society. Ultimately, this book suggests that play allows us to rehearse other ways to live than the ones we see before us and challenges us to reimagine our social reality.

What are the arts? What functions do the arts serve in human life? There has been a surge of cognitive, biological, and evolutionary interest in the arts in recent years, most of it oriented towards individual artforms. However, there has been virtually no bridging work to integrate the arts under a single theoretical perspective. This book presents the first integrated cognitive account of the arts that unites visual art, theatre, literature, dance, and music into a single framework, with supporting discussions about creativity and aesthetics. Its comparative approach identifies both what is unique to each artform and what they share, shedding light on how the arts can combine with one another to form syntheses, such as choreographing dance movements to music, or setting lyrics to music to create a song. While studies in the psychology of the arts tend to focus on perceptual processes and aesthetic responses alone, this book offers a holistic sensorimotor account that examines the full gamut of processes from creation to perception. This allows for a broad discussion of the evolution of the arts, including the origins of rhythm, the co-evolution of music and language, the evolution of drawing, and cultural evolution of the arts. Finally, the book unifies a number of topics that have not previously been fully related to one another, including theatre and literature, music and language, creativity and aesthetics, dancing and acting, and visual art and music. A unique volume providing a bold new approach to the integration of the arts, for academics or general readers of the arts, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology, and evolutionary studies.

Further Steps 2 brings together New Yorka (TM)s foremost choreographers a " among them MacArthur a ~Geniusa (TM) award winners Meredith Monk and Bill T. Jones a " to discuss the past, present and future of dance in the US. In a series of exclusive and enlightening interviews, this diverse selection of artists discuss the changing roles of race, gender, politics, and the social environment on their work.

Bringing her own experience of the New York dance scene to her study, Constance Kreemer traces the lives and works of the following choreographers:

Lucinda Childs, Douglas Dunn, Molissa Fenley, Rennie Harris, Bill T. Jones, Kenneth King, Nancy Meehan, Meredith Monk, Rosalind Newman, Gus Solomons jr, Doug Varone, Dan Wagoner, Mel Wong and Jawole Zollar.

With over 2,600 entries, the second edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Dance is a unique single volume reference on all aspects of dance performance written by two leading dance writers, Debra Craine and Judith Mackrell. The work covers all aspects of the diverse dance world from classical ballet to modern, from flamenco to hip-hop, from tap to South Asian dance forms and includes detailed entries on technical terms, steps, styles, works and countries, in addition to many biographies of dancers, choreographers, and companies.
During the last thirty years the boundaries of dance have been radically redrawn. There has been an explosion of new activity within traditional forms like ballet, a stream of new dance languages invented by fresh generations of choreographers, and there is a growing appreciation of cultural dance forms from around the world. Fans today are likely to attend performances as varied as Spanish flamenco, Indian bharata natyam, Japanese butoh, classical ballet, and post-modern dance. With an emphasis on performance - the dance we see in our theatres today - readers will find both fact and analysis on a wide range of subjects, from styles of dance and the history of dance companies and their productions, to dancers, choreographers, and technical terms.
With 150 new entries, this new edition charts developments that have occurred over the last ten years, including the rise of new digital technology in the creation and staging of dance and the move to the mainstream of formerly fringe genres such as hip-hop, as well as the arrival of a new generation of dancers and choreographers to the scene.

Nothing strikes the ear quite like a soprano singing in the sonic stratosphere. Whether thrilling, chilling, or repellent to the listener, the reaction to cascades of coloratura with climaxing high notes is strong. Coloratura-agile, rapid-fire singing-was originally essential for all singers, but its function changed greatly when it became the specialty of particular sopranos over the course of the nineteenth century. The central argument of Vocal Virtuosity challenges the historical commonplace that coloratura became an anachronism in nineteenth-century opera. Instead, the book demonstrates that melismas at mid-century were made modern. Coloratura became an increasingly marked musical gesture during the century with a correspondingly more specific dramaturgical function. In exploring this transformation, the book reveals the instigators of this change in vocal practice and examines the historical traces of Parisian singers who were the period's greatest exponents of vertiginous vocality as archetypes of the modern coloratura soprano. The book constructs the historical trajectory of coloratura as it became gendered the provenance of the female singer, while also considering what melismas can signify in operatic performance. As a whole, it argues that vocal virtuosity was a source of power for women, generating space for female authorship and creativity. In so doing, the book reclaims a place in history for the coloratura soprano.

Best remembered for his role as the Scarecrow in the 1939 MGM musical The Wizard of Oz, Ray Bolger led a rich and extraordinary career in the decade before and more than four decades after the creation of the film. Ray Bolger: More Than a Scarecrow is the first biography of this classic American entertainer, covering the luminous and forgotten career of the eccentric dancer outside of his burlap mask. The product of a fragmented, working-class Boston Irish family, Bolger learned tap and eccentric dance steps as solace for a difficult life before running away to repertory theater and Vaudeville. From there, he would go on to become a Broadway star, a contract player at Hollywood's major studios, one of the first performers to tour the South Pacific for the USO, a Tony Award winner, an early sitcom star, and the opening headliner of the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas. Using unprecedented access to Bolger's papers and many never-before-published photographs, Ray Bolger: More Than a Scarecrow pieces together the lost story of an itinerant hoofer who survived and thrived during the major media changes of the twentieth century and established himself as a staple of American pop culture.

This is a remarkable account of the revolutionary impact of modern dance on European cultural life in the early twentieth century. Edward Ross Dickinson uncovers modern dance's place in the emerging 'mass' culture of the modern metropolis, sufficiently ubiquitous and high-profile to spark media storms, parliamentary debates, and exasperated denunciations even from progressive art critics. He shows how modern dance spoke in multiple registers - as religious and as scientific; as redemptively chaste and scandalously sensual; as elitist and popular. He reveals the connections between modern dance and changing gender relations and family dynamics, imperialism, racism, and cultural exchanges with the wider non-European world, and new conceptions of selfhood. Ultimately the book finds in these complex and often contradictory connections a new way of understanding the power of modernism and modernity and their capacity to revolutionize and transform the modern world in the momentous, creative, violent middle decades of the twentieth century.

Functional Awareness: Anatomy in Action for Dancers is where anatomy meets artistry. Each chapter provides explorations in embodied anatomy in an engaging manner with the use of images, storytelling, and experiential exercises. It is an accessible introduction to the relationship between daily movement habits, dance training and anatomy. The information is founded on over 30,000 hours of experience teaching and training dancers to generate efficient exertion and appropriate recuperation. Functional Awareness: Anatomy in Action for Dancers employs somatic practices along with explorations in experiential anatomy to awaken the body-mind connection and improve movement function. The book applies the Functional Awareness (R) approach to improve dance technique and provide skills to enable the dancer to move with balance and grace in the classroom, on stage, and in daily life.

From the mid-1920s, the dance hall occupied a pivotal place in the culture of working- and lower-middle-class communities in Britain - a place rivalled only by the cinema and eventually to eclipse even that institution in popularity. Going to the Palais examines the history of this vital social and cultural institution, exploring the dances, dancers, and dance venues that were at the heart of one of twentieth-century Britain's most significant leisure activities. Going to the Palais has several key focuses. First, it explores the expansion of the dance hall industry and the development of a 'mass audience' for dancing between 1918 and 1960. Second, the impact of these changes on individuals and communities is examined, with a particular concentration on working and lower-middle-class communities, and on young men and women. Third, the cultural impact of dancing and dance halls is explored. A key aspect of this debate is an examination of how Britain's dance culture held up against various standardizing processes (for example, commercialization, Americanization) over the period, and whether we can see the emergence of a 'national' dance culture. Finally, the volume offers an assessment of wider reactions to dance halls and dancing in the period. Going to the Palais is concerned with the complex relationship between discourses of class, culture, gender, and national identity and how they overlap - how cultural change, itself a response to broader political, social, and economic developments, was helping to change notions of class, gender, and national identity.

Human movement influences an individual's perceptions and ability to interact with the world. Through exercises, illustrations, and detailed anatomical drawings, this remarkable book guides the reader toward total body integration. An experimental approach to movement fundamentals involving the patterning of connections in the body according to principles of efficient movement, the process of total body integration encourages personal expression and full psychological involvement. Such work, begun by Irmgard Bartenieff and now known as Bartenieff's Fundamentals, is developed by Peggy Hackney, one of Bartenieff's close colleagues, in Making Connections. By examining what is truly fundamental in human movement, Hackney's pioneering study explores inner connections through specific body movements and shares the process for releasing the sensations and feelings that such movements bring forth.

This edited collection draws on the conference, Attending to Movement: Somatic Perspectives on Living in this World, run at C-DaRE, the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University, 12 - 14 July, 2013. Somatic practitioners, dance artists and scholars from a wide range of subject domains cross discipline borders and investigate the approaches that embodied thinking and action can offer to philosophical and socio-cultural inquiry. The book celebrates and builds upon the work of visionary dance artist, teacher and scholar Gill Clarke (1954 -2011), who championed the value of somatic approaches within and beyond dance education and creative practice. This collection of papers covers the themes of: Somatics in the wider social context Pedagogy/Education Intercultural Dialogues Lived lineages Interplay of practice and writing Partial Contents As my attention is wandering: A score for somatic enquiry - Carolyn Roy Not Without My Body: The Struggle of Dancers and Choreographers in the Middle East - Nadra Assaf Disorganising Principles: Corporeal Fragmentation and the Possibilities for Repair - Jennifer Roche Attending to ethics and aesthetics in dance - Fiona Bannon & Duncan Holt At dusk, the collaborative spills and cycles of L219 - Cath Cullinane, Natalie Garrett Brown, Christian Kipp & Amy Voris The Art of Making Choices: The Feldenkrais Method as a soma-critique - Thomas Kampe Motion Capture and The Dancer: Visuality, Temporality and the Dancing Image - Sarah Whatley The fool's journey and poisonous mushrooms - Adam Benjamin 'The daily round the common task': Embodied Practice and the Dance of the Everyday - Hilary Kneale Re-sourcing the body: embodied presence and self-care in working with others - Penny Collinson Thinking, Reflecting and Contemplating With the Body - Lalitaraja (Joachim Chandler) Mythbusting: Using the Alexander Technique to free yourself from detrimental misconceptions in the performing arts - Jennifer Mackerras & Jane Toms A Moving and Touching Career in Dance and Chiropractic - Duncan Holt Attending to movement: the need to make dance that was different to that which went before - Sara Reed Towards a constructive interaction between somatic education and introspective verbalization - Nicole Harbonnier-Topin & Helen Simard Choreographic Mobilities: Embodied Migratory Acts Across the US-Mexico Border - Juan Manuel Aldape Munoz Readership Designed as a guide and stimulus for: teachers, students and practitioners of dance and somatic practices researchers and academics in these fields.

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.