Everyone who viewed the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing
Olympic Games can understand the power of dance and mass movement
in the service of politics. While examples of such public
performances and huge festivals are familiar in Nazi Germany, the
former Soviet Union and today's North Korea, this new book
addresses the lesser known examples of Spain under Franco, the
Dominican Republic, Iran, Croatia and Uzbekistan, all of which have
been subjected to various political regimes. Dance and
choreographed mass movement is the newest field of serious research
in dance studies, particularly in the fields of politics and
international relations and gender and sexuality. The author uses
dance as a lens through which to study political, ethnic, and
gendered phenomena so that the reader grasps that dance constitutes
an important non-verbal lens for the study of human behaviour. This
is the first study on dance and political science to focus
specifically on authoritarian regimes. It is a significant and
original contribution to scholarship in the field, with the key
studies drawn from a variety of different geographical and
historical backgrounds. In Spain under Franco, the Women's Section
of the fascist Falange created a folk dance program that toured
widely and through the performance of Spanish regional folk dances
performed by virginal young Spanish women, embodying Catholic
purity, permitted the regime to re-enter the world of polite
diplomacy. The Dominican Republic dictator, Rafael Trujillo,
himself a gifted dancer, raised the popular folk and vernacular
dance, the merengue, to the level of the "national" dance, which
became a symbol of his regime and Dominican identity, which
merengue it still maintains. For over a thousand years, Croatia,
has endured a series of authoritarian regimes - Hapsburg, Napoleon,
the Yugoslav royal dictatorship, fascist, Josip Broz Tito's
communist regime, Franjo Tudjaman - that ruled that small nation.
For over 70 years, Lado, the National Folk Dance Ensemble of
Croatia, has served as "the light of Croatian identity." Through
its public performances of folk dances and music, Lado has become
the face of a series of different regimes. In Iran, dance became
banned under the Islamic Republic after serving the Pahlavi regime
as a form of representation of its peasant population and its
historic Persian identity. Uzbekistan currently has expanded the
role of the invented tradition of Uzbek "classical" dance, created
during the soviet period, as a representation of Uzbek identity, in
national festivals. Thus, through these examples, the reader will
see how dance and mass movement have become important as political
means for a variety of authoritarian regimes to represent
themselves. Primary readership will be dance scholars; particularly
the growing number interested in ethno-identity dances of the
second half of the twentieth-century Will be of interest to
academic libraries and departments, with valuable information and
interest also for scholars of ethnology, anthropology, cultural
studies, history.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
