From its beginnings as an alternative and dissident form of dance training in the 1960s, Somatics emerged at the end of the twentieth century as one of the most popular and widespread regimens used to educate dancers. It is now found in dance curricula worldwide, helping to shape the look and sensibilities of both dancers and choreographers and thereby influencing much of the dance we see onstage worldwide. One of the first books to examine Somatics in detail and to analyse how and what it teaches in the dance studio, The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training considers how dancers discover and assimilate new ways of moving and also larger cultural values associated with those movements. The book traces the history of Somatics, and it also details how Somatics developed in different locales, engaging with local politics and dance histories so as to develop a distinctive pedagogy that nonetheless shared fundamental concepts with other national and regional contexts. In so doing it shows how dance training can inculcate an embodied politics by guiding and shaping the experience of bodily sensation, constructing forms of reflexive evaluation of bodily action, and summoning bodies into relationship with one another. Throughout, the author focuses on the concept of the natural body and the importance of a natural way of moving as central to the claims that Somatics makes concerning its efficacy and legitimacy.

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.

From its beginnings as an alternative and dissident form of dance training in the 1960s, Somatics emerged at the end of the twentieth century as one of the most popular and widespread regimens used to educate dancers. It is now found in dance curricula worldwide, helping to shape the look and sensibilities of both dancers and choreographers and thereby influencing much of the dance we see onstage worldwide. One of the first books to examine Somatics in detail and to analyse how and what it teaches in the dance studio, The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training considers how dancers discover and assimilate new ways of moving and also larger cultural values associated with those movements. The book traces the history of Somatics, and it also details how Somatics developed in different locales, engaging with local politics and dance histories so as to develop a distinctive pedagogy that nonetheless shared fundamental concepts with other national and regional contexts. In so doing it shows how dance training can inculcate an embodied politics by guiding and shaping the experience of bodily sensation, constructing forms of reflexive evaluation of bodily action, and summoning bodies into relationship with one another. Throughout, the author focuses on the concept of the natural body and the importance of a natural way of moving as central to the claims that Somatics makes concerning its efficacy and legitimacy.

Borrowing from contemporary semiotics and post-structuralist criticism, Foster outlines four models for representation in dance which are illustrated through an analysis of the works of contemporary choreographers and through historical examples beginning with court ballets of the Renaissance.

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.

The fluid nature of performance studies and the widening embrace of the idea of performativity has produced in this volume a collection of great interest that crosses disciplinary lines of academic work. The essays move from the local to the global, from history to sport, from body parts to stage productions, and from race relations to global politics. In the title essay, Elizabeth Wood writes about a basic human relation cast around the question of performance and triangulated by the role a great performer took within it. In this unnatural act of somatic and sonic decomposition of the maternal body's soundscape, "she seeks to liberate herself and us from the last refuge of patriarchal order and compulsory heterosexuality, the subordinating myth of maternal omnipotence. The decomposition of such myths is a binding force in this volume. Together these essays pursue critical understanding of performance in our post-modern world, embodying perspectives that help us understand the historical and cultural issues that underpin it".

"Undoubtedly, Choreography and Narrative is an important contribution to dance history research." Nineteenth-Century French Studies

"This work is a landmark in the field and belongs in all libraries serving undergraduate, graduate, and faculty researchers in dance." Choice

"Invents a new method for writing the history of performance: Foster has found an innovative way of appealing directly to the kinesthetic imagination of her readers, evoking the elusive styles of the pieces she reconstructs." Joseph Roach

"An impressive work of scholarship, this elegantly staged study... uses the concept of a culturally constructed, historically specific body to cut across disciplinary boundaries..." Library Journal

Foster examines the development of ballet, and conceptions of the dancing body, as ballet separated from opera and emerged as an autonomous art form during the turbulence of 18th-century French society and history."

..". I have used essays from the book to help dance graduate students push their thinking beyond the studio and their own physical experience and to realize the varied resources, approaches, and theoretical positions possible in writing about the body." Dance Research Journal

"Choreographing History... assembles an impressive diversity of sites, disciplines and critical approaches... and] includes not only historical bodies and discourses, but also the very bodies of the historians themselves." Parachute

"This volume is not only full of gems (the very lineup of preeminent scholars is impressive), but is also a neat cross-section of the academic conventions and mannerisms of our time." Dance Chronicle

..". an] important step... in the ineluctable dance by postmodern historians across a bridge that spans the gaps among disciplines, between theory and practice, and betweeen present and past." Theatre Journal

Historians of science, sexuality, the arts, and history itself focus on the body, merging the project of writing about the body with theoretical concerns in the writing of history."