THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO DANCE STUDIES edited by Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett. 2020. London: Routledge. 528 pp., 72 BW illustrations, references, index. $200.00 hardcover. ISBN 978-1-138-23458-1. $42.36 e-book. ISBN 978-1-315-20655. doi:10.4324/9781315306551

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-96
Author(s):  
Shantel Ehrenberg
Keyword(s):  
Dance Studies

Approaches to Dance (2): Influences

2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Kant
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
Comic Opera ◽  
Artistic Activity ◽  
Humboldt University ◽  
East German ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Weimar Culture ◽  
Intellectual Formation

This statement is an attempt to reflect on my intellectual formation and how certain influences, both from home (a place suspended between Germany with the remnants of its Weimar culture and Britain as the place of exile) and from subsequent experiences, led me to adopt an historical approach to dance studies and to emphasise the context in which artistic activity unfolds. My education at Berlin's Humboldt University and the Comic Opera shaped my perspectives on theatre and performance. The East German milieu in general forced me to confront the immediate past and think about the political and ideological legacies of the cultures in which I grew up.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
The Body ◽  
Single Source ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Disciplinary Field ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Integral Feature

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance is the first collection of essays to examine the relationship between William Shakespeare and dance. Despite recent academic interest in movement, materiality, and the body—and the growth of dance studies as a disciplinary field—Shakespeare’s employment of dance as both a theatrical device and thematic reference point remains under-studied. The reimagining of his writing as dance works is also neglected as a subject for research. Alan Brissenden’s 1981 Shakespeare and the Dance remains the seminal text for those interested in early modern dancing and its appearances within Shakespearean drama, but this new volume provides a single source of reference for dance as both an integral feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and as a means of translating Shakespearean text into movement.

Cautionary Contours: Joann Kealiinohomoku's Silhougraphs® and Dance Analysis in Black and White

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-43
Author(s):  
Judith Hamera
Keyword(s):  
Culturally Sensitive ◽  
New Method ◽  
Cautionary Tale ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Black And White

AbstractJoann Kealiinohomoku's Silhougraphs®, traces of the silhouettes of dancers, were her attempt to operationalize her cultural relativist commitments and create a new method of dance analysis. Silhougraphs illuminate underexamined scholarly presumptions, methods, and tools that both contributed to and paralleled the emergence of dance studies as a discipline. Silhougraphs are also a cautionary tale demonstrating the ways culturally sensitive research commitments and methods can unintentionally yet decisively reiterate tools and logics of racist typologies.

Dance and Ethnicity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Shay ◽  
Barbara Sellers-Young
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
Research Approach ◽  
Transnational Politics ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Ethnic Category ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Active Contributor

Ethnic groups have been defined as people who share a common ethos based on ancestry, nation, language and other identity markers. This volume brings scholars from across the globe that have incorporated perspectives from critical and cultural studies in an investigation of what it means to define oneself in an ethnic category and how this category is performed and represented as an ethnicity. The essays in this volume engage the four themes of identity construction, local and transnational politics, appropriation and related exotification, and resistance that are part of the ongoing discourse in the relationship between dance and ethnicity. Cumulatively, the essays in their research approach and methodology document the change that has taken place in dance studies from the ethnic as an easily identified category based on biology and geography to ethnicity as a fluid concept and dance as an active contributor to the creation and negotiation of it.

scholarly journals Foucault's Turn From Phenomenology: Implications for Dance Studies

2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 19-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally Ann Ness
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Dance Studies

No critic of phenomenology, arguably, has been more influential in prefiguring recent discourses on power, gender, and sexuality that have emerged in dance studies in recent decades than the philosopher-historian-critic Michel Foucault. The number of dance scholars directly citing Foucault, and the number influenced indirectly by his ideas through intermediary theorists such as Judith Butler—perhaps the single most popular one—is so large as to require an essay of its own just to survey. Virtually every analysis of choreographic practice that has addressed these topics since the 1980s has drawn directly or indirectly on Foucault's theories. Indeed, the very mention of the term “discipline” in current dance scholarship (and many related fields as well) more or less automatically makes reference to Foucault's genealogical study of incarceration,Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison, translated into English asDiscipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison, and, in particular to the chapter, “Les corps dociles” or “Docile Bodies” (Foucault 1975, 137–171; 1975/1995, 135–170).

What is a Rehearsal in Ballet?

2021 ◽  
pp. 808-824
Author(s):  
Janice Ross
Keyword(s):  
Reality Tv ◽  
Professional Lives ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Ballet Dancers ◽  
Video Cameras ◽  
Visual Pleasure ◽  
The Hours

This chapter explores rehearsals, asking what they represent practically and philosophically and when does practice in rehearsals yield to the finished product of a dance ready for public viewing. It considers the hours of labor, failure, and interruption that constitute life in the rehearsal studio as the dancer is shaped by the choreographer and rehearsal director. Rehearsals are considered in contrast to the rules of inviolability protecting a finished performance. Using Ballet 422 by Justin Peck as a case study and examples from reality TV and films to paintings, rehearsal rooms are explored as places of hidden preparation, visual pleasure, and the imaginary as well as fascination for audiences. Ballet dancers are taught to survey themselves through mirrors, the eyes of rehearsal directors, video cameras, and iPhones as ever-expanding systems of surveillance. Although ballet dancers spend the majority of their professional lives in rehearsals, the nature of what goes on in the rehearsal studio has too rarely been the focus of dance studies scholarship.

scholarly journals Talking Politics of Contact Improvisation with Steve Paxton

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 6-18
Author(s):  
Royona Mitra
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
American Theater ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Contact Improvisation ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Research Opportunity ◽  
Study Methodology ◽  
E Mail ◽  
British Bangladeshi

In the autumn of 2015, on the back of the publication of my monograph Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism (Mitra 2015), I was settling into my Brunel University London-sponsored sabbatical to kick-start my postdoctoral research project, then titled “Historicizing and Mapping British Physical Theatre.” At that stage, this new field of study, methodology, and tone of enquiry felt significantly different from the decolonial spirit of my book, which examines the works of the British-Bangladeshi dance artist Akram Khan at the intersections of postcoloniality, race, gender, sexuality, mobility, interculturalism, and globalization, arguing for his choreographic choices as discerning political acts that decenter the whiteness of contemporary western dance from his position within this center. With this new project I was keen, instead, to investigate the development of “British physical theatre” as an interdisciplinary genre that emerged interstitially between and through its “double legacy in both avant-garde theatre and dance” (Sánchez-Colberg 2007, 21) with a particular emphasis on what the import of the choreographic vocabulary of partnering would have brought to these experiments. Very conscious that the now ubiquitous aesthetic of partnering in contemporary Euro-American theater dance derived its roots from the somatic explorations of contact improvisation, I was intrigued to examine how the genre of British physical theatre would have engaged with choreographic touch from its somatic beginnings in contact improvisation to its politicized and aestheticized manifestation in partnering. I was also conscious, of course, of the role that Steve Paxton, the artist whose name has become synonymous with contact improvisation's inception and development in 1970s United States, had to play in teaching contact improvisation in the dance program at Dartington College of Arts in the United Kingdom (UK) in the 1970s and 1980s. Driven by a need to examine the potential relationship between Dartington's 1970s movement experiments with Paxton and contact improvisation, and the emergence of partnering as a key aesthetic within British contemporary dance, specifically its manifestation in physical theatre, I wanted to interview Paxton himself. Needless to say, I was of course fully aware of the difficulty in making such an important research opportunity materialize. However, within months, the remarkable generosity of our dance studies network, in this instance embodied by Professors Susan Foster and Ann Cooper Albright, and the dance artist Lisa Nelson, led me to the inbox of Steve Paxton himself in November 2015. Paxton was instantly responsive to my e-mail communications, and deeply invested and committed to sharing his experiences and insights with me. We arranged our Skype interview for early 2016, agreeing that this would give me enough time to research existing interviews with Paxton, in print and on video, to ensure that I could delineate my own questions for him in productive ways. The more I researched, the more a feature of the extensive archive of interviews with Paxton revealed itself: the predominant absence of bodies and perspectives of color from the early days of contact improvisation's experiments. This absence, in turn, became more and more present in my thinking.

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