Making Broadway Dance

Musical theater dance is an ever-changing and evolving dance form, egalitarian in its embrace of any and all dance genres. It is a living, transforming art developed by exceptional dance artists requiring dramaturgical understanding; character analysis; knowledge of history, art, design; and, most importantly, an extensive knowledge of dance, both intellectual and embodied. Its ghettoization within criticism and scholarship as a throw-away dance form, undeserving of analysis—derivative, cliché ridden, titillating and predictable, the ugly stepsister of both theater and dance—belies and ignores the historic role it has had in musicals as an expressive form equal to book, music, and lyric. The standard adage, “when you can’t speak anymore sing, when you can’t sing anymore dance,” expresses its importance in musical theater as the ultimate form of heightened emotional, visceral, and intellectual expression. Through in-depth analysis author Liza Gennaro examines Broadway choreography through the lens of dance studies, script analysis, movement research, and dramaturgical inquiry offering a close examination of a dance form that has heretofore received only the most superficial interrogation. This book reveals the choreographic systems of some of Broadway’s most influential dance-makers, including George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, Katherine Dunham, Bob Fosse, Donald McKayle, Savion Glover, Sergio Trujillo, Steven Hoggett, and Camille Brown. Making Broadway Dance is essential reading for theater and dance scholars, students, practitioners, and Broadway fans.

Reflections on Bharatanatyam and Neuroscience. A Dance Studies Perspective

Building on recent interest in the convergence of arts and sciences, we propose specific areas of intersection between the disciplines of Bharatanatyam, a classical Indian dance, and neuroscience. We present personal reflections by practitioners of both disciplines and propose that Bharatanatyam can be used to understand and explain brain functioning and that neuroscience can help analyze the dancing Bharatanatyam brain. We explore conceptual areas of convergence between the two fields as well as specific points of connection using language acquisition, rhythm, music, and cognition as examples. We conjecture that Bharatanatyam training and practice support long-term neuronal plasticity in various parts of the brain, including but not limited to the hippocampus, motor, premotor cortex, and the cerebellum. The beginning of the study of the intersection between these disciplines will pave the way for additional allied fields of rich thinking, exploration and potentially, therapy.

Searching for the yet unknown: Writing and dancing as incantatory practices

As two ballet dancers and university educators, we began this collaborative research with a shared belief in ballet and writing as liberatory practices and a desire to confront pedagogies that rely on intimidation. Both we and our students have experienced ballet and writing classes that rely on audit-and-surveillance, and we sought to foster individuality, value differences, and cultivate agency through multimodal approaches in our ballet technique, history, and dance studies courses. During the spring semester of 2021, the history and dance studies courses were online and asynchronous; the ballet classes met in a ‘hybrid’ model: classes were held in person, with students given the option to take class via Zoom either synchronously or asynchronously. Through interviews and analysis, we found praxes that ignite curiosity and motivation by drawing from definitions of writing and dancing as incantatory practices. Notably, this is the first research that takes a capacious view of ‘ballet pedagogy’ to include history, writing, technique, and dance studies courses. Ultimately, we hope these findings support exploratory and multimodal teaching, reinforce connections among language, empowerment, and pedagogy, encourage students and educators to collaboratively challenge current practices, and motivate administrators to rethink university structures that replicate the audit-and-surveillance practices of certain ballet and writing pedagogies.

AllPlay Dance: Two Pilot Dance Projects for Children With Disability, Developed and Assessed With a Dance Studies Approach

AllPlay Dance is founded on a collaborative approach to research between the School of Psychology and the School of Communication of Creative Arts, both of Deakin University. The research is also undertaken in partnership with professional ballet company, Queensland Ballet. This paper describes the development and execution of two pilot projects for children with disability, utilizing a dance studies methodology. The projects were conducted in 2018 and 2019 for children with cerebral palsy (CP) and autism spectrum disorder, as part of the AllPlay Dance program. Participants with disabilities ranged in age from 7 to 12 years. As well as describing the approach to the program development, we discuss the involvement of older and more experienced buddies who were included as a method to support the participation in dance of children with disabilities. We will also describe the diffusion of authorship in the making of group dances as a tool for inclusion and the premise of dance as a social practice in which participants inter-subjectively generate meaning and sense making. The AllPlay Dance projects were developed as a series of dance classes in which participants worked with set or learned movement material, dance improvisation, and tasks for movement generation in order to collectively generate a dance for performance. This paper focuses on the aim of developing inclusive approaches to dance classes that challenge “ableist” notions of dance as spectacle to enable to work toward building transferable programs to allow all children who so desire and to participate in dance in their communities.

Virtual Democracy: Online Ballet and Contemporary Dance Classes During the Covid-19 Crisis

This article considers the politics and dynamics of online ballet and contemporary dance classes during the Covid-19 lockdown on geo-political, economic, and cultural implications of dance classes in digital media. Using a post-colonial lens and popular dance studies, this research analyzes the effect of the online ballet and contemporary classes colonizing digital spaces and the effect of this phenomenon on creating a more democratic and participatory access to dance that has built a more global and inclusive engagement with the arts for geographically peripheral spaces. This essay investigates the kind of common created by kinaesthetic experience of the dancers teaching and participating in the classes in digital media providing a key strategy to analyze the participatory embodiment of dancers as a radical, material, corporeal challenge to the hierarchies of the dance world, and furthermore, the economic dynamics that shape it.

‘What's in a Name?’ Taxonomic Choices in the Field of Dance Studies

Dance genres sometimes require categorisation and this article addresses a collective for which no universally-accepted terminology has been located. Using the example of the author's doctoral research in Australia, four alternatives are examined in turn: ‘folk’, ‘ethnic’, ‘world’ and ‘traditional’, with analysis of the advantages and problems embedded in each term. Discussion of the Australian social and political environment exemplifies pertinent location-specific issues that need to be addressed when making taxonomic choices. The article aims to stimulate further discursive commentary and encourage epistemological and linguistic clarity among dance scholars.

Poetic Transformations in Matisse's Earliest Dance Images

Matisse's early dance paintings Joy of Life, Dance (I), and Dance (II) appear in countless art books in which their public receptions are repeatedly treated in a superficial manner. The fame of these works needs to be understood in a fuller context for students of dance and art. Matisse's early dance paintings are carefully examined in terms of their historical influences. His exposure to Isadora Duncan, Loïe Fuller, and the Ballets Russes is considered. The frequent citation of specific folk dances Matisse saw at the time he created these works is challenged. What becomes significant is how poetically Matisse transformed the many sources he absorbed into his own reductive style. Matisse's decades-long interest in dance is demonstrated by select examples from his dance oeuvre. Even as an invalid, Matisse continued to work with dance themes. His joy in watching dance and making dance works, including those for ballet, reflected his passion for colour, motion, and expression of the liveliness he saw in dance. It is hoped that this article can lead to more interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching between dance studies and art history.