Dance collection

This book of highly original essays addresses the field of movement-based and dance somatics through lenses of ethics and ecology. It is based in methods of phenomenology.

A new collection of essays previously published with Intellect as journal articles, with the addition of new essays and editorial material. The text considers body-based somatic education relative to values, virtues, gender fluidity, lived experience, environmental awareness, fairness, and collective well-being. In delineating interdependent values of soma, ecology, and human movement that are newly in progress, the collection conceives links between personal development of subjective knowledge and cultural, critical, and environmental positionality.

The text raises questions about defining somatics and self, gender dynamics, movement preferences, normative body conceptions, attention to feelings, inclusiveness, ethics of touch, and emotional intelligence in somatics contexts. I include these crucial concerns of somatics and ethics as relational, globally complex, and ongoing.

Like much of Sondra Fraleigh’s writing, these essays utilize phenomenology as a method to investigate embodied relationships—often through lenses of ethics and aesthetics. In providing some examples, the text explores specific values of gratitude, listening, and emotional intelligence in somatic bodywork and learning environments.

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Performing Temporality in Contemporary European Dance develops a new framework to understand how temporality is performed in contemporary dance. It combines an in-depth analysis of the choreographic practices of Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion, Ivana Müller, Mette Edvardsen and Mårten Spångberg with a close study of the philosophical work of Bergson, Deleuze and Bachelard.

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Performing Temporality in Contemporary European Dance: Unbecoming Rhythms develops a new framework to understand how temporality is performed in contemporary dance. It combines an in-depth analysis of the choreographic practices of Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion, Ivana Müller, Mette Edvardsen and Mårten Spångberg with a close study of the philosophical work of Bergson, Deleuze and Bachelard.

In the field of dance and performance studies the notion of ‘unbecoming rhythms’ will stand out and spark the interest of a wide readership. Dance is still mostly associated with notions of flow and continuity. Dancers are supposed to create a continuous rhythm in which the different movements melt together. They should create the feeling of spontaneous renewal or becoming. Recently however, several choreographers have experimented with rhythms that create an experience of temporal unbecoming, a feeling of being stuck in time. This is the first book to develop an in-depth analysis of these rhythms and the unsettling temporal regimes they produce.

The book situates itself at the intersection of dance and philosophy. Its focus on temporality and its innovative methodological approach it will also prove to be an important contribution to the field, and will be a significant resource for students, scholars and practitioners.

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Performance generating systems are systematic and task-based dramaturgies that generate performance for or with an audience. In dance, such systems differ in ways that matter from more closed choreographed scores and more open forms of structured improvisation. Dancers performing within these systems draw on predefined and limited sources while working on specific tasks within constraining rules. The generating components of the systems provide boundaries that enable the performance to self-organize into iteratively shifting patterns instead of becoming repetitive or chaotic.

This book identifies the generating components and dynamics of these works and the kinds of dramaturgical agency they enable. It explains how the systems of these creations affect the perception, cognition and learning of dancers and why that is a central part of how they work. It also examines how the combined dramaturgical and psychological effects of the systems performatively address individual and social conditions of trauma that otherwise tend to remain unchangeable and negatively impact the human capacity to learn, relate and adapt. The book provides analytical frameworks and practical insights for those who wish to study or apply performance generating systems in dance within the fields of choreography and dance dramaturgy, dance education, community dance or dance psychology.

Featured cases offer unique insight into systems created by Deborah Hay and Christopher House, William Forsythe, Ame Henderson, Karen Kaeja and Lee Su-Feh.

 

Dance and Ethics: Moving Towards a More Humane Culture is an introductory study of ethical issues as applied to the history and field of Western theatrical dance. It is the first sustained work of its kind, inspired by the belief that there are serious issues to be illuminated by examining dance in relation to ethics and to the changing values in the dance world itself, especially as faced by young dancers entering the profession.

Since the 1960s and gathering momentum with the #metoo movement, scholars and practitioners, especially from the fields of dance education, somatics and the realms of postmodern dance and ballet, have increasingly believed that attitudes and practices involving psychological, physical and sexual mistreatment of students and dancers must be challenged. Dance and Ethics examines key ethical issues related to the dance field, primarily within the United States, and how those directly impact different aspects of the lives of dance artists over the span of their careers. The issues discussed include the basic ethical choices facing a dance artist in terms of whether to care about ethics or separate art from morality; ethical issues involved in student–teacher and dancer–choreographer relationships; how ethical concerns relate to the creation and reception of choreographic work; ethical aspects of the critical assessment of dance and dancers; and ethical issues related to presenting systems and institutional infrastructures within the dance field.

While there is a clear bias towards greater humanism within the dance field, Naomi Jackson is sensitive to the variety of moral stances available in any given situation. Readers are invited to consider that ethical options exist other than those that are usually promoted, that while sometimes there are no clear right and wrong answers, there are better and worse positions to be explored and defended and that it is important for the dance field and broader culture to consciously address ethical issues in relation to dance in a sustained, thoughtful and creative manner.

The book focuses on theatrical dance forms of ballet, modern/postmodern dance and theatrical jazz, but also extends to commercial dance, dance for the camera/internet and social/vernacular/folk dance when relevant to the main argument. 

Dance and Ethics will appeal primarily to educators and students as well as young professional dancers.  It is designed for undergraduate and graduate students in dance studies, American studies, performance studies and cultural studies. It will be useful for undergraduate and graduate dance courses focused on pedagogy, choreography, criticism, community engagement, politics and aesthetics.

 

Drawing out the particularities of working in twos, with a focus on collaborative performance making, this book considers the duet as a particular configuration in which to think, the duo a microcosm of humankind, and presents everyday entanglement of form and practice seen through the lens of the smallest multiple unit.

This book explores the practical, philosophical and aesthetic implications of performers working in pairs. It focuses on a ten-year period in the work of Karen Christopher, alongside wider reflections on the duet as a concept in artistic and social life. The book presents an investigation of the entanglement of form and practice seen through the lens of the smallest multiple unit of collaboration: the pair.

During this ten-year period, Christopher set out to create a series of duets by working with one other artist. The 25 pieces in the collection includes reflections from an international group of collaborators, artists, linguists, physicists, theologians, philosophers and performance scholars. Many of them deal with the question of artistic collaboration and entanglement, contemplating the significance of those terms both on an interpersonal and global level.

This book provides a fascinating insight into the creative working process of a particular artist, whilst providing a blueprint for how collaboration might take place. There are many passages that might provide inspiration for other artists and overall the book makes a moving and heartfelt plea for interpersonal open-ness and mutual investment. 

Primary readership will be among international theatre-makers, artists, performance and art scholars, philosophers, teachers, directors, actors, dancers, performance artists and those interested in creative and personal writing about performance, art and art-making. It will be of particular relevance to those with an interest in Karen Christopher, or in the other contributors.

In response to a scarcity of writings on the intersections between dance and Christianity, Dancing to Transform examines the religious lives of American Christians who, despite the historically tenuous place of dance within Christianity, are also professional dancers. Emily Wright details how these dancing Christians transform what they perceive as secular professional by transforming concert dance into different kinds of religious practices in order to express individual and communal religious identities. Through a multi-site, qualitative study of four professional dance companies, Wright explores how religious and artistic commitments, everyday lived experience and varied performance contexts influence and shape the approaches of Christian professional dancers to creating, transforming and performing dance. Subsequently, this book provides readers with a greater awareness and appreciation for the complex interactions between American Christianity and dance. This study, in turn, delivers audiences a richer, more nuanced picture of the complex histories of these Christian, dancing communities and offers more fruitful readings of their choreographic productions.

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.

This collection offers insight into different study approaches to disability art and culture practices, and asks: what does it mean to approach disability-focused cultural production and consumption as generative sites of meaning-making? International scholars and practitioners use ethnographic and participatory action research approaches; textual and discourse analysis; as well as other methods to discover how disability figures into our contemporary world(s).

 

Chapters within the collection explore, amongst other topics, deaf theatre productions, representations of disability on-screen, community engagement projects and disabled bodies in dance. Disability Arts and Culture provides a comprehensive overview and a range of case studies benefitting both the practitioner and scholar.

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Increasingly, choreographic process is examined, shared and discussed in a variety of academic, artistic and performative contexts. More than ever before, post-show discussions, artistic blogs, books, archives and seminars provide opportunities for choreographers to explain their particular methodologies. Performing Process: Sharing Dance and Choreographic Practice provides a unique theoretical investigation of this current trend. The chapters in this collection examine the methods, politics and philosophy of sharing choreographic process, aiming to uncover theoretical repercussions of and the implications for forms of knowledge, the appreciation of dance, education and artistic practices.

, Increasingly, choreographic process is examined, shared and discussed in a variety of academic, artistic and performative contexts. More than ever before, post-show discussions, artistic blogs, books, archives and seminars provide opportunities for choreographers to explain their particular methodologies. Performing Process: Sharing Dance and Choreographic Practice provides a unique theoretical investigation of this current trend. The chapters in this collection examine the methods, politics and philosophy of sharing choreographic process, aiming to uncover theoretical repercussions of and the implications for forms of knowledge, the appreciation of dance, education and artistic practices.]

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This collection is the first book to focus on the intersection of dance, disability, and the law. Bringing together a range of writers from different disciplines, it considers the question of how we value, validate, and speak about diversity in performance practice, with a specific focus on the experience of differently-abled dance artists within the changing world of the arts in the United Kingdom.  Contributors address the legal frameworks that support or inhibit the work of disabled dancers and explore factors that affect their full participation, including those related to policy, arts funding, dance criticism, and audience reception.

, This collection is the first book to focus on the intersection of dance, disability, and the law. Bringing together a range of writers from different disciplines, it considers the question of how we value, validate, and speak about diversity in performance practice, with a specific focus on the experience of differently-abled dance artists within the changing world of the arts in the United Kingdom.  Contributors address the legal frameworks that support or inhibit the work of disabled dancers and explore factors that affect their full participation, including those related to policy, arts funding, dance criticism, and audience reception.]

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This anthology negotiates the influential, yet silent educational presence of spiritualities within the field of somatic movement dance education internationally. The expressive and integral nature of spiritual experience remains academically undefined and peripheral to our understanding of creative practice. Lack of theoretical rigour, as well as a lack of a substantive definitional and methodological competency, has resulted in spirituality being marginalised. To date, important questions about how diverse spiritualities shape professional practice in the somatic movement and dance arts remain unanswered. This cutting-edge collection fills that void, providing greater creative and discursive clarity.

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Presenting a rich mosaic of embodied contemporary narratives in spirituality and movement studies, this book explicitly studies the relationship between spirituality and the field of Somatic Movement Dance Education. It is the first scholarly text to focus on contemporary spirituality within the domain of dance and somatic movement studies.

Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities brings together prominent authors and practitioners in order to elucidate how a wide range of sacred narratives/spiritualities are informing pedagogy, educational and therapeutic practice. As well as providing new insights and promoting creative/artistic awareness, this seminal text de-mystifies the spiritual/sacred and brings clarity and academic visibility to this largely uncharted and often misrepresented subject.

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[Throwing the Body into the Fight is the first English-language publication dedicated to the German choreographer Raimund Hoghe. Curated and edited by Mary Kate Connolly, the book operates as a collage, drawing together a variety of international voices to create a fragmented portrait of the artist. Lavishly illustrated with photographs by Rosa Frank, who has collaborated closely with Hoghe for two decades, this book will be welcomed by all who admire a man described by the New York Times – in its review of Hoghe’s 2012 'Pas de Deux' with Japanese dancer Takashi Ueno – as 'a lover of romance and beautiful things.',

Throwing the Body into the Fight is the first English-language publication dedicated to the German choreographer Raimund Hoghe. Curated and edited by Mary Kate Connolly, the book operates as a collage, drawing together a variety of international voices to create a fragmented portrait of the artist. Lavishly illustrated with photographs by Rosa Frank, who has collaborated closely with Hoghe for two decades, this book will be welcomed by all who admire a man described by the New York Times – in its review of Hoghe’s 2012 'Pas de Deux' with Japanese dancer Takashi Ueno – as 'a lover of romance and beautiful things.'

 

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[Live performance continues to be created every time it is performed. This book explores the dynamic relationship between creative process, presentation and spectator response to provide students and scholars in Drama with new insights on performance from poetry to pantomime. These essays make parallels between areas of performance that are rarely, if ever, compared. They present the basis for an overall theory of how 'conception', 'development', 'presentation' and 'reception' are fused together to make up the overall 'performance'. This study investigates the relationship between the process of creating performance and spectator response, and how this exchange is embedded into the product itself. The authors draw on theoretical approaches from a range of sources, and examine the work of contemporary dramatists, choreographers, poets and performers. Its construction of a new, wide-ranging approach to performance research makes this book a valuable resource for the student as well as the broader academic community. It has application both as a textbook and for supplementary research on drama courses nationwide., Live performance continues to be created every time it is performed. This book explores the dynamic relationship between creative process, presentation and spectator response to provide students and scholars in Drama with new insights on performance from poetry to pantomime.



These essays make parallels between areas of performance that are rarely, if ever, compared. They present the basis for an overall theory of how 'conception', 'development', 'presentation' and 'reception' are fused together to make up the overall 'performance'. This study investigates the relationship between the process of creating performance and spectator response, and how this exchange is embedded into the product itself.

The authors draw on theoretical approaches from a range of sources, and examine the work of contemporary dramatists, choreographers, poets and performers including:

• Sarah Kane

• Iain Baxter

• Yolande Snaith

• Slobodan Snajder

• Phylis Nagy

• Steve Benson

• David Fielding

• David Antin

• Bette Midler

• Karen Malpede

• Stephen Daldry

• Mai Lanfang



Its construction of a new, wide-ranging approach to performance research makes this book a valuable resource for the student as well as the broader academic community. It has application both as a textbook and for supplementary research on drama courses nationwide.]