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For more than two decades, le hip hop has shown France's "other" face: danced by minorities associated with immigration and the suburbs, it has channeled rage against racism and unequal opportunity and offered a movement vocabulary for the expression of the multicultural difference that challenges the universalist discourse of the Republic. French hip-hoppers subscribe to black U.S. culture to articulate their own difference but their mouv' developed differently, championed by a Socialist cu...

Now available in paperback, Days on Earth--originally published in 1988 (Yale University Press)--traces the dance career and artistic development of one of the founders of American modern dance. In this biography of dance pioneer Doris Humphrey, Marcia B. Siegel follows Humphrey's career from her days with the Denishawn Company (among fellos students like Martha Graham) to her creative partnership with Charles Weidman to her tenure as artistic director of protege Jose Limon's dance company. Sie...

How to Land: Finding Ground in an Unstable World presents a new look at embodiment that treats gravity as the organizing force for thinking and moving through our twenty-first century world. Author Ann Cooper Albright argues that a renewed attention to gravity as both a metaphoric sensibility and a physical experience can help transform moments of personal disorientation into an opportunity to reflect on the important relationship between individual resiliency and communal responsibility. Lo...

This edited collection provides an in-depth and wide-ranging exploration of pragmatist philosopher Richard Shusterman's distinctive project of "somaesthetics," devoted not only to better understanding bodily experience but also to greater mastery of somatic perception, performance, and presentation. Against contemporary trends that focus narrowly on conceptual and computational thinking, Shusterman returns philosophy to what is most fundamental-the sentient, expressive, human body with its creat...

Somaesthetics and Sport brings together a diverse set of explorations into the embodied experience of watching and playing sport. Sport can at once be a source of sensual beauty and pleasure, and also of pain and anguish; spectators can both celebrate and glorify athletes, but also expect certain forms of behaviour, and intentionally or otherwise police the movements of their bodies; sport and physical exercise can improve our health and increase the self-awareness of our abilities and limitatio...

Daniel B. Reed integrates individual stories with the study of performance to understand the forces of diaspora and mobility in the lives of musicians, dancers, and mask performers originally from Côte d'Ivoire who now live in the United States. Through the lives of four Ivorian performers, Reed finds that dance and music, being transportable media, serve as effective ways to understand individual migrants in the world today. As members of an immigrant community who are geographically dispersed,...

Rudolf Steiner initiated a new art of movement, which can be characterised as speech and music made visible. This concise but informative guide to eurythmy includes a brief survey of dance, from its origin in the ancient mysteries to its contemporary forms, placing Steiner's ideas in their historical context. It then goes on to explore the three main strands of eurythmy: as stage performance, in education, and in therapy, giving insightful examples of each. The book has been revised and updated,...

Floating Bones charts the author’s journey into tensegrity, which begins in ballet and culminates in a model for addressing one’s body as a teacher. Tensegrity flips traditional biomechanical models such that instead of support coming from the bones, the bones float, and it is the muscles and other soft connective tissue that provide support for the moving body. Using the model of tensegretic experience, Roses-Thema connects somatics, cognition, rhetoric, and reflective practices detailing the...