"Vandekeybus brought into focus a whole new genre of modern dance... Combat rolls, breakneck sprints and savagely wrestled duets became the defining vocabulary of a new generation." The Guardian In 2016, Wim Vandekeybus' company Ultima Vez celebrates its 30th birthday. Never before has his oeuvre been recorded in a book. Until now. This extraordinary book is a visual trip through the most powerful images from his repertoire, a quest for the ideas and themes that inspire him. It also contains...
Schrifttanz was one of the most interesting and important journals of the Expressionist dance movement in Germany in the 1920s and 30s. With the suppression of the movement during the Nazi period and the destruction of much relevant archive material during the subsequent war, Schrifttanz provides a unique opportunity for insight into the ideas and artists of the time. Here are presented, translated into English, selected articles from the journal by authors including Rudolf von Laban, Mary Wigma...
This issue examines how dance is transformed by cross-pollinations and how artistic practice incorporates transnational perspectives. Drawing on the work of the World Performance Project at Yale and its 2008 Festival of International Dance, contributors explore the hybrid expressions being created by a new generation of artists.
Treading Through is the first reader in Philippine dance, observed through forty-five years of viewing, reviewing, and doing. It is one observer's understanding of what, where, and how dance, and who makes it and why we dance.
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,...
Up until the 1930s Vienna was one of the international centers of modern dance. The Theatermuseum in Vienna presents a large exhibition dealing with the multifaceted, dense, and effervescent dance scene in Vienna in the early twentieth century, contrasting it with drastic contemporary events: the Nazi dictatorship, persecution, and exile. The focus is on dancers and choreographers who pioneered European modern dance, such as Isadora Duncan, Grete Wiesenthal, Gertrud Bodenwieser, and Rosalia Chla...
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...
"The Judson Dance Theatre "explores the work and legacy of one of the most influential of all dance companies, which first performed at the Judson Memorial Church in downtown Manhattan in the early 1960s. There, a group of choreographers and dancers--including future well-known artists Twyla Tharp, Carolee Schneemann, Robert Morris, Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainier, and others--created what came to be known as " postmodern dance." Taking their cues from the experiments of Merce Cunningham, they took...
Ungoverning Dance examines the work of progressive contemporary dance artists in continental Europe from the mid 1990s to 2015. Placing this within its historical and political context - that of neoliberalism and austerity - it argues that these artists have developed an ethico-aesthetic approach that uses dance practices as sites of resistance against dominant ideologies, and that their works attest to the persistence of alternative ways of thinking and living. In response to the way that the r...
Rudolf Laban's provocative, experimental, explosive dance theatre works have lain hidden since the Third Reich deliberately annihilated his name. This book exposes Laban's audacity and his significance for dance theatre today, giving access to his creative practices as he provided dance audiences with shock, amusement, awe, curiosity, beauty and meaning. Dr. Valerie Preston-Dunlop, with collaborating artists and dancers, has researched and recreated for today's audiences four groundbreaking work...
Horizontal together tells the story of 1960s art and queer culture in New York through the overlapping circles of Andy Warhol, underground filmmaker Jack Smith and experimental dance star Fred Herko. Taking a pioneering approach to this intersecting cultural milieu, the book uses a unique methodology that draws on queer theory, dance studies and the analysis of movement, deportment and gesture to look anew at familiar artists and artworks, but also to bring to light queer artistic figures’ key c...
Dancing the World Smaller (Oxford Studies in Dance Theory)
by Rebekah J. Kowal
This is an open access title. It is available to read and download as a free PDF on the Oxford Academic platform. It is made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. Dancing the World Smaller examines international dance performances in New York City in the 1940s as sites in which dance artists and audiences contested what it meant to practice globalism in mid-twentieth-century America. During and after the Second World War, modern dance and ballet thrived in New York City, a f...
In most forms of dancing, performers carry out their steps with a distance that keeps them from colliding with each other. Dancer Steve Paxton in the 1970s considered this distance a territory for investigation. His study of intentional contact resulted in a public performance in 1972 in a Soho gallery, and the name "contact improvisation" was coined for the form of unrehearsed dance he introduced. Rather than copyrighting it, Paxton allowed it to evolve and spread. In this book the autho...
Sally Banes has been a pre-eminent critic and scholar of American contemporary dance, and ""Before, Between, Beyond"" spans more than thirty years of her prolific work. Beginning with her first published review and including previously unpublished papers, this collection presents some of her finest works on dance and other artistic forms. It concludes with her most recent research on George Balanchine's dancing elephants. In each piece, Banes' detailed eye and sensual prose strike a rare balance...
Perspectives on American Dance: The Twentieth Century
The editors of this anthology analyze a broad range of themes and dance styles in order to examine how dance has helped to shape American identity. This volume focuses on dance and its social, cultural, and political constructs. The first volume, The Twentieth Century, explores a variety of subjects: white businessmen in Prescott, Arizona who created a ""Smoki tribe"" that performed ""authentic"" Hopi dances for over seventy years; swing dancing by Japanese-American teens in World War II inter...
Lost and Found: Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now
by Jamie Shearn Coan
They danced on the roofs of Manhattan: in the 1960s a group of artists in New York began developing a new form of art that went beyond the object. The new, time-based practices of artists such as Robert Morris, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Richard Serra, Sol LeWitt, Lucinda Childs and Yvonne Rainer embraced media such as dance, music, and film. Now, they will be shown in their historical dialogue with Minimalism in an exhibition celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Paris’s Centre Pompidou at t...
The vital role of dance in enacting the embodied experiences of Indigenous peoples In Dancing Indigenous Worlds, Jacqueline Shea Murphy brings contemporary Indigenous dance makers into the spotlight, putting critical dance studies and Indigenous studies in conversation with one another in fresh and exciting new ways. Exploring Indigenous dance from North America and Aotearoa (New Zealand), she shows how dance artists communicate Indigenous ways of being, as well as generate a political force,...