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This study is the first monograph on the work of French choreographer Jérôme Bel, following his artistic trajectory from the beginning of his career as a choreographer in 1994 to his most recent piece in 2016. It contains an overview and in-depth analysis of all of his choreographies, from Nom donné par l’auteur to Disabled Theatre, and provides a theoretical reflection on their theatrical nature. Bel has developed a singular discourse on dance that has often been labelled 'conceptual'.  By red...

In the mid 1990's Deborah Hay's work took a new turn. From her early experiments with untrained dancers, and after a decade of focusing on solo work, the choreographer began to explore new grounds of choreographic notation and transmission by working with experienced performers and choreographers. Using the Sky: a dance follows a similar path as Hay's previous books-Lamb at the Altar and My Body the Buddhist-by exploring her unrelenting quest for ways to both define and rethink her choreographi...

This is a book about falling as a means of reconfiguring our relationship with living and dying. Dancer, choreographer, educator and therapist Emilyn Claid draws inspiration from her personal and professional experiences to explore alternative approaches to being present in the world. Contemporary movement based performers ground their practices in understanding the interplay of gravity and the body. Somatic intentional falling provides them a creative resource for developing both self and envir...

Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia's most popular cultural forms — cinema and dance — historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, sexuality, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts...

Kenneth MacMillan's ballets are in constant demand by world-famous companies, particularly Romeo and Juliet, Manon and Mayerling. However, MacMillan was tormented by an acute sense of being an outsider, and often at odds with the institutions in which he worked.A real-life Billy Elliot from a Scottish working class family, MacMillan demonstrated a prodigious talent for dancing from an early age. Following the premature death of his mother, the young MacMillan sought an escape, and despite his fa...

  An innovative exploration of understanding through dance, Dancing across the Page draws on the frameworks of phenomenology, feminism, and postmodernism to offer readers an understanding of performance studies that is grounded in personal narrative and lived experience. Through accounts of contemporary dance making, improvisation, and dance education, Karen Barbour explores a diversity of themes, including power; activism; and cultural, gendered, and personal identity. An intimate yet rigorous...

". . . almost every page offers provocative commentary on the aesthetics and politics of modern dance." —Signs ". . . [an] important step . . . in the ineluctable dance by postmodern historians across a bridge that spans the gaps among disciplines, between theory and practice, and betweeen present and past." —Theatre Journal "This complex and important book needs to be read by anyone interested in dance history or the cultural politics of dance." —Dance Theatre Journal "Mark Franko's Dancing...

The notation of hand movements ranging from broad general statements for the whole hand to detailed descriptions that necessitate defining use of a particular surface or edge of a specific joint or segment.