Choreographing the North

Choreographing the North PDF Author: Bridget Cauthery
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 104027093X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Get Book Here

Book Description
Choreographing the North examines 11 contemporary dance pieces that perform northern culture, landscape, folklore, and ideas of "North." The choreographers, from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Luxembourg, Australia, and Argentina, translate their real or imagined journeys to the North for stage and/or screen. This book examines the ways Indigenous subjects and subjectivities have been diminished and/or distorted and considers how that diminishment has fuelled misrepresentation both inside and outside the field of contemporary dance. Where Indigenous presence is represented in dances about the North, it is as discarnate storytellers or “everyman” pastoral figures against backdrops of ice and snow. Indigenous presence is there but it is romanticized, caricatured, flattened. Using these works as moving texts Cauthery argues that, in many regards, these dances are colonizing acts that either ignore or erase the land and people upon which they are based. In analyzing and deconstructing these dances, this book acknowledges the land- and culture-based inheritances embedded in and performed through the works themselves. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in dance studies, theatre and performance studies, and cultural studies, as well as those interested in environmental psychology, human geography, and the expanding field of Arctic humanities.

Choreographing the North

Choreographing the North PDF Author: Bridget Cauthery
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 104027093X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Get Book Here

Book Description
Choreographing the North examines 11 contemporary dance pieces that perform northern culture, landscape, folklore, and ideas of "North." The choreographers, from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Luxembourg, Australia, and Argentina, translate their real or imagined journeys to the North for stage and/or screen. This book examines the ways Indigenous subjects and subjectivities have been diminished and/or distorted and considers how that diminishment has fuelled misrepresentation both inside and outside the field of contemporary dance. Where Indigenous presence is represented in dances about the North, it is as discarnate storytellers or “everyman” pastoral figures against backdrops of ice and snow. Indigenous presence is there but it is romanticized, caricatured, flattened. Using these works as moving texts Cauthery argues that, in many regards, these dances are colonizing acts that either ignore or erase the land and people upon which they are based. In analyzing and deconstructing these dances, this book acknowledges the land- and culture-based inheritances embedded in and performed through the works themselves. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in dance studies, theatre and performance studies, and cultural studies, as well as those interested in environmental psychology, human geography, and the expanding field of Arctic humanities.

Modern Bodies

Modern Bodies PDF Author: Julia L. Foulkes
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807862029
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1930, dancer and choreographer Martha Graham proclaimed the arrival of "dance as an art of and from America." Dancers such as Doris Humphrey, Ted Shawn, Katherine Dunham, and Helen Tamiris joined Graham in creating a new form of dance, and, like other modernists, they experimented with and argued over their aesthetic innovations, to which they assigned great meaning. Their innovations, however, went beyond aesthetics. While modern dancers devised new ways of moving bodies in accordance with many modernist principles, their artistry was indelibly shaped by their place in society. Modern dance was distinct from other artistic genres in terms of the people it attracted: white women (many of whom were Jewish), gay men, and African American men and women. Women held leading roles in the development of modern dance on stage and off; gay men recast the effeminacy often associated with dance into a hardened, heroic, American athleticism; and African Americans contributed elements of social, African, and Caribbean dance, even as their undervalued role defined the limits of modern dancers' communal visions. Through their art, modern dancers challenged conventional roles and images of gender, sexuality, race, class, and regionalism with a view of American democracy that was confrontational and participatory, authorial and populist. Modern Bodies exposes the social dynamics that shaped American modernism and moved modern dance to the edges of society, a place both provocative and perilous.

Dancing with the Revolution

Dancing with the Revolution PDF Author: Elizabeth B. Schwall
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469662981
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book Here

Book Description
Elizabeth B. Schwall aligns culture and politics by focusing on an art form that became a darling of the Cuban revolution: dance. In this history of staged performance in ballet, modern dance, and folkloric dance, Schwall analyzes how and why dance artists interacted with republican and, later, revolutionary politics. Drawing on written and visual archives, including intriguing exchanges between dancers and bureaucrats, Schwall argues that Cuban dancers used their bodies and ephemeral, nonverbal choreography to support and critique political regimes and cultural biases. As esteemed artists, Cuban dancers exercised considerable power and influence. They often used their art to posit more radical notions of social justice than political leaders were able or willing to implement. After 1959, while generally promoting revolutionary projects like mass education and internationalist solidarity, they also took risks by challenging racial prejudice, gender norms, and censorship, all of which could affect dancers personally. On a broader level, Schwall shows that dance, too often overlooked in histories of Latin America and the Caribbean, provides fresh perspectives on what it means for people, and nations, to move through the world.

Fifty Contemporary Choreographers

Fifty Contemporary Choreographers PDF Author: Martha Bremser
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 113682832X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Get Book Here

Book Description
A unique and authoritative guide to the lives and work of prominent living contemporary choreographers. Representing a wide range of dance genres, each entry locates the individual in the context of modern dance theatre and explores their impact. Those studied include: Jerome Bel Richard Alston Doug Varone William Forsythe Phillippe Decoufle Jawole Willa Jo Zollar Ohad Naharin Itzik Gallili Twyla Tharp Wim Vandekeybus With a new, updated introduction by Deborah Jowitt and further reading and references throughout, this text is an invaluable resource for all students and critics of dance, and all those interested in the fascinating world of choreography.

Choreographing Difference

Choreographing Difference PDF Author: Ann Cooper Albright
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819569917
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book Here

Book Description
The choreographies of Bill T. Jones, Cleveland Ballet Dancing Wheels, Zab Maboungou, David Dorfman, Marie Chouinard, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and others, have helped establish dance as a crucial discourse of the 90s. These dancers, Ann Cooper Albright argues, are asking the audience to see the body as a source of cultural identity — a physical presence that moves with and through its gendered, racial, and social meanings. Through her articulate and nuanced analysis of contemporary choreography, Albright shows how the dancing body shifts conventions of representation and provides a critical example of the dialectical relationship between cultures and the bodies that inhabit them. As a dancer, feminist, and philosopher, Albright turns to the material experience of bodies, not just the body as a figure or metaphor, to understand how cultural representation becomes embedded in the body. In arguing for the intelligence of bodies, Choreographing Difference is itself a testimonial, giving voice to some important political, moral, and artistic questions of our time. Ebook Edition Note: All images have been redacted.

Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham PDF Author: Merce Cunningham
Publisher: Song Cave
ISBN: 9780998829074
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Get Book Here

Book Description
On the occasion of Merce Cunningham's centennial comes this handsome new edition of his classic and long-out-of-print artist's book Changes: Notes on Choreography, first published in 1968 by Dick Higgins' Something Else Press. The book presents a revealing exposition of Cunningham's compositional process by way of his working notebooks, containing in-progress notations of individual dances with extensive speculations about the choreographic and artistic problems he was facing. Illustrated with over 170 photographs and printed in color and black and white, the book was described by its original publisher as "the most comprehensive book on choreography to emerge from the new dance ... [which] will come to stand with Eisenstein's and Stanislavsky's classics on the artistic process." By the time these notebooks were published, Cunningham had already led the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for 15 years, and had collaborated with Cage and others on milestones such as Variations V (1966) and RainForest (1968), the latter with Andy Warhol, David Tudor and Jasper Johns. Along with his essay collection Dancing in Space and Time (1978), Changes is one of the most significant publications on Cunningham's enduring contributions to dance, which developed through collaboration with John Cage to incorporate formal innovation with regard to chance, silence and stillness.

Daniel Lewis

Daniel Lewis PDF Author: Donna H. Krasnow
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476681910
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book Here

Book Description
Daniel Lewis's legacy as a hugely influential choreographer and teacher of modern dance is celebrated in this biography. It showcases the many roles he played in the dance world by organizing his story around various aspects of his work, including his years at the Juilliard School, dancing and touring with the Jose Limon Company, staging Limon's masterpieces around the world, directing his own company (Daniel Lewis Dance Repertory Company), writing and choreographing operas and musicals, and his years as dean of dance at New World School of the Arts. His life has spanned a particular period of growth of modern and contemporary dance, and his biography gives insight into how the artistic and journalistic perspectives on modern dance were influenced by what was occurring in the broader dance and arts communities. The book also offers rarely seen photographs and interviews with unique perspectives on many dance luminaries.

Expanded Choreographies - Choreographic Histories

Expanded Choreographies - Choreographic Histories PDF Author: Anna Leon
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839461057
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 355

Get Book Here

Book Description
From objects to sounds, choreography is expanding beyond dance and human bodies in motion. This book offers one of the rare systematic investigations of expanded choreography as it develops in contemporaneity, and is the first to consider expanded choreography from a trans-historical perspective. Through case studies on different periods of European dance history - ranging from Renaissance dance to William Forsythe's choreographic objects and from Baroque court ballets to digital choreographies - it traces a journey of choreography as a practice transcending its sole association with dancing, moving, human bodies.

Elements of Performance

Elements of Performance PDF Author: Pauline Koner
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9783718652662
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 144

Get Book Here

Book Description
First Published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Emerging Bodies

Emerging Bodies PDF Author: Gabriele Klein
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839415969
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
The concept of »worldmaking« is based on the idea that ›the world‹ is not given, but rather produced through language, actions, ideas and perception. This collection of essays takes a closer look at various hybrid and disparate worlds related to dance and choreography. Coming from a broad range of different backgrounds and disciplines, the authors inquire into the ways of producing ›dance worlds‹: through artistic practice, discourse and media, choreographic form and dance material. The essays in this volume critically reflect the predominant topos of dance as something fleeting and ephemeral - an embodiment of the Other in modernity. Moreover, they demonstrate that there is more than just one universal »world of dance«, but rather a multitude of interrelated dance worlds with more emerging every day.