Social Choreography

Social Choreography PDF Author: Andrew Hewitt
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386585
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Through the concept of “social choreography” Andrew Hewitt demonstrates how choreography has served not only as metaphor for modernity but also as a structuring blueprint for thinking about and shaping modern social organization. Bringing dance history and critical theory together, he shows that ideology needs to be understood as something embodied and practiced, not just as an abstract form of consciousness. Linking dance and the aesthetics of everyday movement—such as walking, stumbling, and laughter—to historical ideals of social order, he provides a powerful exposition of Marxist debates about the relation of ideology and aesthetics. Hewitt focuses on the period between the mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth and considers dancers and social theorists in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States. Analyzing the arguments of writers including Friedrich Schiller, Theodor Adorno, Hans Brandenburg, Ernst Bloch, and Siegfried Kracauer, he reveals in their thinking about the movement of bodies a shift from an understanding of play as the condition of human freedom to one prioritizing labor as either the realization or alienation of embodied human potential. Whether considering understandings of the Charleston, Isadora Duncan, Nijinsky, or the famous British chorus line the Tiller Girls, Hewitt foregrounds gender as he uses dance and everyday movement to rethink the relationship of aesthetics and social order.

Social Choreography

Social Choreography PDF Author: Andrew Hewitt
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386585
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Through the concept of “social choreography” Andrew Hewitt demonstrates how choreography has served not only as metaphor for modernity but also as a structuring blueprint for thinking about and shaping modern social organization. Bringing dance history and critical theory together, he shows that ideology needs to be understood as something embodied and practiced, not just as an abstract form of consciousness. Linking dance and the aesthetics of everyday movement—such as walking, stumbling, and laughter—to historical ideals of social order, he provides a powerful exposition of Marxist debates about the relation of ideology and aesthetics. Hewitt focuses on the period between the mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth and considers dancers and social theorists in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States. Analyzing the arguments of writers including Friedrich Schiller, Theodor Adorno, Hans Brandenburg, Ernst Bloch, and Siegfried Kracauer, he reveals in their thinking about the movement of bodies a shift from an understanding of play as the condition of human freedom to one prioritizing labor as either the realization or alienation of embodied human potential. Whether considering understandings of the Charleston, Isadora Duncan, Nijinsky, or the famous British chorus line the Tiller Girls, Hewitt foregrounds gender as he uses dance and everyday movement to rethink the relationship of aesthetics and social order.

Shapeshifters

Shapeshifters PDF Author: Aimee Meredith Cox
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822375370
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
In Shapeshifters Aimee Meredith Cox explores how young Black women in a Detroit homeless shelter contest stereotypes, critique their status as partial citizens, and negotiate poverty, racism, and gender violence to create and imagine lives for themselves. Based on eight years of fieldwork at the Fresh Start shelter, Cox shows how the shelter's residents—who range in age from fifteen to twenty-two—employ strategic methods she characterizes as choreography to disrupt the social hierarchies and prescriptive narratives that work to marginalize them. Among these are dance and poetry, which residents learn in shelter workshops. These outlets for performance and self-expression, Cox shows, are key to the residents exercising their agency, while their creation of alternative family structures demands a rethinking of notions of care, protection, and love. Cox also uses these young women's experiences to tell larger stories: of Detroit's history, the Great Migration, deindustrialization, the politics of respectability, and the construction of Black girls and women as social problems. With Shapeshifters Cox gives a voice to young Black women who find creative and non-normative solutions to the problems that come with being young, Black, and female in America.

Social Partner Dance

Social Partner Dance PDF Author: David Kaminsky
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000056570
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Social Partner Dance: Body, Sound, and Space is an ethnographic theory of social partner dancing built on participant observation and interviews with instructors of tango, lindy hop, salsa, blues, and various other forms. The work establishes a general analytical language for the study of these dances, based on the premise that a thorough understanding of any lead/follow form must consider in depth how it manages the four-part relationship between self, partner, music, and surroundings. Each chapter begins with a brief vignette on a distinct dance form and explores the focused worlds of partnered dancing done for the joy and entertainment of the dancers themselves. Grounded intellectually in embodiment studies and sensory ethnography, and empirically in ethnographic fieldwork, Social Partner Dance promotes scholarship that understands the social, cultural, and political functions of partner dance through its embodied practice.

Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice

Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice PDF Author: Naomi M. Jackson
Publisher: Editoriale Jaca Book
ISBN: 9780810861497
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 768

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Book Description
Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion presents a wide-ranging compilation of essays, spanning more than 15 countries. Organized in four parts, the articles examine the regulation and exploitation of dancers and dance activity by government and authoritative groups, including abusive treatment of dancers within the dance profession; choreography involving human rights as a central theme; the engagement of dance as a means of healing victims of human rights abuses; and national and local social/political movements in which dance plays a powerful role in helping people fight oppression. These groundbreaking papers--both detailed scholarship and riveting personal accounts--encompass a broad spectrum of issues, from slavery and the Holocaust to the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; from First Amendment cases and the AIDS epidemic to discrimination resulting from age, gender, race, and disability. A range of academics, choreographers, dancers, and dance/movement therapists draw connections between refugee camp, courtroom, theater, rehearsal studio, and university classroom.

More-Than-Human Choreography

More-Than-Human Choreography PDF Author: Moritz Frischkorn
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839464501
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
In the global context of the Great Acceleration, things and people have been on the move more than ever before. Moritz Frischkorn takes a fresh look at recent performing arts practices that deal with everyday objects on and beyond the stage. Contrasting these practices with the business field of logistics, he examines the aesthetic and ethical concerns of moving things. Drawing on concepts from performance as well as Black studies and philosophy, and based on an artistic-research methodology, the book formulates a notion of more-than-human choreography as an ecologically informed, infinitely indebted practice of living within the material world.

Processing Choreography

Processing Choreography PDF Author: Elizabeth Waterhouse
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 383945588X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Told from the perspective of the dancers, »Processing Choreography: Thinking with William Forsythe's Duo« is an ethnography that reconstructs the dancers' activity within William Forsythe's Duo project. The book is written legibly for readers in dance studies, the social sciences, and dance practice. Considering how the choreography of Duo emerged through practice and changed over two decades of history (1996-2018), Elizabeth Waterhouse offers a nuanced picture of creative cooperation and institutionalized process. She presents a compelling vision of choreography as a nexus of people, im/material practices, contexts, and relations. As a former Forsythe dancer herself, the author provides novel insights into this choreographic community.

Dancing Transnational Feminisms

Dancing Transnational Feminisms PDF Author: Ananya Chatterjea
Publisher: Decolonizing Feminisms
ISBN: 9780295749556
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
"Dancing Transnational Feminisms brings together reflections and critical responses about the embodied creative practices that have been part of the work of Ananya Dance Theatre (ADT), a Twin Cities-based dance company of women of color who work at the intersections of artistic excellence and social justice. Focusing on ADT's creative processes and organizational strategies, the book highlights how women and femme artists of color, working with a marginalized movement aesthetic, claim and transform the spaces of contemporary concert dance into sites of empowerment, resistance, and knowledge production. Blending essays with epistolary texts, interviews and poems, the collection's contributors offer up a multigenre exploration of how dance and other artistic undertakings can be intersectionally reimagined. Building on more than fifteen years of collaborative dance-making and sustained dialogues, Dancing Transnational Feminisms delves into timely questions surrounding race and performance, art and politics, global and local inequities and the responsibilities of artists towards the communities they come from"--

Book of Recommendations

Book of Recommendations PDF Author: Michael Klien
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780955858505
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 30

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Book Description


Meaning in Motion

Meaning in Motion PDF Author: Jane Desmond
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822319429
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
On dance and culture

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

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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.