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This groundbreaking collection combines ethnographic and historic strategies to reveal how dance plays crucial cultural roles in various regions of the world, including Tonga, Java, Bosnia-Herzegovina, New Mexico, India, Korea, Macedonia, and England. The essays find a balance between past and present and examine how dance and bodily practices are core identity and cultural creators. Reaching beyond the typically Eurocentric view of dance, Dancing from Past to Present opens a world of debate over the role dance plays in forming and expressing cultural identities around the world.
Starting from differences between reenactment and the more established practice of historical reconstruction, leading practitioners and theorists ask how the notion of preservation and representation associated with reconstruction is transformed by reenactment into historical experience and affective relation to the past in the present. In other terms: How does dance convey historical meaning through sensuous form? Danced reenactment poses the problem of history and historicity in relation to the troubled temporality inherent to dance itself. Ephemerality as the central trope of dance is hence displaced in favor of dance as a reiterative practice that confounds categories of chronological time and opens up a theoretical space of history that is often invisibilized by ideologies of immediacy traditionally attributed to dancing.
Informed by the anthropological research of Professor Donald E. Brown on human universals, this book compiles 10 articles exploring the representation of common human cultural practices and concerns in literature, cinema and language. The book as a whole demonstrates not only that Brown’s human universals are shared by different cultures, but most importantly that they have the potential to form a basis for inter- and intra-cultural communication and consolidation, bridging gaps of misinformation and miscommunication, both spatial and temporal. The contributors are Egyptian scholars who cross temporal and spatial boundaries and borders from Africa and the Middle East to Asia, Europe and th...
Music Traditions, Cultures, and Contexts is a tribute to the ethnomusicologist Beverley Diamond in recognition of her outstanding scholarly accomplishments. The volume includes essays by leading ethnomusicologists and music scholars as well as a biographical introduction. The book’s contributors engage many of the critical themes in Diamond’s work, including musical historiography, musical composition in historical and contemporary frameworks, performance in diverse contexts, gender issues, music and politics, and how music is nested in and relates to broader issues in society. The essays raise important themes about knowing and understanding musical traditions and music itself as an agent of social, cultural, and political change. Music Traditions, Cultures, and Contexts will appeal to music scholars and students, as well as to a general audience interested in learning about how music functions as social process as well as sound.
Flamenco dance and bullfighting are parallel arts with shared traditions, performance conventions and vocabularies of movement. This volume introduces readers to an ongoing discussion in Spanish scholarship about the links between these two quintessentially Spanish arts. The author--a dancer and a student of bullfighting--describes the informal practice of both arts in private settings and their emergence as formal public rituals in the bullfighting arena and on the flamenco stage. Key bullfighting techniques and their influence on flamenco dance style are discussed in the context of understanding the worldview and kinesthetic culture of Spain.
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In Europe the tradition of secular dance has continued unbroken until the present. In the late Middle Ages it was an important and frequent event—for the nobility a gracious way to entertain guests, for the peasantry a welcome relaxation from the toils of the day. Now back in print, this collection presents compositions that are known or suspected to be instrumental dances from before ca. 1420. The 47 pieces vary in length and style and come from French, Italian, English, and Czech sources. Timothy McGee relates medieval dances to the descriptions found in literary, theoretical, and archival sources and to the depictions in the iconography of the Middle Ages. In a section on instrumental performance practices, he provides information about ornamenting the dances and improvising in a historically appropriate style. This comprehensive edition brings together in one volume a repertory that has been scattered over many years and countries.