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In this sourcebook, Dick McCaw brings together the key writings of Rudolf Laban. McCaw gives an overview of the theory and practice of this pioneer of dance theatre creating a vital resource for students of dance, movement, theatre and performance.
Identity and subjectivity in musical performances Who is the “I” that performs? The arts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have pushed us relentlessly to reconsider our notions of the self, expression, and communication: to ask ourselves, again and again, who we think we are and how we can speak meaningfully to one another. Although in other performing arts studies, especially of theatre, the performance of selfhood and identity continues to be a matter of lively debate in both practice and theory, the question of how a sense of self is manifested through musical performance has been neglected. The authors of Voices, Bodies, Practices are all musician-researchers: the book employs artistic research to explore how embodied performing “voices” can emerge from the interactions of individual performers and composers, musical materials, instruments, mediating technologies, and performance contexts.
In What a Body Can Do, Ben Spatz develops, for the first time, a rigorous theory of embodied technique as knowledge. He argues that viewing technique as both training and research has much to offer current debates over the role of practice in the university, including the debates around "practice as research." Drawing on critical perspectives from the sociology of knowledge, phenomenology, dance studies, enactive cognition, and other areas, Spatz argues that technique is a major area of historical and ongoing research in physical culture, performing arts, and everyday life.
Ungoverning Dance examines recent contemporary dance in continental Europe. Placing this in the context of neoliberalism and austerity, it argues that dancers are developing an ethico-aesthetic approach that uses dance practices as sites of resistance against dominant ideologies. It attests to the persistence of alternative ways of thinking and living.
This book expands the understanding of conditions defining the creation and circulation of contemporary dance that differ across Europe. It focuses on festival-making connected with the Balkan regional project ‘Nomad Dance Academy’ (NDA), and highlights collective approaches to sustain a theorisation of festivals using the concepts of dissensus and imperceptible politics. Drawing from anthropological methods, three festivals PLESkavica, Slovenia; Kondenz, Serbia and LocoMotion, North Macedonia, are explored through social, political and historical currents affecting curatorial practice. This book closely follows how festival-makers navigate the values of international development that du...
Kinaesthesia and Visual Self-reflection in Contemporary Dance features interviews with UK-based professional-level contemporary, ballet, hip hop, and breaking dancers and cross-disciplinary explication of kinaesthesia and visual self-reflection discourses. Expanding on the concept of a ‘kinaesthetic mode of attention’ leads to discussion of some of the key values and practices which nurture and develop this mode in contemporary dance. Zooming in on entanglements with video self-images in dance practice provides further insights regarding kinaesthesia’s historicised polarisation with the visual. It thus provides opportunities to dwell on and reconsider reflections, opening up to a set of playful yet disruptive diffractions inherent in the process of becoming a contemporary dancer, particularly amongst an increasingly complex landscape of visual and theoretical technologies.
The Dancer's World 1920-1945 focuses on modern dancers as they saw themselves. Five chapters describe a narrative arc that encompasses Europe and the USA with a focus between 1920 and 1945. A final chapter considers contemporary relevance for dancers, dance artists, choreographers, dance students and scholars alike.
If much of what we teach and come to know from within the disciplinary regime of Dance Studies is founded on a certain kind of mastery, what scope is there to challenge, criticize and undo this knowledge from within the academy, as well as through productive encounters with its margins? This volume contributes to a growing discourse on the potential of dance and dancers to affect change, politics and situational awareness, as well as to traverse disciplinary boundaries. It ‘undisciplines’ academic thinking through its organisation into ‘movements’ and ‘stumbles’, reinforcing its theme through its structure as well as its content, addressing contemporary dance and performance prac...
This edited collection assembles international perspectives from artists, academics, and curators in the field to bring the insights of screendance theory and practice back into conversations with critical methods, at the intersections of popular culture, low-tech media practices, dance, and movement studies, and the minoritarian perspectives of feminism, queer theory, critical race studies and more. This book represents new vectors in screendance studies, featuring contributions by both artists and theoreticians, some of the most established voices in the field as well as the next generation of emerging scholars, artists, and curators. It builds on the foundational cartographies of screenda...
"Making a Laboratory defines a new audiovisual embodied research method that short-circuits experimental practice and video recording to generate new kinds of data and documents. Overturning conventional hierarchies of knowledge, "Dynamic Configurations with Transversal Video" (DCTV) grounds both discursive and audiovisual knowledges within the space of embodied practice, synthesizing insights from historical epistemologist Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and philosopher of science Karen Barad to offer the first rigorous definition of laboratoriality outside a techno-scientific paradigm. In this concise book, nonbinary practitioner-researcher Ben Spatz situates the DCTV method in the context of artis...