Dancing Identity

Dancing Identity PDF

Author: Sondra Horton Fraleigh

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2004-10-31

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0822963000

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Combining critical analysis with personal history and poetry, Dancing Identity presents a series of interconnected essays composed over a period of fifteen years. Taken as a whole, these meditative reflections on memory and on the ways we perceive and construct our lives represent Sondra Fraleigh's journey toward self-definition as informed by art, ritual, feminism, phenomenology, poetry, autobiography, and-always-dance. Fraleigh's brilliantly inventive fusions of philosophy and movement clarify often complex philosophical issues and apply them to dance history and aesthetics. She illustrates her discussions with photographs, dance descriptions, and stories from her own past in order to bridge dance with everyday movement. Seeking to recombine the fractured and bifurcated conceptions of the body and of the senses that dominate much Western discourse, she reveals how metaphysical concepts are embodied and presented in dance, both on stage and in therapeutic settings. Examining the role of movement in personal and political experiences, Fraleigh reflects on her major influences, including Moshe Feldenkrais, Kazuo Ohno, and Twyla Tharp. She draws on such varied sources as philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Martin Heidegger, the German expressionist dancer Mary Wigman, Japanese Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata, Hitler, the Bomb, Miss America, Balanchine, and the goddess figure of ancient cultures. Dancing Identity offers new insights into modern life and its reconfigurations in postmodern dance.

Dancing Cultures

Dancing Cultures PDF

Author: Hélène Neveu Kringelbach

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2012-10-01

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0857455761

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Dance is more than an aesthetic of life – dance embodies life. This is evident from the social history of jive, the marketing of trans-national ballet, ritual healing dances in Italy or folk dances performed for tourists in Mexico, Panama and Canada. Dance often captures those essential dimensions of social life that cannot be easily put into words. What are the flows and movements of dance carried by migrants and tourists? How is dance used to shape nationalist ideology? What are the connections between dance and ethnicity, gender, health, globalization and nationalism, capitalism and post-colonialism? Through innovative and wide-ranging case studies, the contributors explore the central role dance plays in culture as leisure commodity, cultural heritage, cultural aesthetic or cathartic social movement.

Dancing Jewish

Dancing Jewish PDF

Author: Rebecca Rossen

Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0199791775

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Jewish choreographers have not only been vital contributors to American modern and postmodern dance, but they have also played a critical and unacknowledged role in American Jewish culture. This book delineates this rich history, demonstrating how, over the twentieth century, dance enabled American Jews to grapple with identity, difference, cultural belonging, and pride.

Europe Dancing

Europe Dancing PDF

Author: Andree Grau

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-06

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 113469654X

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Europe Dancing examines the dance cultures and movements which have developed in Europe since the Second World War. Nine countries are represented in this unique collaboration between European dance scholars. The contributors chart the art form, and discuss the outside influences which have shaped it. This comprehensive book explores: * questions of identity within individual countries, within Europe, and in relation to the USA * the East/West cultural division * the development of state subsidy for dance * the rise of contemporary dance as an 'alternative' genre * the implications for dance of political, economic and social change. Useful historical charts are included to trace significant dance and political events throughout the twentieth century in each country. Never before has this information been gathered together in one place. This book is essential reading for everyone interested in dance and its growth and development in recent years.

Dancing from Past to Present

Dancing from Past to Present PDF

Author: Theresa Jill Buckland

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 2007-03-19

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0299218538

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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.

Choreographing Difference

Choreographing Difference PDF

Author: Ann Cooper Albright

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2010-06-01

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780819569912

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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.

Cultural Memory and Popular Dance

Cultural Memory and Popular Dance PDF

Author: Clare Parfitt

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-12-02

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 3030710831

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This book focuses on the myriad ways that people collectively remember or forget shared pasts through popular dance. In dance classes, nightclubs, family celebrations, tourist performances, on television, film, music video and the internet, cultural memories are shared and transformed by dancing bodies adapting yesterday’s steps to today’s concerns. The book gathers emerging and seasoned scholarly voices from a wide range of geographical and disciplinary perspectives to discuss cultural remembering and forgetting in diverse popular dance contexts. The contributors ask: how are Afro-diasporic memories invoked in popular dance classes? How are popular dance genealogies manipulated and reclaimed? What is at stake for the nation in the nationalizing of folk and popular dances? And how does mediated dancing transmit memory as feelings or affects? The book reveals popular dance to be vital to cultural processes of remembering and forgetting, allowing participants to pivot between alternative pasts, presents and futures.

Dancing in Blackness

Dancing in Blackness PDF

Author: Halifu Osumare

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2019-02-08

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 0813065070

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American Society for Aesthetics Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award Dancing in Blackness is a professional dancer's personal journey over four decades, across three continents and 23 countries, and through defining moments in the story of black dance in America. In this memoir, Halifu Osumare reflects on what blackness and dance have meant to her life and international career. Osumare's story begins in 1960s San Francisco amid the Black Arts Movement, black militancy, and hippie counterculture. It was there, she says, that she chose dance as her own revolutionary statement. Osumare describes her experiences as a young black dancer in Europe teaching "jazz ballet" and establishing her own dance company in Copenhagen. Moving to New York City, she danced with the Rod Rodgers Dance Company and took part in integrating the programs at the Lincoln Center. After doing dance fieldwork in Ghana, Osumare returned to California and helped develop Oakland’s black dance scene. Osumare introduces readers to some of the major artistic movers and shakers she collaborated with throughout her career, including Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Jean-Leon Destine, Alvin Ailey, and Donald McKayle. Now a black studies scholar, Osumare uses her extraordinary experiences to reveal the overlooked ways that dance has been a vital tool in the black struggle for recognition, justice, and self-empowerment. Her memoir is the inspiring story of an accomplished dance artist who has boldly developed and proclaimed her identity as a black woman.

Breadth of Bodies

Breadth of Bodies PDF

Author: Emmaly Wiederholt

Publisher:

Published: 2022-03

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 9780998247816

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Breadth of Bodies seeks to investigate and dismantle the language and stereotypes often used to describe professional dancers with disabilities. Spearheaded by dancer/writer Emmaly Wiederholt and dance educator Silva Laukkanen with illustrations by visual artist Liz Brent-Maldonado, the team collected interviews with 35 professional dance artists with disabilities from 15 countries, asking about training, access, and press, as well as looking at the state of the field.

The Irish Dancing

The Irish Dancing PDF

Author: Barbara O'Connor (Cultural historian)

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781782050414

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Partly thematic, partly chronological, this account of dance in Ireland emerges out of a broader interest in the body in society as well as in the construction of national and gender identities. It comprises seven chapters each of which addresses a particular form of cultural identity. These include national, ethnic, gender, social class, postmodern and global identities. It is structured in such a way that many of the chapters are devoted to a specific identity formation while issues of gender and social class are interwoven into most chapters. Underpinning the discussion throughout is the assumption that dance both reflects and produces the social, cultural and politic contexts within which it is performed and represented. This is so because bodily movement including dance reflects societal structures, norms and values as attested to by sociologists and dance scholars alike. Interwoven into the dance narrative, therefore, is the flow of Irish society over this time; a flow that incorporates social stability and social change, tradition and modernity, men and women, rural and urban, as well as the local, the national and the global.