Site, Dance and Body

Site, Dance and Body
Author: Victoria Hunter
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2021-02-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3030648001

How does the moving, dancing body engage with the materials, textures, atmospheres, and affects of the sites through which we move and in which we live, work and play? How might embodied movement practice explore some of these relations and bring us closer to the complexities of sites and lived environments? This book brings together perspectives from site dance, phenomenology, and new materialism to explore and develop how ‘site-based body practice’ can be employed to explore synergies between material bodies and material sites. Employing practice-as-research strategies, scores, tasks and exercises the book presents a number of suggestions for engaging with sites through the moving body and offers critical reflection on the potential enmeshments and entanglements that emerge as a result. The theoretical discussions and practical explorations presented will appeal to researchers, movement practitioners, artists, academics and individuals interested in exploring their lived environments through the moving body and the entangled human-nonhuman relations that emerge as a result.

Meaning in Motion

Meaning in Motion
Author: Jane Desmond
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 1997
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780822319429

On dance and culture

Moving Sites

Moving Sites
Author: Victoria Hunter
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 572
Release: 2015-03-27
Genre: Art
ISBN: 131753249X

Moving Sites explores site-specific dance practice through a combination of analytical essays and practitioner accounts of their working processes. In offering this joint effort of theory and practice, it aims to provide dance academics, students and practitioners with a series of discussions that shed light both on approaches to making this type of dance practice, and evaluating and reflecting on it. The edited volume combines critical thinking from a range of perspectives including commentary and observation from the fields of dance studies, human geography and spatial theory in order to present interdisciplinary discourse and a range of critical and practice-led lenses through which this type of work can be considered and explored. In so doing, this book addresses the following questions: · How do choreographers make site-specific dance performance? · What occurs when a moving body engages with site, place and environment? · How might we interpret, analyse and evaluate this type of dance practice through a range of theoretical lenses? · How can this type of practice inform wider discussions of embodiment, site, space, place and environment? This innovative and exciting book seeks to move beyond description and discussion of site-specific dance as a spectacle or novelty and considers site-dance as a valid and vital form of contemporary dance practice that explores, reflects, disrupts, contests and develops understandings and practices of inhabiting and engaging with a range of sites and environments. Dr Victoria Hunter is Senior Lecturer in Dance at the University of Chichester.

Social Partner Dance

Social Partner Dance
Author: David Kaminsky
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2020-04-08
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1000056570

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.

(Re)Positioning Site Dance

(Re)Positioning Site Dance
Author: Karen Barbour
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2019
Genre: Dance
ISBN: 9781789380149

This co-authored book aims to articulate international approaches to making, performing and theorizing site-based dance. Intended for artists, scholars, and students, the approaches discussed are informed by interdisciplinary engagements with socio-cultural, political, economic and ecological perspectives.

Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece

Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece
Author: Jane K. Cowan
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1990-09-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780691028545

Valued for their sensual and social intensity, Greek dance-events are often also problematical for participants, giving rise to struggles over position, prestige, and reputation. Here Jane Cowan explores how the politics of gender is articulated through the body at these culturally central, yet until now ethnographically neglected, celebrations in a class-divided northern Greek town. Portraying the dance-event as both a highly structured and dynamic social arena, she approaches the human body not only as a sign to be deciphered but as a site of experience and an agent of practice. In describing the multiple ideologies of person, gender, and community that townspeople embody and explore as they dance, Cowan presents three different settings: the traditional wedding procession, the "Europeanized" formal evening dance of local civic associations, and the private party. She examines the practices of eating, drinking, talking, gifting, and dancing, and the verbal discourse through which celebrants make sense of each other's actions. Paying particular attention to points of tension and moments of misunderstanding, she analyzes in what ways these social situations pose different problems for men and women.

The Aging Body in Dance

The Aging Body in Dance
Author: Nanako Nakajima
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2017-01-06
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1315515326

What does it mean to be able to move? The Aging Body in Dance brings together leading scholars and artists from a range of backgrounds to investigate cultural ideas of movement and beauty, expressiveness and agility. Contributors focus on Euro-American and Japanese attitudes towards aging and performance, including studies of choreographers, dancers and directors from Yvonne Rainer, Martha Graham, Anna Halprin and Roemeo Castellucci to Kazuo Ohno and Kikuo Tomoeda. They draw a fascinating comparison between youth-oriented Western cultures and dance cultures like Japan’s, where aging performers are celebrated as part of the country’s living heritage. The first cross-cultural study of its kind, The Aging Body in Dance offers a vital resource for scholars and practitioners interested in global dance cultures and their differing responses to the world's aging population.

The Body is a Clear Place and Other Statements on Dance

The Body is a Clear Place and Other Statements on Dance
Author: Erick Hawkins
Publisher: Princeton Book Company Publishers
Total Pages: 180
Release: 1992
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

The Body is a Clear Place is a collection of ten intelligent, lyrical essays that serve as a testament to Erick Hawkins' long career in dance. The last two essays were written especially for this volume while the first eight essays were collected from speeches, statements and articles Hawkins has written. The essays are framed by a foreword written by Alan Kriegsman.Essay titles are: The Rite in Theatre; Theatre Structure for a New Dance Poetry; Modern Dance as a Voyage of Discovery; Questions and Answers; The Body is a Clear Place; My Love Affair with Music; Inmost Heaven,

Moving Sites

Moving Sites
Author: Victoria Hunter
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 510
Release: 2015-03-27
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1317532503

Moving Sites explores site-specific dance practice through a combination of analytical essays and practitioner accounts of their working processes. In offering this joint effort of theory and practice, it aims to provide dance academics, students and practitioners with a series of discussions that shed light both on approaches to making this type of dance practice, and evaluating and reflecting on it. The edited volume combines critical thinking from a range of perspectives including commentary and observation from the fields of dance studies, human geography and spatial theory in order to present interdisciplinary discourse and a range of critical and practice-led lenses through which this type of work can be considered and explored. In so doing, this book addresses the following questions: · How do choreographers make site-specific dance performance? · What occurs when a moving body engages with site, place and environment? · How might we interpret, analyse and evaluate this type of dance practice through a range of theoretical lenses? · How can this type of practice inform wider discussions of embodiment, site, space, place and environment? This innovative and exciting book seeks to move beyond description and discussion of site-specific dance as a spectacle or novelty and considers site-dance as a valid and vital form of contemporary dance practice that explores, reflects, disrupts, contests and develops understandings and practices of inhabiting and engaging with a range of sites and environments. Dr Victoria Hunter is Senior Lecturer in Dance at the University of Chichester.

Choreographing Difference

Choreographing Difference
Author: Ann Cooper Albright
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2010-06-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780819569912

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.