The Grand Union

The Grand Union
Author: Wendy Perron
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2020-09-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0819579335

The Grand Union was a leaderless improvisation group in SoHo in the 1970s that included people who became some of the biggest names in postmodern dance: Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, Barbara Dilley, David Gordon, and Douglas Dunn. Together they unleashed a range of improvised forms from peaceful movement explorations to wildly imaginative collective fantasies. This book delves into the "collective genius" of Grand Union and explores their process of deep play. Drawing on hours of archival videotapes, Wendy Perron seeks to understand the ebb and flow of the performances. Includes 65 photographs.

The Grand Union (1970-1976)

The Grand Union (1970-1976)
Author: Margaret Hupp Ramsay
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
Total Pages: 226
Release: 1991
Genre: Artists
ISBN:

The Grand Union (1970-1976), An Improvisational Performance Group recaptures the onstage and offstage life of a New York-based improvisational collective whose members included Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, David Gordon, Trisha Brown, and Douglas Dunn. Generous selections from interviews with the principals offer an intimate view of a revolutionary moment in American dance and theater history.

Through the Eyes of a Dancer

Through the Eyes of a Dancer
Author: Wendy Perron
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2013-11-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0819574090

Through the Eyes of a Dancer compiles the writings of noted dance critic and editor Wendy Perron. In pieces for The SoHo Weekly News, Village Voice, The New York Times, and Dance Magazine, Perron limns the larger aesthetic and theoretical shifts in the dance world since the 1960s. She surveys a wide range of styles and genres, from downtown experimental performance to ballets at the Metropolitan Opera House. In opinion pieces, interviews, reviews, brief memoirs, blog posts, and contemplations on the choreographic process, she gives readers an up-close, personalized look at dancing as an art form. Dancers, choreographers, teachers, college dance students—and anyone interested in the intersection between dance and journalism—will find Perron's probing and insightful writings inspiring. Through the Eyes of a Dancer is a nuanced microcosm of dance's recent globalization and modernization that also provides an opportunity for new dancers to look back on the traditions and styles that preceded their own.

Corporeal Politics

Corporeal Politics
Author: Katherine Mezur
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2020-09-03
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0472054554

In Corporeal Politics, leading international scholars investigate the development of dance as a deeply meaningful and complex cultural practice across time, placing special focus on the intertwining of East Asia dance and politics and the role of dance as a medium of transcultural interaction and communication across borders. Countering common narratives of dance history that emphasize the US and Europe as centers of origin and innovation, the expansive creativity of dance artists in East Asia asserts its importance as a site of critical theorization and reflection on global artistic developments in the performing arts. Through the lens of “corporeal politics”—the close attention to bodily acts in specific cultural contexts—each study in this book challenges existing dance and theater histories to re-investigate the performer's role in devising the politics and aesthetics of their performance, as well as the multidimensional impact of their lives and artistic works. Corporeal Politics addresses a wide range of performance styles and genres, including dances produced for the concert stage, as well as those presented in popular entertainments, private performance spaces, and street protests.

Contemporary Art, Photography, and the Politics of Citizenship

Contemporary Art, Photography, and the Politics of Citizenship
Author: Vered Maimon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2020-07-26
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1000096769

This book analyzes recent artistic and activist projects in order to conceptualize the new roles and goals of a critical theory and practice of art and photography. Vered Maimon argues that current artistic and activist practices are no longer concerned with the “politics of representation” and the critique of the spectacle, but with a “politics of rights” and the performative formation of shared yet highly contested public domains. The book thus offers a critical framework in which to rethink the artistic, the activist, and the political under globalization. The primary focus is on the ways contemporary artists and activists examine political citizenship as a paradox where subjects are struggling to acquire rights whose formulation rests on attributes they allegedly don't have; while the universal political validity of these rights presupposes precisely the abstraction of every form of difference, rights for all. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, photography theory, visual culture, cultural studies, critical theory, political theory, human rights, and activism.

This Very Moment

This Very Moment
Author: Barbara Dilley
Publisher:
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2015-05-01
Genre:
ISBN: 9780989608121

Memoir & teaching handbook of dance movement practices

The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training

The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training
Author: Doran George
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2020-10-19
Genre: Dance
ISBN: 0197538738

"Doran George's The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training examines the development of Somatics as it has been adopted by successive generations of practitioners since its early beginnings in the 1950s. The study elucidates the ways that Somatics has engaged globally with some of the various locales in which it was developed and practiced, both in terms of its relationships to other dance training programs in that region and to larger aesthetic and political values. The book thereby offers a cogent analysis of how training regimens can inculcate an embodied politics as they guide and shape the experience of bodily sensation, construct forms of reflexive evaluation of bodily action, and summon bodies into relationship with one another. Throughout it focuses on how the notion of a natural body was implemented and developed in Somatics' pedagogy"--

Keep It Moving

Keep It Moving
Author: Twyla Tharp
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2019-10-29
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1982101326

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER One of the world’s legendary artists and bestselling author of The Creative Habit shares her secrets—from insight to action—for harnessing vitality, finding purpose as you age, and expanding one’s possibilities over the course of a lifetime in her newest New York Times bestseller Keep It Moving. At seventy-eight, Twyla Tharp is revered not only for the dances she makes—but for her astounding regime of exercise and nonstop engagement. She is famed for religiously hitting the gym each morning at daybreak, and utilizing that energy to propel her breakneck schedule as a teacher, writer, creator, and lecturer. This book grew out of the question she was asked most frequently: “How do you keep working?” Keep It Moving is a series of no-nonsense mediations on how to live with purpose as time passes. From the details of how she stays motivated to the stages of her evolving fitness routine, Tharp models how fulfillment depends not on fortune—but on attitude, possible for anyone willing to try and keep trying. Culling anecdotes from Twyla’s life and the lives of other luminaries, each chapter is accompanied by a small exercise that will help anyone develop a more hopeful and energetic approach to the everyday. Twyla will tell you what the beauty-fitness-wellness industry won’t: chasing youth is a losing proposition. Instead, Keep It Moving focuses you on what’s here and where you’re going—the book for anyone who wishes to maintain their prime for life.

Gravity

Gravity
Author: Steve Paxton
Publisher:
Total Pages: 81
Release: 2018-07
Genre:
ISBN: 9782930146416

Caught Falling

Caught Falling
Author: David Koteen
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2021-03-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780937645093

"Caught falling is the inside-out of Nancy Stark Smith's life through the kaleidoscope of the dance form contact improvisation. The books itself is a multifaceted crystal-fourteen years in the making." -- blurb.