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Susan Manning is a professor of English, theater, and performance studies at Northwestern University and the author of Ecstasy and the Demon: The Dances of Mary Wigman. Book jacket.
During its impressive career over the last decades the term 'performative' has been attributed with many parallel meanings in the humanities, philosophy, arts, or economics. Empty Stages, Crowded Flats additionally applies the notion of the performative to the context of curating with the aim to unfold a potential that so far has been mostly unused. The book is following J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, and others in their belief in the performative capacity to transform reality with words and other cultural utterances, but it also emphasises the often dismissed, colloquial notion of the performative as something being 'theatre-like', believing that those two strands are in fact interdependent a...
How can various technologies, from the more conventional to the very new, be used to archive, share and understand dance movement? How can they become part of new ways of creating dance? What does this tell us about the ways in which technology is part of how we make sense and think? Well-known choreographers and dance collectives including William Forsythe, Siohban Davis, Merce Cunningham, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and BADco. have initiated projects to investigate these questions, and in so doing have inaugurated a new era for dance archives, education, research and creation. Their work draws attention to the intimate relationship between the technologies we use and the ways in which we th...
everybodys self interviews is a collection of 20 self interviews in which various contemporary choreographers and performance makers question their own work, offering a wide panorama of the thoughts, questions and practices that are taking place within the performing arts today. everybodys is an artist-initiated open platform created in order to share ideas and strategies that could expand the understanding of performance.It consists of a collection of workshop games, performance scores, texts and performance videos.
The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment brings together a cross-section of artists and scholars engaged with the phenomenon of reenactment in dance from a practical and theoretical standpoint. Synthesizing myriad views on danced reenactment and the manner in which this branch of choreographic performance intersects with important cultural concerns around appropriation this Handbook addresses originality, plagiarism, historicity, and spatiality as it relates to cultural geography. Others topics treated include transmission as a heuristic device, the notion of the archive as it relates to dance and as it is frequently contrasted with embodied cultural memory, pedagogy, theory of history, reconstruction as a methodology, testimony and witnessing, theories of history as narrative and the impact of dance on modernist literature, and relations of reenactment to historical knowledge and new media.
"Choreographing Relations" undertakes the experiment of a conceptual site development of contemporary choreography by means of practical philosophy. Guided by the radically empiricist question "What Can Choreography Do?" the book investigates the performances of Antonia Baehr, Juan Dominguez, Xavier Le Roy, and Eszter Salamon, and the philosophical works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It establishes a relation between these practitioners as an encounter in method, and develops method as a singular, material and experimental practice. In view of these singular methods and the participatory relations to which they give rise, Choreographing Relations offers a prolific inventory of arepresentational procedures that qualitatively transformed choreography and philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century.
The emergence of modern dance and the early history of cinema ran concurrent with the European avant-garde's development of pictorial abstraction in the first decades of the 20th century. However, many assume that modernist abstraction resulted from a century of natural, autonomous evolution to painting styles and tastes. In Moving Modernism, author Nell Andrew challenges this assumption. By examining dance and film created during this period, she argues that performative modes of art created the link between bodily movement and movement depicted in modernist paintings. In a seeming paradox, dance and film - durational arts, involving real bodies in space-participated in the development of a...
Dance Data, Cognition, and Multimodal Communication is the result of a collaborative and transdisciplinary effort towards a first definition of "dance data", with its complexities and contradictions, in a time where cognitive science is growing in parallel to the need of a renewed awareness of the body’s agency in our manyfold interactions with the world. It is a reflection on the observation of bodily movements in artistic settings, and one that views human social interactions, multimodal communication, and cognitive processes through a different lens—that of the close collaboration between performing artists, designers, and scholars. This collection focuses simultaneously on methods an...
This book investigates the practices of reconstructing and representing performance art and their power to shape this art form and our understanding of it. Performance art emerged internationally between the 1960s and 1970s crossing disciplinary boundaries between performing arts and visual arts. Because of the challenge it posed to the ontologies and paradigms of these fields, performance art has since stimulated an ongoing debate on the most appropriate means to document, preserve and display it. Tancredi Gusman brings together international scholars from different disciplinary fields to examine methods, media, and approaches by which this art form has been represented and (re)activated ov...
"Nearly four hundred and fifty years in, ballet still resonates-though the stages have become international, and the dancers, athletes far removed from noble amateurs. While vibrations from the form's beginnings clearly resound, much has transformed. Nowadays ballet dancers aspire to work across disciplines with choreographers who value a myriad of abilities. Dance theorists and historians make known possibilities and polemics in lieu of notating dances verbatim, and critics do the daily work of recording performance histories and interviewing artists. Ideas circulate, questions arise, and discussions about how to resist ballet's outmoded traditions take precedence. In the dance community, c...