Choreographing Mexico
Choreographing Mexico

Author: Manuel R. Cuellar

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2022-09-20

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 1477325182

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2023 de la Torre Bueno® First Book Award, Dance Studies Association The impact of folkloric dance and performance on Mexican cultural politics and national identity. The years between 1910 and 1940 were formative for Mexico, with the ouster of Porfirio Díaz, the subsequent revolution, and the creation of the new state. Amid the upheaval, Mexican dance emerged as a key arena of contestation regarding what it meant to be Mexican. Through an analysis of written, photographic, choreographic, and cinematographic renderings of a festive Mexico, Choreographing Mexico examines how bodies in motion both performed and critiqued the nation. Manuel Cuellar details the integration of Indigenous and regional dance styles into centennial celebrations, civic festivals, and popular films. Much of the time, this was a top-down affair, with cultural elites seeking to legitimate a hegemonic national character by incorporating traces of indigeneity. Yet dancers also used their moving bodies to challenge the official image of a Mexico full of manly vigor and free from racial and ethnic divisions. At home and abroad, dancers made nuanced articulations of female, Indigenous, Black, and even queer renditions of the nation. Cuellar reminds us of the ongoing political significance of movement and embodied experience, as folklórico maintains an important and still-contested place in Mexican and Mexican American identity today.

Choreographing Identities
Choreographing Identities

Author: Anthony Shay

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2014-01-10

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 078645153X

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Throughout its history, the United States has become a new home for thousands of immigrants, all of whom have brought their own traditions and expressions of ethnicity. Not least among these customs are folk dances, which over time have become visual representations of cultural identity. Naturally, however, these dances have not existed in a vacuum. They have changed--in part as a response to ever-changing social identities, and in part as a reaction to deliberate manipulations by those within as well as outside of a particular culture. Compiled in great part from the author's own personal dance experience, this volume looks at how various cultures use dance as a visual representation of their identity, and how "traditional" dances change over time. It discusses several "parallel layers" of dance: dances performed at intra-cultural social occasions, dances used for representation or presentation, and folk dance performances. Individual chapters center on various immigrant cultures. Chiefly the work focuses on cultural representation and how it is sometimes manipulated. Key folk dance festivals in the United States and Canada are reviewed. Interviews with dancers, teachers, and others offer a first-hand perspective. An extensive bibliography encompasses concert programs and reviews as well as broader scholarly sources.

Dancing Mestizo Modernisms
Dancing Mestizo Modernisms

Author: Jose Luis Reynoso

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-11-21

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0197622550

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This book analyzes how national and international dancers contributed to developing Mexico's cultural politics and notions of the nation at different historical moments. It emphasizes how dancers and other moving bodies resisted and reproduced racial and social hierarchies stemming from colonial Mexico (1521-1821). Relying on extensive archival research, choreography as an analytical methodology, and theories of race, dance, and performance studies, author Jose Reynoso examines how dance and other forms of embodiment participated in Mexico's formation after the Mexican War of Independence (1821-1876), the Porfirian dictatorship (1876-1911), and postrevolutionary Mexico (1919-1940). In so doing, the book analyzes how underlying colonial logics continued to influence relationships amongst dancers, other artists, government officials, critics, and audiences of different backgrounds as they refashioned their racial, social, cultural, and national identities. The book proposes and develops two main concepts that explore these mutually formative interactions among such diverse people: embodied mestizo modernisms and transnational nationalisms. 'Embodied mestizo modernisms' refers to combinations of indigenous, folkloric, ballet, and modern dance practices in works choreographed by national and international dancers with different racial and social backgrounds. The book contends that these mestizo modernist dance practices challenged assumptions about racial neutrality with which whiteness historically established its ostensible supremacy in constructing Mexico's 'transnational nationalisms'. This argument holds that notions of the nation-state and national identities are not produced exclusively by a nation's natives but also by historical transnational forces and (dancing) bodies whose influences shape local politics, economic interests, and artistic practices.

The White Indians of Mexican Cinema
The White Indians of Mexican Cinema

Author: Mónica García Blizzard

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2022-04-01

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 143848805X

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The White Indians of Mexican Cinema theorizes the development of a unique form of racial masquerade—the representation of Whiteness as Indigeneity—during the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, from the 1930s to the 1950s. Adopting a broad decolonial perspective while remaining grounded in the history of local racial categories, Mónica García Blizzard argues that this trope works to reconcile two divergent discourses about race in postrevolutionary Mexico: the government-sponsored celebration of Indigeneity and mestizaje (or the process of interracial and intercultural mixing), on the one hand, and the idealization of Whiteness, on the other. Close readings of twenty films and primary source material illustrate how Mexican cinema has mediated race, especially in relation to gender, in ways that project national specificity, but also reproduce racist tendencies with respect to beauty, desire, and protagonism that survive to this day. This sweeping survey illuminates how Golden Age films produced diverse, even contradictory messages about the place of Indigeneity in the national culture. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of Emory University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: https://www.openmonographs.org/. It can also be found in the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/7153

The Methuen Drama Handbook of Gender and Theatre
The Methuen Drama Handbook of Gender and Theatre

Author: Sean Metzger

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-12-28

Total Pages: 521

ISBN-13: 1350123188

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This is a guide to contemporary debates and theatre practices at a time when gender paradigms are both in flux and at the centre of explosive political battlegrounds. The confluence of gender and theatre has long created intense debate about representation, identification, social conditioning, desire, embodiment, and lived experience. As this handbook demonstrates, from the conventions of early modern English, Chinese, Japanese and Hispanic theatres to the subversion of racialized binaries of masculinity and femininity in recent North American, African, Asian, Caribbean and European productions, the matter of gender has consistently taken centre stage. This handbook examines how critical discourses on gender intersect with key debates in the field of theatre studies, as a lens to illuminate the practices of gender and theatre as well as the societies they inform and represent across space and time. Of interest to scholars in the interrelated areas of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, and globalization and diasporic studies, this book demonstrates how researchers are currently addressing theatre about gender issues and gendered theatre practices. While synthesizing and summarizing foundational and evolving debates from a contemporary perspective, this collection offers interpretations and analyses that do not simply look back at existing scholarship, but open up new possibilities and understandings. Featuring essential research tools, including a survey of keywords and an annotated play list, this is an indispensable scholarly handbook for anyone working in theatre and performance.

Geographies of Relation
Geographies of Relation

Author: Theresa Delgadillo

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2024-09-03

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 0472904574

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Geographies of Relation offers a new lens for examining diaspora and borderlands texts and performances that considers the inseparability of race, ethnicity, and gender in imagining and enacting social change. Theresa Delgadillo crosses interdisciplinary and canonical borders to investigate the interrelationships of African-descended Latinx and mestizx peoples through an analysis of Latin American, Latinx, and African American literature, film, and performance. Not only does Delgadillo offer a rare extended analysis of Black Latinidades in Chicanx literature and theory, but she also considers over a century’s worth of literary, cinematic, and performative texts to support her argument about the significance of these cultural sites and overlaps. Chapters illuminate the significance of Toña La Negra in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, reconsider feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s work in revising exclusionary Latin American ideologies of mestizaje, delve into the racial and gender frameworks Sandra Cisneros attempts to rewrite, unpack encounters between African Americans and Black Puerto Ricans in texts by James Baldwin and Marta Moreno Vega, explore the African diaspora in colonial and contemporary Peru through Daniel Alarcón’s literature and the documentary Soy Andina, and revisit the centrality of Black power in ending colonialism in Cuban narratives. Geographies of Relation demonstrates the long histories of networks and exchanges across the Americas as well as the interrelationships among Indigenous, Black, African American, mestizx, Chicanx, and Latinx peoples. It offers a compelling argument that geographies of relation are as significant as national frameworks in structuring cultural formation and change in this hemisphere.

Embodying Mexico
Embodying Mexico

Author: Ruth Hellier-Tinoco

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-06-07

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0199712735

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Embodying Mexico examines two performative icons of Mexicanness--the Dance of the Old Men and Night of the Dead of Lake Pátzcuaro--in numerous manifestations, including film, theater, tourist guides, advertisements, and souvenirs. Covering a ninety-year period from the postrevolutionary era to the present day, Hellier-Tinoco's analysis is thoroughly grounded in Mexican politics and history, and simultaneously incorporates choreographic, musicological, and dramaturgical analysis. Exploring multiple contexts in Mexico, the USA, and Europe, Embodying Mexico expands and enriches our understanding of complex processes of creating national icons, performance repertoires, and tourist attractions, drawing on wide-ranging ethnographic, archival, and participatory experience. An extensive companion website illustrates the author's arguments through audio and video.

Fantasies of Ito Michio
Fantasies of Ito Michio

Author: Tara Rodman

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2024-10-01

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0472904485

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Born in Japan and trained in Germany, dancer and choreographer Ito Michio (1893–1961) achieved prominence in London before moving to the U.S. in 1916 and building a career as an internationally acclaimed artist. During World War II, Ito was interned for two years, and then repatriated to Japan, where he contributed to imperial war efforts by creating propaganda performances and performing revues for the occupying Allied Forces in Tokyo. Throughout, Ito continually invented stories of voyages made, artists befriended, performances seen, and political activities carried out—stories later dismissed as false. Fantasies of Ito Michio argues that these invented stories, unrealized projects, and questionable political affiliations are as fundamental to Ito’s career as his ‘real’ activities, helping us understand how he sustained himself across experiences of racialization, imperialism, war, and internment. Tara Rodman reveals a narrative of Ito’s life that foregrounds the fabricated and overlooked to highlight his involvement with Japanese artists, such as Yamada Kosaku and Ishii Baku, and global modernist movements. Rodman offers “fantasy” as a rubric for understanding how individuals such as Ito sustain themselves in periods of violent disruption and as a scholarly methodology for engaging the past.

Honest Bodies
Honest Bodies

Author: Hannah Kosstrin

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-07-24

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0199396957

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Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow illustrates the ways in which Sokolow's choreography circulated American modernism among Jewish and communist channels of the international Left from the 1930s-1960s in the United States, Mexico, and Israel. Drawing upon extensive archival materials, interviews, and theories from dance, Jewish, and gender studies, this book illuminates Sokolow's statements for workers' rights, anti-racism, and the human condition through her choreography for social change alongside her dancing and teaching for Martha Graham. Tracing a catalog of dances with her companies Dance Unit, La Paloma Azul, Lyric Theatre, and Anna Sokolow Dance Company, along with presenters and companies the Negro Cultural Committee, New York State Committee for the Communist Party, Federal Theatre Project, Nuevo Grupo Mexicano de Clásicas y Modernas, and Inbal Dance Theater, this book highlights Sokolow's work in conjunction with developments in ethnic definitions, diaspora, and nationalism in the US, Mexico, and Israel.

Dancing Throughout Mexican History (1325-1910)
Dancing Throughout Mexican History (1325-1910)

Author: Sanjuanita Martínez-Hunter

Publisher:

Published: 2018-09-21

Total Pages: 138

ISBN-13: 9780692099667

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This book is a must read for anyone who would like to learn more about Dance in Mexican History. It is an especially important reference for teachers of Mexican Folkloric Dance who would like to incorporate Mexican Dance History into their teachings. Using the time frame of 1325-1910, Martínez-Hunter skillfully gives a brief overview of Mexican history accompanied by an analysis of the dances during this period. She begins by diving into accounts of the Aztec dances in Pre-Hispanic Mexico before and after the conquest. Then, she describes the Dance Dramas that arose when the Spanish began to Christianize the Indigenous people. During the Spanish colonization, Martínez-Hunter notes the ways in which theatrical dances were imported from Europe to Mexico; the influences of the court dances including the pavane, sarabande, and the chaconne which began in the New World and traveled to Europe; as well as the Indigenous, mestizo, Chilean, and African influences on the dances of Mexico. Then, covering the dances during the Independence of Mexico (1810-1821) until the beginnings of the Mexican Revolutionary War (1910-1920), Martínez-Hunter juxtaposes the popularity of the European ballroom dances with the dances of the peasant people known as jarabes and sones. To honor the life's work of Martínez-Hunter all the photographs of the jarabes and sones included in this book feature her dancers of the University of Texas at Austin Ballet Folklorico from the 1970s. They document her many contributions to Dance when she was a faculty member at this institution.