This book discusses the challenges and possibilities of preserving dance in order to keep dances, performances, and choreographers' legacies alive so that the dancers of today and tomorrow can experience and learn from those of the past. This book was originally published as a special issue of Dance Chronicle: Studies in Dance and the Related Arts.
This thesis takes the work of Merce Cunningham and William Forsythe as case studies for a socio-historical analysis of choreographic space and, in so doing, develops a sociology of dance around the qualitative study of spatial aesthetics. By locating the spatial innovations of these artists in the social space of their practice and in the light of spatial models inherited by each, it argues that the choreography of space can express ideals of human relationality produced in and productive of its broader societal landscape. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre's contention that 'the space of a (social) order is hidden in the order of space', the thesis takes classical ballet as a primary example of how political ideals come to be embodied in spatial aesthetics and uses the 'classical model' to coordinate a sociologically orientated dance-historical context for these artists. The thesis is structured around four case studies that together form a context for understanding Cunningham's and Forsythe's spatial practices. These are: firstly, a sociopolitical history of harmony in courtly expressions of classical ballet from fifteenth- century Italy to late Imperial Russia; secondly, an analysis of George Balanchine's and Martha Graham's respective choreographies of the 'American geographical imagination'; thirdly, a comparative study of Rudolf von Laban's and Oskar Schlemmer's theories of space and technology in their pre-war German contexts; finally a contextualisation of John Cage's 1952 event in relation to Marshall McLuhan's 'electronic age' and John Dewey's 'democratic' social space. The final two chapters weave these spatial models into comparative frames for measuring the socio-historical specificity of Cunningham's and Forsythe's choreographic spaces. Cunningham's 'no fixed points' aesthetic is understood as producing a coexistent space commensurate with McLuhan's electronic paradigm and Dewey's democratic individualism. Forsythe's fluctuating space is understood as producing a 'space of flows' emblematic, for Manuel Castells, of a late twentieth-century 'digital age'.
Minton shows how to solve common choreography problems, design and shape movements into a dance, and organise a dance concert. She addresses some of the National Dance Content Standards, and features movement exploration exercises.
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.
This book contains readings of American, British and European postmodern dances informed by feminist, postcolonialist, queer and poststructuralist theories. It explores the roles dance and space play in constructing subjectivity. By focusing on site-specific dance, the mutual construction of bodies and spaces, body-space interfaces and 'in-between spaces', the dances and dance films are read 'against the grain' to reveal their potential for troubling conventional notions of subjectivity associated with a white, Western, heterosexual able-bodied, male norm.
The book looks at dance at the beginnings of the 20th century, the time during which modern dance first began to make its radical departure from the aesthetics of classical ballet. Author Gabriele Brandstetter traces modern dance's connection to new innovations and trends in visual and literary arts to argue that modern dance is in fact the preeminent symbol of modernity.
