Anarchic Dance

Liz Aggiss and Billy Cowie, known collectively as Divas Dance Theatre, are renowned for their highly visual, interdisciplinary brand of dance performance that incorporates elements of theatre, film, opera, poetry and vaudevillian humour. Anarchic Dance, consisting of a book and downloadable resources, is a visual and textual record of their boundary-shattering performance work. The downloadable resources feature extracts from Aggiss and Cowie's work, including the highly-acclaimed dance film Motion Control (premiered on BBC2 in 2002), rare video footage of their punk-comic live performances as The Wild Wigglers and reconstructions of Aggiss's solo performance in Grotesque Dancer. These films are cross-referenced in the book, allowing readers to match performance and commentary as Aggiss and Cowie invite a broad range of writers to examine their live performance and dance screen practice through analysis, theory, discussion and personal response. Extensively illustrated with black and white and colour photographs Anarchic Dance, provides a comprehensive investigation into Cowie and Aggiss’s collaborative partnership and demonstrates a range of exciting approaches through which dance performance can be engaged critically.

Since the advent of digital video technology, ’dance on camera’ has become an increasingly popular, and important genre of dance. This is the first ever ’how-to’ manual for choreographers, dancers and students who want to make dance films. Specifically written from a personal experience of a complete lack of printed material to help beginners get started, Katrina McPherson has produced an exemplary text which combines practical help with aesthetic discussion in an anecdotal and accessible style. Making Video Dance includes: exercises to be used inside, or outside the classroom a production diary interviews with leading practitioners on both sides of the camera. Also including a glossary of terms, anyone involved in making dance videos needs this helpful and remarkable book.

Covering fifty years of British dance, from Margot Fonteyn to innovative contemporary practitioners such as Wendy Houstoun and Nigel Charnock, Yes? No! Maybe is an innovative approach to performing and watching dance. Emilyn Claid brings her life experience and interweaves it with academic theory and historical narrative to create a dynamic approach to dance writing. Using the 1970s revolution of new dance as a hinge, Claid looks back to ballet and forward to British independent dance which is new dance’s legacy. She explores the shifts in performer-spectator relationships, and investigates questions of subjectivity, absence and presence, identity, gender, race and desire using psychoanalytical, feminist, postmodern, post-structuralist and queer theoretical perspectives. Artists and practitioners, professional performers, teachers, choreographers and theatre-goers will all find this book an informative and insightful read.

The second edition of The Routledge Dance Studies Reader offers fresh critical perspectives on classic and modern dance forms, including ballroom, tango, Hip-hop, site-specific performance, and disability in dance. Alexandra Carter and Janet O’Shea deliver a substantially revised and updated collection of key texts, featuring an enlightening new introduction, which tracks differing approaches to dance studies. Important articles from the first edition are accompanied by twenty new works by leading critical voices. The articles are presented in five thematic sections, each with a new editorial introduction and further reading. Sections cover: Making dance Performing dance Ways of looking Locating dance in history and society Debating the discipline The Routledge Dance Studies Reader gives readers access to over thirty essential texts on dance and provides expert guidance on their critical context. It is a vital resource for anyone interested in understanding dance from a global and contemporary perspective.

Represents the range and diversity of writings on dance from the mid to late 20th century, providing contemporary perspectives on ballet, modern dance, postmodern 'movement performance' jazz and ethnic dance.

Eleven authors analyse recent dance practices in the theatre, in club culture and on film, addressing dance in interdisciplinary relationship with music, painting and play texts. This text attempts to fill a gap with an up-to-date account of exciting and challenging new work, illuminated by fascinating new theoretical frameworks.

This book addresses the need for critical scholarship about contemporary dance practices in Ireland. Bringing together key voices from a new wave of scholarship to examine recent practice and research in the field of contemporary dance, it examines the excitingly diverse range of choreographers and works that are transforming Ireland’s performance landscape. The first section provides a chronologically-ordered collection of critical essays to ground the reader in some of the most important issues currently at play in contemporary dance in Ireland. The second section then provides an interrogation of individual choreographers’ processes. The book traces new choreographic work and trends through a broad array of topics, including somatics in performance, screendance, cultural trauma, dance archives, affect studies, feminist perspectives, choreographic process, the dancer’s voice, interdisciplinarity, and pedagogical paradigms.

This innovative textbook applies basic dance history and theory to contemporary popular culture examples in order to examine our own ways of moving in—and through—culture. By drawing on material relevant to students, Dance in US Popular Culture successfully introduces students to critical thinking around the most personal of terrain: our bodies and our identities. The book asks readers to think about: what embodied knowledge we carry with us and how we can understand history and society through that lens what stereotypes and accompanying expectations are embedded in performance, related to gender and/or race, for instance how such expectations are reinforced, negotiated, challenged, embraced, or rescripted by performers and audiences how readers articulate their own sense of complex identity within the constantly shifting landscape of popular culture, how this shapes an active sense of their everyday lives, and how this can act as a springboard towards dismantling systems of oppression Through readings, questions, movement analyses, and assignment prompts that take students from computer to nightclub and beyond, Dance in US Popular Culture readers develop their own cultural sense of dance and the moving body’s sociopolitical importance while also determining how dance is fundamentally applicable to their own identity. This is the ideal textbook for high school and undergraduate students of dance and dance studies in BA and BfA courses, as well as those studying popular culture from interdisciplinary perspectives including cultural studies, media studies, communication studies, theater and performance studies. Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY 4.0 license.