Choreographing Discourses

Choreographing Discourses brings together essays originally published by Mark Franko between 1996 and the contemporary moment. Assembling these essays from international, sometimes untranslated sources and curating their relationship to a rapidly changing field, this Reader offers an important resource in the dynamic scholarly fields of Dance and Performance Studies. What makes this volume especially appropriate for undergraduate and graduate teaching is its critical focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century dance artists and choreographers – among these, Oskar Schlemmer, Merce Cunningham, Kazuo Ohno, William Forsythe, Bill T. Jones, and Pina Bausch, some of the most high-profile European, American, and Japanese artists of the past century. The volume’s constellation of topics delves into controversies that are essential turning points in the field (notably, Still/Here and Paris is Burning), which illuminate the spine of the field while interlinking dance scholarship with performance theory, film, visual, and public art. The volume contains the first critical assessments of Franko’s contribution to the field by André Lepecki and Gay Morris, and an interview incorporating a biographical dimension to the development of Franko’s work and its relation to his dance and choreography. Ultimately, this Reader encourages a wide scope of conversation and engagement, opening up core questions in ethics, embodiment, and performativity.

Architecture and Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time examines the field of archi-choreographic experiments—unique interdisciplinary encounters and performed events generated through collaborations between architects and choreographers. Forty case studies spanning four decades give evidence of the range of motivations for embarking on these creative endeavors and diverse conceptual underpinnings, generative methods, objects of inquiry, and outcomes. Architecture and Choreography builds histories and theories through which to examine these works, the contexts within, and processes through which the works emerged, and the critical questions they raise about ways to work together, sites and citations, ethics and equity, control and agency. Three themes frame pairs of chapters. The first addresses disciplinarity through works that critically reflect upon their discipline’s tools, techniques, and conventions juxtaposed against projects that cite or use other art forms and cultural phenomena as source material. The second interrogates space and the role of spatial dispositifs, institutions, and sites, and their hidden and not-so-hidden conditions, as conceptual drivers and structures to subvert, trouble, unsettle, remember. The third asks who and what dances, finding a spectrum from mobilized architectural bodies to more-than-human cybarcorps. Modes of collaboration and the temporalities and life cycles of projects inform bookending chapters. Architecture and Choreography offers vital lessons not only for architects and choreographers but also for students and practitioners across design and performance fields.

Focusing on politics, gender, and identities, a group of international dance scholars provide a broad overview of new methodological approaches – with specific case studies – and how they can be applied to the study of ballet and modern dance. With an introduction exploring the history of dance studies and the development of central themes and areas of concerns in the field, the book is then divided into three parts: politics explores 'Ausdruckstanz' – an expressive dance tradition first formulated in the 1920s by dancer Mary Wigman and carried forward in the work of Pina Bausch and others gender examines eighteenth century theatrical dance – a time when elaborate sets, costumes, and plots examined racial and sexual stereotypes identity is concerned with modern dance. Exploring contemporary analytical approaches to understanding performance traditions, Dance Discourses' pedagogical structure makes it ideal for courses in performing arts and humanities.

A new contribution to studies in choreography, Writing Choreography: Textualities of and beyond Dance focuses upon language and writing-based approaches to choreographing from the perspectives of artists and researchers active in the Nordic and Oceanic contexts. Through the contributions of 15 dance–artists, choreographers, dramaturges, writers, interdisciplinary artists and artist–researchers, the volume highlights diverse textual choreographic processes and outcomes arguing for their relevance to present-day practices of expanded choreography. The anthology introduces some Western trends related to utilizing writing, text and language in choreographic processes. In its focus on art-making processes, it likewise offers insight into how performance can be transcribed into writing, how practices of writing choreograph and how choreography can be a process of writing with. Readers, such as dancers, choreographers, students in higher education of these fields as well as researchers in choreography, gain understanding about different experimental forms of writing forwarded by diverse choreographers and how writing is the motional organisation of images, signs, words and texts. The volume presents a new strand in expanded choreography and acts as inspiration for its continued evolution that engenders new adaptations between language, writing and choreography. Ideal for students, scholars and researchers of choreography and dance studies.

In Choreographing Agonism, author Goran Petrović Lotina offers new insight into the connections between politics and performance. Exploring the political and philosophical roots of a number of recent leftist civil movements, Petrović Lotina forcefully argues for a re-imagining of artistic performance as an instrument of democracy capable of contesting a dominant politics. Inspired by post-Marxist theories of discourse theory, hegemony, conflict, and pluralism, and using tension as a guiding philosophical, political, and artistic force, the book expands the politico-philosophical debate on theories of performance. It offers both scholars and practitioners of performance a thought-provoking analysis of the ways in which artistic performance can be viewed politically as ‘agonistic choreo-political practice,’ a powerful strategy for mobilising alternative ways of living together and invigorating democracy. Choreographing Agonism makes a bold and innovative contribution to the discussion of political and philosophical thought in the field of Performance Studies.

This book illuminates the relationship between philosophy and experimental choreographic practice today in the works of leading European choreographers. A discussion of key issues in contemporary performance from the viewpoint of Deleuze, Spinoza and Bergson is accompanied by intricate analyses of seven groundbreaking dance performances.

"This is an urgently needed book as the question of choreographing behavior enters into realms outside of the aesthetic domains of theatrical dance, Susan Foster writes a thoroughly compelling argument." Andrepecki, New York University"May well prove to be one of Susan Fosters most important works." Ramsay Burt, De Montford University, UKWh