Poetics Of Dance

'Poetics of Dance' 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.

When it was first published in Germany in 1995, Poetics of Dance was already seen as a path-breaking publication, the first to explore the relationships between the birth of modern dance, new developments in the visual arts, and the renewal of literature and drama in the form of avant-garde theatrical and movement productions of the early twentieth-century. Author Gabriele Brandstetter established in this book not only a relation between dance and critical theory, but in fact a full interdisciplinary methodology that quickly found foothold with other areas of research within dance studies. 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. 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. As Brandstetter demonstrates, the aesthetic renewal of dance vocabulary which was pursued by modern dancers on both sides of the Atlantic - Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller, Valeska Gert and Oskar Schlemmer, Vaslav Nijinsky and Michel Fokine - unfurled itself in new ideas about gender and subjectivity in the arts more generally, thus reflecting the modern experience of life and the self-understanding of the individual as an individual. As a whole, the book makes an important contribution to the theory of modernity.

A history of dance’s pathologization may startle readers who find in dance performance grace, discipline, geometry, poetry, and the body’s transcendence of itself. Exploring dance’s historical links to the medical and scientific connotations of a “pathology,” this book asks what has subtended the idealization of dance in the West. It investigates the nineteenth-century response, in the intersections of dance, literature, and medicine, to the complex and long-standing connections between illness, madness, poetry, and performance. In the nineteenth century, medicine becomes a major cultural index to measure the body’s meanings. As a particularly performative form of madness, nineteenth-century hysteria preserved the traditional connection to dance in medical descriptions of “choreas.” In its withholding of speech and its use of body code, dance, like hysteria, functions as a form of symptomatic expression. Yet by working like a symptom, dance performance can also be read as a commentary on symptomatology and as a condition of possibility for such alternative approaches to mental illness as psychoanalysis. By redeeming as art what is “lost” in hysteria, dance expresses non-hysterically what only hysteria had been able to express: the somatic translation of idea, the physicalization of meaning. Medicine’s discovery of “idea” manifesting itself in the body in mental illness strikingly parallels a literary fascination with the ability of nineteenth-century dance to manifest “idea,” suggesting that the evolution of medical thinking about mind-body relations as they malfunction in madness, as well as changes in the cultural reception of danced representations of these relations, might be paradigmatic shifts caused by the same cultural factors: concern about the body as a site of meaning and about vision as a theater of knowledge.

"Drawing on the whole practical and theoretical heritage of modern dance and its pre-cursors and including discussion of works up to and including the 1980s, Louppe reviews the main 'tools' of contemporary dance creation and thought: the body, weight, space, time, flow, breath, style and composition. She also weaves through her analysis a vision of the broader historical and philosophical concerns and challenges specific to this art and its defining values. Rather than taking an objective, cognitive approach to her role as observer and critic, Louppe writes from an intimate place of attention to all of the contemporary dancer's resources and practices: from the 'pre-movement' when stylistic values are born invisibly in bodies, to the moment and location of performance and the encounter with a public."--Publisher.

Both the identity of dance and that of theory are at risk as soon as the two intertwine. This anthology collects observations by choreographers and scholars, dancers, dramaturges and dance theorists in an effort to trace the multiple ways in which dance and theory correlate and redefine each other: What is the nature of their relationship? How can we outline a theory of dance from our particular historical perspective which will cover dance both as a practice and as an academic concept? The contributions examine which concepts, interdependencies and discontinuities of dance and theory are relevant today and promise to engage us in the future. They address crucial topics of the current debate in dance and performance studies such as artistic research, aesthetics, politics, visuality, archives, and the »next generation«.

This book explores the relationship between the body, ecology, place, and site-specific performance. The book is situated within arts-based research, particularly within embodied inquiry and poetic inquiry. It explores a theoretical foundation for integration of these areas, primarily to share the lived experiences, poetry and dance which have come out of decades of sharing site-specific performances. Celeste Nazeli Snowber is a dancer, poet, writer and award-winning educator. She is Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, Canada. .

In her first posthumous work, the revered poet crafts a personal history of Black dance and captures the careers of legendary dancers along with her own rhythmic beginnings. Many learned of Ntozake Shange’s ability to blend movement with words when her acclaimed choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf made its way to Broadway in 1976, eventually winning an Obie Award the following year. But before she found fame as a writer, poet, performer, dancer, and storyteller, she was an untrained student who found her footing in others’ classrooms. Dance We Do is a tribute to those who taught her and her passion for rhythm, movement, and dance. After 20 years of research, writing, and devotion, Ntozake Shange tells her history of Black dance through a series of portraits of the dancers who trained her, moved with her, and inspired her to share the power of the Black body with her audience. Shange celebrates and honors the contributions of the often unrecognized pioneers who continued the path Katherine Dunham paved through the twentieth century. Dance We Do features a stunning photo insert along with personal interviews with Mickey Davidson, Halifu Osumare, Camille Brown, and Dianne McIntyre. In what is now one of her final works, Ntozake Shange welcomes the reader into the world she loved best.

An extended ethnographic essay that explores the socially produced, narratively mediated, and relatively unconscious ideological responses of people--scholars and folk--to a history of race and class domination, with specific reference to several distinct though inter- related spheres of folkloric symbolic action concerning the working classes of Mexican-American south Texas. Paper edition (unseen), $15.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR