Tracing The Landscape Of Dance In Greece

This volume critically discusses dance’s role as an art form in modern Greek society, exploring both ethnographic and cross-cultural issues. The contents of the book unfold in parallel and intertwining dialogues and discourses incorporating reflections on philosophical and scientific subjects and experiences relating to dance. The investigation places ballet, modern and contemporary dance within the Greek context, and juxtaposes these genres with international dance making. It also uncovers the factors that have affected the development of dance practices in Greece during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and considers the reasons why, until now, dance, as an embodied art form, has not been established in Greece as an autonomous academic discipline with its own sustainable educational structures. It paints a picture of the past and the present, while also serving to inspire future artist-practitioners and scholars to advocate and support the discipline of dance in Greece.

"Textbook for undergrad general education and dance courses on the topic of dance around the world. It serves as a gateway into studying world cultures through dance"--

This volume examines the role of gestures in past societies, exploring both how meaning was communicated through bodily actions, and also how archaeologists can trace the symbolism and significance of ancient gestures, ritual practices and bodily techniques through the material remnants of past human groups. Gesture studies is an area of increasing interest within the social sciences, and the individual chapters not only respond to developments in the field, but push it forward by bringing a wide range of perspectives and approaches into dialogue with one another. Each exhibits a critical and reflexive approach to bodily communication and to re-tracing bodies through the archaeological record (in art, the treatment of the body and material culture), and together they demonstrate the diversity of pioneering global research on gestures in archaeology and related disciplines, with contributions from leading researchers in Aegean, Mediterranean, Mesoamerican, Japanese and Near Eastern archaeology. By bringing case studies from each of these different cultures and regions together and drawing on interdisciplinary insights from anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, design, art history and the performing arts, this volume reveals the similarities and differences in gestures as expressed in cultures around the world, and offers new and valuable perspectives on the nature of bodily communication across both space and time.

Presents a landmark study combining key specialists around the region with well-established international scholars, from a wide range of disciplines.

Considering the influence of the forms and tectonics of the Mediterranean vernacular on modern architectural practice and discourse from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Throughout centuries of European colonial domination, the bodies of Middle Eastern dancers, male and female, move sumptuously and seductively across the pages of Western travel journals, evoking desire and derision, admiration and disdain, allure and revulsion. This profound ambivalence forms the axis of an investigation into Middle Eastern dance—an investigation that extends to contemporary belly dance. Stavros Stavrou Karayanni, through historical investigation, theoretical analysis, and personal reflection, explores how Middle Eastern dance actively engages race, sex, and national identity. Close readings of colonial travel narratives, an examination of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, and analyses of treatises about Greek dance, reveal the intricate ways in which this controversial dance has been shaped by Eurocentric models that define and control identity performance.