Overview

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater collects a critical mass of border-crossing scholarship on the intersections of dance and theatre. Taking corporeality as an idea that unites the work of dance and theater scholars and artists, and embodiment as a negotiation of power dynamics with important stakes, these essays focus on the politics and poetics of the moving body in performance both on and off stage. Contemporary stage performances have sparked global interest in new experiments between dance and theater, and this volume situates this interest in its historical context by extensively investigating other such moments: from pagan mimes of late antiquity to early modern archives to Bolshevik Russia to post-Sandinista Nicaragua to Chinese opera on the international stage, to contemporary flash mobs and television dance contests. Ideologically, the essays investigate critical race theory, affect theory, cognitive science, historiography, dance dramaturgy, spatiality, gender, somatics, ritual, and biopolitics among other modes of inquiry. In terms of aesthetics, they examine many genres such as musical theater, contemporary dance, improvisation, experimental theater, television, African total theater, modern dance, new Indian dance theater aesthetics, philanthroproductions, Butoh, carnival, equestrian performance, tanztheater, Korean Talchum, Nazi Movement Choirs, Lindy Hop, Bomba, Caroline Masques, political demonstrations, and Hip Hop.The volume includes innovative essays from both young and seasoned scholars and scholar/practitioners who are working at the cutting edges of their fields. The handbook brings together essays that offer new insight into well-studied areas, challenge current knowledge, attend to neglected practices or moments in time, and that identify emergent themes. The overall result is a better understanding of the roles of dance and theater in the performative production of meaning.

Full Product Details

9780199917495

Table of Contents

Reviews

a substantial anthology ... The Handbook offers serious readers and important collection of new thinking on dance and theatre, that allows the reader to understand the richness and complexity of this area of performance ... the Handbook is important because it considers practice that are rarely analysed side by side, and so reveals new ways of looking at these dances. It is useful because it explicates acts that are sometimes puzzling because they are non-literal, often non-verbal and difficult to categorize. It remains interesting because of the great variety of voices given exposure and expression ... it is this great movement, vibrancy and colour that leaves a lasting impression. * Sara Houston, Times Literary Supplement *

a substantial anthology ... The Handbook offers serious readers and important collection of new thinking on dance and theatre, that allows the reader to understand the richness and complexity of this area of performance ... the Handbook is important because it considers practice that are rarely analysed side by side, and so reveals new ways of looking at these dances. It is useful because it explicates acts that are sometimes puzzling because they are non-literal, often non-verbal and difficult to categorize. It remains interesting because of the great variety of voices given exposure and expression ... it is this great movement, vibrancy and colour that leaves a lasting impression. * Sara Houston, Times Literary Supplement *

a substantial anthology ... The Handbook offers serious readers and important collection of new thinking on dance and theatre, that allows the reader to understand the richness and complexity of this area of performance ... the Handbook is important because it considers practice that are rarely analysed side by side, and so reveals new ways of looking at these dances. It is useful because it explicates acts that are sometimes puzzling because they are non-literal, often non-verbal and difficult to categorize. It remains interesting because of the great variety of voices given exposure and expression ... it is this great movement, vibrancy and colour that leaves a lasting impression. Sara Houston, Times Literary Supplement

Author Information

Nadine George-Graves is Professor of Theater and Dance at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Class in African American Theater, 1900-1940 (2000) and Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of Dance Theater, Community Engagement and Working It Out (2010) as well as numerous articles on American theater and dance.

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