ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |8 pages

Introduction

part I|90 pages

Politics

chapter 1|18 pages

Dance and the political

States of exception

chapter 2|17 pages

Fritz Böhme (1881–1952)

Archeology of an ideologue

chapter 3|15 pages

Ausdruckstanz across the Atlantic

chapter 5|19 pages

Ausdruckstanz

Traditions, translations, transmissions

part II|88 pages

Feminine/Masculine

chapter 6|20 pages

Feminine/Masculine

chapter 7|10 pages

Dido's otherness

Choreographing race and gender in the ballet d'action

chapter 9|16 pages

A balance lost

Staging the body and controlling social mobility during the French Revolution

chapter 10|18 pages

Gender underway

Notes for histories yet to be written

part III|79 pages

Identities

chapter 12|13 pages

Resistant identities

Anderson and Ruckert

chapter 13|15 pages

Donald Byrd

Re/making “beauty”

chapter 14|15 pages

Dispositif trouble

When what is said is not what is shown