From Christopher Columbus to "first anthropologist" Friar Bernardino de Sahagún, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century explorers, conquistadors, clerics, scientists, and travelers wrote about the "Indian" ...dances they encountered throughout the New World. This was especially true of Spanish missionaries who intensively studied and documented native dances in an attempt to identify and eradicate the "idolatrous" behaviors of the Aztec, the largest indigenous empire in Mesoamerica at the time of its European discovery.
Dancing the New Worldtraces the transformation of the Aztec empire into a Spanish colony through written and visual representations of dance in colonial discourse-the vast constellation of chronicles, histories, letters, and travel books by Europeans in and about the New World. Scolieri analyzes how the chroniclers used the Indian dancing body to represent their own experiences of wonder and terror in the New World, as well as to justify, lament, and/or deny their role in its political, spiritual, and physical conquest. He also reveals that Spaniards and Aztecs shared an understanding that dance played an important role in the formation, maintenance, and representation of imperial power, and describes how Spaniards compelled Indians to perform dances that dramatized their own conquest, thereby transforming them into colonial subjects. Scolieri's pathfinding analysis of the vast colonial "dance archive" conclusively demonstrates that dance played a crucial role in one of the defining moments in modern history-the European colonization of the Americas.
In Caribbean and Atlantic Diaspora Dance: Igniting Citizenship, Yvonne Daniel provides a sweeping cultural and historical examination of Diaspora dance genres. Daniel investigates social dances ...brought to the islands by Europeans and Africans, including quadrilles and drum/dances as well as popular dances that followed, such as Carnival parading, Pan-Caribbean danzas, rumba, merengue, mambo, reggae, and zouk. She reviews sacred dance and closely documents combat dances, such as Martinican ladja, Trinidadian kalinda, and Cuban juego de manÃ. In drawing on scores of performers and consultants from the region as well as on her own professional dance experience and acumen, Daniel adeptly places Caribbean dance in the context of cultural and economic globalization, connecting local practices to transnational and global processes and emphasizing the important role of dance in critical regional tourism. Throughout, Daniel reveals impromptu and long-lasting Diaspora communities of participating dancers and musicians.
This book embraces diverse perspectives of dance and its effects on wellbeing for individuals in various contexts.
Section A, Dance in the Body, focuses on experiences of wellbeing in our bodies ...through movement and dance. Chapters refer to anatomical, physiological and neuroscientific perspectives through somatic, psychological and spiritual approaches to movement and dance, reflecting a continuum from objective to subjective approaches to the topic.
Section B, Dance within a Performative Context, considers dance as art, including choreography and appreciation. Contributions discuss new approaches to wellbeing and how audiences, performers and choreographers/directors can understand and share experiences of wellbeing; also how this can inform research on wellbeing in a wider dance context.
Section C, Dance in Education, addresses students’ experiences of dance/movement practices and wellbeing in both mainstream and special education. It covers pedagogical methodology, personal and social achievement, assessment of wellbeing and dance curricula, opening up discussion on cultural diversity and how fixed notions of learning and self-identity can be challenged through dance, thus affecting wellbeing.
Section D, Dance in the Community, emphasises sociological, anthropological and political aspects of dance, covering diverse groups and genres of dance, exploring participants’ feelings of wellbeing. Issues such as identity, social engagement, cohesion and empowerment are discussed.
Section E, Dance in Health Care Contexts, includes dance work in primary care, hospitals or linked with medical thinking. It offers examples of diverse practices, presenting evidence of effects on mental health and quality of life, and discussing patients’ perceptions of dance in their health care programmes.
Based on multiple decades of research on and experience with Egyptian dance and music, this book is a unique exploration into the history, expansion, aesthetics, social reality, regulation, and ...transformation of different forms of dance and dance music in Egypt. The book covers raqs sharqi (Oriental dance, known as belly dance or danse du ventre), raqs sha'biyya (regional or group-specific dances and rituals), sha'bi (lower-class urban music and a dance style), mulid (drawing on Sufi tradition and the festive character of saints' day festivals) and mahraganat (youth-created, primarily electronic music with lively rhythms and biting lyrics). Each chapter touches on a different aspect of Egyptian dance, including genres and sub-genres and evolution, the demeanor of dancers, trends old and new, and social and political criticism using the imagery of dance or a dancer. It also considers the globalization of Egyptian dance, the replication or fantasies of raqs sharqi outside of Egypt, as well as the adoption of the dance as a hobby, competitive dance form, and focus of international dance festivals.
There is a category of choreographic practice with a lineage stretching back to mid-20th century North America that has re-emerged since the early 1990s: dance as a contemporary art medium. Such work ...belongs as much to the gallery as does video art or sculpture and is distinct from both performance art and its history as well as from theater-based dance. The Persistence of Dance: Choreography as Concept and Material in Contemporary Art clarifies the continuities and differences between the second-wave dance avant-garde in the 1950s‒1970s and the third-wave starting in the 1990s. Through close readings of key artists such as Maria Hassabi, Sarah Michelson, Boris Charmatz, Meg Stuart, Philipp Gehmacher, Adam Linder, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Shelley Lasica and Latai Taumoepeau, The Persistence of Dance traces the relationship between the third-wave and gallery-based work. Looking at these artists highlights how the discussions and practices associated with “conceptual dance” resonate with the categories of conceptual and post-conceptual art as well as with the critical work on the function of visual art categories. Brannigan concludes that within the current post-disciplinary context, there is a persistence of dance and that a model of post-dance exists that encompasses dance as a contemporary art medium.
This book examines international dance performances in New York City in the 1940s as sites in which dance artists and audiences contested what it meant to practice globalism in mid-twentieth-century ...America. Debates over globalism in dance proxied larger cultural struggles over how to reconcile the nation’s new role as a global superpower. In dance as in cultural politics, Americans labored over how to realize diversity while honoring difference and manage dueling impulses toward globalism, on the one hand, and isolationism, on the other.
The Routledge Dance Studies Reader has been expanded and updated, giving readers access to thirty-seven essential texts that address the social, political, cultural, and economic impact of ...globalization on embodiment and choreography.
These interdisciplinary essays in dance scholarship consider a broad range of dance forms in relation to historical, ethnographic, and interdisciplinary research methods including cultural studies, reconstruction, media studies, and popular culture.
This new third edition expands both its geographic and cultural focus to include recent research on dance from Southeast Asia, the People’s Republic of China, indigenous dance, and new sections on market forces and mediatization.
Sections cover:
Methods and approaches
Practice and performance
Dance as embodied ideology
Dance on the market and in the media
Formations of the field.
The Routledge Dance Studies Reader includes essays on concert dance (ballet, modern and postmodern dance, tap, kathak, and classical khmer dance), popular dance (salsa and hip-hop), site-specific performance, digital choreography, and lecture performances. It is a vital resource for anyone interested in understanding dance from a global and contemporary perspective.
An innovative exploration of understanding through dance, Dancing Across the Page draws on the frameworks of phenomenology, feminism and postmodernism to offer readers an understanding of performance ...studies that is grounded in personal narrative and lived experience. Through accounts of contemporary dance making, improvisation and dance education, Karen Barbour explores a diversity of themes, including power, activism, and cultural, gendered and personal identity. An intimate yet rigorous investigation of creativity in dance, Dancing Across the Page emphasizes embodied knowledge and imagination as a basis for creative action in the world.
In east Javanese dance traditions like Beskalan and Ngremo , musicians and dancers negotiate gender through performances where males embody femininity and females embody masculinity. Christina ...Sunardi ventures into the regency of Malang in east Java to study and perform with dancers. Through formal interviews and casual conversation, Sunardi learns about their lives and art. Her work shows how performers continually transform dance traditions to negotiate, and renegotiate, the boundaries of gender and sex--sometimes reinforcing lines of demarcation, sometimes transgressing them, and sometimes doing both simultaneously. But Sunardi's investigation moves beyond performance. It expands notions of the spiritual power associated with female bodies and feminine behavior, and the ways women, men, and waria (male-to-female transvestites) access the magnetic power of femaleness. A journey into understudied regions and ideas, Stunning Males and Powerful Females reveals how performances seemingly fixed by tradition are instead dynamic environments for cultural negotiation and change surrounding questions of sex and gender.
