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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Grand Union was a leaderless improvisation group in SoHo in the 1970s that included people who became some of the biggest names in postmodern dance: Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, ...Barbara Dilley, David Gordon, and Douglas Dunn. Together they unleashed a range of improvised forms from peaceful movement explorations to wildly imaginative collective fantasies. This book delves into the collective genius of Grand Union and explores their process of deep play. Drawing on hours of archival videotapes, Wendy Perron seeks to understand the ebb and flow of the performances. Includes 65 photographs.
Los bailarines y las bailarinas de danza clásica entrenan rigurosamente para alcanzar el mayor grado técnico y artístico de calidad en sus ejercicios. Entre los que conforman sus entrenamientos están ...los de barra, siendo los battement jeté en sus diferentes formas de ejecución, los encargados del movimiento de acción de los pies-piemas. El objetivo del estudio es crear y validar una herramienta de observación ad hoc que permita evaluar el ejercicio del battement jeté; en su diseño se utilizó una combinación de formato de campo y sistemas de categorías exhaustivas y mutuamente excluyentes (E/ME). El instrumento se compone de 5 criterios y un total de 66 categorías distribuidas de la siguiente forma: 31 en tren inferior, 8 en tren superior, 13 para cabeza/mirada, 5 en dirección espacial y 9 para las cuentas musicales. La muestra del estudio estuvo conformada por 10 bailarines/as, ocho mujeres y dos hombres, todos con estudios profesionales en danza clásica finalizados. Se llevó a cabo un análisis de Calidad del Dato y un análisis de Generalizabilidad con los programas HOISAN y SAGT vl.O respectivamente. La fiabilidad de los observadores se obtuvo mediante el cálculo de los coeficientes de correlación Pearson, Spearman y Tau b de Kendall; y mediante el índice de concordancia Kappa de Cohen y concordancia canónica de Krippendorf. Los resultados mostraron índices adecuados de correlación, así como excelentes resultados de la Generalizabilidad con un valor G relativo y G absoluto de 1.00 en el acuerdo interobservador y 1.00 para el acuerdo intraobservador, demostrando que la herramienta de observación para el ejercicio del battement jeté en la danza clásica presenta una adecuada precisión, fiabilidad y validez. Se hace un análisis de invarianza y no se evidencian diferencias significativas en los resultados por razón de sexo en el uso de la herramienta de observación.
Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in New York and Dakar, this book explores the Senegalese dance-rhythms Sabar from the research position of a dance student. It features a comparative ...analysis of the pedagogical techniques used in dance classes in New York and Dakar, which in turn shed light on different aesthetics and understandings of dance, as well as different ways of learning, in each context. Pointing to a loose network of teachers and students who travel between New York and Dakar around the practice of West African dance forms, the author discusses how this movement is maintained, what role the imagination plays in mobilizing participants and how the 'cultural flow' of the dances is 'punctuated' by national borders and socio-economic relationships. She explores the different meanings articulated around Sabar's transatlantic movement and examines how the dance floor provides the grounds for contested understandings, socio-economic relationships and broader discourses to be re-choreographed in each setting.
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