Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia's most popular cultural forms cinema and dance historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, sexuality, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies, the book considers the "women's question" via new mobilities corpo-realized by dancing women. Some of the central figures animating this corporeal history are Azurie, Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, Helen, Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit, and Saroj Khan, whose performance histories fold and intersect with those of other dancing women, including devadasis and tawaifs, Eurasian actresses, oriental dancers, vamps, choreographers, and backup dancers. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance, theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration, such as the "choreomusicking body" and "dance musicalization," aesthetic approaches to embodiment drawing on treatises like the Natya Sastra and the Abhinaya Darpana, and formal analyses of cine-choreographic "techno-spectacles," Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. Tracing the gestural genealogies of film dance produces a very different narrative of Bombay cinema, and indeed of South Asian cultural modernities, by way of a corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.

This study examines the transmission and transformation of commonplace wisdom in Renaissance humanism by tracing a series of filiations between classical sayings, anecdotes, and exampes and Renaissance poems, essays, and fictions. The circulation of commonplaces can be understood either as a process of reanimation and revitalization, where frozen sayings thaw out and come to life, or conversely as a process of immobilization and incrustation that petrifies tradition. The paradigmatic figure for this process is the proverbial dance around the well, which expresses both the danger and the compulsion of borrowed speech.

This book provides a comprehensive account of mosaics in the ancient world from the early pebble mosaics of Greece to the pavements of Christian churches in the East. Separate chapters in Part I cover the principal regions of the Roman Empire in turn, in order to bring out the distinctive characteristics of their mosaic workshops. Questions of technique and production, of the role of mosaics in architecture, and of their social functions and implications are treated in Part II. The book discusses both well-known works and recent finds, and balances consideration of exceptional masterpieces against standard workshop production. Two main lines of approach are followed throughout: first, the role of mosaics as a significant art form, which over an unbroken span illuminates the evolution of pictorial style better than any comparable surviving medium; and secondly, their character as works of artisan production closely linked to their architectural context.

Meke, a traditional rhythmic dance accompanied by singing, signifies an important piece of identity for Fijians. Despite its complicated history of colonialism, racism, censorship, and religious conflict, meke remained a vital part of artistic expression and culture. Evadne Kelly performs close readings of the dance in relation to an evolving landscape, following the postcolonial reclamation that provided dancers with political agency and a strong sense of community that connected and fractured Fijians worldwide. Through extensive archival and ethnographic fieldwork in both Fiji and Canada, Kelly offers key insights into an underrepresented dance form, region, and culture. Her perceptive analysis of meke will be of interest in dance studies, postcolonial and Indigenous studies, anthropology and performance ethnography, and Pacific Island studies.

"Over 35 projects and ideas for indoor and outdoor mosaics, including frames, pots, boxes, paving stones, and a splashback"--Cover.