Breaking, popping, locking, waacking, and hip-hop dance are practiced widely in contemporary Vietnam. Considering the dance practices in the larger context of post-socialist transformation, urban restructuring, and changing gender relations, Sandra Kurfürst examines youth's aspirations and desires embodied in dance. Drawing on a rich and diverse range of qualitative data, including interviews, sensory and digital ethnography, she shows how dancers confront social and gender norms while following their passion. As a contribution to area and global studies, the book illuminates the translocal spatialities of hip hop, produced through the circulation of objects and the movement of people.

The authors offer an insightful analysis of the symbiotic relationship between the popular entertainment industry and America's youth, suggest principles for evaluating popular art and entertainment, and propose strategies for rebuilding strong local cultures in the face of global media giants.

This book has systematic directions for those who are creating a dance company for young audiences: how to handle bookings, write effective grants, handle crowds of children, keep their interest high and deal with the unexpected--backstage, or onstage or costume! Important also: how to maintain the support and the appreciation of presenters, teachers and principals. Profiles of ten successful dance companies who perform for children are provided. The book's touring and production information can be applied to almost any performing group that uses the medium of dance to deliver its message--from professional dance companies to university, high school and studio dance performers.

Dancing from the Heart is the first study of gender, globalization, and expressive culture in the Cook Islands. It demonstrates how dance in particular plays a key role in articulating the overlapping local, regional, and transnational agendas of Cook Islanders. Kalissa Alexeyeff reconfigures conventional views of globalization’s impact on indigenous communities, moving beyond diagnoses of cultural erosion and contamination to a grounded exploration of creative agency and vital cultural production. Central to the study is a rich and textured ethnographic account of contemporary Cook Islands dance practice. Based on fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and archival research, it offers an engrossing analysis of how Cook Islands social life is generated through expressive practices. Dance is explored in a variety of settings, including beauty pageants, tourist venues, nightclubs and community celebrations at home and within Cook Islands communities abroad. Contemporary Cook Islands dance practices are also shaped by competing ideas about the past. Debates about precolonial traditions, missionization, and colonialism pervade discussions about dance and expressive culture. Alexeyeff shows how the politics of tradition reflect the competing moral, political, personal, and economic practices of postcolonial Cook Islanders. Throughout the work the stories and voices of individuals are brought to the fore. Their views are juxtaposed with scholarship on tradition, modernity, and social dynamics. Engaging and accessible, Dancing from the Heart illuminates specific and intimate aspects of Cook Islands social life while, at the same time, addressing fundamental questions within anthropology and indigenous, performance, and postcolonial studies.

Dancing out of Line transports readers back to the 1840s, when the craze for social and stage dancing forced Victorians into a complex relationship with the moving body in its most voluble, volatile form. By partnering cultural discourses with representations of the dance and the dancer in novels such as Jane Eyre, Bleak House, and Daniel Deronda, Molly Engelhardt makes explicit many of the ironies underlying Victorian practices that up to this time have gone unnoticed in critical circles. She analyzes the role of the illustrious dance master, who created and disseminated the manners and moves expected of fashionable society, despite his position as a social outsider of nebulous origins. She describes how the daughters of the social elite were expected to “come out” to society in the ballroom, the most potent space in the cultural imagination for licentious behavior and temptation. These incongruities generated new, progressive ideas about the body, subjectivity, sexuality, and health. Engelhardt challenges our assumptions about Victorian sensibilities and attitudes toward the sexual/social roles of men and women by bringing together historical voices from various fields to demonstrate the versatility of the dance, not only as a social practice but also as a forum for Victorians to engage in debate about the body and its pleasures and pathologies.

This book critically examines matters of age and aging in relation to dance. As a novel collection of diverse authors’ voices, this edited book traverses the human lifespan from early childhood to death as it negotiates a breadth of dance experiences and contexts. The conversations ignited within each chapter invite readers to interrogate current disciplinary attitudes and dominant assumptions and serve as catalysts for changing and evolving long entrenched views among dancers regarding matters of age and aging. The text is organized in three sections, each representing a specific context within which dance exists. Section titles include educational contexts, social and cultural contexts, and artistic contexts. Within these broad categories, each contributor’s milieu of lived experiences illuminate age-related factors and their many intersections. While several contributing authors address and problematize the phenomenon of aging in mid-life and beyond, other authors tackle important issues that impact young dancers and dance professionals.

By the 1920s, much of the world was ‘dance mad,’ as dancers from Buenos Aires to Tokyo, from Manchester to Johannesburg and from Chelyabinsk to Auckland, engaged in the Charleston, the foxtrot and a whole host of other fashionable dances. Worlds of social dancing examines how these dance cultures spread around the globe at this time and how they were altered to suit local tastes. As it looks at dance as a ‘social world’, the book explores the social and personal relationships established in encounters on dance floors on all continents. It also acknowledges the impact of radio and (sound) film as well as the contribution of dance teachers, musicians and other entertainment professionals to the making of the new dance culture.