The Dancer's World 1920-1945 focuses on modern dancers as they saw themselves. Five chapters describe a narrative arc that encompasses Europe and the USA with a focus between 1920 and 1945. A final chapter considers contemporary relevance for dancers, dance artists, choreographers, dance students and scholars alike.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Winner of the CORD Outstanding Publication Award (2012) In postwar America, any assertion of difference from the mainstream anticommunist culture carried professional and personal risks. For this reason, modern dance artists left much of what they thought unsaid. Instead they expressed themselves in movement. How To Do Things with Dance positions modern dance as a vital critical discourse, and suggests that dances of the late 1940s and the 1950s can be seen as compelling agents of social change. Concentrating on choreographers whose artistic work conceived dance in terms of action, Rebekah J. Kowal shows how specific choreographic projects demonstrated increasing awareness of the stage as a penetrable space, one on which socially suspect or marginalized modes of being could be performed with relative impunity and exerted in the real world. Artists covered include Martha Graham, José Limón, Anna Sokolow, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Donald McKayle, Talley Beatty, and Anna Halprin. Ebook Edition Note: All images have been redacted.

A dance critic's essays on post-modern dance. Drawing on the postmodern perspective and concerns that informed her groundbreaking Terpischore in Sneakers, Sally Bane's Writing Dancing documents the background and development of avant-garde and popular dance, analyzing individual artists, performances, and entire dance movements. With a sure grasp of shifting cultural dynamics, Banes shows how postmodern dance is integrally connected to other oppositional, often marginalized strands of dance culture, and considers how certain kinds of dance move from the margins to the mainstream. Banes begins by considering the act of dance criticism itself, exploring its modes, methods, and underlying assumptions and examining the work of other critics. She traces the development of contemporary dance from the early work of such influential figures as Merce Cunningham and George Balanchine to such contemporary choreographers as Molissa Fenley, Karole Armitage, and Michael Clark. She analyzes the contributions of the Judson Dance Theatre and the Workers' Dance League, the emergence of Latin postmodern dance in New York, and the impact of black jazz in Russia. In addition, Banes explores such untraditional performance modes as breakdancing and the "drunk dancing" of Fred Astaire.

An original and valuable intervention in the fast-growing field of feminist and new art histories, Nancy Spero, Encounters offers a sophisticated interpretation of the work of a highly original and under-represented woman artist. The study proposes a new model of comparatism within the field of visual studies, mirroring and complementing Spero's dialogic manner of working. Basing her analyses on extensive research and multiple face-to-face interviews with the artist, Joanna Walker examines how a selection of the artists and art forms Spero cited offer significant points of comparison with her work. Walker presents Spero's encounters with the art of Ana Mendieta; with the poetry of the American poet H.D.; with the dance of Isadora Duncan; and, turning the lens back on Spero as subject, with the portraits of the artist by Abe Frajndlich. Also included are transcripts of Walker's interviews with the artist, and a listing of the books contained in Spero's personal library which informed her practice. Not only does this book cast well-deserved light on an artist who spent most of her career on the margins of the mainstream - it reverses genealogies and revises the traditional remit of the art historical monograph through both its structure and content.