How does the moving, dancing body engage with the materials, textures, atmospheres, and affects of the sites through which we move and in which we live, work and play? How might embodied movement practice explore some of these relations and bring us closer to the complexities of sites and lived environments? This book brings together perspectives from site dance, phenomenology, and new materialism to explore and develop how ‘site-based body practice’ can be employed to explore synergies between material bodies and material sites. Employing practice-as-research strategies, scores, tasks and exercises the book presents a number of suggestions for engaging with sites through the moving body and offers critical reflection on the potential enmeshments and entanglements that emerge as a result. The theoretical discussions and practical explorations presented will appeal to researchers, movement practitioners, artists, academics and individuals interested in exploring their lived environments through the moving body and the entangled human-nonhuman relations that emerge as a result.

Dance and Organisation is the first comprehensive work to integrate dance theory and methods into the study of management, which have developed an interest in the arts and the humanities. Dance represents dynamics and change and puts the moving body at the centre, which has been ignored and oppressed by traditional management theory. ‘Being’ a leader however also means to ‘move’ like one, and critical lessons can be learned from ballerinas and modern dancers. Leadership is a dialogue, as in the work of musicians, conductors and DJs who manage groups without words. Movement in organisational space, in a museum or a techno club can be understood as a choreography and site-specific performance. Movement also is practically used for leadership and employee development workshops and can be deployed as an organisational research method. By taking a firm interdisciplinary stance in dance studies and organisational research to explore management topics, reflecting on practitioner accounts and research projects, the book seeks to make an innovative contribution to our understanding of the moving body, generating new insights on teamwork, leadership, gender in management, organisational space, training and research methods. It comprises an important contribution to the organizational behaviour and critical management studies disciplines, and looks to push the boundaries of the academic literature.

Dance’s Duet with the Camera: Motion Pictures is a collection of essays written by various authors on the relationship between live dance and film. Chapters cover a range of topics that explore dance film, contemporary dance with film on stage, dance as an ideal medium to be captured by 3D images and videodance as kin to site-specific choreography. This book explores the ways in which early practitioners such as Loïe Fuller and Maya Deren began a conversation between media that has continued to evolve and yet still retains certain unanswered questions. Methodology for this conversation includes dance historical approaches as well as mechanical considerations. The camera is a partner, a disembodied portion of self that looks in order to reflect on, to mirror, or to presage movement. This conversation includes issues of sexuality, race, and mixed ability. Bodies and lenses share equal billing.

Moving Sites explores site-specific dance practice through a combination of analytical essays and practitioner accounts of their working processes. In offering this joint effort of theory and practice, it aims to provide dance academics, students and practitioners with a series of discussions that shed light both on approaches to making this type of dance practice, and evaluating and reflecting on it. The edited volume combines critical thinking from a range of perspectives including commentary and observation from the fields of dance studies, human geography and spatial theory in order to present interdisciplinary discourse and a range of critical and practice-led lenses through which this type of work can be considered and explored. In so doing, this book addresses the following questions: · How do choreographers make site-specific dance performance? · What occurs when a moving body engages with site, place and environment? · How might we interpret, analyse and evaluate this type of dance practice through a range of theoretical lenses? · How can this type of practice inform wider discussions of embodiment, site, space, place and environment? This innovative and exciting book seeks to move beyond description and discussion of site-specific dance as a spectacle or novelty and considers site-dance as a valid and vital form of contemporary dance practice that explores, reflects, disrupts, contests and develops understandings and practices of inhabiting and engaging with a range of sites and environments. Dr Victoria Hunter is Senior Lecturer in Dance at the University of Chichester.

Tango and the Dancing Body in Istanbul explores the expansion of social Argentine tango dancing among Muslim actors in Turkey, pioneered in Istanbul despite the conservative rule of the Justice and Development Party (JDP) and Tayyip Erdoğan. In this book, Melin Levent Yuna questions why a dance that appears to publicly represent an erotic relationship finds space to expand and increase dramatically in the number of contemporary Turkish Muslim tango dancers, particularly during a conservative rule. Even during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, tango dance classes, gatherings, and messages flourished on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Zoom. Urban Turkey and its tango dance performances provide one symbol and example of how neoliberal capitalism could go hand in hand with conservatism by becoming a bridge between Europe and the Middle East. This study largely focuses on the dancers’ perspective while presenting the policies of Erdoğan. It presents the social characteristics of the tango dancers, the meanings they attach to their bodies and their dance as well as what this dance reflects about them – besides the policies of the Justice and Development Party. The book approaches the tango dance and its dancing body in terms of layers of meaning systems in a neoliberal and conservative context. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in dance, anthropology, cultural studies, and performance studies.

This book, with its focus on the dancing body, is the first of its kind within the larger context of dance in India. The Dancing Body is a body that exists, survives, inhabits and performs in multiple space and time, by moving, laboring, migrating and straddling across geographic, cultural and emotional borders, writing different cultural meanings at different moments of time. In India, discourses around the body in dance have long been trapped within hagiographic histories in and around dancers and their dance. During the last few decades, however, significant scholarly inroads were made into the domain of dance by shaking up the stereotypes, assertions and labels, shaped and moulded by patriarchy, class, caste and power. This book brings together emerging discourses around dance and the body that have become central in the Indian nation-state. Contemporary discourses around identity politics, moral policing, politics of exclusion, and neo-liberal dispossessions vis a vis sexual labour, means of survival, pleasure and agency of dancers have helped frame the focus around labour, leisure and livelihood concerning the everyday existence of the body in dance. This volume will be of great value to students, researchers and scholars in dance, gender studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, with a particular interest in Asian and South Asian Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of South Asian History and Culture. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

Dance occupies a prestigious place in Indian performing arts, yet it curiously, to a large extent, has remained outside the arena of academic discourse. This book documents and celebrates the emergence of contemporary dance practice in India. Incorporating a multidisciplinary approach, it includes contributions from scholars, writers and commentators as well as short essays and interviews with Indian artists and performers; the latter add personal perspectives and insights to the broad themes discussed. Young Indian dance artists are courageously charting out new trajectories in dance, diverging from the time-worn paths of tradition. The classical forms of Bharatnatyam, Kathak, Odissi and Manipuri, to name a few, are rich resources for choreographers exploring contemporary dance. This volume speaks about their struggles of working within and outside tradition as they grapple with national and international audience expectations as well as their own values and sense of identity. The artists represented here continue to question the uneasy relationship that exists between the insular world of dance and outside reality. Simultaneously, they are actively creating new dance languages that are both articulate in a performative context and demand examination by researchers and critics.