In recent years, a growth in dance and wellbeing scholarship has resulted in new ways of thinking that place the body, movement, and dance in a central place with renewed significance for wellbeing. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Wellbeing examines dance and related movement practices from the perspectives of neuroscience and health, community and education, and psychology and sociology to contribute towards an understanding of wellbeing, offer new insights into existing practices, and create a space where sufficient exchange is enabled. The handbook's research components include quantitative, qualitative, and arts-based research, covering diverse discourses, methodologies, and perspectives that add to the development of a complete picture of the topic. Throughout the handbook's wide-ranging chapters, the objective observations, felt experiences, and artistic explorations of practitioners interact with and are printed alongside academic chapters to establish an egalitarian and impactful exchange of ideas.

This text offers new ways of understanding dance on the popular screen in new scholarly arguments drawn from dance studies, performance studies, and film and media studies. Through these arguments, it demonstrates how this dance in popular film, television, and online videos can be read and considered through the different bodies and choreographies being shown.

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater collects a critical mass of border-crossing scholarship on the intersections of dance and theatre. Taking corporeality as an idea that unites the work of dance and theater scholars and artists, and embodiment as a negotiation of power dynamics with important stakes, these essays focus on the politics and poetics of the moving body in performance both on and off stage. Contemporary stage performances have sparked global interest in new experiments between dance and theater, and this volume situates this interest in its historical context by extensively investigating other such moments: from pagan mimes of late antiquity to early modern archives to Bolshevik Russia to post-Sandinista Nicaragua to Chinese opera on the international stage, to contemporary flash mobs and television dance contests. Ideologically, the essays investigate critical race theory, affect theory, cognitive science, historiography, dance dramaturgy, spatiality, gender, somatics, ritual, and biopolitics among other modes of inquiry. In terms of aesthetics, they examine many genres such as musical theater, contemporary dance, improvisation, experimental theater, television, African total theater, modern dance, new Indian dance theater aesthetics, philanthroproductions, Butoh, carnival, equestrian performance, tanztheater, Korean Talchum, Nazi Movement Choirs, Lindy Hop, Bomba, Caroline Masques, political demonstrations, and Hip Hop. The volume includes innovative essays from both young and seasoned scholars and scholar/practitioners who are working at the cutting edges of their fields. The handbook brings together essays that offer new insight into well-studied areas, challenge current knowledge, attend to neglected practices or moments in time, and that identify emergent themes. The overall result is a better understanding of the roles of dance and theater in the performative production of meaning.

Dance intersects with ethnicity in a powerful variety of ways and at a broad set of venues. Dance practices and attitudes about ethnicity have sometimes been the source of outright discord, as when African Americans were - and sometimes still are - told that their bodies are 'not right' for ballet, when Anglo Americans painted their faces black to perform in minstrel shows, when 19th century Christian missionaries banned the performance of particular native dance traditions throughout much of Polynesia, and when the Spanish conquistadors and church officials banned sacred Aztec dance rituals. More recently, dance performances became a locus of ethnic disunity in the former Yugoslavia as the Serbs of Bosnia attended dance concerts but only applauded for the Serbian dances, presaging the violent disintegration of that failed state. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity brings together scholars from across the globe in an investigation of what it means to define oneself in an ethnic category and how this category is performed and represented by dance as an ethnicity. Newly-commissioned for the volume, the chapters of the book place a reflective lens on dance and its context to examine the role of dance as performed embodiment of the historical moments and associated lived identities. In bringing modern dance and ballet into the conversation alongside forms more often considered ethnic, the chapters ask the reader to contemplate previous categories of folk, ethnic, classical, and modern. From this standpoint, the book considers how dance maintains, challenges, resists or in some cases evolves new forms of identity based on prior categories. Ultimately, the goal of the book is to acknowledge the depth of research that has been undertaken and to promote continued research and conceptualization of dance and its role in the creation of ethnicity. Dance and ethnicity is an increasingly active area of scholarly inquiry in dance studies and ethnomusicology alike and the need is great for serious scholarship to shape the contours of these debates. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity provides an authoritative and up-to-date survey of original research from leading experts which will set the tone for future scholarly conversation.

In recent years, a growth in dance and wellbeing scholarship has resulted in new ways of thinking that place the body, movement, and dance in a central place with renewed significance for wellbeing. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Wellbeing examines dance and related movement practices fromthe perspectives of neuroscience and health, community and education, and psychology and sociology to contribute towards an understanding of wellbeing, offer new insights into existing practices, and create a space where sufficient exchange is enabled. The handbook's research components includequantitative, qualitative, and arts-based research, covering diverse discourses, methodologies, and perspectives that add to the development of a complete picture of the topic. Throughout the handbook's wide-ranging chapters, the objective observations, felt experiences, and artistic explorations ofpractitioners interact with and are printed alongside academic chapters to establish an egalitarian and impactful exchange of ideas.

This Handbook asks how competition affects the presentation and experience of dance.

From the dance floor of a tango club to group therapy classes, from ballet to community theatre, improvised dance is everywhere. For some dance artists, improvisation is one of many approaches within the choreographic process. For others, it is a performance form in its own right. And while it has long been practiced, it is only within the last twenty years that dance improvisation has become a topic of critical inquiry. With The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance, dancer, teacher, and editor Vida L. Midgelow provides a cutting-edge volume on dance improvisation in all its facets. Expanding beyond conventional dance frameworks, this handbook looks at the ways that dance improvisation practices reflect our ability to adapt, communicate, and respond to our environment. Throughout the handbook, case studies from a variety of disciplines showcase the role of individual agency and collective relationships in improvisation, not just to dancers but to people of all backgrounds and abilities. In doing so, chapters celebrate all forms of improvisation, and unravel the ways that this kind of movement informs understandings of history, socio-cultural conditions, lived experience, cognition, and technologies.