Choreographies of 21st Century Wars
Title | Choreographies of 21st Century Wars PDF eBook |
Author | Gay Morris |
Publisher | |
Pages | |
Release | 2016 |
Genre | Choreography |
ISBN | 9780190201692 |
'Choreographies of 21st Century Wars' addresses the interface between choreography and war in this century. The book challenges concepts of choreography as solely a structuring mechanism and an aesthetics of politics that is exclusively resistant. Instead, in the context of 21st-century war, it calls for a rethinking of choreography that incorporates the disorder and dispersion of power away from nation-states, which is central to this century. The collection is composed of an introduction and sixteen essays by individual authors who work across a number of disciplines through field notes, case studies, participant observations, and photographs, as well as essays reflecting on war issues and their relationship to choreographic practices.
Choreographies of 21st Century Wars
Title | Choreographies of 21st Century Wars PDF eBook |
Author | Gay Morris |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 385 |
Release | 2016 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0190201665 |
Wars in this century are radically different from the major conflicts of the 20th century--more amorphous, asymmetrical, globally connected, and unending. Choreographies of 21st Century Wars is the first book to analyze the interface between choreography and wars in this century, a pertinent inquiry since choreography has long been linked to war and military training. The book draws on recent political theory that posits shifts in the kinds of wars occurring since the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War, all of which were wars between major world powers. Given the dominance of today's more indeterminate, asymmetrical, less decisive wars, we ask if choreography, as an organizing structure and knowledge system, might not also need revision in order to reflect on, and intercede in, a globalized world of continuous warfare. In an introduction and sixteen chapters, authors from a number of disciplines investigate how choreography and war in this century impinge on each other. Choreographers write of how they have related to contemporary war in specific works, while other contributors investigate the interconnections between war and choreography through theatrical works, dances, military rituals and drills, the choreography of video war games and television shows. Issues investigated include torture and terror, the status of war refugees, concerns surrounding fighting and peacekeeping soldiers, national identity tied to military training, and more. The anthology is of interest to scholars in dance, performance, theater, and cultural studies, as well as the social sciences.
The Againness of Vietnam in Contemporary United States Antiwar Choreography
Title | The Againness of Vietnam in Contemporary United States Antiwar Choreography PDF eBook |
Author | Jessica Spring Dellecave |
Publisher | |
Pages | 252 |
Release | 2015 |
Genre | Choreography |
ISBN | 9781339183305 |
The Againness of Vietnam in Contemporary United States Antiwar Choreography examines eight twentieth- and twenty-first century postmodern antiwar choreographies in order to uncover the reverberations of Vietnam antiwar protests in these dances. The choreographies I examine in this study are Yvonne Rainer's 1970 M-Walk and 1970 (and 1999) Trio A with Flags, Wendy Rogers' 1970 Black Maypole, Ann Carlson's 1990 Flag and 2006 Too Beautiful A Day, Miguel Gutierrez's 2001, 2008, and 2009 Freedom of Information (FOI), Jeff McMahon's 1991 Scatter and Victoria Mark's 2006 Action Conversations: Veterans. I theorize a concept called "againness," in order to think through the multiple ways that repetitions specific to these particular choreographies continue to exist and to enact effects through time. I argue that repeated choreographic embodiment offers immediacy, nuanced response over time, expression through the bodies of former soldiers, and sites of mediated resistance such as live-streamed dance protest, to the United States public's commentary on and critique of war. I conclude that choreography's irregular and inexact repetitions are one of the ways that dance is especially apt for commenting on the large, never-ending, and ongoing traumas of the world such as war. My research extends established discussions about choreographic repetition and ephemerality, exchanging in questions of exactitude for conversations about impact. In particular, I show how the changes inherent to bodily repetitions reflect societal change, raise energy, garner power, and/or respond to current events. I study how politicized dances do not disappear after the time/space event of the initial performance, but instead linger on and reappear in unexpected moments. I thus parse out the many unbounded ways that protest choreographies happen again and again.
Dancers as Diplomats
Title | Dancers as Diplomats PDF eBook |
Author | Clare Croft |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 273 |
Release | 2015-02-03 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 0199958203 |
Dancers as Diplomats chronicles the role of dance and dancers in American cultural diplomacy. In the early decades of the Cold War and the twenty-first century, American dancers toured the globe on tours sponsored by the US State Department. Dancers as Diplomats tells the story of how these tours shaped and some times re-imagined ideas of the United States in unexpected, often sensational circumstances-pirouetting in Moscow as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded and dancing in Burma shortly before the country held its first democratic elections. Based on more than seventy interviews with dancers who traveled on the tours, the book looks at a wide range of American dance companies, among them New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Martha Graham Dance Company, Urban Bush Women, ODC/Dance, Ronald K. Brown/Evidence, and the Trey McIntyre Project, among others. During the Cold War, companies danced everywhere from the Soviet Union to Vietnam, just months before the US abandoned Saigon. In the post 9/11 era, dance companies traveled to Asia and Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.
Dance and Politics
Title | Dance and Politics PDF eBook |
Author | Alexandra Kolb |
Publisher | Peter Lang |
Pages | 382 |
Release | 2011 |
Genre | Dance |
ISBN | 9783039118489 |
This is the first anthology to explore the fertile intersection of dance and political studies. It offers new perspectives on the connections of dance to governmental, state and party politics, war, nationalism, activism, terrorism, human rights, political ideologies and cultural policy. This cutting-edge book features previously unpublished work by leading scholars of dance, theatre, politics, and management, alongside renowned contemporary choreographers, who propose innovative ways of looking at twentieth- and twenty-first-century dance. Topics covered range across the political spectrum: from dance tendencies under fascism to the use of choreography for revolutionary socialist ends; from the capacity of dance to reflect the modern market economy to its function in campaigns for peace and justice. The book also contains a comprehensive introduction to the relations between dance and politics.
Mr. B
Title | Mr. B PDF eBook |
Author | Jennifer Homans |
Publisher | Random House |
Pages | 817 |
Release | 2022-11-01 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 0812994310 |
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • “A fascinating read about a true genius and his unrelenting thirst for beauty in art and in life.”—MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography and the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Baillie Gifford Prize Based on a decade of unprecedented research, the first major biography of George Balanchine, a broad-canvas portrait set against the backdrop of the tumultuous century that shaped the man The New York Times called “the Shakespeare of dancing”—from the bestselling author of Apollo’s Angels New York Times Editors’ Choice • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, NPR, Oprah Daily Arguably the greatest choreographer who ever lived, George Balanchine was one of the cultural titans of the twentieth century—The New York Times called him “the Shakespeare of dancing.” His radical approach to choreography—and life—reinvented the art of ballet and made him a legend. Written with enormous style and artistry, and based on more than one hundred interviews and research in archives across Russia, Europe, and the Americas, Mr. B carries us through Balanchine’s tumultuous and high-pitched life story and into the making of his extraordinary dances. Balanchine’s life intersected with some of the biggest historical events of his century. Born in Russia under the last czar, Balanchine experienced the upheavals of World War I, the Russian Revolution, exile, World War II, and the Cold War. A co-founder of the New York City Ballet, he pressed ballet in America to the forefront of modernism and made it a popular art. None of this was easy, and we see his loneliness and failures, his five marriages—all to dancers—and many loves. We follow his bouts of ill health and spiritual crises, and learn of his profound musical skills and sensibility and his immense determination to make some of the most glorious, strange, and beautiful dances ever to grace the modern stage. With full access to Balanchine’s papers and many of his dancers, Jennifer Homans, the dance critic for The New Yorker and a former dancer herself, has spent more than a decade researching Balanchine’s life and times to write a vast history of the twentieth century through the lens of one of its greatest artists: the definitive biography of the man his dancers called Mr. B.
Moving Modernism
Title | Moving Modernism PDF eBook |
Author | Nell Andrew |
Publisher | Oxford University Press, USA |
Pages | 257 |
Release | 2020 |
Genre | Music |
ISBN | 0190057270 |
"Moving Modernism reenacts the simultaneous eruption of three spectacular revolutions, the development of pictorial abstraction, the first modern dance, and the birth of cinema, which together changed the artistic landscape of early-twentieth-century Europe and the future of modern art. Rather than a book about dancing pictures or about pictures of dancing, however, this study follows the chronology of the historical avant-garde to show how dance and pictures were engaged in a kindred exploration of the limits of art and perception that required the process of abstraction. Recovering performances, working methods, and circles of aesthetic influence and reception for avant-garde dance pioneers and experimental filmmakers from the turn of the century to the interwar period, Moving Modernism challenges to modernism's medium-specific frameworks by demonstrating the significant role played by the arts of motion in the historical avant-garde's development of abstraction: from the turn-of-the-century dancer Loïe Fuller who awakened in symbolist artists the possibility of prolonged or suspended vision; to cubo-futurist and neo-symbolist artists who reached pure abstraction in tandem with the radical dance theory and performance of Valentine de Saint-Point; Sophie Taeuber's hybrid Dadaism between art and dance; to Akarova, a prolific choreographer linked to Belgian constructivism, whose pioneers called her dance "music architecture," "living geometry," and "pure plastics"; and finally to the dancing images of early cinematic abstraction from Edison and the Lumières to Hans Richter, Fernand Léger and Germaine Dulac. Each chapter reveals abstraction's emergence not only as a formal strategy but as an apparatus of creation, perception, and reception deployed across artistic media toward shared modernist goals. Focusing on abstraction's productive rather than reproductive value, Andrew argues that abstraction can be worked like a muscle, a medium through which habits of reception and perception are broken and art's viewers engaged by the kinaesthetic sensation to move and be moved"--