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.

If much of what we teach and come to know from within the disciplinary regime of Dance Studies is founded on a certain kind of mastery, what scope is there to challenge, criticize and undo this knowledge from within the academy, as well as through productive encounters with its margins? This volume contributes to a growing discourse on the potential of dance and dancers to affect change, politics and situational awareness, as well as to traverse disciplinary boundaries. It ‘undisciplines’ academic thinking through its organisation into ‘movements’ and ‘stumbles’, reinforcing its theme through its structure as well as its content, addressing contemporary dance and performance practices and pedagogies from a range of research perspectives and registers. Turbulent and vertiginous events on the world stage necessitate new ways of thinking and acting. This book makes strides towards a new kind of research which creates alternative modes for perceiving, experiencing and making. Through writings and images, its contributions offer different perspectives on how to rethink disciplinarity through choreographic practices, somatics, a reimagining of dance techniques, indigenous ontologies, choreopolitics, critical dance pedagogies and visual performance languages.

""I am not a propagandist," declared the matriarch of American modern dance Martha Graham while on her State Department funded-tour in 1955. Graham's claim inspires questions: the United States government exported Graham and her company internationally to over twenty-seven countries in Europe, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Near and Far East, and Russia representing every seated president from Dwight D. Eisenhower through Ronald Reagan, and planned under George H.W. Bush. Although in the diplomatic field, she was titled "The Picasso of modern dance," and "Forever Modern" in later years, Graham proclaimed, "I am not a modernist." During the Cold War, the reconfigured history of modernism as apolitical in its expression of "the heart and soul of mankind," suited political needs abroad. In addition, she declared, "I am not a feminist," yet she intersected with politically powerful women from Eleanor Roosevelt, Eleanor Dulles, sister of Eisenhower's Dulles brothers in the State Department and CIA, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Betty Ford, and political matriarch Barbara Bush. While bringing religious characters on the frontier and biblical characters to the stage in a battle against the atheist communists, Graham explained, "I am not a missionary." Her work promoted the United States as modern, culturally sophisticated, racially and culturally integrated. To her abstract and mythic works, she added the trope of the American frontier. With her tours and Cold War modernism, Graham demonstrates the power of the individual, immigrants, republicanism, and, ultimately freedom from walls and metaphorical fences with cultural diplomacy with the unfettered language of movement and dance"--

This collection of new essays explores connections between dance, modernism, and modernity by examining the ways in which leading dancers have responded to modernity. Burt and Huxley examine dance examples from a period beginning just before the First World War and extending to the mid-1950s, ranging across not only mainland Europe and the United States but also Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific Asian region, and the UK. They consider a wide range of artists, including Akarova, Gertrude Colby, Isadora Duncan, Katherine Dunham, Margaret H’Doubler, Hanya Holm, Michio Ito, Kurt Jooss, Wassily Kandinsky, Margaret Morris, Berto Pasuka, Uday Shankar, Antony Tudor, and Mary Wigman. The authors explore dancers’ responses to modernity in various ways, including within the contexts of natural dancing and transnationalism. This collection asks questions about how, in these places and times, dancing developed and responded to the experience of living in modern times, or even came out of an ambivalence about or as a reaction against it. Ideal for students and practitioners of dance and those interested in new modernist studies, Dance, Modernism, and Modernity considers the development of modernism in dance as an interdisciplinary and global phenomenon.

The book explores the revolutionary impact of modern dance on European culture in the early twentieth century. Edward Ross Dickinson uncovers modern dance's place in the emerging 'mass' culture of the modern metropolis and reveals the connections between dance, politics, culture, religion, the arts, psychology, entertainment, and selfhood.

The First World War in Computer Games analyses the depiction of combat, the landscape of the trenches, and concepts of how the war ended through computer games. This book explores how computer games are at the forefront of new representations of the First World War.

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.