While the body appears in almost all cultural discourses, it is nowhere as visible as in dance. This book captures the resurgence of the dancing body in the second half of the twentieth century by introducing students to the key phenomenological, kinaesthetic and psychological concepts relevant to both theatre and dance studies.

A 'living history' of dance through the writings of its greatest innovators.

The Natyasastra is the deep repository of Indian performance studies. It embodies centuries of performance knowledge developed in South Asia on a range of conceptual issues and practical methodologies of the body. The composition of the Natyasastra is attributed to Sage Bharatha, and dates back to between 200 BC and AD 200. Written in Sanskrit, the text contains 6000 verse stanzas integrated in 36 chapters discussing a wide range of issues in theatre arts, including dramatic composition; construction of the playhouse; detailed analysis of the musical scales; body movements; various types of acting; directing; division of stage space; costumes; make-up; properties and musical instruments. As a discourse on performance, the Natyasastra is an extensive documentation of terminologies, concepts and methodologies. This book presents 14 scholarly essays exploring the Natyasastra from the multiple perspectives of Indian performance studies--epistemological, aesthetic, scientific, religious, ethnological and practical.

This book takes its point of departure from the overwhelming interest in theories of the body and performativity in sociology and cultural studies in recent years. It explores a variety of ways of looking at dance as a social and artistic (bodily) practice as a means of generating insights into the politics of identity and difference as they are situated and traced through representations of the body and bodily practices. These issues are addressed through a series of case studies.

Judson Dance Theater involved such collaborators as Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Carolee Schneemann, Trisha Brown, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor, et al.

Shakespeare's texts have a long and close relationship with many different types of dance, from dance forms referenced in the plays to adaptations across many genres today. With contributions from experienced and emerging scholars, this handbook provides a concise reference on dance as both an integral feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and as a means of translating Shakespearean text into movement - a process that raises questions of authorship and authority, cross-cultural communication, semantics, embodiment, and the relationship between word and image. Motivated by growing interest in movement, materiality, and the body, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance is the first collection to examine the relationship between William Shakespeare - his life, works, and afterlife - and dance. In the handbook's first section - Shakespeare and Dance - authors consider dance within the context of early modern life and culture and investigate Shakespeare's use of dance forms within his writing. The latter half of the handbook - Shakespeare as Dance - explores the ways that choreographers have adapted Shakespeare's work. Chapters address everything from narrative ballet adaptations to dance in musicals, physical theater adaptations, and interpretations using non-Western dance forms such as Cambodian traditional dance or igal, an indigenous dance form from the southern Philippines. With a truly interdisciplinary approach, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance provides an indispensable resource for considerations of dance and corporeality on Shakespeare's stage and the early modern era.

This comprehensive, interdisciplinary collection, examines disability from a theoretical perspective, challenging views of disability that dominate mainstream thinking. Throughout, social theories of disability intersect with ideas associated with sex/gender, race/ethnicity, class and nation.

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.

Kinaesthesia and Visual Self-reflection in Contemporary Dance features interviews with UK-based professional-level contemporary, ballet, hip hop, and breaking dancers and cross-disciplinary explication of kinaesthesia and visual self-reflection discourses. Expanding on the concept of a ‘kinaesthetic mode of attention’ leads to discussion of some of the key values and practices which nurture and develop this mode in contemporary dance. Zooming in on entanglements with video self-images in dance practice provides further insights regarding kinaesthesia’s historicised polarisation with the visual. It thus provides opportunities to dwell on and reconsider reflections, opening up to a set of playful yet disruptive diffractions inherent in the process of becoming a contemporary dancer, particularly amongst an increasingly complex landscape of visual and theoretical technologies.