'...full credit to Thomas and Macmillan for embarking on such a worthwhile venture - Dance Research I have already found the Thomas edition of enormous value in teaching both undergraduates and postgraduates, from the perspectives of dance anthropology, ethnography and theatre dance analysis - Theresa Buckland, Department of Dance Studies, University of Surrey This unique collection of papers, written specially for this volume, explores the aspects of the ways in which dance and gender intersect in a variety of cultural contexts, from social and disco dance to performance dance, to the Hollywood musical and dances from different cultures. The contributors come from a broad range of disciplines, such as cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, dance studies, film studies, and journalism. They bring to the book a wide body of ideas and approaches, including feminism, psychoanalysis, ethnography and subcultural theory. List of Plates - Preface to the 1995 Reprint - Notes on the Contributors - Introduction - PART 1: CULTURAL STUDIES - Dance, Gender and Culture; T.Polhumus - Dancing in the Dark: Rationalism and the Neglect of Social Dance; A.Ward - Ballet, Gender and Cultural Power; C.J.Novack - 'I Seem to Find the Happiness I Seek': Heterosexuality and Dance in the Musical; R.Dyer - PART 2: ETHNOGRAPHY - An-Other Voice: Young Women Dancing and Talking; H.Thomas - Gender Interchangeability among the Tiwi; A.Grau - 'Saturday Night Fever': An Ethnography of Disco Dancing; D.Walsh - Classical Indian Dance and Women's Status; J.L.Hanna - PART 3: THEORY/CRITICISM - Dance, Feminism and the Critique of the Visual; R.Copeland - 'You put your left foot in, then you shake it all about ...': Excursions and Incursions into Feminism and Bausch's Tanztheater; A.Sanchez-Colberg - 'She might pirouette on a daisy and it would not bend': Images of Femininity and Dance Appreciation; L-A.Sayers - Still Dancing Downwards and Talking Back; Z.Oyortey - The Anxiety of Dance Performance; V.Rimmer - Index

Driven by exacting methods and hard data, this volume reveals gender dynamics within the dance world in the twenty-first century. It provides concrete evidence about how gender impacts the daily lives of dancers, choreographers, directors, educators, and students through surveys, interviews, analyses of data from institutional sources, and action research studies. Dancers, dance artists, and dance scholars from the United States, Australia, and Canada discuss equity in three areas: concert dance, the studio, and higher education. The chapters provide evidence of bias, stereotyping, and other behaviors that are often invisible to those involved, as well as to audiences. The contributors answer incisive questions about the role of gender in various aspects of the field, including physical expression and body image, classroom experiences and pedagogy, and performance and funding opportunities. The findings reveal how inequitable practices combined with societal pressures can create environments that hinder health, happiness, and success. At the same time, they highlight the individuals working to eliminate discrimination and open up new possibilities for expression and achievement in studios, choreography, performance venues, and institutions of higher education. The dance community can strive to eliminate discrimination, but first it must understand the status quo for gender in the dance world. Wendy Oliver, professor of dance at Providence College, is coeditor of Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches. Doug Risner, professor of dance at Wayne State University, is coeditor of Hybrid Lives of Teaching Artists in Dance and Theatre Arts: A Critical Reader. Contributors: Gareth Belling | Karen Bond | Carolyn Hebert | Eliza Larson | Pamela S. Musil | Wendy Oliver | Katherine Polasek | Doug Risner | Emily Roper | Karen Schupp | Jan Van Dyke

Queer Dance challenges social norms and enacts queer coalition across the LGBTQ community. The book joins forces with feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial work to consider how bodies are forces of social change.

Gender and Dance in Modern Iran: Biopolitics on Stage investigates the ways dancing bodies have been providing evidence for competing representations of modernity, urbanism, and religiosity across the twentieth century. Focusing on the transformation of the staged dancing body, its space of performance, and spectatorial cultural ideology, this book traces the dancing body in multiple milieus of performance, including the Pahlavi era’s national artistic scene and the popular café and cabaret stages, as well as the commercial cinematic screen and the post-revolutionary Islamized theatrical stage. It links the socio-political discourses on performance with the staged public dancer, in order to interrogate the formation of dominant categories of "modern," "high," and "artistic," and the subsequent "othering" of cultural realms that were discursively peripheralized from the "national" stage. Through the study of archival and ethnographic research as well as a diverse literature pertaining to music, theater, cinema, and popular culture, it combines a close reading of primary sources such as official documents, press materials, and program notes with visual analysis of filmic materials and imageries, as well as interviews with practitioners. It offers an original and informed exploration into the ways performing bodies and their public have been associated with binary notions of vice and virtue, morality and immorality, commitment and degeneration, chastity and eroticism, and veiled-ness and nakedness. Engaging with a range of methodological and historiographical methods, including postcolonial, performance, and feminist studies, this book is a valuable resource for students and scholars of Middle East history and Iranian studies, as well as gender studies and dance and performance studies.

Dance is more than an aesthetic of life – dance embodies life. This is evident from the social history of jive, the marketing of trans-national ballet, ritual healing dances in Italy or folk dances performed for tourists in Mexico, Panama and Canada. Dance often captures those essential dimensions of social life that cannot be easily put into words. What are the flows and movements of dance carried by migrants and tourists? How is dance used to shape nationalist ideology? What are the connections between dance and ethnicity, gender, health, globalization and nationalism, capitalism and post-colonialism? Through innovative and wide-ranging case studies, the contributors explore the central role dance plays in culture as leisure commodity, cultural heritage, cultural aesthetic or cathartic social movement.

In east Javanese dance traditions like Beskalan and Ngremo, musicians and dancers negotiate gender through performances where males embody femininity and females embody masculinity. Christina Sunardi ventures into the regency of Malang in east Java to study and perform with dancers. Through formal interviews and casual conversation, Sunardi learns about their lives and art. Her work shows how performers continually transform dance traditions to negotiate, and renegotiate, the boundaries of gender and sex--sometimes reinforcing lines of demarcation, sometimes transgressing them, and sometimes doing both simultaneously. But Sunardi's investigation moves beyond performance. It expands notions of the spiritual power associated with female bodies and feminine behavior, and the ways women, men, and waria (males who dress and live as female) access the magnetic power of femaleness. A journey into understudied regions and ideas, Stunning Males and Powerful Females reveals how performances seemingly fixed by tradition are instead dynamic environments for cultural negotiation and change surrounding questions of sex and gender.

Dance Ethnography and Global Perspectives presents the work of dance scholars whose professional fieldwork spans several continents and includes studies of the dance and movement systems of varied global communities.

Dancing Women: Female Bodies Onstage is a spectacular and timely contribution to dance history, recasting canonical dance since the early nineteenth century in terms of a feminist perspective. Setting the creation of specific dances in socio-political and cultural contexts, Sally Banes shows that choreographers have created representations of women that are shaped by - and that in part shape - society's continuing debates about sexuality and female identity. Broad in its scope and compelling in its argument Dancing Women: * provides a series of re-readings of the canon, from Romantic and Russian Imperial ballet to contemporary ballet and modern dance * investigates the gaps between plot and performance that create sexual and gendered meanings * examines how women's agency is created in dance through aspects of choreographic structure and style * analyzes a range of women's images - including brides, mistresses, mothers, sisters, witches, wraiths, enchanted princesses, peasants, revolutionaries, cowgirls, scientists, and athletes - as well as the creation of various women's communities on the dance stage * suggests approaches to issues of gender in postmodern dance Using an interpretive strategy different from that of other feminist dance historians, who have stressed either victimization or celebration of women, Banes finds a much more complex range of cultural representations of gender identities.

On dance and culture

Dance and Cultural Diversity examines the art of dance within the context of different cultures. In doing so, the readings in the text connect dance to academic disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. Based on the core belief that dance is much more than a form of entertainment or artistic expression, the text demonstrates that dance also has the power to provoke intellectual thought, promote the communion of people from all social classes and walks of life, and reveal the undeniable commonalities of the human experience, while also serving as a valuable tool for expressing cultural diversity. The study of dance as presented in this text transcends music and movement and becomes a study of humanity. The chapters in Dance and Cultural Diversity explore the essence of dance, dance in American Indian culture, Polynesian culture, African culture, and South American culture, and the African influence on American dance. The book also covers dances of East Asia, India, and Bali, and the healing properties of dance. The chapters explores specific types of dances, historical and political aspects of geographical areas, and the effect that dance has on the members of each community. Dance and Cultural Diversity is appropriate for courses on dance, world traditions, and cultural diversity. It can also be used in cultural anthropology and global society courses.