[PDF] Choreographing Dirt eBook

Author : Angenette Spalink
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 120 pages
File Size : 40,12 MB
Release : 2023-11-30
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1003849458

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This book is an innovative study that places performance and dance studies in conversation with ecology by exploring the significance of dirt in performance. Focusing on a range of 20th- and 21st-century performances that include modern dance, dance-theatre, Butoh, and everyday life, this book demonstrates how the choreography of dirt makes biological, geographical, and cultural meaning, what the author terms "biogeocultography". Whether it’s the Foundling Father digging into the earth’s strata in Suzan-Lori Park’s The America Play (1994), peat hurling through the air in Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring (1975), dancers frantically shovelling out fistfuls of dirt in Eveoke Dance Theatre’s Las Mariposas (2010), or Butoh performers dancing with fungi in Iván-Daniel Espinosa’s Messengers Divinos (2018), each example shows how the incorporation of dirt can reveal micro-level interactions between species – like the interplay between microscopic skin bacteria and soil protozoa – and macro-level interactions – like the transformation of peat to a greenhouse gas. By demonstrating the stakes of moving dirt, this book posits that performance can operate as a space to grapple with the multifaceted ecological dilemmas of the Anthropocene. This book will be of broad interest to both practitioners and researchers in theatre, performance studies, dance, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities.

Author : Angenette Spalink
Publisher :
Page : 203 pages
File Size : 40,2 MB
Release : 2014
Category : Choreography
ISBN :

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In this dissertation I explore performances in which dirt operates as a critical choreographic element, a dynamic partner in an exchange. In each chapter, dirt functions as a complex site of interaction between human and non-human bodies that structures or choreographs the movement of the participant or performer. Using the discourses of ecocriticism, ecofeminism, postmodernism, and performance studies, I employ close readings of the National Park Service, Suzan-Lori Parks's The America Play as a dramatic text, and productions of Pina Bausch's The Rite of Spring and Eveoke Dance Theatre's Las Mariposas to demonstrate how social, dramatic, performative, and theatrical representations of the natural world inform humans' understanding of their relationship with it. In Chapter One, I explore the representation and performance of "wilderness" in Shenandoah National Park, analyzing the history, construction, and choreography of space in the park to establish that the park's performance of "wilderness" functions as symbol of the American frontier and simulacrum of the wild. In Chapter Two, I examine the unearthing of dirt in The America Play through the character of the Foundling Father who digs up the past in order to create "new" historical events. In Chapter Three, I focus on the relationship between dancer and peat in The Rite of Spring , investigating the significance of the ways in which the onstage peat and the dancers' bodies mark each other. In Chapter Four, I analyze the relationship between dancers and dirt in Las Mariposas , exploring the inter-species interactions between the organisms in the dirt and on the dancers' skin. Together, these analyses allow critical interrogations of the entrenched human notions of the so-called nature/culture divide. Bodies partner not only with the dirt, but also with the myriad species that reside in the dirt. This creates an ecologically complex pas de deux that evokes an intricate rethinking of conceptions of species and demonstrates that interchanges between humans and more-than-humans are porous and trans-corporeal. Each case study testifies that performance has the potential to dismantle master narratives, permeate borders, and create alternate modes of understanding of traditional Western anthropocentric, speciesist tendencies in dance and theatre.

Author : R. Bank
Publisher : Springer
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 12,74 MB
Release : 2015-04-23
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1137397306

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How do the ethical implications of writing theatrical histories complicate the historiographical imperative in our current sociopolitical context? This volume investigates a historiography whose function is to be a mode of thinking and exposes the inner contradictions in social and ideological organizations of historical subjects.

Author : Sondra Fraleigh
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 351 pages
File Size : 48,45 MB
Release : 2024-03-13
Category : Nature
ISBN : 1003854656

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Geographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages is the first edited collection in the field of ecosomatics. With a combination of essays and practice pages that provide a variety of scholarly, creative, and experience-based approaches for readers, the book brings together both established and emergent scholars and artists from many diverse backgrounds and covers work rooted in a dozen countries. The essays engage an array of crucial methodologies and critical/theoretical perspectives, including practice-based research in the arts, especially in performance and dance studies, critical theory, ecocriticism, Indigenous knowledges, material feminist critique, quantum field theory, and new phenomenologies. Practice pages are shorter chapters that provide readers a chance to engage creatively with the ideas presented across the collection. This book offers a multidisciplinary perspective that brings together work in performance as research, phenomenology, and dance/movement; this is one of its significant contributions to the area of ecosomatics. The book will be of interest to anyone curious about matters of embodiment, ecology, and the environment, especially artists and students of dance, performance, and somatic movement education who want to learn about ecosomatics and environmental activists who want to learn more about integrating creativity, the arts, and movement into their work.

Author : Leena Rouhiainen
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 203 pages
File Size : 32,84 MB
Release : 2024-03-28
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1003856047

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A new contribution to studies in choreography, Writing Choreography: Textualities of and beyond Dance focuses upon language and writing-based approaches to choreographing from the perspectives of artists and researchers active in the Nordic and Oceanic contexts. Through the contributions of 15 dance–artists, choreographers, dramaturges, writers, interdisciplinary artists and artist–researchers, the volume highlights diverse textual choreographic processes and outcomes arguing for their relevance to present-day practices of expanded choreography. The anthology introduces some Western trends related to utilizing writing, text and language in choreographic processes. In its focus on art-making processes, it likewise offers insight into how performance can be transcribed into writing, how practices of writing choreograph and how choreography can be a process of writing with. Readers, such as dancers, choreographers, students in higher education of these fields as well as researchers in choreography, gain understanding about different experimental forms of writing forwarded by diverse choreographers and how writing is the motional organisation of images, signs, words and texts. The volume presents a new strand in expanded choreography and acts as inspiration for its continued evolution that engenders new adaptations between language, writing and choreography. Ideal for students, scholars and researchers of choreography and dance studies.

Author : Susan C. Cook
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 390 pages
File Size : 19,59 MB
Release : 2016-04-08
Category : Music
ISBN : 131717352X

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From the ragtime one-step of the early twentieth century to the contemporary practices of youth club cultures, popular dance and music are inextricably linked. This collection reveals the intimate connections between the corporeal and the sonic in the creation, transmission and reception of popular dance and music, which is imagined here as ’bodies of sound’. The volume provokes a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary conversation that includes scholarship from Asia, Europe and the United States, which explores topics from the nineteenth century through to the present day and engages with practices at local, national and transnational levels. In Part I: Constructing the Popular, the authors explore how categories of popular music and dance are constructed and de-stabilized, and their proclivity to appropriate and re-imagine cultural forms and meanings. In Part II: Authenticity, Revival and Reinvention, the authors examine how popular forms produce and manipulate identities and meanings through their attraction to and departure from cultural traditions. In Part III: (Re)Framing Value, the authors interrogate how values are inscribed, silenced, rearticulated and capitalized through popular music and dance. And in Part IV: Politics of the Popular, the authors read the popular as a site of political negotiation and transformation.

Author : Sondra Fraleigh
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 43,1 MB
Release : 2015-07-30
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0252097491

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The popularity of yoga and Zen meditation has heightened awareness of somatic practices. Individuals develop the conscious embodiment central to somatics work via movement and dance, or through touch from a skilled teacher or therapist often called a somatic bodyworker. Methods of touch and movement foster generative processes of consciousness in order to create a fluid interconnection between sensation, thought, movement, and expression. In Moving Consciously , Sondra Fraleigh gathers essays that probe ideas surrounding embodied knowledge and the conscious embodiment of movement and dance. Using a variety of perspectives on movement and dance somatics, Fraleigh and other contributors draw on scholarship and personal practice to participate in a multifaceted investigation of a thriving worldwide phenomenon. Their goal: to present the mental and physical health benefits of experiencing one's inner world through sensory awareness and movement integration. A stimulating addition to a burgeoning field, Moving Consciously incorporates concepts from East and West into a timely look at life-changing, intertwined practices that involve dance, movement, performance studies, and education. Contributors: Richard Biehl, Robert Bingham, Hillel Braude, Alison East, Sondra Fraleigh, Kelly Ferris Lester, Karin Rugman, Catherine Schaeffer, Jeanne Schul, and Ruth Way.

Author : Renée E. D'Aoust
Publisher : Etruscan Press
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 44,2 MB
Release : 2011
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0983294410

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Using the stage and the bedroom, Renée E. D'Aoust interweaves dance history with the stories of contemporary dancers' muscle and

Author : Andree Grau
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 43,9 MB
Release : 2002-06-01
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1134696531

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Europe Dancing examines the dance cultures and movements which have developed in Europe since the Second World War. Nine countries are represented in this unique collaboration between European dance scholars. The contributors chart the art form, and discuss the outside influences which have shaped it. This comprehensive book explores: * questions of identity within individual countries, within Europe, and in relation to the USA * the East/West cultural division * the development of state subsidy for dance * the rise of contemporary dance as an 'alternative' genre * the implications for dance of political, economic and social change. Useful historical charts are included to trace significant dance and political events throughout the twentieth century in each country. Never before has this information been gathered together in one place. This book is essential reading for everyone interested in dance and its growth and development in recent years.