Dance

Told from the perspective of the dancers, Processing Choreography: Thinking with William Forsythe's Duo is an ethnography reconstructing the dancers' activity within William Forsythe's Duo project, written legibly for readers in dance studies, the social sciences, and dance practice. Considering how the choreography of Duo emerges through practice and changes over two decades of history (1996-2018), Elizabeth Waterhouse offers a nuanced picture of creative cooperation and institutionalized process - arguing for choreography as a nexus of people, im/material practices, contexts, and relations. As a former Forsythe dancer herself, the author gives novel insight into this choreographic community.

In Theatre and Its Other, Elisa Ganser revisits a telling debate on the intertwined natures of dance and dramatic acting; preserved in Abhinavagupta's eleventh-century commentary on the Nāṭyaśāstra, it reflects complex historical shifts in aesthetic theory and performance practice.

This book examines men, masculinities and sexualities in Western theatrical dance, offering insights into the processes, actions and interactions that occur in dance institutions around gender-transgressive acts, and the factors that set limits to transgression. This text uses interview and observation data to analyze the conditions that encourage some boys and young men to become involved in this widely unconventional activity, and the ways through which they negotiate the gendered and sexual attachments of their professional identity. Most importantly, the book analyzes the opportunities male dancers find to develop a reflexive habitus, engage in gender transgressive acts and experiment with their sexuality. At the same time, it approaches gender and sexuality as embodied, and therefore as parts of identity that are not as easily amendable.  This book will be of interest to scholars in Gender and Sexuality Studies as well as Dance and Performance Studies.  

How does the moving, dancing body engage with the materials, textures, atmospheres, and affects of the sites through which we move and in which we live, work and play? How might embodied movement practice explore some of these relations and bring us closer to the complexities of sites and lived environments? This book brings together perspectives from site dance, phenomenology, and new materialism to explore and develop how 'site-based body practice' can be employed to explore synergies between material bodies and material sites. Employing practice-as-research strategies, scores, tasks and exercises the book presents a number of suggestions for engaging with sites through the moving body and offers critical reflection on the potential enmeshments and entanglements that emerge as a result. The theoretical discussions and practical explorations presented will appeal to researchers, movement practitioners, artists, academics and individuals interested in exploring their lived environments through the moving body and the entangled human-nonhuman relations that emerge as a result.