DANCE CHRONICLEPub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/01472526.2021.1971020
Arushi Singh
{"title":"Embodying Flexibility: The Aesthetics and Politics of British South Asian Dance","authors":"Arushi Singh","doi":"10.1080/01472526.2021.1971020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01472526.2021.1971020","url":null,"abstract":"Flexible Bodies by Anusha Kedhar intimately traces the lives and labor of dancers and choreographers who were instrumental in the development of British South Asian dance between the 1990s and 2010s. In order to narrate the story of British South Asian dance, Kedhar draws on her time as a dancer in London and her ethnographic fieldwork in Britain and India between 2004 and 2017. Kedhar utilizes ethnography, autoethnography, choreographic analysis, and political economy in her study of this genre. British South Asian dance is a concert form well-known for its aesthetic flexibility. Exponents of this form integrate elements and dynamics of classical, folk, and martial dance idioms from the Indian subcontinent with Euro-American modern and postmodern techniques, staging, and production. As part of their training, they foster South Asian forms of flexibility (deep bends, articulate hands, fast footwork) while also cultivating the flexibility associated with ballet and contemporary dance technique (pointed feet, leg extensions, mobile spine). Kedhar charts the emergence of this genre in relation to the rise of British multiculturalism since the 1990s, which necessitated that British South Asian dancers demonstrate their flexibility to perform South Asianness and Britishness. Under the paradigm of multiculturalism, the British government assumed that countering racism and racist violence of the previous decades “simply required education and greater awareness of cultural differences rather than real structural change” (p. 11). British policy makers unanimously agreed that promoting ethnic and minority arts, including dance, could enable national integration. In fact, support from the Arts Council of Great Britain over the years has played a critical role in catapulting British South Asian dance to international recognition. Kedhar also analyzes the flexible labor of British South Asian dancers in connection with “the broader economic and ideological shift towards labor flexibilization” under neoliberalism since the late 1970s (p. 2). During this","PeriodicalId":42141,"journal":{"name":"DANCE CHRONICLE","volume":"44 1","pages":"289 - 295"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48172676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
DANCE CHRONICLEPub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/01472526.2021.1927434
P. Beaman
{"title":"Dancing Noh and Kabuki in Japanese Shakespeare Productions","authors":"P. Beaman","doi":"10.1080/01472526.2021.1927434","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01472526.2021.1927434","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines how three modern Japanese directors have interpolated Noh and Kabuki dance into their productions of Shakespearean plays: Yukio Ninagawa’s NINAGAWA Macbeth (1980); Satoshi Miyagi’s Othello (Noh style, 2005); and Yoshihiro Kurita’s Hamlet (2007). In synthesizing traditions from two contemporaneous, yet culturally disparate, theatrical forms, these directors both honored and disrupted the conventions of Shakespeare, Noh, and Kabuki. The inclusion of Noh and Kabuki movement in these performances is not simply a decorative divertissement, but serves as a vital language for cross-cultural encounter.","PeriodicalId":42141,"journal":{"name":"DANCE CHRONICLE","volume":"44 1","pages":"106 - 132"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01472526.2021.1927434","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45741040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
DANCE CHRONICLEPub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/01472526.2021.1927602
Olive Mckeon, Clare Lidbury
{"title":"Dance Chronicle’s Past and Futures","authors":"Olive Mckeon, Clare Lidbury","doi":"10.1080/01472526.2021.1927602","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01472526.2021.1927602","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue, Movement Arts in Dance, Theater, and Intermedial Performance, is the brainchild of Dr. Joellen A. Meglin, Dance Chronicle’s stalwart editor from 2008 through 2020. During these thirteen years, inspired by the journal’s subtitle, “Studies in Dance and the Related Arts,” Dr. Meglin and her co-editors explored the intersections between dance and the sister arts of literature, music, visual arts, and theater. As a team, they worked tirelessly to foster new directions in dance research, resulting in special issues ranging from Choreographers at the Cutting Edge: Contemporary Practices in Concert Dance and “Ballet Is Woman”: But Where Are All the Women Choreographers? to Preserving Dances in Diaspora and Dances of Loss, Grief, and Endurance in the Face of Trauma. Together they expanded the international impact of the journal, publishing articles from Brazilian, British, Canadian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Indian, Irish, Israeli, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Peruvian, Rumanian, Singaporean, Spanish, Turkish, and American authors. In 2015, guided by a strong commitment to mentoring new generations of dance researchers, Dr. Meglin and the advisory board devised the Founding Editors Awards, and in time they spearheaded three successful runs of this biennial competition. She brought a remarkable generosity to the role of editor and a principled concern for intellectual integrity, presiding over the scholarly rigor of Dance Chronicle as well as the ethics of its editorial process. Dr. Meglin can now enjoy the delights of serving on the journal’s advisory board, while lending more attention to her own research and writing projects. In her editorial work, Dr. Meglin encouraged dance scholars to develop strong, well-constructed arguments, drawing out of them more than they might think themselves capable of. She encouraged authors, rather than hiding behind content, to reveal their intersection with the subject matter, inviting them to consider, “who is the researcher in the research?” With an overarching concern for fairness and tone, she cautioned against the unsubstantiated claim, the cheap shot, or the needless disparaging remark. Dr. Meglin pushed scholars to ground their work within relevant literature and to articulate the exigency of their studies, framing the contribution of an article within wider conversations in the field. Alive to the humbling difficulties of the writing process, she would refer to each finished article as a","PeriodicalId":42141,"journal":{"name":"DANCE CHRONICLE","volume":"44 1","pages":"103 - 105"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01472526.2021.1927602","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43221204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
DANCE CHRONICLEPub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/01472526.2021.1927432
Elizabeth York
{"title":"Eden in Sin City: Adapting for the Musical Theater Body in Takarazuka Revue’s Ocean’s 11","authors":"Elizabeth York","doi":"10.1080/01472526.2021.1927432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01472526.2021.1927432","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Japanese all-female musical theater company, Takarazuka Revue, uses stylized performance patterns (kata) to depict gender and character onstage. This artificial method, descended from Japan’s all-male Kabuki theater, differs from the assumed realism of contemporary Broadway method acting. Through a study of Takarazuka Revue’s adaptation of the Hollywood film Ocean’s 11, this article argues that Takarazuka Revue’s performance method complements the inherent artificiality of musical theater song and dance and encourages the creation of new works that expand the traditions of the early to mid-twentieth-century Broadway musical. This points toward a broader understanding of global musical theater performance practices.","PeriodicalId":42141,"journal":{"name":"DANCE CHRONICLE","volume":"44 1","pages":"151 - 181"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01472526.2021.1927432","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45584469","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
DANCE CHRONICLEPub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/01472526.2021.1927431
M. Mandradjieff
{"title":"Reimaging Human Bodies and Death with Vibrant (Dark) Matters and Puppetry","authors":"M. Mandradjieff","doi":"10.1080/01472526.2021.1927431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01472526.2021.1927431","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article analyzes the effects of the collaboration between dance and puppetry within Crystal Pite’s Dark Matters (2009) and claims Pite’s work challenges nonhuman-human and object-subject binaries. Functioning within a new materialist philosophical framework, specifically in conversation with theorist Jane Bennett’s concept of vital materialism, this study argues that Dark Matters exposes the human body as an assemblage of vibrant multiple objects, and by positioning both the puppet and human corpse as agential matter, poses a radical rethinking of “liveliness” and “death.” Ultimately, this analysis reveals dance’s unique ability to evoke important posthuman reflection regarding physical matter, which always already includes the human body.","PeriodicalId":42141,"journal":{"name":"DANCE CHRONICLE","volume":"44 1","pages":"133 - 150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01472526.2021.1927431","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47159699","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
DANCE CHRONICLEPub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/01472526.2021.1918535
Olive Mckeon
{"title":"The Searing and Fleeting Improvisational World of Grand Union","authors":"Olive Mckeon","doi":"10.1080/01472526.2021.1918535","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01472526.2021.1918535","url":null,"abstract":"Dance critic and editor Wendy Perron has published a new volume titled The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance, 1970–1976. The improvisational dance group Grand Union brought together some key figures within New York’s downtown dance scene—Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, Nancy Lewis, and Yvonne Rainer—for a six-year period of collective collaboration during which they presented more than fifty improvised performances. Perron writes as an insider, having danced with Trisha Brown in her individual work in the late 1970s and overlapped with other Grand Union members in her long trajectory as a New York–based dancer and choreographer. Perron saw Grand Union perform on a handful of occasions and wrote a review in 1976 of their concert at La MaMa, which she reprints in her book (pp. 125–28). Forty-five years later, she revisits and expands this initial review into a book-length manuscript that endeavours to capture what she loved about and learned from this improvisational ensemble. Written with warmth and fondness, Perron’s book is a meditation on the distinct contribution of Grand Union and the connection she felt to their work. Engaging with dance criticism more than scholarly literature, the debates that Perron takes up are with dance critics who panned Grand Union’s performances, claiming that the group was self-indulgent, boring, narcissistic, and/or ego driven. Against these dismissals, Perron makes a case for Grand Union’s specific approach to dance improvisation and the wider influence of their work on the development of postmodern dance. Perron builds upon one other book about the ensemble, Margaret Hupp Ramsay’s The Grand Union (1970–1976): An Improvisational Performance Group (1991), by adding descriptions of video documents and analyzing the content of the group’s performances. Illustrated with many photographs, Perron’s book provides a window into the worlds that Grand Union created within their performances.","PeriodicalId":42141,"journal":{"name":"DANCE CHRONICLE","volume":"44 1","pages":"202 - 205"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01472526.2021.1918535","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47197561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
DANCE CHRONICLEPub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/01472526.2021.1927433
Huafei Chen
{"title":"Rethinking Modernism and Modernity: A Dance Approach","authors":"Huafei Chen","doi":"10.1080/01472526.2021.1927433","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01472526.2021.1927433","url":null,"abstract":"Ramsay Burt and Michael Huxley’s Dance, Modernism, and Modernity offers an important contribution to our understanding of the nexus of dance, modernism, and modernity. The term “modernity,” cited from sociologist Anthony Giddens, is defined as “a certain set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of the world as open to transformation, by human intervention” (p. 26). This openness to change and transformation, according to Burt and Huxley, is exemplified by the potential of dance to bring about “the diversity, fluidity, and contradictions of modernism” (p. 30). However, in this book, “modernism” no longer connotes “male, heteronormative, resolutely literary, Anglophone” (p. 16), but is characterized by the “expansion” proposed by Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz in their 2008 article “The New Modernist Studies.” Such an expansion, “in terms of discipline, geography, definition and identity” (p. 18), takes place along three axes—temporal, spatial, and vertical—through which the authors conduct a multiple-angled analysis of how dance has developed and responded to the experience of living in modern times. Thus Burt and Huxley’s critical approach is to eschew early writings on modernism in dance that are concerned solely with formal and aesthetic issues—such as Marshall Cohen’s questioning of Susanne K. Langer’s claim that dance creates the illusion of the conquest of gravity as an embodiment of modernism—and attempt to develop a wider and more inclusive interpretation of modernism. After the lengthy and thorough foreword by Claire Warden, this collection of eleven essays—four by Burt, three by Huxley, and four by them both—is thoughtfully organized into two parts. Part 1, co-written by Burt and Huxley, is concerned with key factors and issues about modernism and modernity in dance during the period, with chapter 1 serving as the introduction. Chapter 2 centers on a historiographical (temporal axis) consideration of modern dance from the early 1900s to the mid-1950s. The authors","PeriodicalId":42141,"journal":{"name":"DANCE CHRONICLE","volume":"44 1","pages":"182 - 186"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01472526.2021.1927433","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47455315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
DANCE CHRONICLEPub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/01472526.2021.1932169
Sue-in Kim
{"title":"Decentering and Centering East Asian Dance: Language and Location in Transnational Dance Research","authors":"Sue-in Kim","doi":"10.1080/01472526.2021.1932169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01472526.2021.1932169","url":null,"abstract":"Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia is “the first book-length publication in English” (p. 2) presenting academic research on East Asian dance. Composed of sixteen chapters contained by an introduction and a coda, this anthology emerges from the growing field of East Asian dance research, a previously underrepresented area in Anglophone academia. The editors explain how a series of working groups, conferences, research programs, roundtables, and panels held in and supported by US-based institutions has synthesized the participants’ diverse research interests into a focused discourse. Drawing both from critical area studies (East Asia) and critical dance studies, Corporeal Politics stresses the politics of East Asian dance. As a dance researcher who studied in the US and currently works in Korea, I see this anthology—and my review—dancing to the English tune. With reference to the geographical range included within the term “East Asia,” this book mainly covers China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and North and South Korea. Emily Wilcox’s “Introduction” challenges the conception of East Asian dance within the confines of national borders as engineered by an ecology of nation-centered projects and funding (p. 7). Accordingly, about half of the chapters explicitly address international influences and intrusions, highlighting the area’s constructed nature. However, the other half of the chapters provide studies within a single nation, accurately highlighting that the nation cannot be ignored in dance analysis, as arts and culture is a “subsidized market” that relies heavily on national support. Considering that dance has been shaped by state policy and even plays a role in national propaganda, I read the chapters focusing on a singular national context as a reflection of how, globally, the state greatly influences dance. In terms of temporal span, the book covers dance from ancient times up to the digital technologies of the present day with a more elaborated focus on the twentieth century, accentuated by the world wars, imperialism, and","PeriodicalId":42141,"journal":{"name":"DANCE CHRONICLE","volume":"44 1","pages":"192 - 196"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01472526.2021.1932169","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46080732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
DANCE CHRONICLEPub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/01472526.2021.1922255
Clare Lidbury
{"title":"One Perspective, Many Voices","authors":"Clare Lidbury","doi":"10.1080/01472526.2021.1922255","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01472526.2021.1922255","url":null,"abstract":"London Contemporary Dance School (LCDS) opened in 1966 in modest premises in Berners Place, close to Oxford Street in central London, moving to The Place (near Euston Station), the location with which it is most associated, in 1969. Both authors of Changing the Face of British Dance: Fifty Years of London Contemporary Dance School worked at the school in its early days: Richard Bannerman, for a short time as Promotion Secretary, and Henrietta Bannerman, who had studied at the Graham School in New York in the early 1960s, for several years as school secretary, choreographer, and teacher of technique. After an absence of some years and following postgraduate studies, Henrietta returned in 2005 as head of research and has published widely on the work of Martha Graham. Both authors, then, are in a position to write with some authority on the first fifty years of the school, mapping the school’s growth from a small, privately funded venture to one of the UK’s leading professional training schools for contemporary dance. The book takes a chronological approach, beginning with the genesis of the school in the 1950s and early 1960s, with some of the twelve chapters devoted to significant events in a single year and some to events over five years or more; clearly some years were more momentous than others. There are fifty black-and-white photographs, some of which are portraits of notable individuals connected with the school (such as Robin Howard, the founder of the school) and some of dancers dancing (mostly former students who have had illustrious careers as dancers and choreographers, such as Siobhan Davies); these are beautifully produced. However, the authors could have scanned and enlarged the photographs of significant documents (such as the announcement in the Dancing Times of the establishment of the school) for easier reading. As the authors state, the uniqueness of LCDS “lies in its integration with all the activities of The Place” (p. 2), for the school sits within an","PeriodicalId":42141,"journal":{"name":"DANCE CHRONICLE","volume":"44 1","pages":"197 - 201"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01472526.2021.1922255","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44668417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}