Choreographic Ghosts: Dance and the Revival of Shuffle Along (original) (raw)
Related papers
Special Issue: Dance in musical theatre
Studies in Musical Theatre, 2019
This special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre examines the role of dance in musical theatre from a variety of perspectives. Given the scholarly turn from textual analysis to performance analysis, even studying musicals without extensive dance per se can benefit from understanding how movement shapes meaning. The introduction below explains some key themes that have emerged in the six articles that follow. One is the question of genre: what exactly is musical theatre dance? Another is auteurship: what is the role of the choreographer in shaping musicals? A third is technology, which reminds readers that choreography extends beyond human bodies. Finally, the articles all consider questions of methodology and history – how do we best study musical theatre? While there are several other areas of potential inquiry not covered in these six articles, this special issue, the first in the field to focus on dance in musical theatre, aims to help define and cohere an important subfield.
How Can We Know the Dance from the Dance?: Exploring the Complexity of Staging Dance Legacy Works
2019
Staging works from our rich concert dance heritage relies on determining what the “real” dance is, particularly when the work is no longer currently performed. Because choreographers frequently alter their choreography, creating multiple versions of a dance, identification of a definitive version can be a complex process. Adding to the complexity, there is the involvement of the stager, performers, and the audience who are each active or passive participants in the ultimate performance of a work. Through conversations with prominent stagers, scholarly discourse, and personal experience, the author investigates some of the key concerns and questions regarding staging dance legacy works in concert dance.
Easier Said Than Done: Talking Identity in Late Twentieth-Century American Concert Dance
2015
Author(s): Belmar, Sima Vera | Advisor(s): Jackson, Shannon | Abstract: This dissertation examines how choreographers Bill T. Jones, Joe Goode, and Wallflower Order Dance Collective mobilize auditory, visual, and kinesthetic modes of communication to underscore the unstable relationship between talk, dance, and gesture. I argue that this very instability affords dance theater its power to perform alternative racialized and gendered subjectivities. The project departs from dance studies’ long-standing investment in the notion of choreography as bodily writing to examine theories and ideologies of dance’s status as a form of speech.This dissertation is about how a generation of dance artists dealt with their anxiety around (modern, contemporary, postmodern, American, concert, art, stage) dance’s status as a language that could speak for them so that they could be heard—not only as individuals (hear my story) but as representatives, public figures of underrepresented groups, experience...
Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing by banes, sally
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2008
James Hamilton's book is the second book-length study of theater to have emerged from the Anglo-American aesthetics tradition. The first was Paul Thom's For an Audience (Temple University Press, 1993) whose last paragraph reads as follows: "Given that there can be an autonomous philosophy of the performing arts, the question is, What would such a philosophy be like? This question remains largely a matter for speculation" (p. 211). We need no longer speculate. Hamilton's contribution will hopefully be the first in a long stream of attempts to bring analytic reflection to bear on the conceptually evasive dimensions of performance. Hamilton unfolds a case for the aesthetic autonomy of performed theater. Performance, Hamilton claims, is not a mere addendum to the play, as Aristotle thought. Actors are not props through which a literary text can be vividly accessed. Theatrical performances are aesthetically independent (Part I). Hamilton believes that advocating such independence generates a problem. How does the audience identify a performance once it is dissociated from its links with a text? His reply (Part II) consists of showing how a performance can be understood without explicit or implicit ties to some text. If we are able to understand an evolving object, we can ipso facto delineate and refer to it; hence the mystery involved in identifying it is lifted. But understanding and identifying an object are conceptually distinct from responding to it as art. Hamilton accordingly turns to defend the aesthetic autonomy of performance (Part III). An aesthetic appreciation of performance involves (1) a perception of the performance against a background that determines whether the performance is an "achievement" and (2) a capacity to evaluate why the performance proceeded as it did, which in turn depends upon an imaginative reconstruction and evaluation of the choices shaping the creative process.
What is Mark Morris’ “Choreomusicality”? Illuminate the Music, Dignify the Dance
Bloomsbury Handbook of Dance and Philosophy, 2021
I explore how Mark Morris has pushed the envelope on the relationship between music and movement with his ideas about "choreomusicality." I also offer some suggestions concerning just what aesthetics has to offer to our understanding of this issue—the relationship of movement and music—as well as our understanding of dance theory, dance history, and dance studies, broadly understood.
Arts, 2020
Lucy Hind is a South African choreographer and movement director who lives in the UK. Her training was in choreography, mime and physical theatre at Rhodes University, South Africa. After her studies, Hind performed with the celebrated First Physical Theatre Company. In the UK, she has worked as movement director and performer in theatres including the Almeida, Barbican, Bath Theatre Royal, Leeds Playhouse Lowry, Sheffield Crucible, The Old Vic and The Royal Exchange. Lucy is also an associate artist of the award-winning Slung Low theatre company, which specializes in making epic theatre in non-theatre spaces. Here, Lucy talks to George Rodosthenous about her movement direction on the award-winning musical Girl from the North Country (The Old Vic/West End/Toronto and recently seen on Broadway), which was described by New York Times critic Ben Brantley as “superb”. The conversation delves into Lucy’s working methods: the ways she works with actors, the importance of collaborative wor...