Dancing Cultures

Author: Hélène Neveu Kringelbach
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857455761
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
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.

Moving History/Dancing Cultures

Author: Ann Dils
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819574252
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 513

Book Description
This new collection of essays surveys the history of dance in an innovative and wide-ranging fashion. Editors Dils and Albright address the current dearth of comprehensive teaching material in the dance history field through the creation of a multifaceted, non-linear, yet well-structured and comprehensive survey of select moments in the development of both American and World dance. This book is illustrated with over 50 photographs, and would make an ideal text for undergraduate classes in dance ethnography, criticism or appreciation, as well as dance history—particularly those with a cross-cultural, contemporary, or an American focus. The reader is organized into four thematic sections which allow for varied and individualized course use: Thinking about Dance History: Theories and Practices, World Dance Traditions, America Dancing, and Contemporary Dance: Global Contexts. The editors have structured the readings with the understanding that contemporary theory has thoroughly questioned the discursive construction of history and the resultant canonization of certain dances, texts and points of view. The historical readings are presented in a way that encourages thoughtful analysis and allows the opportunity for critical engagement with the text. Ebook Edition Note: Ebook edition note: Five essays have been redacted, including “The Belly Dance: Ancient Ritual to Cabaret Performance,” by Shawna Helland; “Epitome of Korean Folk Dance”, by Lee Kyong-Hee; “Juba and American Minstrelsy,” by Marian Hannah Winter; “The Natural Body,” by Ann Daly; and “Butoh: ‘Twenty Years Ago We Were Crazy, Dirty, and Mad’,”by Bonnie Sue Stein. Eleven of the 41 illustrations in the book have also been redacted.

Dancing at the Edge

Author: Maureen O'Hara
Publisher: Triarchy Press
ISBN: 1908009284
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description
Maureen O'Hara and Graham Leicester explore the competencies - the ways of being, doing, knowing and organising - that can help us navigate in complex and powerful times. They argue that these competencies are innate and within reach of all of us - given the right setting, plenty of practice and some gentle guidance. But they are seldom seen because they are routinely undervalued in today's culture. That must change, the authors insist, and this book is intended to begin that change.The book is based on the authors' extensive research and their practical experience observing the qualities demonstrated by some of today's most successful cultural, political and business leaders. They write of 'persons of tomorrow' that they have witnessed:"e;We find that people who are thriving in the contemporary world, who give us the sense of having it all together and being able to act effectively and with good spirit in challenging circumstances, have some identifiable characteristics in common... They are the people already among us who inhabit the complex and messy problems of the 21st century in a more expansive way than their colleagues. They do not reduce such problems to the scale of the tools available to them, or hide behind those tools when they know they are partial and inadequate. They are less concerned with 'doing the right thing' according to standard procedure than they are with really doing the right thing in the moment, in specific cases, with the individuals involved at the time. In a disciplined yet engaging way they are always pushing boundaries, including their own. They dance at the edge."e;

Shanghai's Dancing World

Author: Andrew Field
Publisher: Chinese University Press
ISBN: 9629963736
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
"It was thanks to its cabarets that Old Shanghai was called the `Paris of the Orient.' No one has studied the rise and fall of those cabarets more extensively than Andrew Field. His book is packed with fascinating information and attests on every page to his understanding of Shanghai's history." LYNN PAN, author of Sons of the Yellow Emperor --

Cultural Memory and Popular Dance

Author: Clare Parfitt
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030710831
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Book Description
This book focuses on the myriad ways that people collectively remember or forget shared pasts through popular dance. In dance classes, nightclubs, family celebrations, tourist performances, on television, film, music video and the internet, cultural memories are shared and transformed by dancing bodies adapting yesterday’s steps to today’s concerns. The book gathers emerging and seasoned scholarly voices from a wide range of geographical and disciplinary perspectives to discuss cultural remembering and forgetting in diverse popular dance contexts. The contributors ask: how are Afro-diasporic memories invoked in popular dance classes? How are popular dance genealogies manipulated and reclaimed? What is at stake for the nation in the nationalizing of folk and popular dances? And how does mediated dancing transmit memory as feelings or affects? The book reveals popular dance to be vital to cultural processes of remembering and forgetting, allowing participants to pivot between alternative pasts, presents and futures.

Dancing from Past to Present

Author: Theresa Jill Buckland
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299218538
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
This groundbreaking collection combines ethnographic and historic strategies to reveal how dance plays crucial cultural roles in various regions of the world, including Tonga, Java, Bosnia-Herzegovina, New Mexico, India, Korea, Macedonia, and England. The essays find a balance between past and present and examine how dance and bodily practices are core identity and cultural creators. Reaching beyond the typically Eurocentric view of dance, Dancing from Past to Present opens a world of debate over the role dance plays in forming and expressing cultural identities around the world.

Dance and Cultural Diversity (Second Edition)

Author: Darlene O'Cadiz
Publisher: Cognella Academic Publishing
ISBN: 9781516517299
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
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.

Dancing Across Borders

Author: Anthony Shay
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786437847
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
This study describes and analyzes the phenomenal popularity of exotic dance forms in America. Throughout the twentieth century and especially since 1950, millions have begun learning and performing various Balkan dances, the tango, and other Latin American dances, along with the classical dances of India, Japan, and Indonesia. Most studies in dance ethnography and anthropology have focused specifically on "dancing in the field," or the dancing that native dancers do. This study, by contrast, examines the ways in which ethnic dancing has allowed many Americans to create more exciting, "exotic" and romantic identities. The author describes the uniquely American enthusiasm for exotic dances, and cites specific deficiencies in the U.S. cultural identity that have led many people to seek new feelings and experiences through exotic dance genres.

Dancing the World Smaller

Author: Rebekah J. Kowal
Publisher: Oxford Studies in Dance Theory
ISBN: 0190265310
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Book Description
Dancing the World Smaller examines international dance performances in New York City in the 1940s as sites in which dance artists and audiences contested what it meant to practice globalism in mid-twentieth-century America. Debates over globalism in dance proxied larger cultural struggles over how to realize diversity while honoring difference.

Dancing Spirit, Love, and War

Author: Evadne Kelly
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299322009
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
Meke, a traditional rhythmic dance accompanied by singing, signifies an important piece of identity for Fijians. Despite its complicated history of colonialism, racism, censorship, and religious conflict, meke remained a vital part of artistic expression and culture. Evadne Kelly performs close readings of the dance in relation to an evolving landscape, following the postcolonial reclamation that provided dancers with political agency and a strong sense of community that connected and fractured Fijians worldwide. Through extensive archival and ethnographic fieldwork in both Fiji and Canada, Kelly offers key insights into an underrepresented dance form, region, and culture. Her perceptive analysis of meke will be of interest in dance studies, postcolonial and Indigenous studies, anthropology and performance ethnography, and Pacific Island studies.