Clare Croft (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780199377329
- eISBN:
- 9780199377350
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199377329.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Dance
Queer Dance argues that dance has a particular charge in the larger field of queer activism and study because it emphasizes and offers language for how public, physical action can be a force of ...
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Queer Dance argues that dance has a particular charge in the larger field of queer activism and study because it emphasizes and offers language for how public, physical action can be a force of social change. It considers how queer dance has political potential and how it could productively challenge more conservative dance forms, both in terms of making meaning and in terms of institutional practices. Queer Dance brings together artists and scholars in a multi-platformed project—book, website, and live performance series—to ask: “What does dancing queerly challenge us toward?” The artists and scholars whose writing appears in the book and whose performances and filmed interviews appear online, stage a wide range of genders and sexualities as a way to challenge and destabilize social norms. Queer dance is a coalitional project, a gathering that works across LGBTQ identities and in concert with feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial artmaking, activism, and scholarship. The book engages with dance-making, dance scholarship, queer studies, and a host of other fields, always asking how identities, communities, and artmaking and scholarly practices might consider what queer work the body does and can do. Might the slide of a hand across a hipbone be just as much an act of coming out as an announcement offered in words? How does queerness exist in the realm of affect and touch, and what then might be revealed about queerness through these pleasurable and complex bodily ways of knowing?Less
Queer Dance argues that dance has a particular charge in the larger field of queer activism and study because it emphasizes and offers language for how public, physical action can be a force of social change. It considers how queer dance has political potential and how it could productively challenge more conservative dance forms, both in terms of making meaning and in terms of institutional practices. Queer Dance brings together artists and scholars in a multi-platformed project—book, website, and live performance series—to ask: “What does dancing queerly challenge us toward?” The artists and scholars whose writing appears in the book and whose performances and filmed interviews appear online, stage a wide range of genders and sexualities as a way to challenge and destabilize social norms. Queer dance is a coalitional project, a gathering that works across LGBTQ identities and in concert with feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial artmaking, activism, and scholarship. The book engages with dance-making, dance scholarship, queer studies, and a host of other fields, always asking how identities, communities, and artmaking and scholarly practices might consider what queer work the body does and can do. Might the slide of a hand across a hipbone be just as much an act of coming out as an announcement offered in words? How does queerness exist in the realm of affect and touch, and what then might be revealed about queerness through these pleasurable and complex bodily ways of knowing?
Todd Decker
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520268883
- eISBN:
- 9780520950061
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520268883.003.0008
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
In 1952, Fred Astaire remarked that “jazz means the blues,” and this chapter examines this comment in practical terms by detailing Astaire's varied use of the twelve-bar blues progression as a ...
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In 1952, Fred Astaire remarked that “jazz means the blues,” and this chapter examines this comment in practical terms by detailing Astaire's varied use of the twelve-bar blues progression as a musical scaffold for dance making. All the important popular blues-based idioms turn up in his work, from boogie-woogie and swing blues (use of the blues progression by big bands) to 1950s rock and roll and 1960s soul jazz. Astaire danced to popular music, whose structural building blocks are straightforward: thirty-two-bar choruses built on eight-bar phrases in an AABA or ABAC arrangement, twelve-bar blues choruses, introductions, verses, vamps, and big finishes. There was nothing arcane or concealed about the musical forms he deployed: they can be heard easily if we attend just to the music—sometimes hard to do with all that dancing going on. Accompanied on-screen by a group of African American sideline musicians, Astaire created an extended solo dance to “Bugle Call Rag.” His final studio-era solo was a rock-and-roll blues number by Cole Porter.Less
In 1952, Fred Astaire remarked that “jazz means the blues,” and this chapter examines this comment in practical terms by detailing Astaire's varied use of the twelve-bar blues progression as a musical scaffold for dance making. All the important popular blues-based idioms turn up in his work, from boogie-woogie and swing blues (use of the blues progression by big bands) to 1950s rock and roll and 1960s soul jazz. Astaire danced to popular music, whose structural building blocks are straightforward: thirty-two-bar choruses built on eight-bar phrases in an AABA or ABAC arrangement, twelve-bar blues choruses, introductions, verses, vamps, and big finishes. There was nothing arcane or concealed about the musical forms he deployed: they can be heard easily if we attend just to the music—sometimes hard to do with all that dancing going on. Accompanied on-screen by a group of African American sideline musicians, Astaire created an extended solo dance to “Bugle Call Rag.” His final studio-era solo was a rock-and-roll blues number by Cole Porter.
Susan Manning and Lucia Ruprecht
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252036767
- eISBN:
- 9780252093869
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252036767.003.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Dance
This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to offer fresh histories and theoretical inquiries that will resonate not only for scholars working in the field of dance, but ...
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This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to offer fresh histories and theoretical inquiries that will resonate not only for scholars working in the field of dance, but also for scholars working on literature, film, visual culture, theater, and performance. It then sketches the intellectual and artistic trends over the last thirty years that have shaped the scholarship featured in New German Dance Studies. It follows the broadly chronological organization of the volume as a whole: opening essays on theater dance before 1900; then research clusters on Weimar dance, dance in the German Democratic Republic, and conceptual dance; and a closing reflection on the circulation of dance in an era of globalization. Throughout it emphasizes the complex interplay between dance-making and dance writing, as well as interrelations between dance practice and research and artistic and intellectual trends in German culture at large.Less
This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to offer fresh histories and theoretical inquiries that will resonate not only for scholars working in the field of dance, but also for scholars working on literature, film, visual culture, theater, and performance. It then sketches the intellectual and artistic trends over the last thirty years that have shaped the scholarship featured in New German Dance Studies. It follows the broadly chronological organization of the volume as a whole: opening essays on theater dance before 1900; then research clusters on Weimar dance, dance in the German Democratic Republic, and conceptual dance; and a closing reflection on the circulation of dance in an era of globalization. Throughout it emphasizes the complex interplay between dance-making and dance writing, as well as interrelations between dance practice and research and artistic and intellectual trends in German culture at large.
