How To Make Dances In An Epidemic

David Gere, who came of age as a dance critic at the height of the AIDS epidemic, offers the first book to examine in depth the interplay of AIDS and choreography in the United States, specifically in relation to gay men. The time he writes about is one of extremes. A life-threatening medical syndrome is spreading, its transmission linked to sex. Blame is settling on gay men. What is possible in such a highly charged moment, when art and politics coincide? Gere expands the definition of choreography to analyze not only theatrical dances but also the protests conceived by ACT-UP and the NAMES Project AIDS quilt. These exist on a continuum in which dance, protest, and wrenching emotional expression have become essentially indistinguishable. Gere offers a portrait of gay male choreographers struggling to cope with AIDS and its meanings.

This volume examines responses to the epidemic of HIV/AIDS in Anglophone popular musicians and music video during the AIDS crisis (1981–1996). Through close reading of song lyrics, musical texts, and music videos, this book demonstrates how music played an integral part in the artistic-activist response to the AIDS epidemic, demonstrating music as a way to raise money for HIV/AIDS services, to articulate affective responses to the epidemic, to disseminate public health messages, to talk back to power, and to bear witness to the losses of AIDS. Drawing methodologies from musicology, queer theory, critical race studies, public health, and critical theory, the book will be of interest to a wide readership, including artists, activists, musicians, historians, and other scholars across the humanities as well as to people who lived through the AIDS crisis.

Winner of the CORD Outstanding Publication Award (2012) In postwar America, any assertion of difference from the mainstream anticommunist culture carried professional and personal risks. For this reason, modern dance artists left much of what they thought unsaid. Instead they expressed themselves in movement. How To Do Things with Dance positions modern dance as a vital critical discourse, and suggests that dances of the late 1940s and the 1950s can be seen as compelling agents of social change. Concentrating on choreographers whose artistic work conceived dance in terms of action, Rebekah J. Kowal shows how specific choreographic projects demonstrated increasing awareness of the stage as a penetrable space, one on which socially suspect or marginalized modes of being could be performed with relative impunity and exerted in the real world. Artists covered include Martha Graham, José Limón, Anna Sokolow, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Donald McKayle, Talley Beatty, and Anna Halprin. Ebook Edition Note: All images have been redacted.

This collection of new essays explores the many ways in which writing relates to corporeality and how the two work together to create, resist or mark the body of the "Other." Contributors draw on varied backgrounds to examine different movement practices. They focus on movement as a meaning-making process, including the choreographic act of writing. The challenges faced by marginalized bodies are discussed, along with the ability of a body to question, contest and re-write historical narratives.

Regina Nejman’s paper details a dance artist’s negotiation of art-making in a global pandemic. It focuses on her improvisational dance films that were combined with live performance and animation in a gallery-like viewing environment. She situates herself among the many screendances and digital archives shared during NYC’s lockdown.

This Handbook asks how competition affects the presentation and experience of dance.

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater collects a critical mass of border-crossing scholarship on the intersections of dance and theatre. Taking corporeality as an idea that unites the work of dance and theater scholars and artists, and embodiment as a negotiation of power dynamics with important stakes, these essays focus on the politics and poetics of the moving body in performance both on and off stage. Contemporary stage performances have sparked global interest in new experiments between dance and theater, and this volume situates this interest in its historical context by extensively investigating other such moments: from pagan mimes of late antiquity to early modern archives to Bolshevik Russia to post-Sandinista Nicaragua to Chinese opera on the international stage, to contemporary flash mobs and television dance contests. Ideologically, the essays investigate critical race theory, affect theory, cognitive science, historiography, dance dramaturgy, spatiality, gender, somatics, ritual, and biopolitics among other modes of inquiry. In terms of aesthetics, they examine many genres such as musical theater, contemporary dance, improvisation, experimental theater, television, African total theater, modern dance, new Indian dance theater aesthetics, philanthroproductions, Butoh, carnival, equestrian performance, tanztheater, Korean Talchum, Nazi Movement Choirs, Lindy Hop, Bomba, Caroline Masques, political demonstrations, and Hip Hop. The volume includes innovative essays from both young and seasoned scholars and scholar/practitioners who are working at the cutting edges of their fields. The handbook brings together essays that offer new insight into well-studied areas, challenge current knowledge, attend to neglected practices or moments in time, and that identify emergent themes. The overall result is a better understanding of the roles of dance and theater in the performative production of meaning.