Body Impossible: Desmond Richardson and the Politics of Virtuosity(Oxford Studies in Dance Theory)

Body Impossible theorizes the concept of virtuosity in contemporary dance and performance through a study of the career of dancer Desmond Richardson. A virtuoso for the ages, Richardson is renowned for delivering commanding performances over decades in contexts ranging from the stages of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Ballett Frankfurt to featured appearances with Michael Jackson and Prince, along with his work as co-founder of Complexions Contemporary Ballet, inaugurating a virtuosic queer black aesthetic with choreographer Dwight Rhoden. Focusing on Richardson's creative insistence on improvisatory fun and excellence throughout the decades approaching the millennium (shaped by Reaganism, the Culture Wars, the AIDS epidemic, the New Jim Crow, and MTV), this book brings dance into conversation with paradigms of blackness, queerness, masculinity, and class in order to generate a socioculturally attentive understanding of virtuosity. Virtuosity obscures the border between popular and concert performance, and Richardson's versatility epitomizes the demands on the contemporary virtuosic dance artist. Author Ariel Osterweis suggests that discourses of virtuosity are linked to connotations of excess, and that an examination of the formal and socio-cultural aspects of virtuosic performance reveals under-recognized heterogeneity in which we detect <"vernacular> " influences on <"high art.> " In doing so, Body Impossible accounts for the constitutive relationship between disciplined perceptions of virtuosity's excess and the disciplining of the racialized body in national and transnational contexts.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Virtuosity: I Know It When I See It Chapter One Fame Nation: Queer Black Masculinities and a U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts Chapter Two Choreography's Photographic Skin: Sweat, Labor, and Flesh in Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Chapter Three The Muse of Virtuosity: Complexions Contemporary Ballet and Choreographic Falsetto Chapter Four Difficult Fun: The Racial Politics of Improvisation in William Forsythe's Ballett Frankfurt Chapter Five Otherwise in Blackface: American Ballet Theatre and San Francisco Ballet's Othello Chapter Six Bad: Freakery, Iconicity, and Michael Jackson's Ghost Conclusion Desmond Richardson on Tour: Virtuosity's Futures Index Bibliography

About the Author :
Ariel Osterweis holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and is on faculty at the California Institute of the Arts. Research interests include embodied performance with a focus on race, gender, and sexuality. Osterweis has worked professionally as a dancer and performer with Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Mia Michaels R.A.W., Heidi Latsky Dance, and Julie Tolentino, and as a dramaturg for John Jasperse and Narcissister.

Review :
Osterweis triumphantly renders the terms of Black excellence in dance. Theorizing Desmond Richardson's exquisite achievement, Body Impossible opens a window to how Black aesthetics value embodied practices that exceed the normative. A must read for anyone interested in contemporary performance. What does it mean to perform with virtuosity? And how does a black male dancer navigate the tensions and contradictions of this at once glorified and vilified pursuit? In this groundbreaking study, Ariel Osterweis interprets the virtuosic performances of a dancer whose artistry defies categorization. Body Impossible reveals the dance of Desmond Richardson to be a site of both struggle and beauty. Weaving together the choreopolitics of blackness and queerness in America since the Reagan era, Body Impossible disrupts the very notions of what it means to be a virtuoso. With prose informed at every step by a dancer's muscle memory, Osterweis leads us to the ends of movement and beyond: into the social sphere it ceaselessly negotiates. Highly recommended