The Routledge Dance Studies Reader

The second edition of The Routledge Dance Studies Reader offers fresh critical perspectives on classic and modern dance forms, including ballroom, tango, Hip-hop, site-specific performance, and disability in dance. Alexandra Carter and Janet O'Shea deliver a substantially revised and updated collection of key texts, featuring an enlightening new introduction, which tracks differing approaches to dance studies. Important articles from the first edition are accompanied by twenty new works by leading critical voices. The articles are presented in five thematic sections, each with a new editorial introduction and further reading. Sections cover: Making dance Performing dance Ways of looking Locating dance in history and society Debating the discipline The Routledge Dance Studies Reader gives readers access to over thirty essential texts on dance and provides expert guidance on their critical context. It is a vital resource for anyone interested in understanding dance from a global and contemporary perspective.

Table of Contents:
1. Roots/routes of Dance Studies Janet O’Shea Part 1: Making Dance 2. Choreographers: dancing for de Valois and Ashton Annabel Farjeon 3. Torse: there are no fixed points in space Merce Cunningham with Jacqueline Lesschaeve 4. Recovering Hurston, reconsidering the choreographer Anthea Kraut 5. Reworking the ballet: stillness and queerness in Swan Lake, 4 Acts Vida Midgelow 6. Making space, speaking spaces Carol Brown 7. Reflections on new directions in Indian dance Chandralekha 8. What's it worth to ya? Adaptation and anachronism: Rennie Harris' PureMovement & Shakespeare Anna Scott Part 2: Performing Dance 9. I am a dancer Martha Graham 10. Tracing the past: writing history through the body Ann Cooper Albright 11. Cabbages and kings: disability, dance and some timely considerations Adam Benjamin 12. Hips, Hip-notism, Hip(g)nosis: the mulata performances of Ninón Sevilla Melissa Blanco Borelli 13. Still curious Emilyn Claid Part 3: Ways of Looking 14. Dance and gender: formalism and semiotics reconsidered Stephanie Jordan & Helen Thomas 15. A tapestry of intertexts: dance analysis for the twenty-first century Janet Lansdale 16. Looking at movement as culture: contact improvisation to disco Cynthia Novack 17. Getting off the Orient Express Shobana Jeyasingh: 18. Bridging the critical distance Marcia B. Siegel 19. Two analyses of 'Dancing in the Dark' (The Band Wagon, 1953) Richard Dyer and John Muller Part 4: Locating Dance in History and Society 20. In pursuit of the sylph: ballet in the Romantic period Deborah Jowitt 21. Nijinsky: modernism and heterodox representations of masculinity Ramsay Burt 22. Women writing the body: let's watch a little how she dances Elizabeth Dempster 23. Gambling femininity: tango wallflowers and femmes fatales Marta Savigliano 24. Choreographing a flexible Taiwan: Cloud Gate Dance Theatre and Taiwan’s changing identity Yatin Lin 25. Reality check: Dancing with the Stars and the American dream Juliet McMains 26. From interculturalism to historicism: reflections on classical Indian dance Pallabi Chakravorty Part 5: Debating the Discipline 27. Choreographing history Susan Leigh Foster 28. Differentiating phenomenology and dance Philippa Rothfield 29. Dance Studies in the international academy: genealogy of a disciplinary formation Jens Giersdorf 30. Shifting perspectives on dance ethnography Theresa Buckland 31. Slam dancing with the boundaries of theory and practice: the legitimization of popular dance Sherril Dodds 32. What is Art? Betty Redfern

About the Author :
Alexandra Carter is a Professor in Dance Studies at Middlesex University. She edited the Routledge Dance Studies Reader (1998) and Rethinking Dance History (2004). A sole-authored book on gender and ballet in the Victorian music halls was published in 2005.a She is on the Editorial Board of Dance Theatre Journal and Dancelines (Research in Dance Education). Janet O'Shea is Associate Professor in Dance, South Asian Studies and Postcolonial Studies at the Department of World Arts and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles. Her book At Home in the World: Bharata Natyam on the Global Stage (University of Wesleyan Press, 2007) received the Association for Asian Studies First Book Subvention Award.