BiblioVault - Books by Barbour, Karen

Back to the Dance Itself

Phenomenologies of the Body in Performance

Edited with Essays by Sondra Fraleigh

University of Illinois Press, 2018

In Back to the Dance Itself, Sondra Fraleigh edits essays that illuminate how scholars apply a range of phenomenologies to explore questions of dance and the world; performing life and language; body and place; and self-knowing in performance. Some authors delve into theoretical perspectives, while others relate personal experiences and reflections that reveal fascinating insights arising from practice. Collectively, authors give particular consideration to the interactive lifeworld of making and doing that motivates performance. Their texts and photographs study body and the environing world through points of convergence, as correlates in elemental and constant interchange modeled vividly in dance. Selected essays on eco-phenomenology and feminism extend this view to the importance of connections with, and caring for, all life.

Contributors: Karen Barbour, Christine Bellerose, Robert Bingham, Kara Bond, Hillel Braude, Sondra Fraleigh, Kimerer LaMothe, Joanna McNamara, Vida Midgelow, Ami Shulman, and Amanda Williamson.

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Dancing across the Page

Narrative and Embodied Ways of Knowing

Karen Barbour

Intellect Books, 2011

An innovative exploration of understanding through dance, Dancing across the Page draws on the frameworks of phenomenology, feminism, and postmodernism to offer readers an understanding of performance studies that is grounded in personal narrative and lived experience. Through accounts of contemporary dance making, improvisation, and dance education, Karen Barbour explores a diversity of themes, including power; activism; and cultural, gendered, and personal identity. An intimate yet rigorous investigation of creativity in dance, Dancing across the Page emphasizes embodied knowledge and imagination as a basis for creative action in the world.

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(Re)Positioning Site Dance

Local Acts, Global Perspectives

Edited by Karen Barbour, Vicky Hunter, and Melanie Kloetzel

Intellect Books, 2019

Site-based dance performance and sited movement explorations implicate dance makers, performers, and audience members in a number of dialogical processes between body, site, and environment. This book aims to articulate international approaches to the making, performing, and theorizing of site-based dance. Drawing on perspectives from three practitioner-academics based in three distinct world regions--Europe, North America, and Oceania--the authors explore a range of practices that engage with socio-cultural, political, ecological, and economic discourses, and demonstrate how these discourses both frame and inform processes of site dance making as well as shape the ways in which such interventions are conceived and evaluated. Intended for artists, scholars, and students, (Re)Positioning Site Dance is an important addition to the theoretical discourse on place and performance in an era of global socio-political and ecological transformation.

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