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The Acceptance World
Book 3 of A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell
University of Chicago Press, 1995

Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic A Dance to the Music of Time offers a matchless panorama of twentieth-century London . Now, for the first time in decades, readers in the United States can read the books of Dance as they were originally published—as twelve individual novels—but with a twenty-first-century twist: they’re available only as e-books.

The third volume, The Acceptance World (1955), opens with Nick Jenkins, in his late twenties, beginning to make his way in the world of letters: working for a publisher, writing on his own, and establishing connections across the literary landscape. At the same time, he is making his way in love, as a surprise meeting with an old friend’s sister blossoms into an affair. Meanwhile, friends are diving into marriage and careers, and the patterns of life’s dance are starting to take shape—even as the future steps remain shadowy.

"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."--Chicago Tribune

"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."--Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times

"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."--Naomi Bliven, New Yorker

“The most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.”--Kingsley Amis

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ADVERSARIES OF DANCE
FROM THE PURITANS TO THE PRESENT
Ann Wagner
University of Illinois Press, 1997

Whether in the private parlor, public hall, commercial "dance palace," or sleazy dive, dance has long been opposed by those who viewed it as immoral--more precisely as being a danger to the purity of those who practiced it, particularly women. In Adversaries of Dance, Ann Wagner presents a major study of opposition to dance over a period of four centuries in what is now the United States.

Wagner bases her work on the thesis that the tradition of opposition to dance "derived from white, male, Protestant clergy and evangelists who argued from a narrow and selective interpretation of biblical passages," and that the opposition thrived when denominational dogma held greater power over people's lives and when women's social roles were strictly limited.

Central to Wagner's work, which will be welcomed by scholars of both religion and dance, are issues of gender, race, and socioeconomic status.

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African Performance Arts and Political Acts
Naomi André, Yolanda Covington-Ward, and Jendele Hungbo, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2021

African Performance Arts and Political Actspresents innovative formulations for how African performance and the arts shape the narratives of cultural history and politics. This collection, edited by Naomi André, Yolanda Covington-Ward, and Jendele Hungbo, engages with a breadth of African countries and art forms, bringing together speech, hip hop, religious healing and gesture, theater and social justice, opera, radio announcements, protest songs, and migrant workers’ dances. The spaces include village communities, city landscapes, prisons, urban hostels, Township theaters, opera houses, and broadcasts through the airwaves on television and radio as well as in cyberspace. Essays focus on case studies from Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania.

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African-American Concert Dance
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE AND BEYOND
John O. Perpener III
University of Illinois Press, 2001
African-American Concert Dance significantly advances the study of pioneering black dancers by providing valuable biographical and historical information on a group of artists who worked during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s to legitimize black dance as a serious art form. John O. Perpener sets these seminal artists and their innovations in the contexts of African-American culture and American modern dance and explores their creative synthesis of material from European-American, African-American, Caribbean, and African sources.

Perpener begins with Hemsley Winfield, a versatile performer and director whose company, the New Negro Art Theatre, launched the careers of Edna Guy, Randolph Sawyer, and Ollie Burgoyne, among many others. Also profiled are Charles Williams, who directed the Hampton Creative Dance Group at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, and Asadata Dafora Horton, a native African who established himself as the preeminent purveyor of African dance and culture in America during the 1930s. Dafora's African Dance Troupe, which at one point came under the umbrella of the WPA Federal Theatre Project, was a focal point of the famous "voodoo" Macbeth, an all-black production set in Haiti and directed by the young Orson Welles.

Stepping onto the path cleared by these early innovators, two important artists combined dance with anthropology to expand the reach and scope of African-American dance. Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus both studied anthropology and engaged in extensive fieldwork that infused their dances with Caribbean and African influences. Dunham founded two ambitious training schools, one in New York and one in East St. Louis, while Primus's projects included an African Arts Center in Monrovia, Liberia, dedicated to collecting dance material, teaching, and organizing professional performances.

Perpener examines the politics of racial and cultural difference and their impact on these early African-American dance leaders. In particular he documents the critical reception of their work, detailing the rigid preconceptions of African-American dance that white critics imposed on black artists. He also surveys important black dancers and choreographers since 1950, including Talley Beatty, Donald McKayle, Alvin Ailey, Eleo Pomare, Rod Rodgers, and Dianne McIntyre, and discusses how they have extended and diverged from traditions established by their predecessors.

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Afro-Mexico
Dancing between Myth and Reality
By Anita González
University of Texas Press, 2010

While Africans and their descendants have lived in Mexico for centuries, many Afro-Mexicans do not consider themselves to be either black or African. For almost a century, Mexico has promoted an ideal of its citizens as having a combination of indigenous and European ancestry. This obscures the presence of African, Asian, and other populations that have contributed to the growth of the nation. However, performance studies—of dance, music, and theatrical events—reveal the influence of African people and their cultural productions on Mexican society.

In this work, Anita González articulates African ethnicity and artistry within the broader panorama of Mexican culture by featuring dance events that are performed either by Afro-Mexicans or by other ethnic Mexican groups about Afro-Mexicans. She illustrates how dance reflects upon social histories and relationships and documents how residents of some sectors of Mexico construct their histories through performance. Festival dances and, sometimes, professional staged dances point to a continuing negotiation among Native American, Spanish, African, and other ethnic identities within the evolving nation of Mexico. These performances embody the mobile histories of ethnic encounters because each dance includes a spectrum of characters based upon local situations and historical memories.

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Agency and Embodiment
Performing Gestures/Producing Culture
Carrie Noland
Harvard University Press, 2009

In Agency and Embodiment, Carrie Noland examines the ways in which culture is both embodied and challenged through the corporeal performance of gestures. Arguing against the constructivist metaphor of bodily inscription dominant since Foucault, Noland maintains that kinesthetic experience, produced by acts of embodied gesturing, places pressure on the conditioning a body receives, encouraging variations in cultural practice that cannot otherwise be explained.

Drawing on work in disciplines as diverse as dance and movement theory, phenomenology, cognitive science, and literary criticism, Noland argues that kinesthesia—feeling the body move—encourages experiment, modification, and, at times, rejection of the routine. Noland privileges corporeal performance and the sensory experience it affords in order to find a way beyond constructivist theory’s inability to produce a convincing account of agency. She observes that despite the impact of social conditioning, human beings continue to invent surprising new ways of altering the inscribed behaviors they are called on to perform. Through lucid close readings of Marcel Mauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Bill Viola, André Leroi-Gourhan, Henri Michaux, Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Derrida, and contemporary digital artist Camille Utterback, Noland illustrates her provocative thesis, addressing issues of concern to scholars in critical theory, performance studies, anthropology, and visual studies.

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Always More Than One
Individuation's Dance
Erin Manning
Duke University Press, 2012
In Always More Than One, the philosopher, visual artist, and dancer Erin Manning explores the concept of the "more than human" in the context of movement, perception, and experience. Working from Whitehead's process philosophy and Simondon's theory of individuation, she extends the concepts of movement and relation developed in her earlier work toward the notion of "choreographic thinking." Here, she uses choreographic thinking to explore a mode of perception prior to the settling of experience into established categories. Manning connects this to the concept of "autistic perception," described by autistics as the awareness of a relational field prior to the so-called neurotypical tendency to "chunk" experience into predetermined subjects and objects. Autistics explain that, rather than immediately distinguishing objects—such as chairs and tables and humans—from one another on entering a given environment, they experience the environment as gradually taking form. Manning maintains that this mode of awareness underlies all perception. What we perceive is never first a subject or an object, but an ecology. From this vantage point, she proposes that we consider an ecological politics where movement and relation take precedence over predefined categories, such as the neurotypical and the neurodiverse, or the human and the nonhuman. What would it mean to embrace an ecological politics of collective individuation?
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Ambrose Bierce and the Dance of Death
Sharon Talley
University of Tennessee Press, 2009

Ambrose Bierce and the Dance of Death uses psychoanalytic theory in combination with historical, cultural, and literary contexts to examine the complex motif of death in a full range of Bierce’s writings. Scholarly interest in Bierce, whose work has long been undervalued, has grown significantly in recent years. This new book contributes to the ongoing reassessment by providing new contexts for joining the texts in his canon in meaningful ways.

Previous attempts to consider Bierce from a psychological perspective have been superficial, often reductive Freudian readings of individual stories such as “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “The Death of Halpin Frayser.” This new volume not only updates these interpretations with insights from post-Freudian theorists but uses contemporary death theory as a framework to analyze the sources and expressions of Bierce’s attitudes about death and dying. This approach makes it possible to discern links among texts that resolve some of the still puzzling ambiguities that have—until now—precluded a fuller understanding of both the man and his writings.

Lively and engaging, Ambrose Bierce and the Dance of Death adds valuable new insights not only to the study of Bierce but to that of nineteenth-century American literature in general.

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The American Dance Festival
Jack Anderson
Duke University Press, 1987
The American Dance Festival has been a magnet drawing together diverse artists, styles, theories, and dance training methods; from this creative mix the ADF has emerged as the sponsor of performances by some of the greatest choreographers and dance companies of our time. Jack Anderson traces the development of ADF from its beginnings in New England to its seasons at Duke University. He displays the ADF for the multidimensional creature it is—a center for performances, a school for the best young dancers in the country, and a provider of community and professional services.
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Analyzing Performance
Theater, Dance, and Film
Patrice Pavis
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Analyzing Performance provides conceptual tools for understanding a range of performance, including theater, dance, cinema, other audiovisual media, and mime. This richly illustrated book develops protocols for the analysis of performance at every level -- from the minute gestures and facial expressions of an actor to the social network in which theater is embedded -- and respects the importance of every aspect of performance, including actor, costume, space, time, music, and lighting. With a keen awareness of the roles of social context in the interpretation of performance, Patrice Pavis leads the reader from a purely formal analysis to a semiology and anthropology of performance, where spectator and actor are equally objects of study. Drawn from performance traditions and innovations all over the world, the book's many examples make critical techniques vivid and concrete.
Analyzing Performance will be essential reading for critics, scholars, students, and practitioners of theater, who will find that David Williams's elegant translation brings Pavis's insights within reach of English-language readers.
Patrice Pavis, Professor of Theater at Paris-VIII University, has written extensively and influentially on performance.
David Williams is Professor of Theater, Dartington College of Arts, Devon, England.
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Anthropology and the Dance
TEN LECTURES (2D ED.)
Drid WIlliams
University of Illinois Press, 1991
Now in paperback, Anthropology and the Dance is a lively, controversial examination and discussion of theories of dance by the pioneer of the anthropology of human movement. Drid Williams's definitive text is explicitly intended for graduate students in anthropology faced with the wide spectrum of theories of human movement, including the dance, sign language, martial arts, and rituals. With its groundbreaking approach to this previously unexamined field, however, Anthropology and the Dance brings the study of human movement to readers in fields such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, ethnomusicology, library science, physical education, history, music, linguistics,  dance, and dance education.
 
Williams examines subjects ranging from Aboriginal and African dances to the Royal Ballet, and makes a compelling case for moving beyond the Western view of the dance as mere entertainment, locating human movement firmly and irrefutably within the sphere of serious study.
 
Anthropology and the Dance: Ten Lectures is the thoroughly rewritten second edition of Ten Lectures on Theories of the Dance (1991). Included are a glossary of terms, indexes and notes, an updated bibliography, and an appendix, "An Exercise in Applied Personal Anthropology."
 
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Appalachian Dance
Creativity and Continuity in Six Communities
Susan Eike Spalding
University of Illinois Press, 2014
In Appalachian Dance: Creativity and Continuity in Six Communities, Susan Eike Spalding brings to bear twenty-five years' worth of rich interviews with black and white Virginians, Tennesseeans, and Kentuckians to explore the evolution and social uses of dance in each region.

Spalding analyzes how issues as disparate as industrialization around coal, plantation culture, race relations, and the 1970s folk revival influenced freestyle clogging and other dance forms like square dancing in profound ways. She reveals how African Americans and Native Americans, as well as European immigrants drawn to the timber mills and coal fields, brought movement styles that added to local dance vocabularies. Placing each community in its sociopolitical and economic context, Spalding analyzes how the formal and stylistic nuances found in Appalachian dance reflect the beliefs, shared understandings, and experiences of the community at large, paying particular attention to both regional and racial diversity.

Written in clear and accessible prose, Appalachian Dance is a lively addition to the literature and a bold contribution to scholarship concerned with the meaning of movement and the ever-changing nature of tradition.

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The Art of Tradition
Sacred Music, Dance & Myth of Michigan's Anishinaabe, 1946-1955
Michael D. McNally
Michigan State University Press, 2009
A half-century ago, three writers—all intimately familiar with the Native American culture of their time and locale—collaborated to produce a 450-page typescript of a study entitled Religious Customs of Modern Michigan Algonquians, together with sound recordings and photographs. Their 1959 work offered a detailed view of the life of Ojibwe and Odawa music, dance, myth, and ceremony at mid-century. Now framed by a substantive editor's introduction, and published for the first time in book form, this material offers a unique glimpse into a significant and largely overlooked era in the history of North American ethnology and ethnomusicology.
     The Art of Tradition documents the complexity of Native life and culture at a critical juncture in Native American history, where the rekindling of pride in Native cultures characteristic of the later twentieth century met the generation of elders who spent their early years speaking Native tongues but who came of age in boarding schools and amid strong pressures of assimilation. Because this period was deemed by most ethnographers of the time to be one of "acculturation," marking the end of traditional Native cultures, the authors' appreciation for the integrity of mid-century Native culture stands out markedly from other scholarship of the day. The songs, dance steps, and stories collected here are evidence of the artful work of maintaining and breathing new life into traditions, often in contexts that seem anything but traditional, by indigenous elders and artists. As the editor notes, there are no "Native informants" in this study, only collaborators whose lives are shown to be as resilient as the repertories they performed.
     The Art of Tradition is itself a demonstration of the improvisation and resourcefulness that ensured the continuity of Native communities. In documenting the rich ethnographic material with refreshingly little analytical overlay, it serves today as a valuable primary resource on Native religions and cultures.
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Art without Boundaries
The World of Modern Dance
Jack Anderson
University of Iowa Press, 1999
Out of his long history as dance critic for the New York Times, Jack Anderson gives us this important, comprehensive history of one of the liveliest and most unpredictable of the arts. Treating modern dance as a self-renewing art, Anderson follows its changes over the decades and discusses the visionary choreographers who have devised new modes of movement.
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Astad Deboo
An Icon of Contemporary Indian Dance
Ketu H. Katrak
Seagull Books, 2024
A biography that unveils the iconic life, innovative choreography, and enduring legacy of Astad Deboo, a pioneer of Indian modern dance.
 
Astad Deboo (1947–2020), widely considered a pioneer of modern dance in India, was globally renowned for his distinctive style, characterized by meditative minimalism, gravity-defying backbends, and signature whirls which defined his innovative approach to form and content. In this first biography and book-length appreciation of Deboo’s work, Ketu H. Katrak unveils the remarkable life, choreography, and legacy of this groundbreaking figure in Indian modern dance. Through a comprehensive exploration, readers journey from Deboo's formative years in Jamshedpur and Bombay to his global endeavors that shaped his unique dance style.
 
Divided into four parts, this biography sheds light on various aspects of Deboo’s life and career: his youth, schooling, and the friendships that shaped him; his solo choreography, which boldly addressed social issues and fused modern dance with traditional elements; his humanitarian spirit, showcasing group choreography with deaf performers and Manipuri drum-dancers; and his mastery in collaborating with artists from India and abroad.
 
From receiving prestigious awards to transforming lives through dance, traveling around the world for over five decades yet being firmly rooted in Indian soil, Deboo left an indelible mark on contemporary Indian dance. Astad Deboo: An Icon of Contemporary Indian Dance pays homage to the dancer’s legendary status, emphasizing his unparalleled dedication and resilience—a guiding light for aspiring dancers striving to realize their artistic visions. It is a valuable addition to scholarship on dance studies, performance studies, and South Asian studies.
 
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At Lady Molly's
Book 4 of A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell
University of Chicago Press, 1995

Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic A Dance to the Music of Time offers a matchless panorama of twentieth-century London. Now, for the first time in decades, readers in the United States can read the books of Dance as they were originally published—as twelve individual novels—but with a twenty-first-century twist: they’re available only as e-books.

As the fourth book, At Lady Molly’s (1957), opens, the heady pleasures of the 1920s have begun to give way to the austerity and worries of the 1930s. Even so, the whirl of London life continues: friends commit to causes and to spouses, confess adulteries, and fall victim to dissipation and disillusion. As Nick moves ever more comfortably in the worlds of art, culture, and society, Powell’s palette broadens: old friends make appearances, but new ones take places on the stage as well—including Isobel Tolland, whom Nick knows at first sight he’s destined to marry.

"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."--Chicago Tribune

"
A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."--Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times

"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."--Naomi Bliven, New Yorker

“The most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.”--Kingsley Amis

[more]


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