Valuing Dance: Commodities and Gifts in Motion

Arts & Photography

Foster, Susan Leigh

Music

Oxford University Press

Because dance materializes through and for people, because we learn to dance from others and often present dance to others, the moment of its transmission is one of dance's central and defining features. Valuing Dance looks at the occasion when dancing passes from one person to another as an act of exchange, one that is redolent with symbolic meanings, including those associated with its history and all the labor that has gone into its making. It examines two ways that dance can be exchanged, as commodity and as gift, reflecting on how each establishes dance's relative worth and merit differently. When and why do we give dance? Where and to whom do we sell it? How are such acts of exchange rationalized and justified? Valuing Dance poses these questions in order to contribute to a conversation around what dance is, what it does, and why it matters.

"Undoubtedly, Choreography and Narrative is an important contribution to dance history research." ―Nineteenth-Century French Studies
"This work is a landmark in the field and belongs in all libraries serving undergraduate, graduate, and faculty researchers in dance." ―Choice
"Invents a new method for writing the history of performance: Foster has found an innovative way of appealing directly to the kinesthetic imagination of her readers, evoking the elusive styles of the pieces she reconstructs." ―Joseph Roach
"An impressive work of scholarship, this elegantly staged study... uses the concept of a culturally constructed, historically specific body to cut across disciplinary boundaries..." ―Library Journal
Foster examines the development of ballet, and conceptions of the dancing body, as ballet separated from opera and emerged as an autonomous art form during the turbulence of 18th-century French society and history.

Choreography & Narrative: Ballet's Staging of Story and Desire

Humor & Entertainment

Indiana University Press

Susan Foster traces the development of the story ballet from the pantomimes of early 18th-century theaters through the Revolutionary fetes to the well-known romantic ballets La Sylpbide and Giselle. She examines changing conceptions of the dancing body as ballet separated from opera and emerged as an autonomous art form during this turbulent period in French history. Approaching choreography as theory, she shows how choreographic choices are integral to the construction of bodily, individual, gendered, and social identities.

Choreography and Narrative: Ballets Staging of Story and Desire (French Edition)

introduction by Bill T. Jones Arnie Zane (1948-1988) is best known for his seventeen-year personal and artistic partnership with choreographer Bill T. Jones. Their creative interchange defined each other's artistic vision and led to one of the most celebrated collaborations in late-twentieth-century dance. The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company continues to bear Zane's name and to be inspired by his spirit.Continuous Replay, which is titled after a dance work of Zane's, is the first comprehensive presentation of his photography. Zane took up the camera in earnest in 1971, the year he and Jones met. His photography examines the body's physicality, sexual identity, and potential for beauty and decay. The design of the book and of its associated exhibition--which will travel widely within the United States--reflects Zane's aesthetic strategies and the dynamic interplay between his art and life, photography and dance, his collection of found images and his own photographs, and his self-portraits and images of others. The core of the book consists of six portfolios that present Zane's photographs side by side with his artwork, sketches, performance notes, snapshots of Bill and Arnie, and video stills and photos of the company in action. The portfolios are interpreted through writings by friends, dancers, curators, and historians from the worlds of photography, art, and dance.Essays by Jonathan Green, Susan Leigh Foster, and Christine Pichini commentary by Bill Bissell, Bill T. Jones, Robert Longo, Philip Sykas, and Lois Welk

Continuous Replay: The Photographs of Arnie Zane

Jones, Bill T.

Longo, Robert

Green, Jonathan

Zane, Arnie

Pichini, Christine

Bissell, Bill

Sykas, Phil

Welk, Lois

Individual Artists

Mit Pr

Suggests a new theory of dance, describes four models for representation in dance, and discusses the work of modern choreographers, including Balanchine, Graham, and Tharp

Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance

Performing Arts

Univ. Of California Pr.

During an improvised performance, both dancers and audience members reflect on how the dance is being made. They ask themselves: What will happen next? What choices will each dancer make? And how will these decisions contribute to the overall effect and significance of the performance? Trained as a jazz pianist, Richard Bull did not uphold the opposition often found in dance between improvisation and composition. Instead, he believed that dancers, like jazz musicians, could craft a piece spontaneously in performance. Analyzing performances by Bull and many of his contemporaries, Susan Foster argues that their diverse practices embody distinctive values representative of different artistic communities, yet they all share a capacity to reflect on their own making, in a sense, describing themselves.

Dances that Describe Themselves: The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

Wesleyan University Press

Foster, Susan

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