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Palgrave Macmillan
Book cover

Transmissions in Dance

Contemporary Staging Practices

  • Book
  • © 2017

Overview

  • Brings together a range of perspectives on staging a dance production, from director to dancer

  • Explores a century of dance, from Rudolf Laban’s Dancing Drumstick (1913) to Robert Cohan’s Sigh (2015)

  • Offers fresh insights and approaches to the process of staging

  • Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

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Table of contents (9 chapters)

Keywords

About this book

This book is a collection of essays that capture the artistic voices at play during a staging process. Situating familiar practices such as reimagining, reenactment and recreation alongside the related and often intersecting processes of transmission, translation and transformation, it features deep insights into selected dances from directors, performers, and close associates of choreographers. The breadth of practice on offer illustrates the capacity of dance as a medium to adapt successfully to diverse approaches and, further, that there is a growing appetite amongst audiences for seeing dances from the near and far past. This study spans a century, from Rudolf Laban’s Dancing Drumstick (1913) to Robert Cohan’s Sigh (2015), and examines works by Mary Wigman, Madge Atkinson (Natural Movement), Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham, Yvonne Rainer and Rosemary Butcher, an eclectic mix that crosses time and borders.

Reviews

“This edited collection will resonate with both practitioners and academics. The examples it gathers together uncover the difficulties, joys, and complexities of communicating earlier dances to current performers and audiences—raising issues, triggering debate, and providing marvelous resources for further study. It is an innovative and useful collection.” (Geraldine Morris, Dance Research Journal, Vol. 52 (1), April, 2020)

“Transmissions is, therefore, recommended reading for all with a stake in our moving past, including dance practitioners, historians, critics, and philosophers of art.” (Renee M. Conroy, Dance Research, Vol. 37 (2), November, 2019)
“Dance’s relationships with the past are a continuing source of interest. There is a burgeoning field of current research and debates relating to transmission, reimagining and re-enactment. Lesley Main and her authors make some valuable and focussed contributions to the field with their work on transmission and the staging of dance performance.” (Michael Huxley, Reader in Dance, De Montfort University, UK)

Editors and Affiliations

  • Department of Performing Arts, Middlesex University, London, United Kingdom

    Lesley Main

About the editor

Lesley Main is Head of the Department of Performing Arts at Middlesex University, UK, and Director of the Doris Humphrey Foundation UK. She stages Humphrey’s dances for companies in Europe and the USA, and is the author of Directing the Dance Legacy of Doris Humphrey: the Creative Impulse of Reconstruction (2012).

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Transmissions in Dance

  • Book Subtitle: Contemporary Staging Practices

  • Editors: Lesley Main

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64873-6

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham

  • eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-64872-9Published: 08 January 2018

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-87891-1Published: 10 May 2019

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-64873-6Published: 23 November 2017

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XVII, 231

  • Number of Illustrations: 28 b/w illustrations

  • Topics: Dance, Performing Arts, Technology and Stagecraft

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