Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality

Contents

Preface ix introduction: Situated Dancing 1 I Performance Writings 19 1 Pooh Kaye and Eccentric Motions 22 2 Johanna Boyce 25 3 improvisations by Simone Forti and Pooh Kaye 27 4 Song of Lawino 31 5 Joseph holmes, Sizzle and heat 33 6 Performing across identity 36 7 in Dialogue with Firebird 40 8 Dancing Bodies and the Stories They Tell 44 9 Embodying history: The new Epic Dance 50 10 Desire and Control: Performing Bodies in the Age of AiDS 55 II Feminist Theories 61 11 Mining the Dancefield: Spectacle, Moving Subjects, and Feminist Theory 64 12 Writing the Moving Body: nancy Stark Smith and the hieroglyphs 76 13 Auto-Body Stories: Blondell Cummings and Autobiography in Dance 92 14 Femininity with a Vengeance: Strategies of Veiling and Unveiling in loïe Fuller’s Performances of Salomé 115 III Dancing Histories 139 15 The long Afternoon of a Faun: reconstructions and Discourses of Desire 142 16 Embodying history: Epic narrative and Cultural identity in African-American Dance 148 17 Matters of Tact: Writing history from the inside out 175 18 The Tanagra Effect: Wrapping the Modern Body in the Folds of Ancient greece 188 Contents IV Contact Improvisation 209 19 A Particular history: Contact improvisation at oberlin College 212 20 open Bodies: (X)changes of identity in Capoeira and Contact improvisation 218 21 Present Tense: Contact improvisation at Twenty-five 230 22 Feeling in and out: Contact improvisation and the Politics of Empathy 237 V Pedagogy 247 23 Dancing across Difference: Experience and identity in the Classroom 250 24 Channeling the other: An Embodied Approach to Teaching across Cultures 263 25 Training Bodies to Matter 270 VI Occasional Pieces 279 26 The Mesh in the Mess 281 27 Through Yours to Mine and Back Again: reflections on Bodies in Motion 288 28 Physical Mindfulness 292 29 researching Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality 294 30 Strategic Abilities: negotiating the Disabled Body in Dance 297 31 Dancing in and out of Africa 318 32 rates of Exchange 321 33 Moving Contexts: Dance and Difference in the Twenty-first Century 325 34 Three Beginnings and a Manifesto 335 35 improvisation as radical Politics 338 36 Space and Subjectivity 343 37 Strategic Practices 348 38 resurrecting the Future: Body/image/Technology 354 39 Falling . . . on-screen 360 40 The Tensions of Technˉ e: on heidegger and Screendance 367 41 Falling 370 Afterword 379 Acknowledgments 381 Index 383 ...