New Books In Dance

The long 1950s, which extend back to the early postwar period and forward into the early 1960s, were a period of “containment culture” in America, as the media worked to reinforce traditional family values and suspected communist sympathizers were blacklisted from the entertainment industry. Yet some brave filmmakers and actors still challenged the status quo to produce indelible and imaginative work that delivered uncomfortable truths to Cold War audiences. Triumph Over Containment: American Film in the 1950s (Rutgers University Press, 2021) offers an uncompromising look at some of the era’s greatest films and directors, from household names like Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick to lesser-known iconoclasts like Samuel Fuller and Ida Lupino. Taking in everything from The Thing from Another World (1951) to Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), acclaimed film scholar Robert P. Kolker scours a variety of different genres to find pockets of resistance to the repressive a

Once viewed as an embarrassing superstition, the theatrical religious performances of Korean shamans--who communicate with the dead, divine the future, and become possessed--are going mainstream. Attitudes toward Korean shamanism are changing as shamanic traditions appear in staged rituals, museums, films, and television programs, as well as on the internet.  In Contemporary Korean Shamanism: From Ritual to Digital (Indiana University Press, 2021), Liora Sarfati explores this vernacular religion and practice, which includes sensory rituals using laden altars, ecstatic dance, and animal sacrifice, within South Korea's hypertechnologized society, where over 200,000 shamans are listed in professional organizations. In doing so, Sarfati reveals how representations of shamanism in national, commercialized, and screen-mediated settings have transformed opinions of these religious practitioners and their rituals. Applying ethnography and folklore research, Contemporary Korean Shamanism maps this shift in perception

During the 1910s, films about war often featured a female protagonist. The films portrayed women as spies, cross-dressing soldiers, and athletic defenders of their homes--roles typically reserved for men and that contradicted gendered-expectations of home-front women waiting for their husbands, sons, and brothers to return from battle. The representation of American martial spirit--particularly in the form of heroines--has a rich history in film in the years just prior to the American entry into World War I. The American Girl Goes to War: Women and National Identity in US Silent Film (Rutgers UP, 2022) demonstrates the predominance of heroic female characters in in early narrative films about war from 1908 to 1919. American Girls were filled with the military spirit of their forefathers and became one of the major ways that American women's changing political involvement, independence, and active natures were contained by and subsumed into pre-existing American ideologies. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History

Deirdre Ní Chonghaile is a writer, musician, broadcaster, and curator from the Aran Islands. Working bilingually in Irish and English, she is drawn to voices, contemporary and historical, especially those that have been marginalized, and to what they have to say or sing. She read Music at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, and worked at the University of Notre Dame and the Library of Congress. Deirdre is currently curating an exhibition for Roinn na Gaeilge at NUI Galway on the first professor of Irish there, Tomás Ó Máille, and also preparing an anthology of over fifty traditional songs composed in the Aran Islands from the nineteenth century to the present day. In this interview, she discusses her new book Collecting Music in the Aran Islands: A Century of History and Practice (U Wisconsin Press, 2021), which uses interlocking case-studies of traditional music collection to investigate questions of preservation, curation and marginalization. Collecting Music in the Aran Islands, a critical historiographical study

Funny music is often dismissed as light and irrelevant, but Weird Al Yankovic’s fourteen successful studio albums prove there is more going on than comedic music's reputation suggests. In this book, for the first time, the parodies, original compositions, and polka medleys of the Weird Al universe finally receive their due respect. In Weird Al, Seriously, musicologist Lily Hirsch weaves together original interviews with the prince of parody himself, creating a fresh take on comedy and music’s complicated romance. She reveals that Yankovic’s jests have always had a deeper meaning, addressing such topics as bullying, celebrity, and racial and gender stereotypes. Weird Al is undeterred by those who say funny music is nothing but a low-brow pastime. And thank goodness. With his good-guy grace still intact, Yankovic remains unapologetically and unmistakably himself. Reveling in the mischief and wisdom of Yankovic’s forty-year career, this book is an Al-expense-paid tour of a true comedic and musical genius. Franz

What is the hidden history of women in the television industry? In Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (U California Press, 2022), Annie Berke, film editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and host of the Film channel of the New Books Network podcast, explores the history of women writers through key case studies, industry analysis, and readings of on-screen representations. The book is a rich and detailed analysis of the changing nature of the gendered profession of making television, thinking through the past, with lessons for the present and future of the entertainment industry. Accessible and fascinating, the book should be widely read by scholars, industry insiders, and the public too! Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

What is education? Most of the time, we have little patience for this question because we take the answer to be obvious: we identify education with school learning. This book focuses on education outside of the school context as a basis for criticizing and improving school learning. Following the examples of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Dewey, Arcilla seeks to harmonize schooling with a more pervasive education we are all naturally undergoing. He develops a philosophical theory of education that stresses the experience of being led out —a theory latent in the Latin term, “educere”— by examining the road movies of Wim Wenders. Wim Wenders's Road Movie Philosophy: Education Without Learning (Bloomsbury, 2020) contributes both to our understanding of another crucial kind of education our schooling could better serve, and to our appreciation of what unifies and distinguishes Wenders's achievements in cinema. René V. Arcilla is Professor of Philosophy of Education in the Steinhardt School of Education, at New Yo

The humanities, considered by many as irrelevant for modern careers and hopelessly devoid of funding, seem to be in a perpetual state of crisis, at the mercy of modernizing and technological forces that are driving universities towards academic pursuits that pull in grant money and direct students to lucrative careers. But as Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon show in Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age (U Chicago Press, 2021), this crisis isn’t new—in fact, it’s as old as the humanities themselves. Today’s humanities scholars experience and react to basic pressures in ways that are strikingly similar to their nineteenth-century German counterparts. The humanities came into their own as scholars framed their work as a unique resource for resolving crises of meaning and value that threatened other cultural or social goods. The self-understanding of the modern humanities didn’t merely take shape in response to a perceived crisis; it also made crisis a core part of its project. Through this critica

Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition (Rutgers University Press, 2021) focuses on a rich, usable American Jewish cinematic tradition. This tradition includes fiction and documentary films that make Jews through antisemitism, Holocaust indirection, and discontent with assimilation. It prominently features the unapologetic assertion of Jewishness, queerness, and alliances across race and religion. Author Helene Meyers shows that as we go to our local theater, attend a Jewish film festival, play a DVD, watch streaming videos, Jewishness becomes part of the multicultural mosaic rather than collapsing into a generic whiteness or being represented as a life apart. This engagingly written book demonstrates that a Jewish movie is neither just a movie nor for Jews only. With incisive analysis, Movie-Made Jews challenges the assumption that American Jewish cinema is a cinema of impoverishment and assimilation. While it’s a truism that Jews make movies, this book brings into focus the diverse ways movies make Jews.  Na

Uwe Schütte's Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany (Penguin, 2021) is not your typical rock star biography. Eschewing gossipy interpersonal details, Schütte instead contextualizes Kraftwerk within contemporaneous debates about German cultural identity in the wake of Nazi atrocities. Kraftwerk's intellectual and artistic debts to Weimar era movements like Bauhaus and early Soviet experimentation in constructivism and futurism are fully elucidated, showing how Kraftwerk's futuristic electro-pop was actually deeply rooted in pan-European avant-garde movements. Schütte also provides in-depth analysis of each of Kraftwerk's albums, including now-disowned early recordings and the most recent Kraftwerk studio release, 2003's Tour de France. With this book, Schütte makes a compelling case for Kraftwerk as a major artist in 20th century pop music, as influential in its own way as The Beatles or Elvis Presley. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia Uni

Larissa FastHorse's new collection of plays includes the wildly successful plays The Thanksgiving Play/What Would Crazy Horse Do? (Theatre Communications Group, 2021). In both plays, FastHorse explores issues facing contemporary Native Americans, but also white America's complicated self-identity in an era of multiculturalism. In The Thanksgiving Play, four white people with varying degrees of theatre experience try to stage a historically sensitive Thanksgiving pageant for a local school, with predictably disastrous results. What Would Crazy Horse Do? features the last two members of a fictional tribe who are forced to confront uncomfortable aspects of their own history when they learn that their grandfather participated in a reenactment of a powwow as part of a Klan rally. This gut-churning play reveals the fallacy of any ideology of racial purity, whether involving whites, indigenous peoples, or any other group. Together, these two plays are a riotously funny but ultimately unsettling look at contemporary

“Not a whisper. / Never laughter. / Buster, thank you / for disaster.” So wrote graduate student Dana Stevens, who would go on to become Slate’s resident film critic and podcaster. Her love affair with Buster Keaton – strictly platonic, as their “first sustained encounter” was decades after the actor’s passing in 1966 – began at a cinematheque in Alsace. But Stevens’ book about actor-director-gag man-stunt virtuoso Buster Keaton, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, The Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century (Simon & Schuster, 2022), is more than the story of one man. Through Keaton, Stevens tells the story of modernity, one that includes the myths and scandals of the Hollywood Dream Factory but that goes far beyond the usual contours of the celebrity biography. In this conversation, Dana Stevens discusses the origins of this, her first full-length book project, weighs in on her favorite Keaton films, and reveals the particular challenges of working as a critic of contemporary franchise filmmaking.

Lynn Garafola's La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern (Oxford UP, 2022) is both readable and rigorous, a rare combination. As a historian and eminent dance scholar, Garafola brings her skills to the art of biography with acumen. We also get a deep sense of the woman and her works. The interview not only includes a discussion of Nijinska and the way in which her history has been overshadowed by her famous brother, as well as dance history which has foregrounded and celebrated male ballet choreographers, and modern choreographers after the first wave of women through the late 1940s, Garafola provides insights into Nijinska's works and suggests links for viewing the best productions to further understand this ephemeral art. What emerges from the interview is the story of a woman who survived revolutions, wars, geographic moves, misogyny, motherhood, and cared for her brother who was institutionalised, and continued to work as an artist through the end of her life. Victoria Phillips is a Visiting Fellow at the

I am joined for my interview with Edward Tyerman by Ed Pulford, another host on our channel. Together, we discuss Edward’s new book, Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture (Columbia University Press, 2021). Internationalist Aesthetics examines how knowledge of China is produced in the early Soviet period through the aesthetic idiom of internationalism. Tyerman shows how artist intellectuals, especially Sergei Tretyakov, the book’s protagonist, make China affectively sensible for Russian audiences. Each chapter takes on a separate medium: travelogue, stage, film, and “bio-narrative,” to think through how Soviet aesthetes negotiate old and new forms to demystify China, a nation that even in the revolutionary environment of 1920s Russia, was still understood through recourse to orientalist tropes. The book ultimately spans a very short period, a slither of the 1920s, a moment of opportunity before the Guomindang’s persecution of the communists in China in 1927 and a moment of aesthetic possi

Singing the same song is a central part of the worship practice for members for the Cherubim and Seraphim Christian Church in Lagos, Nigeria. Vicki L. Brennan reveals that by singing together, church members create one spiritual mind and become unified around a shared set of values. She follows parishioners as they attend choir rehearsals, use musical media—hymn books and cassette tapes—and perform the music and rituals that connect them through religious experience. Brennan asserts that church members believe that singing together makes them part of a larger imagined social collective, one that allows them to achieve health, joy, happiness, wealth, and success in an ethical way. Brennan discovers how this particular Yoruba church articulates and embodies the moral attitudes necessary to be a good Christian in Nigeria today. Singing Yoruba Christianity: Music, Media, and Morality (Indiana UP, 2018) makes an important contribution to understanding the complex religious landscape of Lagos, which includes variou

James Lapine's Putting it Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created "Sunday in the Park with George" (FSG, 2021)  is a fascinating behind the scenes look at the creation of a modern masterpiece. Through personal recollections and interviews with nearly all his surviving collaborators, Lapine gives us an intimate look at the fights, feuds, and deadline-defying compositions that went into this beloved musical. The result is a dramatic and entertaining book that deserves a place on every musical theatre lover's shelf next to Finishing the Hat. It will also appeal to instructors in musical theatre book-writing and directing. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Poet and jazz band musician Sun Ra, born in 1914, is one of the most wildly prolific and unfailingly eccentric figures in the history of music. Renowned for extravagant performances in which his band “Arkestra” appeared in neo-Egyptian garb, this keyboardist and bandleader also espoused an interstellar cosmology and that the planet Saturn was his true home. In his book, Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. William Sites contextualizes this visionary musician in his home on earth—specifically in Chicago’s South Side, where from 1946 to 1961 Sun Ra lived and relaunched his career. The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism: Afrocentric philosophies flourished, storefront prophets sold “dream-book bibles,” and Elijah Muhammad was building the Nation of Islam. It was also an unruly musical crossroads where the man then still known as Sonny Blount drew from an array of intellectual and musical sources—from radical nationalism, r

From his early horror movies, including Scanners, Videodrome, Rabid, and The Fly—with their exploding heads, mutating sex organs, rampaging parasites, and scientists turning into insects—to his inventive adaptations of books by William Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Don DeLillo (Cosmopolis), and Bruce Wagner (Maps to the Stars), Canadian director David Cronenberg (b. 1943) has consistently dramatized the struggle between the aspirations of the mind and the messy realities of the flesh. “I think of human beings as a strange mixture of the physical and the non-physical, and both of these things have their say at every moment we’re alive,” says Cronenberg. “My films are some kind of strange metaphysical passion play.” Moving deftly between genre and arthouse filmmaking and between original screenplays and literary adaptations, Cronenberg’s work is thematically consistent and marked by a rigorous intelligence, a keen sense of humor, and a fearless engagement with the nature of human existence. He has been exploring the

Today I spoke to Dr. Rebecca Janzen, Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at the University of South Carolina about her book Unholy Trinity: State Church and Film in Mexico published by the State University of New York Press 2021. She says in the Introduction that her aim is not to promote religious devotion but to research how films critically engage with their context through imagery and goes on to describe how the State in Mexico has been remarkably active in creating new institutions to train filmmakers and yet the films are critiques of the “hand that feeds them”. Through her analysis of films like Novia te vea she underlines the complexity of Mexican Catholicism, the multiple religious heritages and also how religiosity in Mexico takes important symbols from various origins –pagan – Jewish Mexican. In chapters titled “Catholicism at its Wit’s end”, she analyses films teeming with priests and brothels and underlines that these films do not reflect reality as much as the politics o

Shakespeare’s plays enjoy a great deal of popularity across the world, yet most of us study Shakespeare's local productions and scholarship. Shakespeare & East Asia (Oxford University Press, 2021) addresses this gap through a wide-ranging analysis of stage and film adaptations related to Japan, South Korea, China, Singapore, and Taiwan. The book builds on Alexa Alice Joubin’s already extensive publication record regarding the circulation of Shakespeare’s plays in East Asia. In particular, it expands on her previous book, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (Columbia University Press, 2009). Shakespeare & East Asia focuses on post-1950 adaptations that were produced in, distributed across, or associated with East Asia. Joubin offers a nuanced view of what it means to think about Shakespeare and East Asia by carefully considering the international circulation of various stagings and films. She identifies a quartet of characteristics that distinguish these adaptations: innovations in form, t