New Books In Dance

Soul is one of those concepts that is often evoked, but rarely satisfactorily defined. In The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s (Duke University Press 2020), Emily J. Lordi takes on the challenge of explaining “soul,” through a book that zooms in and out between sweeping ideas about suffering and resilience in Black culture and fine-grained, close readings of individual performances by soul musicians. Rather than centering big musical gestures and major popular hits, Lordi pays close attention to musical practices like falsetto, ad-libs, and false endings to ground her analysis. She focuses on artists that are some of the most recognizable Black singers in the United States such as Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, and James Brown, but she also spends a lot of time with more obscure figures including Donny Hathaway and Minnie Riperton. She ends the book with a powerful contemplation of how the logic of soul, born in the political and social tumult of the late 1960s, still resonates with

Warren Hoffman’s The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical, 2nd edition (Rutgers UP, 2020) explores the ways that race and racism have shaped the American musical from Show Boat to Hamilton. Perhaps surprisingly, Hoffman’s analysis isn’t limited to shows with characters of color like West Side Story; he writes about how the assumption of whiteness shapes apparently race-free musicals like The Music Man and Oklahoma! His book also includes a fascinating discussion of how diverse casting has created both opportunity and controversy, from an all-black Hello, Dolly! to Book of Mormon. This is a book equally valuable to theatre scholars and to fans of the Broadway musical who want to engage more critically with this rich and multi-faceted art form. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatr

In this episode of New Books in Literary Studies we speak with Lissette Lopez Szwydky, author of the new book Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (Ohio State UP, 2020) A comprehensive study of adaptation across media, form and genre, this book argues passionately for the importance of adaptation to our understanding of literary texts. For Lopez Szwydky, adaptation does not just constitute the afterlife of the adapted work, but instead it forms part of the dynamic process that brings the work to life. Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century explores a range of works by authors such as Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Lord Byron, John Keats and many more. Filled with engaging case studies, this book charts the evolution of literary narratives across novels, illustrations, stage plays, chapbooks, commercial merchandise and more. Lissette Lopez Szwydky is Associate Professor of English at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville where she teaches courses in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Cu

Written from Neil Shister’s perspective as a journalist, student of American culture, and six-time participant in Burning Man, Radical Ritual: How Burning Man Changed the World (Counterpoint, 2019) presents the event as vitally, historically important. Shister contends that Burning Man is a significant player in the avant-garde, forging new social paradigms as liberal democracy unravels. Burning Man’s contribution to this new order is postmodern, a fusion of sixties humanism with state-of-the-art Silicon Valley wizardry. Shister is not alone in his opinion. In 2018, the Smithsonian dedicated its entire Renwick Gallery, located next door to the White House, to an exhibition of Burning Man art and culture. The festival intertwines conservative and progressive ideas. On one hand it is a celebration of self-reliance, personal accountability, and individual freedom; on the other hand it is based on strong values of inclusion, consensual decision making, and centered, collaborative endeavor. In a wonderful mix of n

Born around 1820, Augusta Browne was a pianist, organist, composer, music pedagogue, entrepreneur, music critic, and writer. In Augusta Browne: Composer and Woman of Letters in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Rochester Press, 2020), author Bonny Miller contextualizes the life and career of this remarkable woman who built a public career that at times seems at odds with her conservative Christian belief system. Browne spent much of her life in New England and the area around Washington, D.C. and had a regional reputation by the time of her death in 1882. Miller uses Augusta Browne as an example at once of an extraordinary woman who was involved in establishing nineteenth-century musical culture in the US, but also an ordinary woman whose experiences were typical of people in that era—the loss of loved ones, the trauma of the Civil War, the pain of dislocation and living through financial hardship, the comfort of deep religious belief, and the joys of marriage and a close family. In Miller’s hands, Br

Lisa B. Thompson is equally renowned as a scholar of African and African-American studies and as a playwright. Her latest book Underground, Monroe, and the Mamalogues: Three Plays (Northwestern University Press 2020) collects plays from throughout her two decades as a playwright. "Underground" is a tense two-hander exploring themes of race, class, and masculinity through the story of two friends with very different ideas about how to change the world. Monroe draws on Thompson’s family’s history as part of the Great Migration of Blacks from the South to the urban north and west. "The Mamalogues" is the funniest and most personal play in this collection: it is a love letter to unpartnered Black mothers and a spiritual sequel to Thompson’s earlier play "Single Black Female." Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at

With Against Demagogues: What Aristophanes Can Teach Us about the Perils of Populism and the Fate of Democracy (University of California Press, 2020), Robert Bartlett provides a stirring argument for the relevance of comic playwright Aristophanes as a serious political and philosophical thinker. In his translations of two lesser-known plays, The Acharnians and The Knights, Bartlett presents an Aristophanes who is equally a thinker of his times and a prescient voice warning about the fragility of democracy. Equally noteworthy are the essays that accompany the translations, which provide necessary political and philosophical context for understanding these plays. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud

Few mainstream filmmakers have as pronounced a disregard for the supposed rules of filmmaking as Martin Scorsese. His inventiveness displays a reaction against the “right” way to make a movie, frequently eschewing traditional cinematic language in favor of something flashy, unexpected and contrary to the way “proper” films are done. Yet despite this, he’s become one of the most influential directors of the last fifty years, a critical darling (though rarely a box office titan), and a fan favorite. In this book, Eric San Juan guides readers through the crooks, the mobsters, the loners, the moguls, and the nobodies of Scorsese's 26-movie filmography. The Films of Martin Scorsese: Gangsters, Greed, and Guilt (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) examines the techniques that have made him one of the most innovative directors in history. The book further looks at the themes that are the engine driving all of this, including themes of self-sabotage, alienation, faith, and guilt. Eric San Juan has written a number of books

Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond (U Massachusetts Press, 2020) by Dr. Chinua Thelwell is a rich, well-researched, and sobering investigation of blackface minstrelsy as the “visual bedrock of a transcolonial cultural imaginary.” In tracing minstrel globalization across the Anglo-colonial and British imperial worlds beginning in the 1800s, Thelwell explores the ways that blackface minstrelsy helped to construct and maintain notions of exclusionary citizenship in racial states throughout the Atlantic, Indian, Pacific Ocean worlds. Thelwell shows that the South African Cape Colony became the minstrel nexus of these globalizing performance circuits. Putting this history in conversation with ongoing white settler colonialism and attendant plunder, annexation, and resource extraction, Thelwell argues that minstrel performances discursively strengthened the economic, social, and political cornerstones of the South African racial state, a state that ultimately developed into an apart

“How can dance be sustained by its practitioners in the unstable political and geographical landscape of war?” Satkunaratnam asks this through her text, Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict: Practicing Bharatanatyam in Colombo, Sri Lanka (Wesleyan UP, 2020), a groundbreaking ethnographic examination of dance practice in Colombo, Sri Lanka, during the civil war (1983–2009). It is the first book of scholarship on bharata natyam (a classical dance originating in India) in Sri Lanka, and the first on the role of this dance in the country's war. Focusing on women dancers, Ahalya Satkunaratnam shows how they navigated conditions of conflict and a neoliberal, global economy, resisted nationalism and militarism, and advocated for peace. Her interdisciplinary methodology combines historical analysis, methods of dance studies, and dance ethnography. In this discussion, Satkunaratnam describes her ethnographic work, placing importance on the body, which carries the memory of war and transnational shifts. Satkunaratnam emp

Yvonne Rainer is one of the most influential living choreographers. After studying with Merce Cunningham she co-founded the Judson Dance Theater, a center of post-modern dance whose influence far outlasted its three years of existence. In the 1970s Rainer transitioned into film directing. She released seven feature films between 1972 and 1996 before returning to choreography in 2000 with After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, a piece created for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project. Her latest book Revisions: Essays by Apollo Musagète, Yvonne Rainer, and Others (No Place Press, 2020) features the text of her ongoing piece Revisions: A Truncated History of the Universe for Dummies along with essays and interviews reflecting on her life and work. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre C

In his new book, Memoir of a Roadie: Axl said I made a great Cup of Tea…Scott Weiland liked The Carpenters…and Ozzy Drinks Rosé (2020) Joel Miller recounts his time in the early 2000s as a road for Stone Temple Pilots, Guns N’ Roses, Poison, and The Cranberries. Using his journal entries from being on the road, Miller shares what it was like for a young man in his early 20s to be on the road, learning about what it meant to be a roadie. Often humorous and also thoughtful, Miller brings readers into the backstage world of the hardworking crews that make sure performances and tours go on without a hitch (or at least without a hitch for the fans). Although the book does share insight into some of the biggest names in rock-n-roll during the time Miller was a roadie, the focus on the day to day life and Miller’s attempt at trying to navigate the world during this time is what readers will find most interesting. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines

It would be hard to overstate the importance of culture. It teaches us, heals us, rips us apart and puts us back together in new and surprising ways. Given its fundamental importance to the human experience, it would make sense that looking at the sort of people who produce it for us, thinking about who they are, what their experiences are, and what that may say about the cultural products they then make. There is no product without a producer, and cultural products are no different, so understanding cultural products means thinking more critically about who produces them. This is the goal of the recently published ​Culture is Bad for You: Inequality in the Cultural and Creative Industries (Manchester University Press, 2020). Written by Orian Brook, Mark Taylor and, my guest today, Dave O’Brien, the book combines quantitative data analysis with personal interviews to weave together the complicated picture of who the people behind some of our most cherished experiences are. Dave O’Brien is Chancellor’s Fellow

How do we distinguish art from non-art artifacts, and what does cognitive science have to do with it? In Attentional Engines: A Perceptual Theory of the Arts (Oxford University Press, 2020), William Seeley offers a cognitive science-based account of how we engage with art, what it is that artworks do, and what artists do to make sure they do it. In his diagnostic recognition framework for locating art, artworks are communicative devices in which artists embed perceptual cues that enable the perceiver to categorize the work as intended and thereby unlock its meanings. Seeley, an associate professor at the University of Southern Maine, also considers how his framework might handle conceptual art, what goes wrong when a novice about art perceives an artwork, and the relation between the neuroscience of art and neuroaesthetics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes (Columbia UP 2020), Jill Richards radically rewrites our understanding of first-wave feminism by demonstrating its proximity to international avant-garde movements including surrealism, Dada, and futurism. Using case studies including the movement for a proletarian birth strike, the anti-Nazi pranks of Claude Cahun, and the theatre of Ina Cesaire, Richards shows that our understanding of early 20th-century women activists as stodgy and conservative is woefully inadequate. While some among the turn of the century feminist movement saw suffrage as the primary goal, others dreamed of revolution, decolonization, and a world where art was life and life was art. Richards also shows how these forgotten feminisms sharply depart from the liberal understandings of human rights taking shape alongside them. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University,

In After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (NYU Press, 2018) Joshua Chambers-Letson invites you to a party featuring Eiko, Nina Simone, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Danh Vō, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Tseng Kwong Chi. Through this diverse cast of characters, Chambers-Letson highlights moments of immanent communism: collaborations, romantic relationships, and serendipitous collisions that point towards a liberated future which also exists in our troubled present. Chambers-Letson draws on queer theorists like Jose Esteban Muñoz as well as Third World Marxists like C.L.R. James to articulate “a practice of being together in difference.” These artists and theorists model a form of solidarity that never denies our differences. Writing back against an often heteronormative and Euro-centric Marxism, Chambers-Letson helps us imagine a revolutionary communist party that lasts through the night and into the morning. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA p

In Everyone Loves Live Music: A Theory of Performance Institutions (University of Chicago Press), Fabian In Everyone Loves Live Music: A Theory of Performance Institutions (University of Chicago Press), Fabian Holt shows how festivals and other institutions of musical performance have evolved in recent decades. Adopting a critical approach, Holt upends commonly-held ideas of live music and introduces a theory of performance institutions. The two central institutions of popular music—the club and the festival—are analyzed within the broader history of music and cultural life in modernity, shedding new light on organized cultural life in capitalism, urban media cultures, and the role of festive events in society. Everyone Loves Live Music argues that while live music provides exciting experiences for many people, it also promotes a new ideology of music in neoliberal capitalism. Dr. Fabian Holt is associate professor in the Department of Communication and Arts at Roskilde University. He is also the author of th

The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators (Oxford University Press) is the first book-length study to examine the historical foundations and stylistic mechanics of pure cinema. Author Bruce Isaacs, Associate Professor of Film Studies and Director of the Film Studies Program at the University of Sydney, explores the potential of a philosophical and artistic approach most explicitly demonstrated by Hitchcock in his later films, beginning with Hitchcock's contact with the European avant-garde film movement in the mid-1920s. Tracing the evolution of a philosophy of pure cinema across Hitchcock's most experimental works - Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, Marnie, and Frenzy - Isaacs rereads these works in a new and vital context. In addition to this historical account, the book presents the first examination of pure cinema as an integrated stylistics of mise en scène, montage, and sound design. The films of so-called Hitchcockian imitators like Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and Br

From the gouging out of eyes in Shakespeare's King Lear or Sarah Kane's Cleansed, to the adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, theatre has long been intrigued by the staging of challenging plays and impossible texts, images or ideas. Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure (Methuen Drama) examines this phenomenon of what the theatre cannot do or has not been able to do at various points in its history. The book explores four principal areas to which unstageability most frequently pertains: stage directions, adaptations, violence and ghosts. Karen Quigley incorporates a wide range of case studies of both historical and contemporary theatrical productions including the Wooster Group's exploration of Hamlet via the structural frame of John Gielgud's 1964 filmed production, Elevator Repair Service's eight-hour staging of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and a selection of impossible stage directions drawn from works by such playwrights as Eugene O'Neill, Philip Glass, Caryl Chu

Silviana Wood is a legend of Chicano theatre. Through her involvement with Teatro Libertad, Teatro Chicano, and El Teatro Nacional de Atzlán she has created plays where working class Chicanos are center stage. Despite her insistence that she is “a storyteller, not an activist,” her plays reflect her deep connection to the Movimiento Chicano. They are also funny, imaginative, and heartbreaking, sometimes all in the same scene. Her book Barrio Dreams (University of Arizona Press 2016) collects five of her plays. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U