Books in the Oxford Studies in Dance Theory series

Choreographies of 21st Century Wars is the first book to analyze the interface between choreography and contemporary warfare, a pertinent inquiry since choreography has long been linked to war and military training. Authors from a range of disciplines reconceptualize choreography in the face of this century's never ending wars.

The book looks at dance at the beginnings of the 20th century, the time during which modern dance first began to make its radical departure from the aesthetics of classical ballet. Author Gabriele Brandstetter traces modern dance's connection to new innovations and trends in visual and literary arts to argue that modern dance is in fact the preeminent symbol of modernity.

Dancing the World Smaller examines international dance performances in New York City in the 1940s as sites in which dance artists and audiences contested what it meant to practice globalism in mid-twentieth-century America. Debates over globalism in dance proxied larger cultural struggles over how to realize diversity while honoring difference.

Gestural Imaginaries offers a new interpretation of European modernist dance by addressing it as guiding medium in a vibrant field of gestural culture that ranged across art and philosophy.

In this book, author Kelina Gotman examines choreographies of unrest, rethinking the modern formation of choreomania, a fantastical concept across scientific disciplines used to designate the spontaneous and uncontrolled movements of crowds.

Situating ballet within twentieth-century modernism, this book brings complexity to the history of George Balanchine's American neoclassicism. It intervenes in the prevailing historical narrative and rebalances Balanchine's role in dance history by revealing the complex social, cultural, and political forces that actually shaped the construction of American neoclassical ballet.

Ungoverning Dance examines recent contemporary dance in continental Europe. Placing this in the context of neoliberalism and austerity, it argues that dancers are developing an ethico-aesthetic approach that uses dance practices as sites of resistance against dominant ideologies. It attests to the persistence of alternative ways of thinking and living.

Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body is a historical and theoretical examination of French court ballet of the late Renaissance and early baroque.

Choreographies of 21st Century Wars is the first book to analyze the interface between choreography and contemporary warfare, a pertinent inquiry since choreography has long been linked to war and military training. Authors from a range of disciplines reconceptualize choreography in the face of this century's never ending wars.

Watching Weimar Dance historicizes and theorizes the spectatorship of dances in and from interwar Germany - at home, on tour, and later returning from exile - developing a culturally-situated model of watching that not only offers a revisionist historical narrative, but also demonstrates new methods for dance scholarship to shape cultural history.

This book shows how le hip hop reflects a republic of culture rather than a culture industry; a minority identity politics that takes shape as a movement poetics or figural language; and the public valorization of dance as a technique, meriting unemployment compensation and understood as a high-tech knowledge practice.

The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar is the first book not only to discuss the resistance to Lifar in the French press at the start of his much-mythologized career, but also the first to present substantial evidence of Lifar's collaborationism and relate it to his artistic profile during the preceding decade.

Unworking Choreography considers how philosophy traditionally understands dance as space rather than art in order to postulate a new theory of unworking that is grounded in both historical and contemporary dance. work production.

Based on research in the archives of the Paris Opera, One Dead at the Paris Opera Ballet illustrates the full and complex history of performances of the ballet The Source, contextualized by political events, colonial and post-colonial narratives, and staging theories of heredity and hybridity.