1st Edition

Exhausting Dance Performance and the Politics of Movement

By Andre Lepecki Copyright 2006
160 Pages
by Routledge

160 Pages
by Routledge

160 Pages
by Routledge

The only scholarly book in English dedicated to recent European contemporary dance, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement examines the work of key contemporary choreographers who have transformed the dance scene since the early 1990s in Europe and the US. Through their vivid and explicit dialogue with performance art, visual arts and critical theory from the past thirty... Read more

1. Introduction: The Political Ontology of Movement  2. Masculinity, Solipsism, Choreography: Bruce Nauman, Juan Dominguez, Xavier Le Roy  3. Choreography’s 'Slower Ontology': Jérôme Bel’s Critique of Representation  4. Toppling Dance: The Making of Space in Trisha Brown and La Ribot  5. Stumbling Dance: William Pope L.’s crawls  6. The Melancholic Dance of the Post-Colonial Spectral: Vera Mantero Summoning Josephine Baker  7. Concluding Note: Exhausting Dance - To be Done with the Vanishing Point  References  Index

Biography

André Lepecki is Full Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

'In this book Andre Lepecki aims to bring dance studies up to speed with an extensive examination of a diverse group of contemporary choreographers who since the early 1990s have explored the mobilising potentialalities of standing still.' - Dance Theatre Journal

'Lepecki is at his best when describing the work and engaging with its curious circumstances and contingencies.' - Michal Sapir, writer, academic and musician, London

'musings on loss and rage, colonialist pasts, ghostly knockings, and white melancholia offer the reader productive strategies for responding to performances' - Thomas F. DeFrantz, The Dance Review

 

"Exhausting Dance represents a significant development for dance studies because it does not merely put dance in dialogue with critical theory; rather, it articulates dance's potentiality as critical theory itself." --Dance Research Journal