Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (Wesleyan Paperback)

Drawing on the postmodern perspective and concerns that informed her groundbreaking Terpischore in Sneakers, Sally Bane’s Writing Dancing documents the background and development of avant-garde and popular dance, analyzing individual artists, performances, and entire dance movements. With a sure grasp of shifting cultural dynamics, Banes shows how postmodern dance is integrally connected to other oppositional, often marginalized strands of dance culture, and considers how certain kinds of dance move from the margins to the mainstream.

Banes begins by considering the act of dance criticism itself, exploring its modes, methods, and underlying assumptions and examining the work of other critics. She traces the development of contemporary dance from the early work of such influential figures as Merce Cunningham and George Balanchine to such contemporary choreographers as Molissa Fenley, Karole Armitage, and Michael Clark. She analyzes the contributions of the Judson Dance Theatre and the Workers’ Dance League, the emergence of Latin postmodern dance in New York, and the impact of black jazz in Russia. In addition, Banes explores such untraditional performance modes as breakdancing and the “drunk dancing” of Fred Astaire.

• Speaking of Dance: Twelve Contemporary Choreographers on Their Craft
• Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture (New Directions in Anthropological Writing)
• Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance (Studies. Engineering Dynamics Series;9)
• Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible
• Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance
• Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theatre, 1962–1964
• Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces
• Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism
• The Politics of Postmodernism (New Accents)
• Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts