From the dance floor of a tango club to group therapy classes, from ballet to community theatre, improvised dance is everywhere. For some dance artists, improvisation is one of many approaches within the choreographic process. For others, it is a performance form in its own right. And while it has long been practiced, it is only within the last twenty years that dance improvisation has become a topic of critical inquiry. With The Oxford Handbook of
Improvisation in Dance, dancer, teacher, and editor Vida L. Midgelow provides a cutting-edge volume on dance improvisation in all its facets. Expanding beyond conventional dance frameworks, this
handbook looks at the ways that dance improvisation practices reflect our ability to adapt, communicate, and respond to our environment. Throughout the handbook, case studies from a variety of disciplines showcase the role of individual agency and collective relationships in improvisation, not just to dancers but to people of all backgrounds and abilities. In doing so, chapters celebrate all forms of improvisation, and unravel the ways that this kind of movement informs understandings of
history, socio-cultural conditions, lived experience, cognition, and technologies.
From the dance floor of a tango club to group therapy classes, from ballet to community theatre, improvised dance is everywhere. For some dance artists, improvisation is one of many approaches within the choreographic process. For others, it is a performance form in its own right. And while it has long been practiced, it is only within the last twenty years that dance improvisation has become a topic of critical inquiry. With The Oxford Handbook of
Improvisation in Dance, dancer, teacher, and editor Vida L. Midgelow provides a cutting-edge volume on dance improvisation in all its facets. Expanding beyond conventional dance frameworks, this
handbook looks at the ways that dance improvisation practices reflect our ability to adapt, communicate, and respond to our environment. Throughout the handbook, case studies from a variety of disciplines showcase the role of individual agency and collective relationships in improvisation, not just to dancers but to people of all backgrounds and abilities. In doing so, chapters celebrate all forms of improvisation, and unravel the ways that this kind of movement informs understandings of
history, socio-cultural conditions, lived experience, cognition, and technologies.
Introduction. Improvising Dance: A Way of Going About Things
Vida L Midgelow
Section 1: Life worlds and Ethics
1. Life Practices
Ann Cooper Albright
2. Ethico-aesthetic practice of improvising: relations through
motion
Fiona Bannon
3. Reflections on dance improvisation and its dynamic
interrelationship with everyday movement
Libby Worth
4. A Philosophy of the Improvisational Body
Sondra Fraleigh
5. Chance encounters, Nietzschean philosophy and the question of
improvisation Philipa Rothfield
6. Moving in medias res: Towards a phenomenological hermeneutics of
dance improvisation
Nigel Stewart
Section 2: Attunement and Perception
7. I notice that I'm noticingEL
Sally Doughty
8. Embodied Consciousness in Improvised Performance
Nalina Wait
9. 'Mass may be the single most important sensation': Perceptual
Philosophies in Dance Improvisation
Malaka Sacro-Thomas
10. Rethinking Improvisation from a Daoist perspective of
Qi-energy
I-Ying Wu
11. Exploring Uncertainties of Language in Dance Improvisation
Louise McDowall
Section 3: Habit, Freedom and Resistance
12. Improvisation and Habit
Gary Peters
13. Unpredictable Maneuvers: Eva Karczag's Improvised Strategies
for Thwarting Institutional Agendas
Doran George
14. Movements of freedom: performing popular liberty in the early
cancan
Claire Parfitt-Brown
15. Valorizing Uncertainty: Chance, Totalitarianism and Soviet
Ballet
Janice Ross
16. The Emancipation of Improvisation
Larry Lavender
Section 4: Memory and Transmission
17. Improvisation and Argentinean Tango: On playing with body
memories
Susanne Ravn
18. Dancing Life
Norah Zuniga Shaw
19. What Remains
Robert Bingham & Stephanie Hanna
20. Improvisational Practices in Jazz Dance Battles
Jane Carr and Irven Lewis
21. Twelve Days in Tarbena: an evolutionary approach to moving
through silence and sound to speech in Ruth Zaporah's Action
Theater training
Robert Vesty
22. Intention and Surrender
Stephanie Skura
Section 5: Agency and Transformation
23. Transcending Boundaries: Improvisation and disability in
dance
Sarah Whatley
24. Artful humanising conversations: Improvisation in Early Years
dance
Kerry Chappell and Lizzie Swinford
25. Instinctive Connections: Improvisation as a research
methodology in health and care settings
Lisa Dowler
26. Somatic Sensing and Creaturely Knowing in the University
Improvisation Class
Ali East
27. Improvising Happiness: Belly Dance's Evolution through
Improvisation
Barbara Sellers Young
Section 6: Interconnectivity, emergence and technologies
28. Dancing the Interface: Improvisation in Zones of Virtual
Exchange
Thomas DeFrantz
29. Programmed Improvisation Inspied from Autonomous Humanoids
Amy LaVeirs
30. Contact Improvisation and Embodied Social Cognition
April Flakne
31. Modelling Improvisation as Emergence: A Critical Investigation
of the Practice of Cognition
Colleen Dunagan, Roxane Fenton, and Evan Dorn
32. Towards a cognitive theory of joint improvisation: The case of
tango argentino
Micheal Kimmel
Section 7: Ecology and Environments
33. Improvisation and the Earth: Dancing in the Moment as
Ecological Practice
Tamara Ashley
34. Dancing the Land: An Emerging Geopoetics
Melinda Buckwalter
35. Scoring and Siting: Improvisatory Approaches to Site-Specific
Dance
Victoria Hunter
36. The Dancer, the Philosopher and the Tramp
Hilary Elliot
37. Audience Improvisation and Immersive Experiences: the sensuous
world of the body in the work of Lundahl & Seitl
Josephine Machon
Section 8: Techniques, Strategies and Histories
38. Lost in the Footlights: The Secret Life of Improvisation in
Contemporary American Concert Dance
Kent De Spain
39. In the Moment: Improvisation in Traditional Dance
Anthony Shay
40. Playing with the Beat: Choreomusical Improvisation in Rhythm
Tap Dance
Allison Robbins & Christopher J. Wells
41. Moving Sound: New Relationships between Contemporary Dance and
Music in Improvisation
Anna Sanchez Colberg & Dimitris Karalis
42. Mens Agilis Corpore Agili
Ivar Hagendoorn
43. Embodiology®: A Hybrid Neo-African Improvisation-as-Performance
Practice distinguished by Dynamic Rhythm
Sheron Wray
Vida L Midgelow is Professor in Dance and Choregraphic Practices at
Middlesex University. Her interests, that encompass somatics,
improvisation, and practice-as-research, have become increasingly
methodological in focus leading to publications such as
Improvisation as paradigm for Phenomenology (2018); "Some Fleshy
Thinking: Improvisation, Experience, Perception" (2015) and
"Creative Articulations Process" (2015). She is the Director of
the Erasmus Plus funded Artistic Doctorates in Europe Project and
co-editor of the hybrid peer reviewed journal Choreographic
Practices.
"Most contributors are from the US, the UK, and Continental Europe, and they range from young scholars to scholars with years of experience. This range makes the volume useful for a broad audience. The fairly consistent and approachable length of each essay (15-20 pages) will encourage comparative readings. Well-sourced references accompany each piece, and a helpful index is included. ... Highly recommended" -- CHOICE
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