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Dances that Describe Themselves

Dances that Describe Themselves

The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull

Susan Foster

Series: Wesleyan Dance

Sales Date: 2002-09-04

352 Pages, 8.00 x 9.25 in

Paperback
9780819565518

$28.95

BUY

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An inquiry into improvisation as practiced by Richard Bull and his contemporaries.

During an improvised performance, both dancers and audience members reflect on how the dance is being made. They ask themselves: What will happen next? What choices will each dancer make? And how will these decisions contribute to the overall effect and significance of the performance?

Trained as a jazz pianist, Richard Bull did not uphold the opposition often found in dance between improvisation and composition. Instead, he believed that dancers, like jazz musicians, could craft a piece spontaneously in performance. Analyzing performances by Bull and many of his contemporaries, Susan Foster argues that their diverse practices embody distinctive values representative of different artistic communities, yet they all share a capacity to reflect on their own making, in a sense, describing themselves.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
GENEALOGIES OF IMPROVISATION
Structuring Improvisation
Appropriating the Improvisatory
Scoring the Unanticipated
Corporeal Spontaneity
Improvised Democracies
Conversations
MAKING AND DOING
Daniel Nagrin's Workshop
The Grand Union
Dianne McIntyre's Sounds in Motion
Contact Improvisation
Richard Bull's New York Chamber Dance Group
Improvising Community
ECONOMIES OF COMMUNITY
Financing Dances
The Warren Street Performance Loft
Training and Rehearsing
Interactions
SPEECH AS ACT
Talking Dance
Signifying Dancing
The Grand Union
Trisha Brown's Accumulation (1971) with Talking (1973) Plus Watermotor (1977)
Bill T. Jones's Floating the Tongue and 21
Ishmael Houston-Jones's Part 2: Relatives
Person-abilities
Storying Dance
INTERLUDE: EPISTOLARY CHOREOGRAPHIES FROM THE DANCE THAT DESCRIBES ITSELF
IMPROVISING CHOREOGRAPHY
Re-membering Past, Present, and Future
Re-politicizing the Aesthetic
Choreologue
Voices in the Text
Appendix A: A Chronological Listing of Works by Richard Bull
Appendix B: Selected Writings by Richard Bull
Notes
Bibliography
Index

SUSAN FOSTER is Professor of Dance History at UC-Riverside and author of Choreography and Narrative (1998) and Reading Dancing (1988).

""Foster elegantly and seamlessly integrates the Africanist improvisational aesthetic into her lively, detailed picture of Bull's world, realigning a landscape that has too long suffered from ethnocentric skew.""
~Brenda Dixon Gottschild, author of Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance

""This is an extremely important book. By adopting Richard Bull's tactic of personifying 'the dance' as if it were a speaking, thinking person, Foster's book forces us to think about dance as a way of knowing, and about the ways of knowing that will be most useful for our understanding of dance as a social practice and a social force.""
~George Lipsitz, Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego

"Foster elegantly and seamlessly integrates the Africanist improvisational aesthetic into her lively, detailed picture of Bull's world, realigning a landscape that has too long suffered from ethnocentric skew."
~Brenda Dixon Gottschild, author of Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance

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Dances that Describe Themselves

The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull

Dances that Describe Themselves

The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull

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