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Critical Gestures
Writings on Dance and Culture
Series: Wesleyan Dance
Sales Date: 2002-10-30
320 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 in
Collects the far-reaching and influential work of an eminent dance critic and scholar.
Ann Daly ranks among the most insightful, articulate dance critics and scholars writing today. Spanning the divide between journalism and scholarship, this collection offers a double-sighted view of dance in America from 1986 to the present, documenting the shift in experimental dance from formal to social concerns, and recording the expansion of dance studies in the academy from historical documentation to cultural criticism.
Daly examines performance art and visual art as they relate to and influence dance, with a look at the intersection of dance and history. Gender is the subject of the final section of the book. More than 80 reviews, features, essays, interviews and scholarly articles — including extended considerations of Pina Bausch, Deborah Hay, Bill T. Jones and Ralph Lemon — were originally published in venues ranging from High Performance to The New York Times to TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies.
Introduction
Looking Underneath the Itch to Criticize
Writing about Dance: An Urgent, High-Profile Opportunity
Review: Diana Theodore's First We Take Manhattan, Jill Johnston's Marmalade Me and Lynne Conner's Spreading the Gospel of the Modern Dance
The Interested Act of Dance Criticism
Writing Dance: Choreographers
Pina Bausch: Tanztheater: the thrill of the Lynch Mob or the Rage of a Woman?
Pina Bauch Goes West to Prospect for Imagery
Love Mysterious and Familiar: Pina Bausch Brings Her Visceral Non Sequiturs to Austin
Remembered Gesture
Mellower Now, A Resolute Romantic Keeps Trying
Deborah Hay: Review: The Man Who Grew Common in Wisdom
The Play of Dance: An Introduction to Lamb, Lamb, Lamb, Lamb, Lamb…
No Exit: Deborah Hay's Latest Work a Meditation and Celebration in Space and Time
An Experimentalist in Soul and Body
Horse Rider Woman Playing Dancing: Ann Daly Interviews Deborah Hay
Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane: Dance at Prospect Park: High Art, Lowbrow Spectacle
Review: Body Against Body, edited by Elizabeth Zimmer and Susan Quasha
Dancing the Unsayable: Bill T. Jones's Still/Here becomes a Meditation on the Possibilities of Postmodernist Art
When Dancers Move on to Making Dances
The Long Day's Journey of Bill T. Jones
Bill T. Jones in Conversation with Ann Daly
Voice Lessons
Ralph Lemon: Review: Ralph Lemon Repertory Concert
Conversations bout Race in the Language of Dance
Afterword
Performances: Review: Kei Takei's Light, Part 20 &21 (Diary of the Dream) and Testu Maeda's Evocations
Review: Fred Holland's Harbor/Cement
Review: Jane Comfort's TV Love
Kazuo Ohno's Admiring La Argentina and Kuniko Kisanukis Tefu Tefu
Review: Molissa Fenely Repertory Concert
Review: Gwall's Exit
Review: Lucinda Childs Repertory Concert
Review: Merce Cunnigham's Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegan's Wake
New York (USA) Experimental Dance
Review: John Kelly's Ode to a Cube
Review: Ralf Ralf's The Summit
Review: Fenley's State of Darkness
Review: Susan Marshall's Interior with Seven Figures
Review: Dana Reitz's Suspect Terrain
Review: Nina Martin's Changing Face and Date with Fate
Susan Marshall Choreography Explores Tragedy, Joy
Review: Merce Cunningham Repertory Concert and Robert Wilson's Four Saints in Three Acts
The Choreography of Crisis: Women, Machines and Utopia Lost
Ballet with Attitude (or the Ballet of the Sexes)
Margery Segal's Primal Emotions
No Gravity No Boundary
The Freedom of Tradition
A Chronicle Faces Death and Celebrates Life
A Dancer Discovers a World of Profit and Daredevil Feats
Images and Exhibits: New York (USA): Dance and Fashion
John Singer Sargent and the Dance
Lois Greenfield the Frames That Bline, and the Metaphysics of Dance
Becoming Artaud: Solo Performances at Drawing Center Expand MOMA Exhibit
Body of Evidence Schneemann Retrospective Exposes Subversive Gestures
An Inspiration Compounded of Hands and Feet
Turning a Photographers Vision into Choreography
What Dance Has to Say about Beauty
Books: Review: Sondra Horton Fraleigh's Dance and the Livid Body
"What Revolution?": The New Dance Scholarship in America
Review: Martha Graham's Blood Memory and Agnes de Mille's Martha
Review: A Cultural History of Gesture, edited by Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg
Alvin Ailey Revealed
Seasons and Occasions: Postmodernism and American New Dance
BAM and Beyond: The Postmoderns Get Balleticized
The Closet Classicist
Darkness into Light: A Decade in the West Transforms a Butoh Troupe
Finding the Logic of Difference
Dancing: A Letter from New York City
Some sentences by and about Merce Cunnigham, New World A-commin': A Century of Jazz and Modern Dance
In Dance: Preserving a Precarious Legacy Begins Onstage
Making History: Review: From the Repertory of Isadora Duncan's "Soviet Workers' Songs"
The Continuing Beauty of the Curve: Isadora Duncan and her last Compositions
Review: Milicent Dillon's After Egypt
Isadora Duncan in 1920's America: "A Bolshevick Shade of Red"
Review: Lillian Loewentha's The Search for Isadora
Isadora Duncan and the Distinction of Dance
Isadora Duncan's Dance Theory
A Fearless Confession Heard Round the World
Theorizing Gender: The Balanchine Woman: Of Hummingbirds and Channel Swimmers
Classical Ballet: A Discourse of Difference
To Dance is "Female"
Unlimited Partnership: Dance and Feminist Analysis
Dance History and Feminist Theory: Reconsidering Isadora Duncan and the male Glaze
About Interpretation: Joann McNamara Interviews Ann Daly
Gender Issues in Dance History Pedagogy
"Woman," Women, and Subversion: Some Nagging Questions from a Dance Historian
Trends in Dance Scholarship: Feminist Theory across the Millennial Divide
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Ann Daly is Associate Professor of Dance History/Criticism at The University of Texas at Austin and author of Critical Gestures: Writings on Dance and Culture (Wesleyan, 2002). Done into Dance received the Outstanding Publication Award from the Congress on Research in Dance.
""Critical Gestures offers reflections on Ann Daly's critical practice; her responses to experiment in choreography and performance as well as to books, exhibitions, and conferences; and her contributions to feminist and cultural theory. The writing is perceptive, persuasive, finely detailed and engaging.""
~Selma Odom, Department of Dance, York University, Toronto
"Critical Gestures offers reflections on Ann Daly's critical practice; her responses to experiment in choreography and performance as well as to books, exhibitions, and conferences; and her contributions to feminist and cultural theory. The writing is perceptive, persuasive, finely detailed and engaging."
~Selma Odom, Department of Dance, York UniversityToronto
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