Moving History/Dancing Cultures ─ A Dance History Reader

This new collection of essays surveys the history of dance in an innovative and wide-ranging fashion. Editors Dils and Albright address the current dearth of comprehensive teaching material in the dance history field through the creation of a multifaceted, non-linear, yet well-structured and comprehensive survey of select moments in the development of both American and World dance. This book is illustrated with over 50 photographs, and would make an ideal text for undergraduate classes in dance ethnography, criticism or appreciation, as well as dance history--particularly those with a cross-cultural, contemporary, or an American focus.

The reader is organized into four thematic sections which allow for varied and individualized course use: Thinking about Dance History: Theories and Practices, World Dance Traditions, America Dancing, and Contemporary Dance: Global Contexts. The editors have structured the readings with the understanding that contemporary theory has thoroughly questioned the discursive construction of history and the resultant canonization of certain dances, texts and points of view. The historical readings are presented in a way that encourages thoughtful analysis and allows the opportunity for critical engagement with the text.

Ann Cooper Albright is Associate Professor of Dance at Oberlin College and the author of Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance (Wesleyan, 1997). Ann Dils is Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her articles on dance reconstruction have been published in Dance Research Journal and other scholarly publications.