This book offers something entirely new: detailed scene-by-scene descriptions of the action and dancing of Giselle, Paquita, Le Corsaire, La Bayadère, and Raymonda, bringing the reader far closer to what the audience saw when the curtain went up on these five classic story ballets than has heretofore been possible.
Relying on extensive archival research, choreography as an analytical methodology, and theories of race, dance, and performance studies, this book examines how dance and other forms of embodiment participated in Mexico's formation after the Mexican War of Independence (1821-1876), the Porfirian dictatorship (1876-1911), and postrevolutionary Mexico (1919-1940).
Body Impossible theorizes the concept of virtuosity in contemporary dance and performance through a study of the career of dancer Desmond Richardson. Focusing on Richardson's creative insistence on improvisatory fun and excellence throughout the decades approaching the millennium (shaped by Reaganism, the Culture Wars, the AIDS epidemic, the New Jim Crow, and MTV), this book brings dance into conversation with paradigms of blackness, queerness, masculinity, and class in order to generate a socio-culturally attentive understanding of virtuosity.
Bakhru, Kumari (Walt Disney Studios, USA) & Clark, Barbara (20th Century Fox, USA) & Higginbotham, Dawn (Morning Person Pictures, USA) & Spohr, Susan (Associate Producer, USA)
Smith, Marian (Professor Emerita, Professor Emerita, University of Oregon) & Fullington, Doug (Musicologist and dance historian, Musicologist and dance historian)
