"Virtual Motion” asks how early modern literature may be apprehended as a choreographic medium. It explores the relationship between literature and dance across plays, poems, ballads, and political and religious treatises, in order to show that dance manifests to different ends in each. It treats dance as aesthetic patterns of movement that span a range of virtual and actual spaces, from the imagination of readers to specific material and textual phenomena, which include the human body most consequentially, but also scripts and libretti, moving scenery, engravings, and manuscript miscellanies. It argues that as dance circulates between such media, it helps to emblematize broad forms of social upheaval characterized by motional effects, for example the migration of people and the spread of religious beliefs. Its four chapters study four such social upheavals. The first chapter studies theological controversies that arose during the Reformation, and argues that the graceful dancing body became implicated in theories concerning the circulation of spiritual grace between divine and mortal bodies. In points to the ambiguous place of the body in the writings of John Calvin and Baldassare Castiglione, and argues that William Shakespeare drew on dance theory in order to grant women a specifically choreographic form of devotional authority. The second chapter demonstrates that the classical interests of prominent humanist scholars, especially Julius Caesar Scaliger, included reviving the dances of antiquity. It traces the influence of such scholarship on two productions that sought to revive satyr dances as a form of embodied satire: Ben Jonson’s masque Oberon, and an anonymous Jesuit play staged at the English College in Rome, Captiva Religio. The third chapter argues that literature used New World “Indian” dance as a means of theorizing the tensions of colonial ventures both past and present, and traces Indian dance across several media: a single engraving altered to produce new kinetic effects as it was reused by multiple travelogues, the scenery and bodies in William Davenant’s “history ballet” about the Spanish colonization of Peru, and the ballads that Aphra Behn drew upon to stage the collision of Scottish and Indian dance in Virginia. The fourth chapter examines how English country dance, as both a physical practice and a political metaphor, circulated between actual households and those depicted in plays, for example through manuscript miscellanies like that maintained at Monkland manor in Herefordshire. It studies country dances that occurred in performances devised by Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson, Henry Purcell, and Thomas Betterton, in order to argue that this genre played an underappreciated role in cultivating political identities across some of England’s most turbulent decades.

In questioning the complexity of human identity, the multiplicity of the self is uniquely grounded within embodied experience. Unearthing edges : constructing gaps is the result of creative research centered on investigation of the following questions: What can practices of collaborative movement making bring to the process of illuminating, excavating, and perhaps reconciling these alternate versions of the self? In practices supporting the development of individual movement vocabularies and physical agency what can be learned of the complications of the self and identity? What can be revealed of self and community in collective movement practice and in sharing solo practice? How can improvisational work, practiced in the realm of rehearsal and performance, engage with these ideas? Through studio practice utilizing a range of methodologies, this project seeks to contend with ideas of the self, identity, alternate reality, spontaneity, empathy, agency, and community.

To study pairs of people is to study how individuals establish senses of self, other, and us. Every time two individuals meet, they confront their intersections; they align, collide, refract, reflect, and maybe even absorb one another. I am interested in a third element of betweenness created at the intersection of one-to-one interactions, and how that betweenness holds relationships between individuals in constant dialogue. In choreographing and directing Three Completely Distinct Duets with Absolutely Nothing in Common (TCDDwANiC), I investigate contradictions in the duet form in order to mine and frame a betweenness loaded with awkward aesthetics. In a world in which awkwardness is often shamed, I seek to illuminate its presence in my art-making. In this manner, TCDDwANiC immediately questions whether it is or is not what it says it is. In an attempt to conceptually and choreographically destabilize some of my contradictory relationships to my own trainings in Western concert dance forms, I rigorously conceived of the production through its framing, character developments, and re-distributed narrative layers. Having set up specific working procedures with rigid creative boundaries regarding time and space, I have come to recognize ways in which my research actively disallows a certain amount of pleasure in its making. Demanding the watching, witnessing, and participating spectator to engage with complex layers of contradiction, TCDDwANiC reflects its own making, and carries social implications more relevant than the production itself or its most direct communal reach.

No description available.

Abstract not available

Ukrainian staged dance is a popular element of Ukrainian culture. In Canada, Ukrainian dance flourished and has transformed into a distinct symbol of Canadian-Ukrainian culture. Each Canadian province shows an evolution in its Ukrainian dance that is distinct from the others, depending on where the choreographers found inspiration. Ukrainian dance in Montral has been influenced strongly by the spectacular dance model, which was associated most strongly with the state sponsored dance companies coming from the Soviet Union. A question arose regarding this observation: why would these rather anti-Soviet communities in Canada choose a Soviet style to represent Ukrainians? And why would Qubcois choreographers repeatedly choose to add Ukrainian dance into their international dance repertoire? The goal of this research project is to set a chronological and aesthetic framework of Ukrainian dance in Montral and to observe the main influences that changed its aesthetics both inside and outside the Ukrainian community. / Ukrainian Folklore

Given the history of colonization and commodification in Hawai`i, it is no surprise that non-traditional performances are met with critical reception. However, in this thesis, I hope to destabilize the popular binary juxtaposition of authentic Hawaiian art and (mis)appropriated tourist kitsch. I argue that hula has been Orientalized and wrongly associated with religion not only by colonizers and the tourist industry, but also by those whose response to colonization is a call for purity and authenticity in the practice of Hawaiian culture. I am specifically referring to people who romanticize and mythologize hula and Hawai`i prior to European contact. Therefore, I am interested in presenting a retheorization of hula that (1) recognizes hula as a recycled tradition, (2) acknowledges the unique history of the indigenous people of Hawai`i, (3) does not limit participation to certain bodies, and (4) acknowledges, without over-emphasizing or de-emphasizing, the role of religion in the history of hula.

Texte remanié de: Diss.--Stuttgart--Universiẗat, 2001. / Bibliogr. p. 239-263.

Thesis (doctoral)--University of Surrey, 1993. / BLDSC reference no.: DX180487.

Bremen, Universität, Diplomarbeit, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-81).