Dancing Communities Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City

Winner of the Book of the Year Award from the Ethnography Division of the National Communication Association 2008! Dancing Communities is a landmark volume in dance scholarship, and examines performances that create urban communities by blurring, or reinforcing, complex cultural and ethnic boundaries. It argues that amateur and concert dance practices are laboratories for examining the myriad complex intersections of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and culture. In the five sites examined here, dance creates small and generative worlds: sometimes havens, sometimes hauntopias. The everyday labors and final products of dance in the global city offer intimacy, solidarity, and communal and cultural continuity for performers and audiences.

Judith Hamera is Professor and Head of the Department of Performance Studies at Texas A&M University, USA. She is the editor of Open Acts: Performance in/as Communication and Cultural Studies and co-editor of The Handbook of Performance Studies. She is the recipient of the National Communication Association's Lilla Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies, and received her PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University.

Introduction: Dancing the City: Aesthetics, Technique, and the Social Lives of Dance * Dancing Places, Placing Dances * Joyful Attachments * INTIMACIES IN MOTION: Protocols for Intimacy * Performing Intimacy in Pilates Training * Corporeal Verities, Metaphoric Ambiguities * Romancing Monsters, Consuming Looks * Defining Virtuosity, Engaging Monstrosity * Oguri: Sacred Monster * Technologies of Monstrosity * CORPOREAL CHRONOTOPES: MAKING PLACE AND KEEPING TIME IN BALLET: Dancing Bodies in Space and Time * Keeping Time * Taking, and Making, Place * Corporeal Chronotopes * Home Girls: Gendered Self-Fashioning and Solidarity at Le Studio * Where the Heart Is: Three Stories of Ballet in L.A. * Parental Investments, Cultural Capital * Hiding in the Light * On Her Toes: Pleasures and Pains of Creation in Community * Home Boys on Fault Lines: Masculinity at Le Studio * Standing Out: Consolidating Homosociality in Dancing Communities * Anxious Pedagogy, Ambivalent Agency * "SAVING KHMER CLASSICAL DANCE IN LONG BEACH * Answerable Bodies/"Unclaimed" Experience * Thresholds of Secrecy * The Answerability of Memory * Technologies of Answerability * Pure Products * Virtual Bodies * Incommensurable Biographies * DANCING OTHER-WISE: ETHICS, DIFFERENCE, AND * Transcendence in Hae Kyung Lee and Dancers * "The Universe's Piece" * Referent Trouble and the Metaphysical Performative * "Giving Energy" * Energy, Ethics, and Corporeal Commitments * "Human on Stage" * Metaphysical Performatives and Alterity * "Connections, Distinctions": Metaphysical Vocabularies and Reading Choreography * " . . . like the words I cannot find, beyond words . . .": Dancing the Ethical Transformation of Grief * Conclusion: Ideas of Order, Queer Intimacies, and Civic Infrastructure in Dancing Communities * Bibliography * Index Introduction: Dancing the City: Aesthetics, Technique, and the Social Lives of Dance * Dancing Places, Placing Dances * Joyful Attachments * INTIMACIES IN MOTION: Protocols for Intimacy * Performing Intimacy in Pilates Training * Corporeal Verities, Metaphoric Ambiguities * Romancing Monsters, Consuming Looks * Defining Virtuosity, Engaging Monstrosity * Oguri: Sacred Monster * Technologies of Monstrosity * CORPOREAL CHRONOTOPES: MAKING PLACE AND KEEPING TIME IN BALLET: Dancing Bodies in Space and Time * Keeping Time * Taking, and Making, Place * Corporeal Chronotopes * Home Girls: Gendered Self-Fashioning and Solidarity at Le Studio * Where the Heart Is: Three Stories of Ballet in L.A. * Parental Investments, Cultural Capital * Hiding in the Light * On Her Toes: Pleasures and Pains of Creation in Community * Home Boys on Fault Lines: Masculinity at Le Studio * Standing Out: Consolidating Homosociality in Dancing Communities * Anxious Pedagogy, Ambivalent Agency * "SAVING KHMER CLASSICAL DANCE IN LONG BEACH * Answerable Bodies/"Unclaimed" Experience * Thresholds of Secrecy * The Answerability of Memory * Technologies of Answerability * Pure Products * Virtual Bodies * Incommensurable Biographies * DANCING OTHER-WISE: ETHICS, DIFFERENCE, AND * Transcendence in Hae Kyung Lee and Dancers * "The Universe's Piece" * Referent Trouble and the Metaphysical Performative * "Giving Energy" * Energy, Ethics, and Corporeal Commitments * "Human on Stage" * Metaphysical Performatives and Alterity * "Connections, Distinctions": Metaphysical Vocabularies and Reading Choreography * " . . . like the words I cannot find, beyond words . . .": Dancing the Ethical Transformation of Grief * Conclusion: Ideas of Order, Queer Intimacies, and Civic Infrastructure in Dancing Communities * Bibliography * Index