Choreographing History

by Susan Leigh Foster

Overview

". . . I have used essays from the book to help dance graduate students push their thinking beyond the studio and their own physical experience and to realize the varied resources, approaches, and theoretical positions possible in writing about the body." —Dance Research Journal

"Choreographing History . . . assembles an impressive diversity of sites, disciplines and critical approaches . . . [and] includes not only historical bodies and discourses, but also the very bodies of the historians themselves." —Parachute

"This volume is not only full of gems (the very lineup of preeminent scholars is impressive), but is also a neat cross-section of the academic conventions and mannerisms of our time." —Dance Chronicle

". . . [an] important step. . . in the ineluctable dance by postmodern historians across a bridge that spans the gaps among disciplines, between theory and practice, and betweeen present and past." —Theatre Journal

Historians of science, sexuality, the arts, and history itself focus on the body, merging the project of writing about the body with theoretical concerns in the writing of history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253209351
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	05/22/1995
Series:	Unnatural Acts: Theorizing the Performative
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

SUSAN LEIGH FOSTER, Professor and Chair of the Department of Dance at the University of California, Riverside, is the author of Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
An Introduction to Moving Bodies
Choreographing History—Susan Leigh Foster

Resurrecting Historical Bodies
Toward a Universal Language of Motion: Reflections on a Seventeenth-Century Muscle Man—Stephen Greenblatt
Interval Training—John MacAloon

Bodily Interventions into Academic Disciplines
Tacit Knowledge, Courtliness, and the Scientist's Body—Mario Biagioli
Music, the Pythagoreans, and the Body—Susan McClary
Agency and History: The Demands of Dance Ethnography—Randy Martin

Moving Theory Across Bodies of Practice
Credit, Novels, Masturbation—Thomas W. Laqueur
Advertising Every Body: Images from the Japanese Modern Years—Miriam Silverberg
Bodies of Doctrine: Headshots, Jane Austen, and the Black Indians of Mardi Gras—Joseph Roach

Historians as Bodies in Motion
Modern Dance in the Third Reich: Six Positions and a Coda—Susan A. Manning
The Body's Endeavors as Cultural Practices—Cynthia J. Novak
Different Personas: A History of One's Own?—Lena Hammergren

Embodying Theory
Meditations on the Patriarchal Pythagorean Pratfall and the Lesbian Siamesia Two-Step—Sue-Ellen Case
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Choreographing Writing—Peggy Phelan
Bodies of Evidence: Law and Order, Sexy Machines, and the Erotics of Fieldwork among Physicists—Sharon Traweek
Bodies and Their Plots—Hayden White

Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index