Ruth Barnes

Telory D. Arendell

Dance’s Duet with the Camera: Motion Pictures is a collection of essays written by various authors on the relationship between live dance and film. Chapters cover a range of topics that explore dance film, contemporary dance with film on stage, dance as an ideal medium to be captured by 3D images and videodance as kin to site-specific choreography. This book explores the ways in which early practitioners such as Loïe Fuller and Maya Deren began a conversation between media that has continued to evolve and yet still retains certain unanswered questions. Methodology for this conversation includes dance historical approaches as well as mechanical considerations. The camera is a partner, a disembodied portion of self that looks in order to reflect on, to mirror, or to presage movement. This conversation includes issues of sexuality, race, and mixed ability. Bodies and lenses share equal billing.

Motion Pictures

Dance’s Duet with the Camera

Pina Bausch’s Aggressive Tenderness: Repurposing Theater through Dance maps Bausch’s pieces alongside methodologies of key theater and film practitioners. This book includes discussion of a variety of Bausch pieces, including Sacre du Printemps (Rite of Spring 1975), Kontakthof (Meeting Place 1978), Café Müller (Café Mueller 1978), Nelken (Carnations 1982), Arien (Arias 1985), and Vollmond (Full Moon 2006). Beginning with her approach as one avenue of dance dramaturgy, the author connects the content expressed in these pieces with theoretical conversations, works from other artists inspired by Bausch, and her own experiences, providing an examination that is both academic and personally insightful. Arendell reads all of these theatrical and film approaches into Bausch’s work to highlight how the time frame involves a cross-pollination between Bausch and the other artists that looks both backward and forward in its influences. Ideal for students of dance and theater, Pina Bausch’s Aggressive Tenderness shows how Bausch’s Tanztheater speaks a kinaesthetic language, one that Arendell translates into a somaesthetic exploration to pair a repurposed body ethic with movements that present new forms of embodiment.

Telory D. Arendell

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