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Cover of Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance

Wesleyan

Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance

Sally Banes

€32.00

Drawing on the postmodern perspective and concerns that informed her groundbreaking Terpischore in Sneakers, Sally Bane's Writing Dancing documents the background and development of avant-garde and popular dance, analyzing individual artists, performances, and entire dance movements. With a sure grasp of shifting cultural dynamics, Banes shows how postmodern dance is integrally connected to other oppositional, often marginalized strands of dance culture, and considers how certain kinds of dance move from the margins to the mainstream. 

Banes begins by considering the act of dance criticism itself, exploring its modes, methods, and underlying assumptions and examining the work of other critics. She traces the development of contemporary dance from the early work of such influential figures as Merce Cunningham and George Balanchine to such contemporary choreographers as Molissa Fenley, Karole Armitage, and Michael Clark. She analyzes the contributions of the Judson Dance Theatre and the Workers' Dance League, the emergence of Latin postmodern dance in New York, and the impact of black jazz in Russia. In addition, Banes explores such untraditional performance modes as breakdancing and the drunk dancing of Fred Astaire.

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Cover of The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land: Bilingual Edition

Wesleyan

The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land: Bilingual Edition

Aimé Césaire

Poetry €18.00

The first bilingual edition of this radically original work.

Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Commentary on Césaire's work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric—material that Césaire only added in 1956. The original 1939 version of the poem, given here in French, and in its first English translation, reveals a work that is both spiritual and cultural in structure, tone, and thrust. This Wesleyan edition includes the original illustrations by Wifredo Lam, and an introduction, notes, and chronology by A. James Arnold.

Cover of Traces of Dance

Dis Voir

Traces of Dance

Laurence Louppe

Traces of Dance brings together scores, drawings, sketches, notes, graphics and paintings, which contributes to define a textuality of movement between writing and image.

The drawings and notations of choreographers rarely come before the public eye; and yet they are far more than simple memory aids. Several types of speech and writing have been called upon to lead the viewer's perception through the traces that the dancing body lays down. While these texts are not all concerned with the specific practices of dance, they all deal with the most profound contribution that a knowledge of the moving body brings to our culture, to our lives.

With Georges Appaix, Dominique Bagouet, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Régine Chopinot, Merce Cunningham, Philippe Decouflé, Raoul-Auger Feuillet, Roxane Huilmand, Isaac, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Rudolf Laban, Daniel Larrieu, Jean-Marc Matos, Dana Reitz, Hervé Robbe, Kellon Tomlinson, Mary Wigman, André Lorin, Vaslav Nijinski, Louis-Guillaume Pécour, Pierre Rameau, Bob Wilson.

Texts by Daniel Dobbels, Jean-Noel Laurenti, Laurence Louppe, Valérie Preston-Dunlop, René Thom, Paul Virilio.

Cover of Writing Wounds to Heal

Self-Published

Writing Wounds to Heal

Pontus Pettersson

Performance €12.00
Writing Wounds to Heal (2015) is a project that uses clothes and photography to express poetry in between the field of clothes, choreography, photography, performance and documentation led by Pontus Pettersson.
Cover of And then it got legs: Notes on dance dramaturgy

Varamo Press

And then it got legs: Notes on dance dramaturgy

Jeroen Peeters

Drawing on his experience in the field of contemporary dance, Jeroen Peeters discusses principles, methods and practices that contribute to an understanding of dramaturgy as an experimental, collaborative practice and a material form of thinking.

Written from practice, this book reflects a particular history of collaboration and conversation with dance-makers such as Martin Nachbar, Meg Stuart, Vera Mantero, Sabina Holzer, Lisa Nelson, Jennifer Lacey, Chrysa Parkinson, deufert + plischke, Eleanor Bauer, Philipp Gehmacher and many others.

Phantasmal archaeology, unfolding material, literal and physical reading, crafting method, articulating process, witnessing and performing not-knowing, naming and ritual destruction, conceptual landscapes, symbolic waste, internal fictions and foreign objects – they may all play a role in creation and in exploring the unfamiliar in pursuit of making sense.

And then it got legs is an invitation to think along or against, to discuss those ideas with others or explore them in the studio, and eventually to imagine and devise one’s own methods of research, observation, reflection and creation.

Cover of Being a Chair. Essays on Choreographic Poetry

Varamo Press

Being a Chair. Essays on Choreographic Poetry

Janne-Camilla Lyster

Imagine words approaching a dance eyes closed or sleepwalking, words adrift beyond what can be envisioned beforehand, prompting writer and reader alike into a zone where time multiplies, where bodies grow footnotes and paper skin, savour the taste of language, attune their ears to the wavelength of blue. In a string of brief essays on her practice of writing choreographic poetry and scores, Janne-Camilla Lyster offers reflections on time, memory and the senses, on translation, punctuation and rhythm, on mistakes and crevasses, on the impossible and yet other things. What does it take to enter another form of existence, say, a chair?

Janne-Camilla Lyster is a writer, dancer and choreographer. She has published poetry, novels, essays and plays.

Cover of Writing Dance

Varamo Press

Writing Dance

Jonathan Burrows

‘Human beings embody whatever they meet, and it’s all there when you work whether you want it there or not.’ Practice is like the dust that accumulates, and revisiting fragments of essays and talks on choreography Jonathan Burrows ended up embracing the haphazard and the mess, moments of unfocus and focus, harnessing them in pithy formulations and scores, adding room and punctuation and line breaks in the process so readers can hear the rhythm as he writes his dance on writing dance.

Jonathan Burrows is a choreographer, who has worked for many years in collaboration with the composer Matteo Fargion, with whom he continues to create and perform work. He is the author of A Choreographer’s Handbook (Routledge, 2010) and is currently an Associate Professor at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures
Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

Cover of Afternoon Editions N°4: Certain Things

Afternoon Editions

Afternoon Editions N°4: Certain Things

Claudia la Rocco

A day can be a composition not unlike an essay. Full of possibilities, full of limitations, bound by universal structures and marked by idiosyncratic desires. You go on walks. You read. You do your chores. All the while memory and other forms of imagination keep time with you. Books are strange companions; writing is a lonely thing rich with consolations.

Certain Things is a text by Claudia La Rocco, created with and through ideas such as these.

Published September 2022.