Authors: Emilyn Claid
ISBN-13: 9780415372473, ISBN-10: 041537247X
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Taylor & Francis, Inc.
Date Published: May 2006
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Yes? No! Maybe... is a book about performing and watching dance. Using a unique combination of historical, academic and autobiographical voices, it covers fifty years of British dance, from Margot Fonteyn in the 1950s to innovative contemporary practitioners such as Wendy Houstoun, Nigel Charnock, Lloyd Newson, Javier DeFrutos and Fin Walker.
Emilyn Claid's thought-provoking investigation of performing presence is illuminated by episodes from her own history as founder member of X6 Dance Space, the experimental dance collective, and as one of the UK's most radical and exciting practitioners. Using the 1970s revolution of new dance as a hinge, the author looks back to ballet and forward to British independent dance which is new dance's legacy. This book explores the shifting dynamic between performer and spectator through feminist, psychoanalytic, post-structuralist and queer theoretical perspectives. In the process, the concepts of seduction, androgyny and ambiguity are refigured as embodied strategies with which to enliven performer-spectator relations.
1 | Setting the scene | 3 |
2 | X6 : a hinge in time | 11 |
I | Yes? : fantasies of perfection : setting the scene for change | 17 |
3 | The upward line | 17 |
4 | Watching ballet : illusion becoming real | 21 |
5 | Performing ballet : real becoming illusion | 24 |
6 | Classical androgyny | 27 |
7 | Cracking the myth | 29 |
8 | The Oedipal narrative | 31 |
9 | An articulate silence | 37 |
10 | Dying to please | 41 |
II | No! : coming down to earth as dancing subjects | 53 |
11 | Expressions from the lifeworld | 53 |
12 | Figures of parody | 60 |
13 | Subverting tragedy | 66 |
14 | Feminist battles with androgyny | 70 |
15 | Within the frame of new dance | 77 |
16 | Letting go of the mirror | 80 |
17 | Figures of jouissance | 87 |
18 | K/no/w body of illusion : seduction in reverse | 91 |
19 | Derrida's presents | 96 |
20 | Parallel emergences | 100 |
21 | Different visibilities | 108 |
22 | Negation of seduction | 114 |
23 | The other of the other | 117 |
24 | Kristeva's crunch | 121 |
25 | Collective strategies | 123 |
26 | The X6 legacy | 130 |
27 | Drawn to the mainstream | 133 |
28 | Repertory versus project | 136 |
29 | Middle mush | 140 |
III | Maybe ... : depth becomes surface and ambiguous points of play | 147 |
30 | Process to product | 147 |
31 | Full body empty body | 154 |
32 | The chameleon | 156 |
33 | Boys transcending | 160 |
34 | His look, his gaze | 163 |
35 | Bodies of pleasure | 168 |
36 | Letting go of fear | 175 |
37 | Re-figuring androgyny | 179 |
38 | Queer living | 183 |
39 | Re-dressing the girls | 186 |
40 | Eye flight | 203 |