TADN 3621: Moving History, Dance in Culture

6 volume set on dance around the world, including cultural and national overviews plus information on dance forms, music and costumes, performances, and biographies of dancers and choreographers.

Using a global approach, this collection of 22 original essays considers ballet, modern, jazz, and tap dance, Broadway and movie dance, folk, ethnic, and social dance. Explores the significance of dance in culture, its relationship to other art forms, the contributions of great choreographers, dancers, and teachers, and the creative process. Africa, Europe, North America and Latin America.

Focuses on the diffusion of Cuban popular musical styles throughout the Americas as well as the creation of new hybrids in places such as Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Latin New York. Also includes information on the history and evolution of lesser-known regional styles such as Colombian champeta, Puerto Rican bomba y plena and Dominican bachata as well as such well-known transnational idioms as mambo, salsa and merengue.

Ethnographic and historic strategies to reveal how dance plays crucial cultural roles in various regions of the world, including Tonga, Java, Bosnia-Herzegovina, New Mexico, India, Korea, Macedonia, and England. The essays find a balance between past and present and examine how dance and bodily practices are core identity and cultural creators.

Maps out the key features of dance studies as the field stands today, while pointing to potential future developments. It locates these features both historically--within dance in particular social and cultural contexts--and in relation to other academic influences that have impinged on dance studies as a discipline.