Full Description
Body Impossible theorizes the concept of virtuosity in contemporary dance and performance through a study of the career of dancer Desmond Richardson. A virtuoso for the ages, Richardson is renowned for delivering commanding performances over decades in contexts ranging from the stages of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Ballett Frankfurt to featured appearances with Michael Jackson and Prince, along with his work as co-founder of Complexions Contemporary Ballet, inaugurating a virtuosic queer black aesthetic with choreographer Dwight Rhoden.
Focusing on Richardson's creative insistence on improvisatory fun and excellence throughout the decades approaching the millennium (shaped by Reaganism, the Culture Wars, the AIDS epidemic, the New Jim Crow, and MTV), this book brings dance into conversation with paradigms of blackness, queerness, masculinity, and class in order to generate a socioculturally attentive understanding of virtuosity.
Virtuosity obscures the border between popular and concert performance, and Richardson's versatility epitomizes the demands on the contemporary virtuosic dance artist. Author Ariel Osterweis suggests that discourses of virtuosity are linked to connotations of excess, and that an examination of the formal and socio-cultural aspects of virtuosic performance reveals under-recognized heterogeneity in which we detect "vernacular" influences on "high art." In doing so, Body Impossible accounts for the constitutive relationship between disciplined perceptions of virtuosity's excess and the disciplining of the racialized body in national and transnational contexts.
Contents
Introduction
Virtuosity: I Know It When I See It
Chapter One
Fame Nation:
Queer Black Masculinities and a U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts
Chapter Two
Choreography's Photographic Skin: Sweat, Labor, and Flesh in Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Chapter Three
The Muse of Virtuosity: Complexions Contemporary Ballet and Choreographic Falsetto
Chapter Four
Difficult Fun: The Racial Politics of Improvisation in William Forsythe's Ballett Frankfurt
Chapter Five
Otherwise in Blackface: American Ballet Theatre and San Francisco Ballet's Othello
Chapter Six
Bad: Freakery, Iconicity, and Michael Jackson's Ghost
Conclusion
Desmond Richardson on Tour: Virtuosity's Futures
Index
Bibliography
