Full Description
Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of Song and Dance offers new cutting edge essays focusing on Song and Dance as performative gestures that not only entertain but also act on audiences and performers. The chapters range across musical theatre, opera, theatre and other artistic practices, from Glee to Gardzienice, Beckett to Disney, Broadway to Turner Prize winning sound installation. The chapters draw together these diverse examples of vocality and physicality by exploring their affect rather than through considering them as texts.
This book considers performativity in relation to Dramaturgy, Transition, Identity, Context, Practice, Community and finally, Writing. The book reveals how the texture of music theatre, containing as it does the gestures of song and dance, is performative in dense, interwoven, dialogical and paradoxical ways, partly caused by the intertextual and interdisciplinary energies of its make-up, partly by its active dynamism in performance. The book's contributors derive methodologies from many disciplines, seeking in many ways to resist and explode discrete discipline-based enquiry. They share methodologies and performance repertoires with discipline-based scholarship from theatre studies, musicology and cultural studies, but there are many other approaches and case studies which we also embrace. Together, they view these as neighboring voices whose dialogue enriches the study of contemporary music theatre.
Contents
Introduction: Singing the Dance, Dancing the Song ; Chapter 1: The Song's the Thing: Capturing the "Sung" to Make it "Song" ; Chapter 2: The (Un)Pleasure of Song: On the Enjoyment of Listening to Opera ; Performativity as Dramaturgy ; Chapter 3: Relocating the Song: Julie Taymor's Jukebox Musical Across the Universe (2007) ; Chapter 4: Dynamic shape: the Dramaturgy of Song and Dance in Lloyd Webber's Cats (1981) ; Performativity as Transition ; Chapter 5: Dance Breaks and Dream Ballets: Transitional Moments in Musical Theater ; Chapter 6: "Love Let Me Sing you": The Liminality of Song and Dance in La Chiusa's Bernarda Alba (2006) ; Performativity as Identity ; Chapter 7: Tapping the Ivories: Jazz and Tap Dance in Jelly's Last Jam (1992). ; Chapter 8: Everything's Coming up Kurt: the Broadway Song in Glee ; Chapter 9: Angry Dance: Postmodern Innovation, Masculinities and Gender Subversion ; Performativity as Context ; Chapter 10: Deconstructing the Singer: the Concerts of Laurie Anderson ; Chapter 11: Singing and a Song: The "Intimate Difference" in Susan Philipsz's Lowlands (2010) ; Chapter 12: Acting Operatically: Body, Voice and the Actress in Beckett's Theater ; Performativity as Practice ; Chapter 13: Vox Elettronica: Song, Dance and Live Electronics in the Practice of Sound Theater ; Chapter 14: From Ear to Foot: How Choreographers Interpret Music ; Chapter 15: Singing from Stones: Physiovocality and Gardzienice's Theater of Musicality ; Performativity as Community ; Chapter 16: Singing the Community: the Musical Theater Chorus as Character ; Chapter 17: Singing and Dancing Ourselves: The Politics of the Ensemble in A Chorus Line (1975) ; Performativity as Writing ; Bibliography ; Index ; Bibliography
