Dance, Performance and Visual Art Intersections with Material Culture

This collection presents a selection of essays written from a point of view that has dance, movement, or performance at its centre, and examines the intellectual and material relationship to the art form from which they are conceived. The themes that emerge from the authors’ contributions signify a desire to explore individual techniques in making art or unravelling the techniques of others within the composition of visual art and its contemporary movement language. Similarly, textual, and pictorial representations depict both antiquated and modern art and all their social aspects of human life. Digitization also remains a strong focus in both dance and its representation in performance contexts and place in social constructs of societies.

Chapter 1 - The Politics of Movement Appropriation: From Visual Art to Contemporary Dance.- Chapter 2 - Mauro Bigonzetti’s Caravaggio (2008): Exploring painting techniques as choreographic devices.- Chapter 3 - Escapist-Escaping Performances of Hats Theatre, Belgrade.- Chapter 4 - From Page to Stage: Irish dance costumes and the use of illustrations from The Book of Kells.- Chapter 5 - Articulating Dancing Bodies: Social and Pictorial Representations in Early Indian Art.- Chapter 6 - Dancing Clay: on kinaesthetic experience and tactile materialization.- Chapter 7 - Process as Performance: The collaborative methods of choreographer, Merce Cunningham and Pop artist, Richard Hamilton.- Chapter 8 - From Physical Sensation to Digital Presentation: Exploring Interdisciplinary World Building.- Chapter 9 - Frozen Scenography: Extending Somatic Movement Practice through 3D- Scanning.

Linda E Dankworth is an independent dance ethnographer and ethnochoreologist and has published extensively on Mallorquin dance. She is the joint editor of Dance Ethnography and Global Perspectives: Identity, Embodiment and Culture, Palgrave Macmillan (2014). She established the ‘Dance Histories’ Degree Course at the School of Liberal and Performing Arts, University of Gloucestershire in 2019. Linda is also Co-Director and founder of the workshops of the World Folk Dance Festival, Palma, Mallorca (2005-2011).

Henia Rottenberg is a dance studies scholar, whose interests focus on the dialogue between dance and visual art and on dance in Israel. She is co-editor of Resling books (in Hebrew): Dance Discourse in Israel (2009), Sara Levi-Tanai (2015) Points of Contact (2018), editor of Bat-Dor: The Story of a Dance Company (2020), and a co-editor of Moving through Conflict (2020). Henia lectures in the Theatre Studies faculty at Western Galilee College, Israel, and was Head of the Dance Theatre Program from 2012-2019.

Deborah Williams is a senior lecturer in Dance Studies at the University of Malta. She holds a BA in Dance with a focus on education and community partnerships from Smith College (Five College Dance Department) USA. From the University of Roehampton in London, Deborah received both an MA in Dance Anthropology and a PhD in Dance. Her research is rooted in the fields of dance anthropology, ethnography, and oral history, and centres around highlighting the voices of non-professional dancers. Her current research areas include investigating dance, social value, and representation, and dance/movement within digital game design.