| Contents |
Introduction / Dustyn Martincich and Phoebe Rumsey -- Section I. Choreography and function. Reading dance: the body in motion onstage / Phoebe Rumsey -- Dancing genre: influences on dance in musical theatre / Nathan James -- Musical theatre dance training: approaches in the United States and China / Mijiang He and Dustyn Martincich -- Ensembles in motion: formations, spectacle, and unison / Adrienne Gibbons Oehlers -- Dancing narrative: storytelling through the ensemble body / Amanda Jane Olmstead -- Storytelling through dance: the rise of the dream ballet / Bud Coleman -- Making space, keeping time: musical theatre dance and temporality in the United States / Joanna Dee Das -- Section II. Approaches to choreography and the body. Take off with us: expressing gender and sexuality in golden age Broadway choreography / Kevin Winkler -- Asian faces, American bodies: reading Asian/American movement on the Broadway stage / Kim Varhola -- Tap and the Broadway musical: subversion and subjectivity through historical consciousness / Benae Beamon -- Ballet, race, and the great white way / Ramón Flowers -- Conversations, creators, and storytellers in Contact: an interview with Tomé Cousin / Phoebe Rumsey -- Postmodern dance's legacies on the contemporary musical theatre stage / Ariel Nereson -- Movement direction in musical theatre: physical actions and gestural storytelling / Michael D. Jablonski and Dustyn Martincich -- Everybody cancan: contemporary musical theatre dance / Dustyn Martincich and Alexandra Joye Warren. |
| Abstract |
This book offers guidelines in how to read this movement by analyzing it in terms of composition and movement vocabulary whilst simultaneously situating it both historically and critically. This collection provides the tools, terms, history, and movement theory for reading, interpreting, and centralizing a discussion of dance in musical theatre, importantly, with added emphasis on women and artists of color. Bringing together musical theatre and dance scholars, choreographers and practitioners, this edited collection highlights musical theatre case studies that employ dance in a dramaturgically essential manner, tracking the emergence of the dancer as a key figure in the genre, and connecting the contributions to past and present choreographers. This collection foregrounds the work of the ensemble, incorporating firsthand and autoethnographic accounts that intersect with historical and cultural contexts. Through a selection of essays, this volume conceptualizes the function of dance in musical: how it functions diegetically as a part of the story or non-diegetically as an amplification of emotion, as well as how the dancing body works to reveal character psychology by expressing an unspoken aspect of the libretto, embodying emotions or ideas through metaphor or abstraction. This book makes dance language accessible for instructors, students, and musical theatre enthusiasts, providing the tools to critically engage with the work of important choreographers and dancers from the beginning of the 20th century to today. |
