Dance in US Popular Culture

ISBN-13: 9780367819729 / Angielski

Jennifer Atkins

Opis

This innovative textbook applies basic dance history and theory to contemporary popular culture examples in order to examine our own ways of moving in - and through - culture.

By drawing on material relevant to students, Dance in US Popular Culture successfully introduces students to critical thinking around the most personal of terrain: our bodies and our identities. The book asks readers to think about:

• what embodied knowledge we carry with us and how can we understand history and society through that lens
• what gender and racialized stereotypes are embedded in performance and what expectations accompany them
• how are such expectations reinforced, negotiated, challenged, embraced, or rescripted altogether?
• how readers articulate their own sense of complex identity within the constantly shifting landscape of popular culture, how this shapes an active sense of their everyday lives, and how can this act as a springboard towards dismantling systems of oppression

Through readings, questions, movement analyses, and assignment prompts that take students from computer to nightclub, Dance in US Popular Culture readers develop their own sense of dance and the moving body’s sociopolitical and cultural importance while also determining how dance might be fundamentally applicable to their own sense of identity.

This is the ideal textbook for high school and undergraduate students of dance and dance studies in BA and BfA courses, as well as those studying popular culture from interdisciplinary perspectives including cultural studies, media studies, communication studies, theatre and performance studies.

O autorze

Jennifer Atkins is an associate professor of dance at Florida State University.