Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity Of Song And Dance - Softcover

Symonds, Dominic

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199997160 ISBN 13: 9780199997169

Publisher: Oxford University Press, Usa, 2013

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

This book makes for a very rewarding read: it combines an excellent selection of emerging and established scholars and practitioners' voices and despite its diversity with regard to genre, time, methodology and focus, it is held together firmly by a very specific and timely common research question: how song and dance can be read as performative gestures. The editors and contributors demonstrate vividly how song and dance are not merely the concern of a limited group of musicologists and dance scholars, but are omnipresent in our culture and provide a fascinating prism through which to see and understand human communication. (Dr. David Roesner, University of Kent)

This impressive volume offers important new insights on the act of music theatre and the performativity of song and dance. The collection of essays on vocality and physical gesture expands our understanding of how voices and bodies can be located in multiple theatrical contexts. (Dr. William A. Everett, University of Missouri-Kansas City)

About the Author:

Dominic Symonds is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Portsmouth and, with George Burrows, is joint editor of the journal Studies in Musical Theatre, Millie Taylor is Reader in Performing Arts at The University of Winchester and author of Music Theatre, Realism and Entertainment (2012).

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press, Usa
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0199997160
• ISBN 13: 9780199997169
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336