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Choreographies of the Living explores the shift from viewing art as an exclusively human undertaking to recognizing it as an activity that all living creatures enact. Carrie Rohman's bioaesthetic framework describes how art-making binds us to other animals in literature, visual art, dance, and performance.
About the author
Carrie Rohman is Associate Professor of English at Lafayette College and the author of Stalking the Subject (2008).
Summary
Choreographies of the Living explores the shift from viewing art as an exclusively human undertaking to recognizing it as an activity that all living creatures enact. Carrie Rohman's bioaesthetic framework describes how art-making binds us to other animals in literature, visual art, dance, and performance.
Additional text
Drawing on her intimate knowledge of dance as much as on her scholarly studies of literature, art, and performance, Rohman elaborates the thesis that in fact art has deep roots in the nonhuman world, and that the same creative force that impels us to make it also courses through the non-human animals from whom it-and we-are descended [...] Rohman makes clear, bioaesthetics calls for nothing less than a radical revision to our understanding of art [...] Rohman presents her ideas with merciful clarity, and the book should be accessible to the art-curious from all disciplines [...] In an era that's witnessing a growing respect for the intelligence of the body, the bioaesthetic call for a rethinking of art could hardly be more timely.
