24: Linda McJannet: Incorporating the Text: John Farmanesh
About the author
Lynsey McCulloch is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Coventry University and an Associate Member of its Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE). She researches the relationship between literature and dance.
A dance scholar-practitioner, Brandon Shaw's research interests include literature and dance, early modern European body culture, phenomenology, dance historiography, US Race Studies, and representations of the invisible in dance. He was the inaugural Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Dance Studies at Brown University and the recipient of the 2016 Gertrude Lippincott Award for outstanding publication in the field of Dance Studies.
Summary
Shakespeare's texts have a long and close relationship with many different types of dance, from dance forms referenced in the plays to adaptations across many genres today. With contributions from experienced and emerging scholars, this handbook provides a concise reference on dance as both an integral feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and as a means of translating Shakespearean text into movement - a process that raises questions of authorship and authority, cross-cultural communication, semantics, embodiment, and the relationship between word and image.
Motivated by growing interest in movement, materiality, and the body, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance is the first collection to examine the relationship between William Shakespeare - his life, works, and afterlife - and dance. In the handbook's first section - Shakespeare and Dance - authors consider dance within the context of early modern life and culture and investigate Shakespeare's use of dance forms within his writing. The latter half of the handbook - Shakespeare as Dance - explores the ways that choreographers have adapted Shakespeare's work. Chapters address everything from narrative ballet adaptations to dance in musicals, physical theater adaptations, and interpretations using non-Western dance forms such as Cambodian traditional dance or igal, an indigenous dance form from the southern Philippines.
With a truly interdisciplinary approach, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance provides an indispensable resource for considerations of dance and corporeality on Shakespeare's stage and the early modern era.
