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This book addresses the need for critical scholarship about contemporary dance practices in Ireland. Bringing together key voices from a new wave of scholarship to examine recent practice and research in the field of contemporary dance, it examines the excitingly diverse range of choreographers and works that are transforming Ireland's performance landscape. The first section provides a chronologically-ordered collection of critical essays to ground the reader in some of the most important issues currently at play in contemporary dance in Ireland. The second section then provides an interrogation of individual choreographers' processes. The book traces new choreographic work and trends through a broad array of topics, including somatics in performance, screendance, cultural trauma, dance archives, affect studies, feminist perspectives, choreographic process, the dancer's voice, interdisciplinarity, and pedagogical paradigms.
List of contents
Aoife McGrath and Emma Meehan; Introduction.- Emma Meehan; Revisiting Lunar Parables: Dublin Contemporary Dance Theatre and the Intangible Archive.- Finola Cronin; On Peregrine Collaborations - Cindy Cummings' Choreography of Triúr Ban: Woman, Disorientation, Displacement.- Roisín O'Gorman; Bodied Stories and Storied Bodies in Contemporary Irish performance.- Aoife McGrath; Discomforting/Disarming Touch: experiencing affective contradiction in improvisatory dance performance.- Paula Guzzanti; The Language of Affect in Choreographic Practice: Embodied at the GPO.- Rachel Sweeney; Dance Ecology as a Live Research Practice.- Jenny Roche; Dancing, Identity and Place: Balancing Subjectivity and Technique in Contemporary Dance Training.- Jürgen Simpson and Mary Wycherley; (Per)forming the Triptych / Two Voices from a Work: The Dance of Making.- Mary Nunan; A Gallery of Hanging Thoughts: Reflections on a Choreographic Practice (12 Frames).- Jools Gilson; The Kenning.
About the author
Aoife McGrath is Lecturer in the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. A dancer and choreographer, her publications include Dance Theatre in Ireland: Revolutionary Moves (Palgrave, 2012). She is a co-convener of the Choreography and Corporeality Working Group of the IFTR.
Emma Meehan is Research Fellow at Coventry University’s Centre for Dance Research, UK. She co-edited The Performing Subject in the Space of Technology: Through the Virtual Towards the Real (Palgrave, 2015) with Matthew Causey and Néill O’Dwyer and is Associate Editor for the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices.
Summary
This book addresses the need for critical scholarship about contemporary dance practices in Ireland. Bringing together key voices from a new wave of scholarship to examine recent practice and research in the field of contemporary dance, it examines the excitingly diverse range of choreographers and works that are transforming Ireland’s performance landscape. The first section provides a chronologically-ordered collection of critical essays to ground the reader in some of the most important issues currently at play in contemporary dance in Ireland. The second section then provides an interrogation of individual choreographers’ processes. The book traces new choreographic work and trends through a broad array of topics, including somatics in performance, screendance, cultural trauma, dance archives, affect studies, feminist perspectives, choreographic process, the dancer’s voice, interdisciplinarity, and pedagogical paradigms.
