All I want for Christmas is… Oxford Dance Writers recommends 2016

It is that time of the year again, suddenly Christmas is looming with urgent gift shopping imperatives.  But don’t worry, once again Oxford Dance Writers is here to help with our round up of dance publications reviewed and received this year, from the highly academic and practical to the entertaining memoir and gorgeously illustrated records of companies and dancers; for the dance lovers in your lives, or to add to your own Christmas wish list…  Great thanks once again to all our reviewers!

 

Dance Dramaturgy – Modes of Agency, Awareness and Engagement: Pil Hansen and Darcey Callison (eds) – Miranda Laurence reviews

This collection of essays has emerged at a time at which the term dramaturgy is increasingly heard and used within dance disciplines, particularly in the UK. Whilst, as the preface says, dramaturgy has been included in the choreographic process since the 1970s, it is still very much a term that has many different meanings and connotations within dance practice today, with artists and scholars often aware of the term but little else about the practice. This book’s contributors approach dramaturgy for dance from a number of different directions, and as a whole the book illuminates quite how diverse the practice of dance dramaturgy is, highlighting this very diversity as a strength of the practice of dramaturgy.

The book is divided into three sections, ‘Agency’, ‘Awareness’, and ‘Engagement’, with a mixture of theoretical essays, case studies and reflections on experiences written by dance scholars, dance artists and dramaturgs.