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.

 

Ballet, Why and How? On the role of classical ballet in dance education, edited by Derrick Brown and Minke Vos, 2014 – Susie Crow reviews

This thought-provoking volume is an edited collection of papers and presentations from the conference Ballet, Why and How? Illuminating the role of ballet in the vocational education and the professional life of today’s dancer, held in Holland in 2012. In her introduction Gaby Allard of the editorial board movingly describes her own experience as a dancer transitioning from ballet to contemporary dance, her realisation of being “locked in” to her balletic bodily practice, and her search for new knowledge and approaches. The conference addressed the need she perceives for the on-going work of research and innovation in “best practice” that is integral to dance culture to be shared in dialogue, here specifically considering “the position and value of classical technique for the dancer today” (Allard in Brown & Vos edit. 2014, p.20).  A wide range of speakers with differing perspectives including historians, pedagogues, psychologists, practitioners and dance scientists contributed, to build a revealing picture of the current state of the art.