Dancing Communities - (Studies in International Performance) by J Hamera (Paperback)

About the Book

Dancing Communities is a landmark volume in dance scholarship, and examines performances that create urban communities by blurring, or reinforcing, complex cultural and ethnic boundaries. It argues that amateur and concert dance practices are laboratories for examining the myriad complex intersections of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and culture. In the five sites examined here, dance creates small and generative worlds: sometimes havens, sometimes hauntopias. The everyday labors and final products of dance in the global city offer intimacy, solidarity, and communal and cultural continuity for performers and audiences.

Book Synopsis

Dancers create 'civic culture' as performances for public consumption, but also as vernaculars connecting individuals who may have little in common. Examining performance and the construction of culturally diverse communities the book suggests that amateur and concert dance can teach us how to live and work productively together.

Review Quotes

Winner of the Book of the Year Award from the Ethnography Division of the National Communication Association.

'[Hamera] makes several prominent contributions to dance studies, and also to any scholarship interested in the relationship between community-building and the arts.' Theatre Journal

'As a practitioner of several disciplines...and as a resident of the global city wherein Hamera grounds her investigation, I recommend Dancing Communities not only as a text worth reading but, even more so, as a task worth rehearsing.' - Shakina Nayfack, Dance Research Journal

'There has been a longstanding belief by practitioners of community dance that participation in dance can be a force that can affect or change people's lives, usually for the better. This belief has wide currency, yet without much academic research to bolster it. Judith Hamera offers a unique and personal monograph that provides dance scholarship with a convincing argument, not only for community dance, but professional dance too.' - Sara Houston, Contemporary Theatre Review

'...an enviable synthesis of performance studies, dance studies, queer theory, critical geography, and cultural studies literature rendered in direct and purposeful prose...[and] an invaluable resource in teaching performance-centred research methods to graduate students... Dancing Communities is both beautiful and practical. The book is theoretically dense enough to reward re-reading, but written withsufficient clarity to give structure to a time-crunched graduate student's first pass through.' - David P. Terry, Text and Performance Quarterly

'This book deserves serious attention from dance and performance scholars. It is likely to influence the formulation of future studies that challenge understanding of the significance of a particular body mastering a technique.' - Theatre Survey

About the Author

JUDITH HAMERA is Professor and Head of the Department of Performance Studies at Texas A&M University, USA. She is the editor of Open Acts: Performance in/as Communication and Cultural Studies and co-editor of The Handbook of Performance Studies. She is the recipient of the National Communication Association's Lilla Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies, and received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, USA.