Synopses & Reviews
Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of Song and Dance offers new, cutting-edge essays focusing on song and dance as performative gestures that not only entertain but also act on audiences and performers. The chapters range across musical theater, opera, theater, and other artistic practices, from Glee to Gardzienice, Beckett to Disney, Broadway to Turner-Prize-winning sound installation. The chapters draw together these diverse examples of vocality and physicality by exploring their affect rather than through considering them as texts. The book's contributors derive methodologies from many disciplines. Resisting discrete discipline-based enquiry, they share methodologies and performance repertoires with discipline-based scholarship from theater studies, musicology, and cultural studies, among other approaches. Together, they view these as neighboring voices whose dialogue enriches the study of contemporary music theater.
About the Author
Dominic Symonds is Reader in Drama at the University of Lincoln and, with George Burrows, joint editor of the journal Studies in Musical Theatre.
Millie Taylor is Professor of Musical Theatre at The University of Winchester and author of Musical Theatre, Realism, and Entertainment (2012).
Table of Contents
Introduction: Singing the Dance, Dancing the Song
Chapter 1: The Song's the Thing: Capturing the "Sung" to Make it "Song"
Chapter 2: The (Un)Pleasure of Song: On the Enjoyment of Listening to Opera
Performativity as Dramaturgy
Chapter 3: Relocating the Song: Julie Taymor's Jukebox Musical Across the Universe (2007)
Chapter 4: Dynamic shape: the Dramaturgy of Song and Dance in Lloyd Webber's Cats (1981)
Performativity as Transition
Chapter 5: Dance Breaks and Dream Ballets: Transitional Moments in Musical Theater
Chapter 6: "Love Let Me Sing you": The Liminality of Song and Dance in La Chiusa's Bernarda Alba (2006)
Performativity as Identity
Chapter 7: Tapping the Ivories: Jazz and Tap Dance in Jelly's Last Jam (1992).
Chapter 8: Everything's Coming up Kurt: the Broadway Song in Glee
Chapter 9: Angry Dance: Postmodern Innovation, Masculinities and Gender Subversion
Performativity as Context
Chapter 10: Deconstructing the Singer: the Concerts of Laurie Anderson
Chapter 11: Singing and a Song: The "Intimate Difference" in Susan Philipsz's Lowlands (2010)
Chapter 12: Acting Operatically: Body, Voice and the Actress in Beckett's Theater
Performativity as Practice
Chapter 13: Vox Elettronica: Song, Dance and Live Electronics in the Practice of Sound Theater
Chapter 14: From Ear to Foot: How Choreographers Interpret Music
Chapter 15: Singing from Stones: Physiovocality and Gardzienice's Theater of Musicality
Performativity as Community
Chapter 16: Singing the Community: the Musical Theater Chorus as Character
Chapter 17: Singing and Dancing Ourselves: The Politics of the Ensemble in A Chorus Line (1975)
Performativity as Writing
Bibliography
Index
Bibliography