Synopses & Reviews
Lengel takes the reader on a journey from India and Romania, where women preserve cultural rituals through mourning songs, to South Africa, where the body is a site of struggle for meaning and power in contemporary dance. This volume examines the interrelationship of cultural and national identity, ethnicity, gender, performance, and lived experience. It offers an understanding of how music and dance function within the lives of its performers and audiences, and how they embody meaning, carry social value, and act as a vehicle for intercultural communication.
This book analyzes the communicative impact of women's cultural products and creative practice and creates links across disciplines such as communication, cultural studies, and performance studies. Contributors have lived, researched, and performed in the United States, Australia, Belize, Barbados, Canada, China, England, India, the Pacific, Romania, and Yemen. Their chapters address women's creative performance as a means of political and ideological expression.
Review
Lengel throws down a gauntlet when she cites Jan Blommaert's 1998 assessment that "few fields are as fuzzy as ... the study of intercultural communication." That intercultural communication is a field in search of theoretical grounding is both exemplified and transcended by the essays in this volume....Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.Choice
Synopsis
Lengel takes the reader on a journey from India and Romania, where women preserve cultural rituals through mourning songs, to South Africa, where the body is a site of struggle for meaning and power in contemporary dance. This volume examines the interrelationship of cultural and national identity, ethnicity, gender, performance, and lived experience. It offers an understanding of how music and dance function within the lives of its performers and audiences, and how they embody meaning, carry social value, and act as a vehicle for intercultural communication. This book analyzes the communicative impact of women's cultural products and creative practice and creates links across disciplines such as communication, cultural studies, and performance studies. Contributors have lived, researched, and performed in the United States, Australia, Belize, Barbados, Canada, China, England, India, the Pacific, Romania, and Yemen. Their chapters address women's creative performance as a means of political and ideological expression.
Synopsis
The author addresses the importance of women's dance, music, and other performing arts as vehicles for intercultural communication.
Table of Contents
Intercultural Communication and Creative Practice: Dance, Music and Women's Cultural Identity by Laura Lengel
Preface by Lengel
Intercultural Communication and Creative Practice by Laura Lengel
Voicing the Unspoken: 'Interculturally' Connecting Race, Gender and Nation in Women's Creative Practice by Lliane Loots
Moving Contexts: Dance and Difference in the 21st Century by Ann Cooper Albright
Claiming the Empire: Women's Marginalization in 19th Century Ballet and Opera by Margaret Lindley
Dance of the Red Dog: Na Wahine Kumu Hula and Hawai'ian Cultural Identity by Fay Yokomizo Akindes
The Feminist vs. the Dancing Girl: The Devadasis, the Indian Women's Movement and a Lost Opportunity by Teresa Hubel
Corporeality and Discipline of the Performing Body: Women, Representation, and International Ballet Companies by Ginger Bihn and Paige P. Edley
Vietnamese Women Performing Artists: Making a Song and Dance Out of Patriarchal Submission by Ly Hoang Nguyen
Rudaali (The Crier): Performing the Music of Mourning by Priya Kapoor
Romanian Dirge: Women's Ritualistic Narratives of Life and Death as Cultural Construction of Identity in Southeastern Europe by Noemi Marin
Gender, Genre, Race and Identity in Barbadian Female Musicianship by Keri McClean
Shifting the Performance Characteristics of Opera and the Status Quo for Women in China by Xiaoyu Xiao and D. Ray Heisey
Marriage Customs as Creative Practice among Yemeni Women by Margaret Curtis
Women's Stages/Women's Management: An International Study by Sharon Foley
Shifting Matriarchal Traditions to the Mainstream: Articulating Ethnicity, Gender, Nation and Cultural Identity through Creative Practice by Laura Lengel