Choreographing History

SUSAN LEIGH FOSTER, Professor and Chair of the Department of Dance at the University of California, Riverside, is the author of Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance.

"... I have used essays from the book to help dance graduate students push their thinking beyond the studio and their own physical experience and to realize the varied resources, approaches, and theoretical positions possible in writing about the body." - Dance Research Journal "Choreographing History ... assembles an impressive diversity of sites, disciplines and critical approaches ... [and] includes not only historical bodies and discourses, but also the very bodies of the historians themselves." - Parachute "This volume is not only full of gems (the very lineup of preeminent scholars is impressive), but is also a neat cross-section of the academic conventions and mannerisms of our time." - Dance Chronicle "... [an] important step... in the ineluctable dance by postmodern historians across a bridge that spans the gaps among disciplines, between theory and practice, and betweeen present and past." - Theatre Journal

• AcknowledgmentsAn Introduction to Moving BodiesChoreographing History—Susan Leigh FosterResurrecting Historical BodiesToward a Universal Language of Motion: Reflections on a Seventeenth-Century Muscle Man—Stephen GreenblattInterval Training—John MacAloonBodily Interventions into Academic DisciplinesTacit Knowledge, Courtliness, and the Scientist's Body—Mario BiagioliMusic, the Pythagoreans, and the Body—Susan McClaryAgency and History: The Demands of Dance Ethnography—Randy MartinMoving Theory Across Bodies of PracticeCredit, Novels, Masturbation—Thomas W. LaqueurAdvertising Every Body: Images from the Japanese Modern Years—Miriam SilverbergBodies of Doctrine: Headshots, Jane Austen, and the Black Indians of Mardi Gras—Joseph RoachHistorians as Bodies in MotionModern Dance in the Third Reich: Six Positions and a Coda—Susan A. ManningThe Body's Endeavors as Cultural Practices—Cynthia J. NovakDifferent Personas: A History of One's Own?—Lena HammergrenEmbodying TheoryMeditations on the Patriarchal Pythagorean Pratfall and the Lesbian Siamesia Two-Step—Sue-Ellen CaseThirteen Ways of Looking at Choreographing Writing—Peggy PhelanBodies of Evidence: Law and Order, Sexy Machines, and the Erotics of Fieldwork among Physicists—Sharon TraweekBodies and Their Plots—Hayden WhiteBibliographyNotes on ContributorsIndex