Adesola Akinleye - Böcker

The Oxford Handbook of Ballet Pedagogy offers a comprehensive exploration of contemporary perspectives on teaching and learning ballet, emphasizing the embodied nature of dance and its role in shaping both the student sense of expression and development as an artist. The book positions ballet pedagogy as a dynamic and cross-disciplinary field that transcends traditional separation between practice and theory. It offers a holistic approach that integrates the whole body, identity, and well-being into the learning process. Through five thematic sections-focusing on the whole-dancer, embodied pedagogy, diverse teaching sites, syllabus construction, and ballet as praxis. The volume engages with critical issues such as belonging, access, rigor, syllabus, and excellence within pedagogical practices in the ballet learning space that move beyond the limitations of constructs such as race, gender, and disability. The book challenges entrenched pedagogical hierarchies, offering a vision for the future of ballet education that is inclusive, transformative, and deeply connected to embodied knowledge. Contributors range from across the globe, including pedagogues, scholars, and artist practitioners, explore how ballet pedagogy intersects with contemporary concerns in education, culture, and social justice, highlighting the evolution of the practice in response to historical and social contexts. As a whole, the book demonstrates the rich exciting future of ballet and its embodied pedagogy. It is aimed at educators, practitioners, and scholars in ballet and dance education, providing a broad and inclusive framework for teaching ballet in the 21st century.

This book was born from a year of exchanges of movement ideas generated in cross-practice conversations and workshops with dancers, musicians, architects and engineers. Events took place at key cultural institutions such as the Royal Academy of Arts, London; and The Lowry, Salford, as well as on-site at architectural firms and on the streets of London. The author engages with dance’s offer of perspectives on being in place: how the ‘ordinary person’ is facilitated in experiencing the dance of the city, while also looking at shared cross-practice understandings in and about the body, weight and rhythm. There is a prioritizing of how embodied knowledges across dance, architecture and engineering can contribute to decolonizing the production of place – in particular, how dance and city-making cultures engage with female bodies and non-white bodies in today’s era of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. Akinleye concludes in response conversations about ideas raised in the book with John Bingham-Hall, Liz Lerman, Dianne McIntyer and Richard Sennett. The book is a fascinating resource for those drawn to spatial practices from dance to design to construction.

This book was born from a year of exchanges of movement ideas generated in cross-practice conversations and workshops with dancers, musicians, architects and engineers. Events took place at key cultural institutions such as the Royal Academy of Arts, London; and The Lowry, Salford, as well as on-site at architectural firms and on the streets of London. The author engages with dance’s offer of perspectives on being in place: how the ‘ordinary person’ is facilitated in experiencing the dance of the city, while also looking at shared cross-practice understandings in and about the body, weight and rhythm. There is a prioritizing of how embodied knowledges across dance, architecture and engineering can contribute to decolonizing the production of place – in particular, how dance and city-making cultures engage with female bodies and non-white bodies in today’s era of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. Akinleye concludes in response conversations about ideas raised in the book with John Bingham-Hall, Liz Lerman, Dianne McIntyer and Richard Sennett. The book is a fascinating resource for those drawn to spatial practices from dance to design to construction.

The collection of essays demonstrates that ballet is not a single White Western dance form but has been shaped by a range of other cultures. In so doing, the authors open a conversation and contribute to the discourse beyond the vantage point of mainstream to look at such issues as homosexuality and race. And to demonstrate that ballet’s denial of the first and exclusion of the second needs rethinking.This is an important contribution to dance scholarship.  The contributors include professional ballet dancers and teachers, choreographers, and dance scholars in the UK, Europe and the USA to give a three dimensional overview of the field of ballet beyond the traditional mainstream.It sets out to acknowledge the alternative and parallel influences that have shaped the culture of ballet and demonstrates they are alive, kicking and have a rich history. Ballet is complex and encompasses individuals and communities, often invisiblized, but who have contributed to the diaspora of ballet in the twenty-first century. It will initiate conversations and contribute to discourses about the panorama of ballet beyond the narrow vantage point of the mainstream – White, patriarchal, Eurocentric, heterosexual constructs of gender, race and class.This book is certain to be a much-valued resource within the field of ballet studies, as well as an important contribution to dance scholarship more broadly.  It has an original focus and brings together issues more commonly addressed only in journals, where issues of race are frequently discussed.The primary market will be academic.  It will appeal to academics, researchers, scholars and students working and studying in dance, theatre and performance arts and cultural studies.  It will also be of interest to dance professionals and practitioners.Academics and students interested in the intersection of gender, race and dance may also find it interesting.

The book explore how dance practices can be embodied through relationships with the environment. The book begins with discussing somatic experiences of being in Place; including discussing a sense of belonging to the environment through responsive movement. The second part offers infrastructures (scores) for generative movement drawn from transdisciplinary workshops. The book presents text, poetic prose, and image.Dancing Place: Scores of the City, Scores of the Shore reveals the collaborative choreographic making process as a way of being in the world. In the book the authors story their experiences of working with scores as ways of noticing, sensing and bringing focus to moments within the assemblage of environments of which we are a part.

The book explore how dance practices can be embodied through relationships with the environment. The book begins with discussing somatic experiences of being in Place; including discussing a sense of belonging to the environment through responsive movement. The second part offers infrastructures (scores) for generative movement drawn from transdisciplinary workshops. The book presents text, poetic prose, and image.Dancing Place: Scores of the City, Scores of the Shore reveals the collaborative choreographic making process as a way of being in the world. In the book the authors story their experiences of working with scores as ways of noticing, sensing and bringing focus to moments within the assemblage of environments of which we are a part.

This book brings together a diverse array of perspectives and histories that weave together notions of Black-ness, British-ness, and dance. It offers a starting point for those interested in these topics, signposting readers to other sources while also providing an extensive overview of companies, artists, events, and artworks that compose a foundational account.The chapters foreground Black-ness within the multicultural landscape of British dance, addressing gaps in narratives of dance history, development, and innovation from a British perspective. Engaging with Black-ness as diasporic multiplicities—expressed through the lived contexts of Caribbean British, African British, Black British, and Afro-Indigenous British lineages, alongside African American influences that have been lived and developed within Britain—the collection highlights artists whose work has profoundly shaped and continues to enrich the British dance landscape. More than a record of the past, this book reflects the living, evolving presence of Black-ness in British dance today.