This book brings researchers and readers together by offering a selection of work which embraces new perspectives on key periods and people in theatre-dance history and addresses some gaps and silences within that history. Questioning what constitutes the historical study of dance is exploring the intersection between varied theatre-dance forms and popular culture.
Chapter 2 (Alexandra Carter): How debates in macro history impact upon dance history
Chapter3 (Lena Hammergren): A consideration of the selection and interpretation of source material disrupting conventional notions about the status and value of historical sourses.
Chapter 4 (Helen Thomas): selective criteria by which works are chosen for reconstruction, diverse and contested terminology, notion of authenticity.
“For Selma Cohen (1993) a reconstruction is made by someone else who researches the ‘work’. A re-creation is concerned to capture the ‘spirit of the work’.” (2004: 36)
“For Hutchinson Guest (2000) a reconstruction involves ‘constructiong a work anew’ from a wide range ‘sourses’ and information, with the intention of getting as close to the original as possible. […] A re-creation is based on an idea or a story of a ballet (or dance), which has been lost in the mists of time and it may involve using the original music or idea”. (2004: 37)
Chapter 8 (Linda Tomko): whether history operates not with linear development moved forward by key individual agents but as lateral moments in time.
Chapter 13 (Ananya Chatterjee): how the history of Odissi has been organized based on concepts of development, linearity, coherence and ‘truth’
Chapter 15 (André Lepecki): claims a trend of European modern dance practicioners at the end of the twentieth century not to subscribe to the imperative of always rupturing the past by creating ‘new’, but to acknowledge the past ‘as common ground, as the surface it is inevitably destined to wander on’.
