Tag Archive for performance arts

Announcing “Staging Brazil”

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How Capoeira Became A National Folk Form

“As elaborate and beautiful as capoeira itself! Drawing on interviews, manuals, sketches, photographs, and embodied knowledge, and highlighting the authorship of often overlooked actors, Staging Brazil demonstrates that capoeira elides and eludes the binaries purity/mixture, tradition/modernity, authentic/staged, angola/regional, and black/white.”
—Patricia de Santana Pinho, author of Mapping Diaspora: African American Roots Tourism in Brazil

Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian combat game practiced today throughout the world. Staging Brazil: Choreographies of Capoeira is the first in-depth study of the process of legitimization of capoeira and its globalization as Brazil’s national folklore. Using early illustrated capoeira manuals, the book contextualizes the two main styles of capoeira, angola and regional, within discourses of race and nation in mid-twentieth century Brazil and reveals the mutual influences between capoeira practitioners, tourism bureaucrats, intellectuals, artists, and directors of folkloric ensembles.

Ana Paula Höfling is an assistant professor of dance at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She splits her time between North Carolina and Brazil.

“As elaborate and beautiful as capoeira itself! Drawing on interviews, manuals, sketches, photographs, and embodied knowledge, and highlighting the authorship of often overlooked actors, Staging Brazil demonstrates that capoeira elides and eludes the binaries purity/mixture, tradition/modernity, authentic/staged, angola/regional, and black/white.” —Patricia de Santana Pinho, author of Mapping Diaspora: African American Roots Tourism in Brazil

“In this tour-de-force of painstaking archival work and theoretical sophistication, Höfling brings capoeira alive as a crucial area of study for understanding the role of bodies and movement in post-colonial nation-building.” —Jane C. Desmond, author of Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World

“This book is at once a fine biography of capoeira in its kinesthetic specificities and a necessary examination of the narratives that sustain the invention of a modern Brazil . . . it is a valuable addition to a growing body of work that challenges us to see beyond staged and authentic, loss and retention dichotomies.” —Bianca Freire-Medeiros, author of Touring Poverty

“Staging Brazil represents an important contribution to dance studies, martial arts studies, and Brazilian history . . . Rejecting false binaries of tradition versus innovation and Brazilian versus African, Höfling emphasizes choreographic authorship not as a sign of decline but as fundamental to capoeira. Meticulously researched and clearly articulated, Staging Brazil nuances understandings of capoeira by treating modernity and choreographic authorship as central to its practice.” —Janet O’Shea, author of Risk, Failure, Play: What Dance Reveals about Martial Arts Training

June 4, 2019
280 pp., 40 illus., 6 x 9”
Unjacketed Cloth, $85.00x  978-0-8195-7880-8
Paper, $26.95 978-0-8195-7881-5
eBook, $21.99 Y 978-0-8195-7882-2

Announcing “Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light”

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Unique perspectives on the roots and reaches of contemporary Native Theater

“This play clearly illuminates the collective grief, disconnection, and suffering many indigenous people experience because of the brutalities of colonization. But more importantly, Joy’s voice gives us strength, by reconnecting us to our ancestors, to our guardian spirits, and to each other.”
— Victoria Nalani Kneuhbuhl, Pacific Island author and playwright

 

Joy Harjo and Priscilla Page will be at Yale University March 5th, 4PM. 

Joy Harjo’s play Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light is the centerpiece of this stunning collection that is also comprised of essays and interviews detailing the roots and the reaches of contemporary Native Theater. Harjo blends storytelling, music, movement, and poetic language in Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light. The collection is accompanied by interviews with Native theater artists Rolland Meinholtz and Randy Reinholz, and it includes essays on Harjo’s work by Mary Kathryn Nagle (an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee nation, playwright, and attorney) and by Priscilla Page (of Wiyot heritage, a writer, performer, and educator), who looks at indigenous feminism, jazz, and performance as influences on Harjo’s theatrical work.

Joy Harjo is a member of the Mvskoke Nation. Her seven books of poetry, which include such well-known titles as Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, In Mad Love and War, and She Had Some Horses. These titles and her memoir Crazy Brave have garnered many awards. Priscilla Page is a writer and dramaturg as well as a senior lecturer in the department of theater at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

March 5, 2019
136 pp., 6 x 9”
Unjacketed Cloth, $40.00 978-0-8195-7865-5
Paper, $15.95 978-0-8195-7866-2

Announcing Anna Halprin’s “Making Dances that Matter”

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Dance innovator shares wisdom and scores 

 

“Anna Halprin is a pioneer of postmodern dance, a warrior for connecting arts to social issues, and a healer of individuals and communities.”
–Wendy Perron, author of Through the Eyes of a Dancer

In Making Dances that Matter, Halprin presents her philosophy and experience as well as step-by-step processes for bringing people together to create dances that foster individual and group well-being. At the heart of this book are accounts of two dances: the Planetary Dance, which continues to be performed throughout the world, and Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line. Halprin shows how dance can be a powerful tool for healing, learning and mobilizing change.

Anna Halprin, an avante-garde postmodern dancer turned community artist and healer, has created groundbreaking dances with communities all over the world. She also founded the groundbreaking San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop as well as the Tamalpa Institute, and is the author of several books including Moving Toward Life which was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1995.

February 5, 2019
232 pp., 7 x 10″
Paper, $27.95 978-0-8195-7565-4
Unjacketed Cloth, $85.00 978-0-8195-7844-0
Ebook, $22.95 978-0-8195-7566-1