Yes? No! Maybe…

Seductive Ambiguity in Dance

Emilyn Claid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415372473
• eBook ISBN: 9781134195473
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

Covering fifty years of British dance, from Margot Fonteyn to innovative contemporary practitioners such as Wendy Houstoun and Nigel Charnock, Yes? No! Maybe is an innovative approach to performing and watching dance.

Emilyn Claid brings her life experience and interweaves it with academic theory and historical narrative to create a dynamic approach to dance writing.

Using the 1970s revolution of new dance as a hinge, Claid looks back to ballet and forward to British independent dance which is new dance's legacy. She explores the shifts in performer-spectator relationships, and investigates questions of subjectivity, absence and presence, identity, gender, race and desire using psychoanalytical, feminist, postmodern, post-structuralist and queer theoretical perspectives.

Artists and practitioners, professional performers, teachers, choreographers and theatre-goers will all find this book an informative and insightful read.

Index

(Numbers in italics indicate illustrations; numbers followed by ‘n’ indicate notes.)

5 Saturdays (1975)62, 125, 128

12XU (1983)135, 156–7, 158

Aboriginal dance forms167

absence:

and presence in relation to ballet23, 24–7;

as seduction of presence91–2, 94, 95–100, 114–17, 154, 160–3, 182

academic study, dance as subject of115, 140–1

Across Your Heart (1996)46–7

Adair, Christy11, 12, 37, 147, 218n

Adam Ant222n

ADMA (Association of Dance and Mime Artists)60, 62, 132, 217n

aesthetics:

vertical aesthetics, in relation to horizontal9, 81, 84, 186–7, 194, 204

(see also line);

Western aesthetic tradition of see ballet;

beauty, myth of

African–Caribbean dance9, 100, 103–8, 111, 220n

African dance forms9, 100–3, 108, 111–13, 141, 167, 220n

agency:

of dancer37, 38, 49, 90, 186, 209;

of pain9, 41;

of sexual submission171

Aggiss, Liz75, 76, 187–8, 198, 223n

Agis, Gaby76, 84, 118

Aikido80, 143, 222n

Ajose, Tracy105

Alexander technique54, 60, 80, 82, 85, 94, 193, 217n, 219n;

see also body–mind centring techniques;

new dance

Allegro, il Pen...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Yes?
• No!
• Maybe …
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index