BOOK RELEASE 2005

Tanz im Kopf/Dance and Cognition.

Johannes Birringer and Josephine Fenger (eds), Jahrbuch 15 der Gesellschaft für Tanzforschung. Hamburg: LIT Verlag.

ISBN 3-8258-8712-x

    Tanz im Kopf / Dance and Cognition (Yearbook No. 15) is a bilingual anthology of new dance studies reflecting the annual research focus proposed for 2004 by the German Association for Dance Research. The title refers to tendencies both in contemporary dance practices and in dance scholarship. The discursive thread of the eighteen essays collected in the book runs from a historical understanding of dance which tended largely to separate dancing from thinking to the current proposition that dancing is thinking. Theoretical considerations regarding contemporary concept dance are examined along with sociological dimensions of dance culture and pedagogical concepts. Intercultural projects are included and analyzed along with approaches to dance improvisation and dance experiments with media technologies.

The discussion forum "Dance and Science" offers a special focus on various new research approaches in the cognitive neurosciences and experimental psychology and their impact on dance research and aesthetics. The essays in this forum present innovative models for the analysis of cognition and movement, and provide a critical framework for examining the influence of media and visualization technologies in dance production and research. Observational analyses of sensorimotoric behavior yield new findings that are relevant both for composition and performance practice as well as for dance pedagogical and therapeutic methods and improvisational techniques. This yearbook breaks new ground in international dance research advocating a strong cross-disciplinary emphasis on aesthetic and scientific investigations of performance and cognition.  

BOOK RELEASE 2000

PERFORMANCE ON THE EDGE
Transformations of Culture

by Johannes Birringer

Performance on the Edge takes the reader on a journey across geographical borders and conceptual boundaries in order to map out the new territory of contemporary theatre, dance, media arts and activism. Working across social, cultural and political fault lines, the book explores performance as both process and contact, as the commitment to political activism and the reconstruction of community, as site-specific intervention into the social and technological structures of abandonment, and as the highly charged embodiments of erotic fantasies.
Performance on the Edge addresses the politics of community-oriented and reconstructive artmaking in an era marked by the AIDS crisis, cultural and racial polarization, warfare, separatism and xenophobia. Provocatively illustrated with work from North and Central America and Eastern and Western Europe, the book challenges our assumptions about the relations between media and activism, technological imperatives and social processes, and bodily identities and virtual communities.

(London/New Brunswick: Athlone, 2000). ISBN 0 485 00418 6
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New paperpack edition, 285 pages (1st and 2nd impression)
Publisher: Continuum; ISBN: 0826457797, Price: $ 29.95
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