Book Launch
Thursday 17 July 2025, 4.00-6.00pm BST
This is a hybrid event
To join us at the RAI (Address), register here. To join us online via Zoom, register here
Dance, Performance and Visual Art:
Intersections with Material Culture
(2024) Palgrave Macmillan/ Springer Nature: Switzerland
with editors Linda E. Dankworth, Henia Rottenberg, and Deborah Williams
This book offers a research framework for investigating the varied ways in which dance, movement, and performance intersect with visual media, such as painting, sculpture, video, digital design, and photography. The cross- fertilization produces new encounters and forms of knowledge that reflect national, cultural, social, political, and historical issues. The chapters are all written by experts in their field, whether they are anthropologists, artists, dance studies researchers, ethnochoreologists, historians, or theorists from European, Far Eastern, Near East, and Oceania cultures. Their chapters examine in various ways the critical discourses and practices that arise from their interactions, in which each field is situated.
The focus on an interdisciplinary approach is located at the intersections of material culture studies and contributes to this discourse, presented in our anthology in three different sections. We aim to create further discussion and thought towards a new understanding of the interrelationships between dance, performance, and visual art. Part I, “Choreographed Interrelationships: Artists and Their Art”, comprises three chapters that deal with contemporary approaches to performance. The choreographers and artists reveal their interrelatedness to the artwork. Part II, “Cultural Representations: Materialized Movement”, consists of two chapters that consider visual art as seen in the representation of pictorial art and antiquity through religious doctrine. Part III, “Interdisciplinary Kinaesthetic: Process to Product”, consists of three chapters that include a focus on digital and 3D-scanning to promote interdisciplinary practices between visual artists and the performing arts, whether it is physical and digital dance or urban landscaping. In contrast, a contemporary perspective is given by an artist’s experience working with clay, who takes a sensorial and kinaesthetic approach to her art.
Many of the chapters question the nature of ‘materiality’, seeking to include what is produced by the body, whether tangible or intangible, within this category. Like Barad (2003), the authors in this volume are each in their own way connecting to the conceptual nature that is representational of her thinking related to “intra-actions”. That is, in each of the chapters, the relationship to materiality reveals deeper agentic connections between the creator and object(s), process and outcome. As the notion of New Materiality suggests, it is not just subject and object that are of importance, but it is often the spaces in between that also need considering.
References
Barad, Karen, 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 28 No. 3: 801–831.
Bios
Linda E. Dankworth is a dance ethnographer and ethnochoreologist and has written extensively on Mallorquin dance. She is the co-editor of Dance Ethnography and Global Perspectives: Identity, Embodiment and Culture (2014), Palgrave Macmillan: Oxford. She established and taught the “Dance Histories” Degree Course at the University of Gloucestershire (2019). Her publications include ICTM Proceedings (2021); Bulletin of the ICTM (October 2018); Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice (2013). Dankworth is a co-director of the workshops of the World Folk Dance Festival, Palma, Mallorca (2005–2011). She is a member of the ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology since 2003, and RAI since 2024.
Henia Rottenberg is a dance studies scholar, whose interests focus on the dialogue between dance and visual art and on dance in Israel. She is the co-editor of Resling books (in Hebrew): Dance Discourse in Israel (2009), Sara Levi-Tanai (2015), Points of Contact (2018), editor of Bat- Dor: The Story of a Dance Company (2020), and of co-editor of Routledge: Moving Through Conflict (2020). Rottenberg was Senior Lecturer at the Theatre Studies Faculty (2012-2024), Western Galilee College; was its Head of Dance Theatre Program (2012–2019); and lectured at Kibbutzim College of Education (2004–2020).
Deborah Williams holds a BA in Dance with a focus on education and community partnerships from Five College Dance Department at Smith College, USA. From the University of Roehampton, London, Deborah received both an MA in Dance Anthropology and a PhD in Dance. Her research is rooted in the fields of dance anthropology, ethnography, and oral history, and centres around highlighting the voices of non-professional dancers. Her current research areas include investigating dance, social value, and representation. She is Senior Lecturer in Dance Studies at the University of Malta. She is a member of the ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology since 2014.
