Browsing by Author "Burt, Ramsay, 1953-"

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    Alone into the world: reflections on solos from 1919 by Vaslav Nijinsky and Mary Wigman.
    (University Press of Florida, 2012) Burt, Ramsay, 1953-
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    Angelin Preljocaj
    (2010) Burt, Ramsay, 1953-
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    Avoiding Capture
    (Cambridge University Press, 2018-12-21) Burt, Ramsay, 1953-
    This essay discusses three recent British contemporary dance works that radically rework the spatial relation between audience and performer. These are: Nicola Conibere’s Assembly (2013), Katye Coe’s (To) Constantly Vent (2014), and Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small’s Voodoo (2017). The essay draws on Henri Lefebvre theorisation of the social and political production of space to analyse the kinds of reworkings of space time that these works enact. It argues that the works evade capture by the apparatuses that maintain normative ideologies, not only those governing the reception of art but also the apparatuses of racial classification.
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    The biopolitics of modernist dance and suffragette protest
    (Diaphanes Verlag, 2012) Burt, Ramsay, 1953-
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    Blasting out of the past: the politics of history and memory in Janez Jansa's Reconstructions
    (Oxford University Press, 2017) Burt, Ramsay, 1953-
    This chapter analyzes three reenactments by the Slovenian director Janez Janša, two reconstructions of experimental performances made under communism in Ljubljana during the late 1960s and early 1970s by poets and performers associated with the Pupilija group, and one which subversively reappropriates canonical contemporary dance works from the United States, Germany, and Japan. The two earlier works, it argues, interrogate the utopian ideals espoused by the communist partisans who freed Yugoslavia from German occupation during World War II. It develops a framework for this analysis by drawing on Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the philosophy of history and on Michel de Certeau’s work on memory and the everyday. It places the three reconstructions in their social, historical, and political context and evaluates their meanings in relation to misperceptions about art in post-communist countries.
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    British Dance: Black Routes
    (Routledge, 2016-11) Adair, C.; Burt, Ramsay, 1953-
    British Dance: Black Routes re-examines the distinctive contributions made to British dance by dancers who are Black. Covering the period 1946 to the present, it presents a radical re-reading of dancers and their companies, placing their achievements within a broader historical, cultural and artistic context. The result of a two year research project, British Dance and the African Diaspora, led by editors Christy Adair and Ramsay Burt, the collection looks at artists working with contemporary dance, African Caribbean dance, jazz dance, and dance improvisation. Chapters illuminate the commonalities and differences between sub-Saharan West African dance forms and hybridised dance forms from the USA and the Caribbean, addressing key themes such as rhythm, community, and spirituality. This outstanding collection re-evaluates dancers’ work in the context of cultural and aesthetic issues relevant to the African diaspora, looking afresh at over ve decades of artistic production to provide an unparalleled resource for dance students and scholars.
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    Cynical Parrhesia
 And Contemporary European Dance
    (2016) Burt, Ramsay, 1953-
    This paper draws on Michel Foucault’s discussion of the concept of cynical parrhesia to explore some similarities between the kind of provocative dialogue practised by the Cynics and the provocative way in which some recent European contemporary dance pieces criticise contem- porary dance as an institution. It focuses on one ancient and one modern, twenty-first century example of provocative dialogue: the meeting between Diogenes and Alexander the Great, and that between gallery visitors and dancers in Production (2010) by Xavier Le Roy and Ma° rten Spa° ngberg in response to an invitation to create a work for exhibition in an art gallery. The purpose of provoca- tive dialogue, Foucault argues, is not to make someone to accept the truth but to persuade them to internalise the voice of the provocateur and thus initiate within themselves a process of ethical self-criticism. This paper argues that Production offers opportunities for this ethical practice both to gallery visitors and to the institution that commissioned it.
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    Dance, Brexit and post-truth hate merchants
    (Live Art DevelopmentAgency, 2019) Burt, Ramsay, 1953-
    Discussion of Rita Marcalo's project Dance with Strangers: From Calais to England and its treatment by right-wing tabloid journalists.
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    Dance, Modernism, and Modernity
    (Routledge, 2020) Burt, Ramsay, 1953-; Huxley, Michael
    This collection of new essays explores connections between dance, modernism, and modernity by examining the ways in which leading dancers have responded to modernity. Burt and Huxley examine dance examples from a period beginning just before the First World War and extending to the mid-1950s, ranging across not only mainland Europe and the United States but also Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific Asian region, and the UK. They consider a wide range of artists, including Akarova, Gertrude Colby, Isadora Duncan, Katherine Dunham, Margaret H’Doubler, Hanya Holm, Michio Ito, Kurt Jooss, Wassily Kandinsky, Margaret Morris, Berto Pasuka, Uday Shankar, Antony Tudor, and Mary Wigman. The authors explore dancers’ responses to modernity in various ways, including within the contexts of natural dancing and transnationalism. This collection asks questions about how, in these places and times, dancing developed and responded to the experience of living in modern times, or even came out of an ambivalence about or as a reaction against it.
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    Dancers and / as archives
    (Siobhan Davies Dance, 2014) Burt, Ramsay, 1953-
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    Dancing bodies and modernity.
    (Oxford University Press, 2011) Burt, Ramsay, 1953-
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    Diasporic cultures and colonialism: Katherine Dunham and Berto Pasuka's dance translations
    (Transcript Verlag, 2019-04) Burt, Ramsay, 1953-
    This paper discusses two examples of the translation of African diasporic dance forms from the Caribbean to Great Britain and the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. It examines the American choreographer Katherine Dunham and the Jamaican choreographer Berto Pasuka’s staging of movement material relating to spirit possession for theatres in New York and London. Stuart Hall, who was born in Jamaica, has argued that the distinctiveness of Caribbean culture is the result of creolization of African diasporic cultural forms. Caribbean culture, in his view, has absorbed a number of influences from different sources – from the American hemisphere, European colonial countries, India and Asia as well as from Africa. Unequal power relations, he argues, have always influenced the extent to which these influences have been accepted or resisted. Where religion is concerned, Hall uses the term translation to describe this process. Acknowledging the complex role of religion in Caribbean life, he points to the ‘translation’ between Christianity and the African religions and the mixtures in Caribbean music. In Jamaican revivalist churches, music and dancing can lead to expressions of ecstasy. Katherine Dunham’s experience as participant observer in Haitian vaudun ceremonies informed the pieces like L’Ag’Ya and Shango that she choreographed and performed in the United States in the late 1930s and 1940s. Her aim was to teach both Black and white Americans about the rich cultural heritage of people of African descent. Pasuka, developed his ideas about Africa and religion through his work with Marcus Garvey’s Eidelweiss project. Emigrating to Britain in 1939, he founded Les Ballets Nègres in 1946 with his savings from performing in British wartime films. The anti-colonial stance of his ballets like De Prophet and They Came are marked by a tension between pride in his African heritage and the need for emancipation from residual African religious superstitions. This paper examines the way each choreographer negotiated between the different things that African diasporic culture meant to them and the limitations arising when these were translated and framed through the cultural forms and conventions of European and North American theatrical practices.
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    Dissolving in pleasure: the threat of the queer male dancing body
    (University of Wisconsin Press, 2001-07-31) Burt, Ramsay, 1953-
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    ‘Don’t give the game away’: Rainer’s 1967 reflections on dance and the visual arts  revisited.
    (2012) Burt, Ramsay, 1953-
    In April 1967, Yvonne Rainer published an article ‘Don’t give the game away’ in Arts Magazine. Although she had been asked to discuss new developments in dance, she wrote instead about some minimalist sculptures by Robert Morris - who she describes as her husband - and Andy Warhol’s recent experiments in film, including Chelsea Girls. This was a time when a shift was taking place among progressive dance artists away from an alignment with new music and towards an exploration of progressive ideas shared with visual artists, particularly those working in the fields of minimal and conceptual art. The fact that Rainer was writing at all is itself symptomatic of this shift. In both the visual and performing arts, in Manhattan during the 1960s, artists were themselves beginning to use writing as a way to map out a theoretical context in which to locate their work and that of their colleagues. Hence visual artists like Robert Morris, Donald Judd and Robert Smithson wrote reviews and articles for magazines like Artforum, while, under Richard Schechner’s editorship, The Drama Review published writings by Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, George Macunias and others. Rainer’s so-called ‘no manifesto’ is part of an essay she wrote for The Drama Review. By the early 1970s, Rainer, Trisha Brown, Meredith Monk and others were presenting performances in major art museums in New York at a time when their work was largely rejected by the main theatres presenting modern dance. Writing in the magazine Artforum in 1974, film theorist Annette Michelson pointed out that both experimental dance and film in New York were being produced alongside what ‘constitutes the center of our commerce in the visual arts. They live, and work, however, entirely on the periphery of their world’s economy, stimulated by the labor and production of that economy, with no support, no place in the structure of its market’ (Michelson 1974: 57-8). This paper uses Rainer’s 1967 article to explore the relation between Rainer’s own work and contemporary concerns within visual art practice. It argues that the formal properties that she identifies in Morris’s sculptures and the kinds of performative behaviour recorded in Warhol’s films correspond to two key aspects of Rainer’s own avant-garde deconstruction of choreographic processes. It points to the persistence of these avant-garde tactics in the works Rainer has created since her return to dance-making since 1999, and traces their influence in the 1990s and 2000s in the work of progressive European dance artists who, like Rainer, have a sophisticated knowledge of art history and of current concerns in the visual arts.
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    The East West binary and the burden of representation.
    (2012) Burt, Ramsay, 1953-
    In a 1990 article, ‘Black art and the burden of representation’, Kobena Mercer discusses general expectations about the work of artists of colour. Critics and spectators in Europe and North America, he argues, invariably assume that the work of black artists always ‘represents’ Black identities or addresses the concerns of the Black community. This paper examines the conditions that determine when, in choreography and performance, dancers are or are not required to carry this ‘burden of representation’, focusing in particular on European attitudes towards dancers of Asian origin. It does this through discussions of five recent dance works: Gustavia by Matthilde Monnier and Maria La Ribot; Cheap Lecture and Cow Piece by Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion; Zero Degrees by Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui; and Pichet Klunchun and Myself by Jérôme Bel and Pichet Klunchun. Each of these pieces are performed by two dancers of the same gender and, compared with the love narrative of a conventional ballet pas de deux, each work seems to explore a social relationship. In most of these pieces, a friendship seems to bridge the dancers’ different backgrounds. Burrows is a dancer and choreographer while Fargion is a composer; La Ribot’s work lies in the ambiguous space between experimental dance and Live Art while Monnier is one of France’s leading contemporary dance choreographers; Khan is a British Asian dancer and choreographer while Cherkaoui is Belgian, from a Moroccan family, and is a long term member of the Belgian company Ballets C de la B. In Pichet Klunchun and Myself the differences between Bel and Klunchun are presented in a way that makes this bridging difficult. Bel is French with a similar background to La Ribot while Klunchun, from Thailand, has trained in the Thai Court Ballet style ‘Khon’, and is pioneering contemporary Thai dance. Part of the appeal of Burrows and Fargion’s pieces is the way each performer seems to allow the other a space in which to be different while at the same time working closely together. Something similar occurs with both Monnier and La Ribot, and with Khan and Cherkaoui. Bel and Klunchun, however, are more like adversaries, and the dramaturgy of their piece seems to place the burden of representing Thai dance on Klunchun, while Bel seems only to represent his own, idiosyncratic approach to conceptually-oriented European dance. It thus reinforces the idea of a binary split between Europe and Asia. In Zero Degrees, the problem of this split is presented through Khan himself who recounts, during the piece, his own semi-autobiographical experiences of vulnerability as a western born, educated young man on a journey between Bangladesh and India. Cherkaoui, who like Khan was born in Europe to a family with an Islamic background, and who shares with Khan a love of Sufi poetry and music, seems in the piece to play the role of sympathetic fellow witness. While Khan and Cherkaoui escape the burden of representation, Bel and Klunchun are unable to escape appearing to be on opposite sides of an ideologically constructed binary with its accompanying unequal power relations. Because what is at issue here is both personal and political, this paper uses postcolonial theory and recent discussions of ethics and relationality to examine the conditions of possibility for escaping the burden of representation.
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    Elroy Josephs and the hidden history of Black British Dance
    (Routledge, 2019-11) Burt, Ramsay, 1953-
    This chapter gives a brief overview of the career of the black British dance artist and teacher Elroy Josephs and reflects on the reasons for his relative obscurity. Josephs danced with Les Ballets Nègres in 1952. From the late 1950s until the early 1970s, he appeared on stage and screen as a dancer, and sometimes actor, in Britain. In the early 1970s, in Camden, he started a community dance project and was appointed as one of the Greater London Arts Association’s (GLAA) first dance animateurs. In 1979 he became the first black lecturer in dance in British higher education teaching at IM Marsh in Liverpool, subsequently part of Liverpool John Moores University. In 1993 he chaired an event “What is Black Dance in Britain?” There are largely unwritten assumptions about the British dance history narrative in which black British artists are largely marginalized. Josephs specialized in jazz dance, and spent his later years working away from the metropolitan center. By offering an overview of Josephs’s career, this paper raises questions about how the de facto canon of British dance history can become more diverse and inclusive.
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    A Greater Fullness of Life: Wellbeing in Early Modern Dance
    (2017-10-26) Huxley, Michael; Burt, Ramsay, 1953-
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    History, memory, and the virtual in current European dance practice
    (Taylor & Francis, 2009) Burt, Ramsay, 1953-
    Focusing on current European dance, this essay identifies two recent phenomena among virtual dance pieces: calling upon beholders to use their imaginations and evoking histories and memories. Such works have the potential to transform society by creating time for a belief in the impossible. This account of virtual dance draws from Susanne Langer's dance theory and Henry Bergson’s ideas about memory and the virtual, particularly as developed by Gilles Deleuze. The theoretical matrix that results allows lucid readings of works by New Art Club, Raimund Hoghe, and Janez Janša.