Browsing by Author "Huxley, Michael"

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    The Dance of the Future: Wassily Kandinsky’s Vision, 1908–1928
    (2017-10-31) Huxley, Michael
    One can best glean painter Wassily Kandinsky’s contribution to ideas about dance by looking at the totality of his writings. Kandinsky conceptualized dance as part of his theories for a new abstract art in his major book Concerning the Spiritual in Art. I consider his 1912 statement on the dance of the future as a modernist statement in its time. Kandinsky’s idea for a new form of theater, Bühnenkomposition, incorporated dance, as his script for The Yellow Sound demonstrates. His later writings in Moscow and at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau reveal his concern for what the modern dance might achieve. In 1928, Kandinsky finally realized his ambition to stage a new form of synthetic theater in a production of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
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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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    F. Matthias Alexander and Mabel Elsworth Todd: Proximities, practices and the psycho-physical
    (Intellect, 2012) Huxley, Michael
    Proximities in the work of F. Matthias Alexander and Mabel Elsworth Todd are examined for the first time. There are close geographical proximities in their location and to those in their respective circles during the period 1914–1937. Both Alexander and Todd drew on ideas prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century. There are historical proximities based around the intellectual hub of New York City, notably to the philosopher John Dewey, the historian James Harvey Robinson and the pioneer dance educationalist Margaret H’Doubler. Alexander’s and Todd’s ideas and practices are considered in their time from a starting point of the idea of the‘psycho-physical’, a term used by these practitioners in their writings. They both used it to try and speak about the self in a new way, and what they proposed had major ramifications. The article concludes by suggesting that we might reconsider how we think of dancers and dance students in the light of this historical reconsideration of Alexander’s and Todd’s ideas.
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    German Drama, Theatre and Dance
    (Cambridge University Press, 1999) Huxley, Michael; Patterson, M.
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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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    Ideas of nature, the natural and the modern in early twentieth century dance discourse
    (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) Huxley, Michael; Burt, Ramsay, 1953-
    This chapter examines the way dance writers in the first two decades of the twentieth century negotiated ideas of the natural. Discourses around nature, the natural and the modern were extensively debated during this period, which was one of rapid and disturbing social and technological transitions. It was also a period during which there were deep anxieties around notions of the health or degeneracy of the body, this being an issue in which the state had a particular bio political investment. It is proposed that discourses about dancing at this time reveal an antinomy between two different notions of the natural. The first of these is concerned with investigations within the natural sciences: for example Charles Sherrington, Jakob von Uexküll . The second manifested itself as a call to get back to nature that could sometimes betray implicitly reactionary tendencies. The chapter will trace the way unacknowledged concerns about modernity and the consequences of developments in the natural sciences, particularly those dealing with embodied perception and motor functioning, conditioned the developing discourse about natural or free dancing in writings by authors such as Crawford Flitch and Lady Richardson. The wider context includes ideas of the natural as espoused by Macfadden, Sandow and Mensendieck. It then compares this approach to the way later writers involved in the development of dance education and training negotiated ideas of the natural and new scientific ideas to explore new approaches to the practice of dance. This complex discourse can be found in the writings of authors such H’Doubler, Alexander and Todd. It permeates the writings of those concerned with dancing, the self, and the body—and is expressive of a moving forwards at the start of a new century.
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    Kurt Jooss in Exile in England.
    (2012) Huxley, Michael
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    Modern Dance: A Historical Consideration
    (De Montfort University, 2016-10) Huxley, Michael
    This thesis presents a selection of my published works and an accompanying exposition to demonstrate my sustained, substantial, continuous and coherent research and how it has made an original contribution to the field of dance history. The nine selected published works—Volume 2—written over the course of three decades, consider modern dance between 1900 and 1945 and how its historical study illuminates this significant period. All these writings made contributions to dance history that were original in their time. My first publication helped to define the field of dance history. My most recent one has taken an innovative approach to modern dance, informed by my developed understanding of the idea of dance history. The exposition—volume 1— examines my ideas of dance history. It does so by placing my writings within the context of the development of dance history as a field, especially in the UK. It goes further by considering this development within the broader context of the development of history as a discipline, both philosophically and practically. This contextualisation is then used to reflect further on my writings and their original contributions to dance historiography. I conclude with a reconsideration of the idea of dance history.
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    Modern movements: women’s contributions to the success of Rudolf Laban’s ideas and practice in England 1930-1941
    (Taylor and Francis, 2020-09) Huxley, Michael; Burt, Ramsay, 1953-
    This journal article considers women who could all be said to have been working in the shadow of Rudolf Laban. During the 1930s and 40s in England a number of them developed the new modern dance as independent performers and teachers. Laban’s arrival in 1938 set up a series of complicated criss-crossings of ideas, practices, events, and relationships that were to have far reaching consequences and which left a legacy where it is Laban’s name that is canonical. These dancers and teachers included Anny Boalth, Sylvia Bodmer, Leslie Burrowes, Anny Fligg, Hilde Holger, Ann Hutchinson, Diana Jordan, Jean Newlove, Valerie Preston-Dunlop, Peggie Rowlands, Geraldine Stephenson, Veronica Tyndale-Biscoe, Lisa Ullmann, Jane Winearls and others. We give an overview of the ways in which these women interacted with Laban and his ideas and how they variously became Laban’s shadow or shadowed his practices. Their marginalization is largely because they were overshadowed by his name and reputation. We therefore focus on Lisa Ullmann and Anny Boalth as two individuals with different narratives in relation to Laban. We go on to consider three disparate women Leslie Burrowes, Louise Soelberg and Diana Jordan, who came together to establish the short-lived Dance Centre in London. The histories of these women working in Britain during the 1930s and 1940s in Laban’s shadow are histories that are in Foucault’s terms a genealogy of divergent traits with a focus on the corporeality of experience. ‘The body’, he wrote, ‘is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), … Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history’ (1977: 148). As a genealogy, this chapter is a reappropriation of those archival records out of which the canonical history of dance and theatre performances have been created in order to find something altogether different, the hidden histories of the contributions that these women made to the field of movement training, bringing their contributions out of the shadows.
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    Movement concerns the whole man
    (Dance Books, 2010) Huxley, Michael
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    Review. Susan Rosenberg, Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art
    (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) Huxley, Michael
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    Technological enhancements in the teaching and learning of reflective and creative practice in dance
    (Research in Dance education, 2008) Doughty, Sally; Francksen, Kerry; Huxley, Michael; Leach, Martin
    A team of researchers at De Montfort University’s Centre for Excellence in Performance Arts has explored uses of technology in dance education. The wider context of dance and technology pedagogy includes research into dance, technologies, learning and teaching and the relationships between teaching and research. The paper addresses all of these themes. Three pedagogic research projects are reported on. They address dance and technology in terms of: (i) teaching the Alexander Technique for dancers, (ii) improvisation, (iii) interactive practice using the software environment Isadora. Two main themes are highlighted: (1) use of technology as a means of enabling reflection, and (2) technology as a means of both engaging in the creative process and as a creative tool. It is argued that student-centred autonomous learning in dance can be significantly enhanced by an informed application of technologies.