Writing Dancing Together

This collection of essays and interviews, written both separately and together over the last fifteen years traces a journey of writing and thinking about dance together. In doing so, it points to new ways of writing about and studying dance that focus on the distinctly open, affective and often intense ways in which dancers' and beholders' experience performance. The pieces and their introductions show how the authors have adapted their strategies to changing social, historical and political times and they provide examples of the importance of open, collaborative, ethical relations within dance and writing practices. Drawing heavily on continental philosophy, specifically the works of Bergson, Deleuze, Agamben and Spinoza, amongst others, issues of temporality, corporeality, memory and ethics are explored in depth through the discussion of selected ballets and contemporary dances from the last three centuries, sometimes in conjunction with visual art, theatre, film and music. The essays also engage with cultural studies as issues of gender, sexuality, class and race within the works are investigated. Artists whose work is discussed come from Britain, the USA and continental Europe and the book's topics span historical periods from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the last decade. Indeed it is part of the book's political agenda, whilst situating dances socially and historically, to also disrupt chronological notions of history by viewing and discussing works from very different historical periods alongside each other.