Gestures of Music Theater The Performativity of Song and Dance [Paperback]

Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of Song and Danceoffers new, cutting-edge essays focusing on song and dance as performative gestures that not only entertain but also act on audiences and performers. The chapters range across musical theater, opera, theater, and other artistic practices, fromGleeto Gardzienice, Beckett to Disney, Broadway to Turner-Prize-winning sound installation. The chapters draw together these diverse examples of vocality and physicality by exploring their affect rather than through considering them as texts. The book's contributors derive methodologies from many disciplines. Resisting discrete discipline-based enquiry, they share methodologies and performance repertoires with discipline-based scholarship from theater studies, musicology, and cultural studies, among other approaches. Together, they view these as neighboring voices whose dialogue enriches the study of contemporary music theater.

Introduction: Singing the Dance, Dancing the Song
Chapter 1: The Song's the Thing: Capturing the Sung to Make it Song
Chapter 2: The (Un)Pleasure of Song: On the Enjoyment of Listening to Opera
Performativity as Dramaturgy
Chapter 3: Relocating the Song: Julie Taymor's Jukebox Musical Across the Universe (2007)
Chapter 4: Dynamic shape: the Dramaturgy of Song and Dance in Lloyd Webber's Cats (1981)
Performativity as Transition
Chapter 5: Dance Breaks and Dream Ballets: Transitional Moments in Musical Theater
Chapter 6: Love Let Me Sing you : The Liminality of Song and Dance in La Chiusa's Bernarda Alba (2006)
Performativity as Identity
Chapter 7: Tapping the Ivories: Jazz and Tap Dance in Jelly's Last Jam (1992).
Chapter 8: Everything's Coming up Kurt: the Broadway Song in Glee
Chapter 9: Angry Dance: Postmodern Innovation, Masculinities and Gender Subversion
Performativity as Context
Chapter 10: Deconstructing the Singer: the Concerts of Laurie Anderson
Chapter 11: Silƒj