New Books In Dance

Paul Thomas Anderson’s evolution from a brash, self-anointed “Indiewood” auteur to one of his generation’s most distinctive voices has been one of the most remarkable career trajectories in recent film history. From early efforts to emulate his cinematic heroes to his increasingly singular late films, Anderson has created a body of work that balances the familiar and the strange, history and myth: viewers feel perpetually off balance, unsure of whether to expect a pitch-black joke or a moment of piercing emotional resonance. The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha (Columbia UP, 2023) provides the most complete account of Anderson’s career to date, encompassing his varied side projects and unproduced material; his personal and professional relationships with directors such as Jonathan Demme, Robert Altman, and Robert Downey Sr.; and his work as a director of music videos for Fiona Apple, Joanna Newsom, and Haim. Ethan Warren explores Anderson’s recurring thematic preoccupations―the fraught dynam

By the early 1950s, Jane Russell (1921–2011) should have been forgotten. Her career was launched on what is arguably the most notorious advertising campaign in cinema history, which invited filmgoers to see Howard Hughes's The Outlaw (1943) and to "tussle with Russell." Throughout the 1940s, she was nicknamed the "motionless picture actress" and had only three films in theaters. With such a slow, inauspicious start, most aspiring actresses would have given up or faded away. Instead, Russell carved out a place for herself in Hollywood and became a memorable and enduring star. Christina Rice offers the first biography of the actress and activist perhaps most well-known for her role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Despite the fact that her movie career was stalled for nearly a decade, Russell's filmography is respectable. She worked with some of Hollywood's most talented directors―including Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, Nicholas Ray, and Josef von Sternberg―and held her own alongside costars such as Marilyn Mon

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most concentrated and thrilling tragedies. Macbeth is a warrior lord living in medieval Scotland who starts the play by saving his king — only to then murder the king himself. In this course, you’ll learn Macbeth’s story, explore the complex morality and psychology of Macbeth and his accomplice, Lady Macbeth, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. Part 2 addresses some of the central questions the play raises, especially questions of evil and guilt. With Professor Emma Smith, you’ll explore the Macbeths’ marriage and the different ways it can be interpreted, issues about joint agency and responsibility, and the question of how Shakespeare can dramatize such evil in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and still make these figures sympathetic.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd's book Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South (U Georgia Press, 2022) explains a curiosity: why a feminine ideal rooted in the nineteenth century continues to enjoy currency well into the twenty-first. Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd examines how the continuation of certain gender rituals in the American South has served to perpetuate racism, sexism, and classism. In a trio of popular gender rituals—sorority rush, beauty pageants, and the Confederate Pageant of the Natchez (Mississippi) Pilgrimage—young white southern women have readily ditched contemporary modes of dress and comportment for performances of purity, gentility, and deference. Clearly, the ability to “do” white southern womanhood, convincingly and on cue, has remained a valued performance. But why? Based on ethnographic research and more than sixty taped interviews, Southern Beauty goes behind the scenes of the three rituals to explore the motivations and rewards associated with participation. The picture tha

Today I talked to Sarah L Kaufman about her book The Art of Grace: On Moving Well Through Life (Norton, 2016). Grace as a word comes from Greek, conveying a sense of giving a favor as a gift or act or kindness. It’s related to Hebrew and Muslim words for compassion, and is something today’s society could use more of notes today’s guest. Instead, we have reality TV that thrives on dis-grace. This book began as the author confesses, with her writing an appreciation of how well Cary Grant moves on screen. In this interview, we also had time to hear from the author on the “devastatingly liquid” forehand of Roger Federer, and his overall grace on and off the court. Is grace charming? So much so that Cary Grant even once deliciously said, “Even I want to be Cary Grant.” Learn why Margaret Thatcher (“Atilla the Hen”) qualifies as graceful, and how we might move past today’s penchant for intolerance. Sarah L. Kaufman is an author, journalist and educator. For almost 30 years, she was a Pulitzer Prize-Winning dance cr

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most concentrated and thrilling tragedies. Macbeth is a warrior lord living in medieval Scotland who starts the play by saving his king — only to then murder the king himself. In this course, you’ll learn Macbeth’s story, explore the complex morality and psychology of Macbeth and his accomplice, Lady Macbeth, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a detailed account of the story with commentary by Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford. Professor Smith outlines the imagery and structure of the play and its relationship to historical events of Shakespeare’s time. This summary is told using the language of the play itself, placing key quotations in context to help you understand where these lines come from and what they mean.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! h

In Play Like a Man: My Life in Poster Children (University of Illinois Press, 2023), Poster Children bassist Rose Marshack details her life in the 80s and 90s as part of a heavily touring Indie Rock band. Using her Tour Reports from the 1990s, Marshack relates what life was like during the indie rock breakthrough while the advent of new digital technologies transformed the recording and marketing of music. Touring in a van, meeting your idols, juggling a programming job with music, keeping control and credibility, the perils of an independent record label (and the greater perils of a major)--Marshack chronicles the band's day-to-day life and punctuates her account with excerpts from her tour reports and hard-learned lessons on how to rock, program, and teach while female. She also details the ways Poster Children applied punk's DIY ethos to digital tech as a way to connect with fans via then-new media like pkids listservs, internet radio, and enhanced CDs. An inside look at a scene and a career, Play Like a M

In Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019), Nicholas Brown offers a fresh perspective on aesthetic autonomy and its political value, one of the great debates of the twentieth century. The monograph illustrates the viability of the modernist project in the era after postmodernism while offering one illuminating reading after another of contemporary examples in novels, photography, sculpture, popular music, TV, or movies. Brown defends art as a liberatory force in an age dominated by markets. By exploring the nuances of artistic production, Autonomy is a feast of delicious and insightful appraisals of artwork—with surprising turns and twists—within a larger context of the dialectics between art and market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

In this podcast, Claire MacDonald and Sarah Parry discuss the history of recording, the sharing of sound art between artists, how recording has shaped communities, the impact of technology on artists and their publics, and the artist's voice and the different genres it inhabits. About the Contributors: Claire MacDonald is a curator, writer, and editor whose work focuses on the intersections of performance, writing, and art. She is a founding editor of Performance Research and a contributing editor to PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. She recently served as Director of the International Centre for Fine Art Research at University of Arts London, and is currently Professor II at the Norwegian Theatre Academy. She has a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, and has recently written a novel. Sarah Parry has been teaching at the Univeristy of British Columbia since 2005. Her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Alberta, entitled "Caedmon Records, the Cold War, and the Scen

Humility and humiliation have an awkward, often unacknowledged intimacy. Humility may be a queenly, cardinal or monkish virtue, while humiliation points to an affective state at the extreme end of shame. Yet a shared etymology links the words to lowliness and, further down, to the earth. As this study suggests, like the terms in question, T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett share an imperfect likeness. Between them is a common interest in states of abjection, shame and suffering – and possible responses to such states. Tracing the relation between negative affect, ethics, and aesthetics, Eliot and Beckett's Low Modernism: Humility and Humiliation (Edinburgh UP, 2021) demonstrates how these two major modernists recuperate the affinity between humility and humiliation – concepts whose definitions have largely been determined by philosophy and theology. Rick de Villiers is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. He holds a PhD from Durham Unive

This is the late 1970s and '80s as explained through the urgent and still-relevant songs of the Clash, the Specials, the Au Pairs, the Style Council, the Pet Shop Boys, and nearly four hundred other bands and solo artists. Each chapter presents a mixtape (or playlist) of songs related to an alarming feature of Thatcher's Britain, followed by an analysis of the dialogue these artists created with the Thatcherite vision of British society. "Tell us the truth," Sham 69 demanded, and pop music, however improbably, did. It's a furious and sardonic account of dark times when pop music raised a dissenting fist against Thatcher's fascist groove thing and made a glorious, boredom-smashing noise. Bookended with contributions by Dick Lucas and Boff Whalley as well as an annotated discography, The Fascist Groove Thing: A History of Thatcher's Britian in 21 Mixtapes (PM Press, 2023) presents an original and polemical account of the era. Hugh Hodges has written extensively on African and West Indian music, poetry, and fict

In Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2021), Laura Kolb examines how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented credit-driven artifice and interpretation on the early modern stage. It also analyses a range of practical texts—including commercial arithmetics, letter-writing manuals, legal formularies, and tables of interest—which offered strategies for generating credit and managing debt. Looking at plays and practical texts together, Fictions of Credit argues that both types of writing constitute “equipment for living”: practical texts by offering concrete strategies for navigating England's culture of credit, and plays by exploring the limits of credit's dangers and possibilities. In their representations of a world re-written by debt relations, dramatic texts in particular articulate a phenomenology of economic life, telling us what it feels like to live in credit culture: to live, that is, inside a fiction. Laura Kolb is an Assistant Professor of English at Baruch Co

Dive into the question of why audiences love Shakespeare’s plays and Game of Thrones so much, despite their depictions of prejudice and violence, and discuss the unique power of tragic art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

How can we—jazz fans, musicians, writers, and historians—understand the legacy and impact of a musician like Dave Brubeck? It is undeniable that Brubeck leveraged his fame as a jazz musician and status as a composer for social justice causes, and in doing so, held to a belief system that, during the civil rights movement, modeled a progressive approach to race and race relations. It is also true that it took Brubeck, like others, some time to understand the full spectrum of racial power dynamics at play in post-WWII, early Cold War, and civil rights-era America. Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness (Oxford UP, 2023) uses Brubeck's performances of whiteness across his professional, private, and political lives as a starting point to understand the ways in which whiteness, privilege, and white supremacy more fully manifested in mid-century America. How is whiteness performed and re-performed? How do particular traits become inscribed with whiteness, and further, how do those traits, now racialized in a

Joey Merlo's On Set With Theda Bara is a one-person four-character play about the nearly-forgotten silent film "vamp" Theda Bara, but also about fan culture, contemporary queerness, and the timeless allure of a mysterious and possibly cursed castle. The play premiered at The Brick's Exponential Festival, and is now available in an expanded edition from Eureka! Press and 1080 Press, including gorgeous artwork by artist, poet, and critic Wayne Koestenbaum. Even people who don't typically read plays will find a lot to love in this book, which is written without traditional character headings or stage directions. On Set With Theda Bara is a strange, beguiling, and brilliant piece of writing. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm

John W. Bubbles was an actor, singer, comedian, and most importantly, a dancer. Born in 1902, Bubbles was an innovator in the jazz tap style and half of the great vaudeville act, "Buck and Bubbles," with his partner pianist Buck Washington. Brian Harker tells Bubbles' story in Sportin’ Life: John W. Bubbles, An American Classic (Oxford University Press, 2022). Bubbles’ long career, which largely ended after a stroke in 1967, spanned several significant shifts in American popular entertainment. He started entertaining audiences in vaudeville just as films began to dominate the landscape followed by television. Harker tells the story of Bubbles’ tumultuous life and situates his career as a Black dancer within segregated America and an entertainment industry that perpetuated racist stereotypes and exploited its workers—especially those from minoritized communities. Although Bubbles originated the role of Sportin’ Life in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, he has largely slipped out of American memory. Harker rest

Today’s guest is Jessica Rosenberg, who is the author of a new book titled Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022). An Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami, Professor Rosenberg has contributed book chapters to Shakespeare and Hospitality and Ecological Approaches to Early Modern Literature and published articles on “The Poetics of Practical Address” in Philological Quarterly and “The Point of the Couplet” in ELH: English Literary History. Botanical Poetics, a wide-ranging study of print culture around poetry between the years 1568 and 1583, investigates the intersection of literary history and horticultural practice. The book includes new interpretations of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Romeo and Juliet, as well as George Gascoigne’s A Hundred Sundry Flowers and Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosegay. Botanical Poetics offers a variety of fresh concepts for the study of early modern poetry such as “the ecology of small forms” and “slippe

Broadway has body issues. What is a Broadway Body? Broadway has long preserved the ideology of the "Broadway Body": the hyper-fit, exceptionally able, triple-threat performer who represents how Broadway musicals favor certain kinds of bodies. Casting is always a political act, situated within a power structure that gives preference to the Broadway Body. In Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity (Oxford UP, 2023), author Ryan Donovan explores how ability, sexuality, and size intersect with gender, race, and ethnicity in casting and performance. To understand these intersectional relationships, he poses a series of questions: Why did A Chorus Line, a show that sought to individuate dancers, inevitably make dancers indistinguishable? How does the use of fat suits in musicals like Dreamgirls and Hairspray stigmatize fatness? What were the political implications of casting two straight actors as the gay couple in La Cage aux Folles in 1983? How did deaf actors change the sound of musicals in Deaf West’s

Lilly: The First Latina Rockette (Lilly Enterprises, 2021) is the improbable story of a Puerto Rican toddler, confined by her father for 15 years to a Bronx orphanage—the former Kennedy estate--and her emergence as a successful jazz and Broadway dancer on the way to becoming the first Latina Rockette. Equally important: a thoughtful exploration of Roman Catholic charitable institutions, the New York City’s fabled High School of Performing Arts, the uncertainties and brutality of Puerto Rican family life and the joy of discovering a Latina identity during a troubled time. James Wunsch is Emeritus Professor of Historical and Education Studies at SUNY Empire State. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Explore the moral tensions and dilemmas that Shakespeare and George R.R. Martin force their audiences to confront, especially in the storylines of their most notable political leaders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts