Big Dance Theater
Book Launch: Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study

October 2, 2024
7pm

Photo by Jasmine Fridman. Image: the covers for the books comprising "Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study", arranged in a circle on a white background. Each cover is a different vibrant color.
Photo by Jasmine Fridman. Image: the covers for the books comprising "Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study", arranged in a circle on a white background. Each cover is a different vibrant color.

Event will take place at The Chocolate Factory Theater, 38-33 24th Street, Long Island City.

In an effort to deepen our understanding of what dance is and how it has functioned throughout human history, this prismatic book project is dedicated to an artist-centric perception of dance history. This book interrogates the history of dance from the subjective, poetic perspective of a choreographer. Diverse dance artists from the American dance field contribute prismatic, disruptive perspectives on how dance has unfolded over time and what dance history is. They reimagine the question: What is dance history? Twelve illustrated booklets, each written by a working choreographer, address the subject of dance history from nonacademic, subjective, poetic perspectives. The books model a way of enlarging and complicating how we view dance history by giving the authorial microphone to artists, to learn how their embodied perceptions relate to or diverge from the dominant dance canon.

Authors: mayfield brooks, thomas f. defrantz, Maura Nguyen Donohue, Keith Hennessy, Bebe Miller, Okwui Okpokwasili, Eiko Otake, Annie-B Parson, Javier Stell-Fresquez, Ogemdi Ude, Mariana Valencia, and Andros Zins-Browne.

Published by Dancing Foxes Press and Wesleyan University Press.

Produced by Big Dance Theater with the generous support of The Howard Gilman Foundation, The Starry Night Fund, Big Dance Theater’s Board Designated Fund, Virginia and Timothy Millhiser, and King’s Fountain.

Dance History(s) was published through a partnership between Dancing Foxes Press, Big Dance Theater, and Wesleyan University Press.