 The people have never stopped dancing: Native American modern dance histories.
Author: Murphy, Jacqueline Shea Published: 2007 During the past thirty years, Native American dance has emerged as a visible force on concert stages throughout North America. In this first major study, Jacqueline Shea Murphy shows how these performances are at once diverse and connected by common influences. Demonstrating the complex relationship between Native and modern dance choreography, Shea Murphy delves first into US and Canadian federal policies towards Native performance from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the engages the innovative work of Ted Shawn, Lester Horton, and Martha Graham. Illustrating how Native dance enacts, rather than represents, cultural connections to land, ancestors, and animals, as well as spiritual and political concerns, Shea Murphy challenges stereotypes about American Indian dance and offers new ways of recognising the agency of bodies on stage. |
