 Women's work: making dance in Europe before 1800.
Author: Brooks, Lynn Matluck Published: 2007 A collection of essays which shed new and surprising light on women's roles as performers of dance, choreographers, shapers of aesthetic trends, and patrons of dance in Italy, France, England, and Germany before 1800. Through dance, women asserted power in spheres largely dominated by men: the court, the theatre, and the church. As women's dance worlds intersected with men's, their lives and visions were supported or opposed, creating a complex politics of creative, spiritual, and political expression. From a women's religious order in the thirteenth-century Low Countries that used dance as a spiritual rite of passage to the salon culture of eighteenth-century France where dance became an integral part of women's cultural influence, the writers in this volume explore the meaning of these women's stories, performances, and dancing bodies, demonstrating that dance is truly a field across which women have moved with finesse and power for many centuries past. The contributors are Barbara Sparti, Angene Feves, Anne Daye, Nathalie Lecomte, Régine Astier, Sarah McCleave, Moira Goff, Karen Silen, Joellen A Meglin, with an introduction by the editor, Lynn Matluck Brooks. |
