Download or read book The Dangerous Lives of Public Performers written by A. Shay and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-07-10 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining performers from the ancient Mediterranean world to the modern Islamic Middle East, including India and Pakistan, Shay explores the careers, artistic performances, and legacies of these individuals who were forced to produce entertainment and art for, and have sex with, any and all patrons.
Download or read book Core Connections written by Acting Assistant Professor of Dance Christine M Şahin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Core Connections: Cairo Belly Dance in the Revolution's Aftermath investigates local, intra-Middle Eastern, and global circulations of belly dance centered within Cairo, Egypt, in the tumultuous aftermath of the Jan. 25th, 2011 revolution. This multi-sited ethnography takes audiences on a taxi ride that viscerally moves through contemporary city-circuitries of dance venues and stories from the Nile cruising tourist boats and decadent five-star hotels to smoky late-night discos and Pyramid Street cabarets. While mapping the multiple maneuverings of Cairene dancers and non-dancers alike, this book centralizes Cairene dancers embodied political insight while fleshing out nuanced portraits of their lives and stories amidst ongoing political precarity. In addition to interweaving Dance and Middle Eastern Gender Studies, this book innovatively 'does' and writes ethnography. This book's ethnographic approach embodies the dance itself via attending to the dual meanings of moving; centralizing mobility and movement as sites of power and knowledge, but also in researching and writing in ways that move emotionally, stirring up poignant affect that leads to physical reaction, change, and connection. In other words, this ethnography aims to center the same aesthetics and values of Cairo belly dancing, to 'move' with greater feeling to cultivate richer core connections within ourselves, between one another, and within our city-spaces. In doing so, this book stakes a claim for listening to the subtleties of otherwise marginalized bodily interaction, exchange, and wisdom as rippling with potential for stepping into more revolutionary realities and relationships. Core Connections: Cairo Belly Dance in the Revolution's Aftermath investigates local, intra-Middle Eastern, and global circulations of belly dance centered within Cairo, Egypt. This ethnography takes audiences on a taxi ride that viscerally moves through contemporary dance venues from the Nile cruising tourist boats and decadent five-star hotels to smoky late-night discos and Pyramid Street cabarets"--
Download or read book The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment written by and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-11-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was popular entertainment like for everyday Arab societies in Middle Eastern cities during the long nineteenth century? In what ways did café culture, theatre, illustrated periodicals, cinema, cabarets, and festivals serve as key forms of popular entertainment for Arabic-speaking audiences, many of whom were uneducated and striving to contend with modernity's anxiety-inducing realities? Studies on the 19th to mid-20th century's transformative cultural movement known as the Arab nahda (renaissance), have largely focussed on concerns with nationalism, secularism, and language, often told from the perspective of privileged groups. Highlighting overlooked aspects of this movement, this book shifts the focus away from elite circles to quotidian audiences. Its ten contributions range in scope, from music and visual media to theatre and popular fiction. Paying special attention to networks of movement and exchange across Arab societies in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Morocco, this book heeds the call for 'translocal/transnational' cultural histories, while contributing to timely global studies on gender, sexuality, and morality. Focusing on the often-marginalized frequenters of cafés, artist studios, cinemas, nightclubs, and the streets, it expands the remit of who participated in the nahda and how they did.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance written by Vida L. Midgelow and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the dance floor of a tango club to group therapy classes, from ballet to community theatre, improvised dance is everywhere. For some dance artists, improvisation is one of many approaches within the choreographic process. For others, it is a performance form in its own right. And while it has long been practiced, it is only within the last twenty years that dance improvisation has become a topic of critical inquiry. With The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance, dancer, teacher, and editor Vida L. Midgelow provides a cutting-edge volume on dance improvisation in all its facets. Expanding beyond conventional dance frameworks, this handbook looks at the ways that dance improvisation practices reflect our ability to adapt, communicate, and respond to our environment. Throughout the handbook, case studies from a variety of disciplines showcase the role of individual agency and collective relationships in improvisation, not just to dancers but to people of all backgrounds and abilities. In doing so, chapters celebrate all forms of improvisation, and unravel the ways that this kind of movement informs understandings of history, socio-cultural conditions, lived experience, cognition, and technologies.
Download or read book Iranian Music and Popular Entertainment written by GJ Breyley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The word motreb finds its roots in the Arabic verb taraba, meaning ‘to make happy.’ Originally denoting all musicians in Iran, motrebi came to be associated, pejoratively, with the cheerful vulgarity of the lowbrow entertainer. In Iranian Music and Popular Entertainment, GJ Breyley and Sasan Fatemi examine the historically overlooked motrebi milieu, with its marginalized characters, from luti to gardan koloft and mashti, as well as the tenacity of motreb who continued their careers against all odds. They then turn to losanjelesi, the most pervasive form of Iranian popular music that developed as motrebi declined, and related musical forms in Iran and its diasporic popular cultural centre, Los Angeles. For the first time in English, the book makes available musical transcriptions, analysis and lyrics that illustrate the complexities of this history. As it presents the findings of the authors’ years of ethnographic work with the history’s protagonists, from senior motreb to pop-rock stars, the book reveals parallels between the decline of motrebi and the rise of ‘modernity.’ In the twentieth century, the fate of Tehran’s motrebi music was shaped by the social and urban polarization that ensued from the modern market economy, and losanjelesi would be similarly affected by transnational relations, revolution, war and migration. Through its detailed and informed examination of Iranian popular music, this study reveals much about the values and anxieties of Iranian society, and is a valuable resource for students and scholars of Iranian society and history.
Download or read book Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery written by Parisa Vaziri and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2023-12-26 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking the history of African enslavement in the western Indian Ocean through the lens of Iranian cinema From the East African and Red Sea coasts to the Persian Gulf ports of Bushihr, Kish, and Hurmuz, sailing and caravan networks supplied Iran and the surrounding regions with African slave labor from antiquity to the nineteenth century. This book reveals how Iranian cinema preserves the legacy of this vast and yet long-overlooked history that has come to be known as Indian Ocean slavery. How does a focus on blackness complicate traditional understandings of history and culture? Parisa Vaziri addresses this question by looking at residues of the Indian Ocean slave trade in Iranian films from the second half of the twentieth century. Revealing the politicized clash between commercial cinema (fīlmfārsī) and alternative filmmaking (the Iranian New Wave), she pays particular attention to the healing ritual zār, which is both an African slave descendent practice and a constitutive element of Iranian culture, as well as to cinematic sīyāh bāzī (Persian black play). Moving beyond other studies on Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan slavery, Vaziri highlights the crystallization of a singular mode of historicity within these cinematic examples—one of “absence” that reflects the relative dearth of archival information on the facts surrounding Indian Ocean slavery. Bringing together cinema studies, Middle East studies, Black studies, and postcolonial theory, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery explores African enslavement in the Indian Ocean through the revelatory and little-known history of Iranian cinema. It shows that Iranian film reveals a resistance to facticity representative of the history of African enslavement in the Indian Ocean and preserves the legacy of African slavery’s longue durée in ways that resist its overpowering erasure in the popular and historical imagination. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
Download or read book Belly Dance Pilgrimage and Identity written by Barbara Sellers-Young and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-07 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the globalization of belly dance and the distinct dancing communities that have evolved from it. The history of belly dance has taken place within the global flow of sojourners, immigrants, entrepreneurs, and tourists from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. In some cases, the dance is transferred to new communities within the gender normative structure of its original location in North Africa and the Middle East. Belly dance also has become part of popular culture’s Orientalist infused discourse. The consequence of this discourse has been a global revision of the solo dances of North Africa and the Middle East into new genres that are still part of the larger belly dance community but are distinct in form and meaning from the dance as practiced within communities in North Africa and the Middle East.
Download or read book Performing Iran written by Babak Rahimi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The result of collaborative research from noteworthy dramatists and scholars, this volume investigates the dynamic relationship between culture, performance and theatre in Iran. The studies gathered here examine how various forms of performances, especially theatre, have and continue to undergo change in response to shifting political and social settings from the antiquity to the present day. The analysis in this book focuses on performance practices, examining drama, texts, rituals, plays, music, cinema and drama technologies. This is done in order to show how Iran has been imagined through enactments and representations, and reproduced through these performative actions. The book uses a wider definition of the concept of 'performance', offering analysis of a wide range of phenomena, including indigenous rituals – such as the naqqali and taziyeh – and online performances by diaspora communities.
Download or read book The Encoded Cirebon Mask written by Laurie Margot Ross and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-08-29 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Encoded Cirebon Mask: Materiality, Flow, and Meaning along Java’s Islamic Northwest Coast, Laurie Margot Ross situates masks and masked dancing in the Cirebon region of Java (Indonesia) as an original expression of Islam. This is a different view from that of many scholars, who argue that canonical prohibitions on fashioning idols and imagery prove that masks are mere relics of indigenous beliefs that Muslim travelers could not eradicate. Making use of archives, oral histories, and the performing objects themselves, Ross traces the mask’s trajectory from a popular entertainment in Cirebon—once a portal of global exchange—to a stimulus for establishing a deeper connection to God in late colonial Java, and eventual links to nationalism in post-independence Indonesia.
Download or read book Contemporary Choreography written by Jo Butterworth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-06 with total page 555 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fully revised and updated, this second edition of Contemporary Choreography presents a range of articles covering choreographic enquiry, investigation into the creative process, and innovative challenges to traditional understandings of dance making. Contributions from a global range of practitioners and researchers address a spectrum of concerns in the field, organized into seven broad domains: Conceptual and philosophical concerns Processes of making Dance dramaturgy: structures, relationships, contexts Choreographic environments Cultural and intercultural contexts Challenging aesthetics Choreographic relationships with technology. Including 23 new chapters and 10 updated ones, Contemporary Choreography captures the essence and progress of choreography in the twenty-first century, supporting and encouraging rigorous thinking and research for future generations of dance practitioners and scholars.
Download or read book Flamenco on the Global Stage written by K. Meira Goldberg and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The language of the body is central to the study of flamenco. From the records of the Inquisition, to 16th century literature, to European travel diaries, the Spanish dancer beguiles and fascinates. The word flamenco evokes the image of a sensuous and rebellious woman--the bailaora --whose movements seduce the audience, only to reject their attention with a stomp of defiance. The dancer's body is an agent of ideological resistance, conveying a conflicting desire for subjectivity and autonomy and implying deeply held ideas about history, national identity, femininity and masculinity. This collection of new essays provides an overview of flamenco scholarship, illuminating flamenco's narrative and chronology and addressing some common misconceptions. The contributors offer fresh perspectives on age-old themes and suggest new paradigms for flamenco as a cultural practice. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
Download or read book Greek Music in America written by Tina Bucuvalas and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2018-11-26 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2019 Vasiliki Karagiannaki Prize for the Best Edited Volume in Modern Greek Studies Contributions by Tina Bucuvalas, Anna Caraveli, Aydin Chaloupka, Sotirios (Sam) Chianis, Frank Desby, Stavros K. Frangos, Stathis Gauntlett, Joseph G. Graziosi, Gail Holst-Warhaft, Michael G. Kaloyanides, Panayotis League, Roderick Conway Morris, National Endowment for the Arts/National Heritage Fellows, Nick Pappas, Meletios Pouliopoulos, Anthony Shay, David Soffa, Dick Spottswood, Jim Stoynoff, and Anna Lomax Wood Despite a substantial artistic legacy, there has never been a book devoted to Greek music in America until now. Those seeking to learn about this vibrant and exciting music were forced to seek out individual essays, often published in obscure or ephemeral sources. This volume provides a singular platform for understanding the scope, practice, and development of Greek music in America through essays and profiles written by principal scholars in the field. Greece developed a rich variety of traditional, popular, and art music that diasporic Greeks brought with them to America. In Greek American communities, music was and continues to be an essential component of most social activities. Music links the past to the present, the distant to the near, and bonds the community with an embrace of memories and narrative. From 1896 to 1942, more than a thousand Greek recordings in many genres were made in the United States, and thousands more have appeared since then. These encompass not only Greek traditional music from all regions, but also emerging urban genres, stylistic changes, and new songs of social commentary. Greek Music in America includes essays on all of these topics as well as history and genre, places and venues, the recording business, and profiles of individual musicians. This book is required reading for anyone who cares about Greek music in America, whether scholar, fan, or performer.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity written by Anthony Shay and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-20 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dance intersects with ethnicity in a powerful variety of ways and at a broad set of venues. Dance practices and attitudes about ethnicity have sometimes been the source of outright discord, as when African Americans were - and sometimes still are - told that their bodies are 'not right' for ballet, when Anglo Americans painted their faces black to perform in minstrel shows, when 19th century Christian missionaries banned the performance of particular native dance traditions throughout much of Polynesia, and when the Spanish conquistadors and church officials banned sacred Aztec dance rituals. More recently, dance performances became a locus of ethnic disunity in the former Yugoslavia as the Serbs of Bosnia attended dance concerts but only applauded for the Serbian dances, presaging the violent disintegration of that failed state. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity brings together scholars from across the globe in an investigation of what it means to define oneself in an ethnic category and how this category is performed and represented by dance as an ethnicity. Newly-commissioned for the volume, the chapters of the book place a reflective lens on dance and its context to examine the role of dance as performed embodiment of the historical moments and associated lived identities. In bringing modern dance and ballet into the conversation alongside forms more often considered ethnic, the chapters ask the reader to contemplate previous categories of folk, ethnic, classical, and modern. From this standpoint, the book considers how dance maintains, challenges, resists or in some cases evolves new forms of identity based on prior categories. Ultimately, the goal of the book is to acknowledge the depth of research that has been undertaken and to promote continued research and conceptualization of dance and its role in the creation of ethnicity. Dance and ethnicity is an increasingly active area of scholarly inquiry in dance studies and ethnomusicology alike and the need is great for serious scholarship to shape the contours of these debates. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity provides an authoritative and up-to-date survey of original research from leading experts which will set the tone for future scholarly conversation.
Download or read book Gore Vidal and Antiquity written by Quentin J. Broughall and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-01 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Gore Vidal’s lifelong engagement with the ancient world. Incorporating material from his novels, essays, screenplays and plays, it argues that his interaction with antiquity was central to the way in which he viewed himself, his writing, and his world. Divided between the three primary subjects of his writing – sex, politics, and religion – this book traces the lengthy dialogue between Vidal and antiquity over the course of his sixty-year career. Broughall analyses Vidal’s portrayals of the ancient past in novels such as Julian (1964), Creation (1981) and Live from Golgotha (1992). He also shows how classical literature inspired Vidal’s other fiction, such as The City and the Pillar (1948), Myra Breckinridge (1968), and his Narratives of Empire (1967–2000) novels. Beyond his fiction, Broughall examines the ways in which antiquity influenced Vidal’s careers as a playwright, an essayist and a satirist, and evaluates the influence of classical authors and their works upon him. Of interest to students and scholars in classical studies, reception studies, American politics and literature, and the work of Gore Vidal, this volume presents an original perspective on one of the most provocative writers and intellectuals in post-war American letters. It offers new insights into Vidal’s attitudes, influences, and beliefs, and throws fresh light upon his patrician self-fashioning and his mercurial output.
Download or read book England Re Oriented written by Humberto Garcia and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-19 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1750 and 1857, westward-bound Central and South Asian travelers connected imperial Britain to Persian Indo-Eurasia by performing queer masculinities.
Download or read book Raqs in the City written by Heather D. Ward and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2024-07-26 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the city of Cairo, certain spaces bear strong historical associations with belly dance, belly dancers, and professional entertainment in general. Azbakiyah, Imad al-Din Street, and Muhammad Ali Street were all staging grounds for innovations in Egyptian belly dance, as well as in Egyptian music, song, and theater, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in the Egyptian popular imagination, these places continue to be linked to entertainment and entertainers. However, research reveals that the ties binding these spaces to entertainment extend much deeper: in some cases, this relationship can be traced back to the Fatimid era. The longstanding associations between belly dance and certain Cairene spaces demand a more in-depth investigation into the nature of this historical interconnection. In this work, the author examines the relationship between belly dance space and belly dancer in the Cairo landscape over the course of the city's history, relying on a theoretical framework informed by Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice, Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia, and Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque. This analysis reveals the mutually constituting relationship between dance, dancers, and the Cairene landscape and explains why and how certain Cairo spaces have retained their centuries-long historical associations with belly dance and its professional practitioners.
Download or read book A House on Water written by Kameel Ahmady and published by Avaye Buf. This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are contradictory attitudes toward temporary marriage in Iranian society. The proponents consider it as a means to prevent social degradation and moral corruption while the opponents take it as a pleasure-seeking tool for men in violation of the rights of children and women. This study supports the view that temporary marriage is a back door to sexual exploitation. According to the study’s findings, mut'ah is a practice that lacks redeeming values and positive functions. Rather, it causes harms such as child marriage, the collapse of the family foundation, negative attitudes towards permanent marriage, the promotion of corruption and violations of women’s rights. Many women agree to be subjected to sexual exploitation because they lack economic rights and a sense of security. As an institution, it is not without controversy. In fact, child marriage is partly the result of the tradition of sigheh mahramiat which paves the road for increase of child marriage in Iran. It is performed in some Iranian families when their sons and daughters are in early puberty, or even before then, to supervise the sexual behaviour of children, to prevent them from committing a sin, for fear of girls’ solitude at older ages, to fight against social and cultural pressures related to communication between young girls and boys (which are more obvious in small communities), and to facilitate smoother relations between two families. The religious and traditional stratum of the Iranian society performs sigheh / sigheh mahramiat and continues to follow this tradition. Both the country’s laws and the jurisprudence treat the permanent and temporary marriages the same although they are different in nature and so far temporary marriage has not been addressed as an independent subject. The religious and legal ambiguities surrounding sigheh and temporary marriage and inattention to Iran’s social circumstances lead to grave consequences such as child marriage, school drop-out, violation of women’s rights and in particular physical and emotional vulnerabilities of women and girls. Revision of laws pertaining to sigheh/temporary marriage while considering the social characteristics of the society can serve as a key solution to minimize these negative impacts
