Dancing Communities Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City [Hardcover]

Dancers create 'civic culture' as performances for public consumption, but also as vernaculars connecting individuals who may have little in common. Examining performance and the construction of culturally diverse communities the book suggests that amateur and concert dance can teach us how to live and work productively together.List of Photographs Acknowledgements Series Editor's Preface Introduction: Dancing the City Intimacies in Motion Corporeal Chronotopes: Making Place and Keeping Time in Ballet Saving Khmer Classical Dance in Long Beach Dancing Other-Wise: Ethics, Difference and Transcendence in Hae Kyung Lee and Dancers Conclusion: Dancing Communities - Ideas of Order, Queer Intimacies, Civic Infrastructure References Index

Winner of the Book of the Year Award from the Ethnography Division of the National Communication Association.

'[Hamera] makes several prominent contributions to dance studies, and also to any scholarship interested in the relationship between community-building and the arts.' Theatre Journal

'As a practitioner of several disciplines...and as a resident of the global city wherein Hamera grounds her investigation, I recommend Dancing Communities not only as a text worth reading but, even more so, as a task worth rehearsing.' - Shakina Nayfack, Dance Research Journal

'There has been a longstanding belief by practitioners of community dance that participation in dance can be a force that can affect or change people's lives, usually for the better. This belief has wide currency, yet without much academic research to bolster it. Judith Hamera offers a unique and personal monograph that provides dance scholarship with a convincing argument, not only for community dance, but professional dance too.' - Sara Houston, Contemporary Theatre Review

'...an enviable synthesis of performance studies, dance studies, queer theory, critical geography, and cultural studies literatlÓÖ