Reworking the Ballet Counter Narratives and Alternative Bodies [Paperback]

Challenging and unsettling their predecessors, modern choreographers such as Matthew Bourne, Mark Morris and Masaki Iwana have courted controversy and notoriety by reimagining the most canonical of Classical and Romantic ballets.

In this book, Vida L. Midgelow illustrates the ways in which these contemporary reworkings destroy and recreate their source material, turning ballet from a classical performance to a vital exploration of gender, sexuality and cultural difference.

Reworking the Ballet: Counter Narratives and Alternative Bodiesarticulates the ways that audiences and critics can experience these new versions, viewing them from both practical and theoretical perspectives, including:

• eroticism and the politics of touch
• performing gender
• cross-casting and cross-dressing
• reworkings and intertextuality
• cultural exchange and hybridity.

Introduction  Part 1: Approaching Reworkings of the Ballet in Theory and Practice  1. Reworking the Ballet: (En)countering the Canon  1.1 Reworking the Ballet  1.2 Defining the Terms of the Discourse  1.3 Reviewing Five Giselles  1.4 Counter Discourses and the Canon  1.5 Reconsidering the Past: Reworkings as Postmodern Historiography  1.6 Reworkings as Intertextual Practices  1.7 Towards a Definition of Reworkings  2. Canonical Crossings: Narratives and Forms Revisioned  2.1 Strategies of Dissonance: Moments of Sameness  2.2 Inverting Bodies: Reformulating the Dance Vocabulary  2.3 Re-Telling Tales: New Contexts, New Narratives  2.4 Gender Bending: Cross-Casting and Cross-Dressing  2.5 Feathered Pantaloons and Homoeroticism  2.6 Hyl“¦