Gestures of Music Theater

Dominic Symonds is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Portsmouth and, with George Burrows, is joint editor of the journal Studies in Musical Theatre, Millie Taylor is Reader in Performing Arts at The University of Winchester and author of Music Theatre, Realism and Entertainment (2012).

• Introduction: Singing the Dance, Dancing the Song ; Chapter 1: The Song's the Thing: Capturing the "Sung" to Make it "Song" ; Chapter 2: The (Un)Pleasure of Song: On the Enjoyment of Listening to Opera ; Performativity as Dramaturgy ; Chapter 3: Relocating the Song: Julie Taymor's Jukebox Musical Across the Universe (2007) ; Chapter 4: Dynamic shape: the Dramaturgy of Song and Dance in Lloyd Webber's Cats (1981) ; Performativity as Transition ; Chapter 5: Dance Breaks and Dream Ballets: Transitional Moments in Musical Theater ; Chapter 6: "Love Let Me Sing you": The Liminality of Song and Dance in La Chiusa's Bernarda Alba (2006) ; Performativity as Identity ; Chapter 7: Tapping the Ivories: Jazz and Tap Dance in Jelly's Last Jam (1992). ; Chapter 8: Everything's Coming up Kurt: the Broadway Song in Glee ; Chapter 9: Angry Dance: Postmodern Innovation, Masculinities and Gender Subversion ; Performativity as Context ; Chapter 10: Deconstructing the Singer: the Concerts of Laurie Anderson ; Chapter 11: Singing and a Song: The "Intimate Difference" in Susan Philipsz's Lowlands (2010) ; Chapter 12: Acting Operatically: Body, Voice and the Actress in Beckett's Theater ; Performativity as Practice ; Chapter 13: Vox Elettronica: Song, Dance and Live Electronics in the Practice of Sound Theater ; Chapter 14: From Ear to Foot: How Choreographers Interpret Music ; Chapter 15: Singing from Stones: Physiovocality and Gardzienice's Theater of Musicality ; Performativity as Community ; Chapter 16: Singing the Community: the Musical Theater Chorus as Character ; Chapter 17: Singing and Dancing Ourselves: The Politics of the Ensemble in A Chorus Line (1975) ; Performativity as Writing ; Bibliography ; Index ; Bibliography

This book makes for a very rewarding read: it combines an excellent selection of emerging and established scholars and practitioners' voices and despite its diversity with regard to genre, time, methodology and focus, it is held together firmly by a very specific and timely common research question: how song and dance can be read as performative gestures. The editors and contributors demonstrate vividly how song and dance are not merely the concern of a limited group of musicologists and dance scholars, but are omnipresent in our culture and provide a fascinating prism through which to see and understand human communication.