Transmissions in Dance

Lesley Main is Head of the Department of Performing Arts at Middlesex University, UK, and Director of the Doris Humphrey Foundation UK. She stages Humphrey’s dances for companies in Europe and the USA, and is the author of Directing the Dance Legacy of Doris Humphrey: the Creative Impulse of Reconstruction (2012).

• 1. Introductions; Lesley Main.- 2. Transmission: from archive to production. Re-imagining Laban - contemporizing the past, envisioning the future; Alison Curtis-Jones.- 3. Impure transmissions; traditions of modern dance across historical and geographical boundaries; Fabián Barba.- 4. Performing history: Wind Tossed (1936), Natural Movement and the hyper-historian; Maria Salgado Llopis.- 5. The Transmission—Translation--Transformation of Doris Humphrey’s Two Ecstatic Themes (1931); Lesley Main.- 6. Transmission as Process and Power in Graham’s Chronicle (1936); Kim Jones.- 7. Transmitting Trio A (1966): The Relations and Sociality of an Unspectacular Dance; Sara Wookey.- 8. Silent Transformations in Choreography-Making over Time: Rosemary Butcher’s Practice of ‘Looking Back and Ahead’; Stefanie Sachsenmaier.- 9. The Living Cultural Heritage of Robert Cohan; Paul R W Jackson.

“This edited collection will resonate with both practitioners and academics. The examples it gathers together uncover the difficulties, joys, and complexities of communicating earlier dances to current performers and audiences—raising issues, triggering debate, and providing marvelous resources for further study. It is an innovative and useful collection.” (Geraldine Morris, Dance Research Journal, Vol. 52 (1), April, 2020)“Transmissions is, therefore, recommended reading for all with a stake in our moving past, including dance practitioners, historians, critics, and philosophers of art.” (Renee M. Conroy, Dance Research, Vol. 37 (2), November, 2019)