Womenas Work: Making Dance in Europe Before 1800 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780299225346)

Like the history of women, dance has been difficult to capture as a historical subject. Yet in bringing together these two areas of study, the nine internationally renowned scholars in this volume shed new and surprising light on women's roles as performers of dance, choreographers, shapers of aesthetic trends, and patrons of dance in Italy, France, England, and Germany before 1800.
Through dance, women asserted power in spheres largely dominated by men: the court, the theater, and the church. As women's dance worlds intersected with men's, their lives and visions were supported or opposed, creating a complex politics of creative, spiritual, and political expression. From a women's religious order in the thirteenth-century Low Countries that used dance as a spiritual rite of passage to the salon culture of eighteenth-century France where dance became an integral part of women's cultural influence, the writers in this volume explore the meaning of these women's stories, performances, and dancing bodies, demonstrating that dance is truly a field across which women have moved with finesse and power for many centuries past.

Author: Lynn Brooks
ISBN-10: 0299225348
ISBN-13: 9780299225346
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Language: English
Published: 11/28/2007
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.87lbs
Size: 8.93h x 6.10w x 0.61d