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Gendering Bodies / Performing Art is the first book that attempts a conceptual integration of dance and literary history in British culture. It attempts to make visible the role of dance in creating, reinforcing, and challenging developments in aesthetic practice and ideology in which both dance and literature participated. Koritz integrates chapters on dance and dancers- from music hall ballet girls of the 1890s to the prestigious season of Diaghilev's Russian Ballet- with discussions on how major literary figures such as Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, and T.S. Eliot used dance to further their own aesthetic agendas. In doing so, she provides an illuminating analysis of the connections between literature and dance, and explores the ways in which these two arts actively engaged in cultural processes encompassing both. ". . . provocative and stimulating . . . an invaluable addition to the work that is already available on turn-of-century theater/culture. . . ."--Vivien Gardner, Manchester University "Reaching between the poles of popular music hall and the Ballet Russe, Koritz addresses a series of interrelated, mutually informing discourses in which we overhear the language of the literary community in its accolades and in its outcries. Koritz's book will prove useful to a wide variety of readers; many scholars of English literature will undoubtedly use this book to the fullest, turning to it again and again as a contextual primer for performance issues in their field."--Cheryl Herr, University of Iowa Amy Koritz is Co-Director of the Cultural Studies Program and Assistant Professor of English, Tulane University.

Capoeira began as a martial art developed by enslaved Afro-Brazilians. Today, the practice incorporates song, dance, acrobatics, and theatrical improvisation—and leads many participants into activism.

Lauren Miller Griffith’s extensive participant observation with multiple capoeira groups informs her ethnography of capoeiristas--both individuals and groups--in the United States. Griffith follows practitioners beyond their physical training into social justice activities that illuminate capoeira’s strong connection to resistance and subversion. As both individuals and communities of capoeiristas, participants march against racial discrimination, celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth, organize professional clothing drives for job seekers, and pursue economic and environmental justice in their neighborhoods. For these people, capoeira becomes a type of serious leisure that contributes to personal growth, a sense of belonging, and an overall sense of self, while also imposing duties and obligations.

An innovative look at capoeira in America, Graceful Resistance reveals how the practicing of an art can catalyze action and transform communities.

Grounding Practice: Dancing Haiti on Tè Glise tracks the responsive physical techniques Haitian dancers devised for navigating precarity, making place, and igniting repair in the decade following the 2010 earthquake. Via the concept “grounding practice,” which connotes the powerful community building and placemaking made possible by the teaching and practice of Haitian folkloric dance, this interdisciplinary study illustrates how the embodied labor of revitalizing traditions took on increasing relevance as vital reparative worldmaking amidst instability, or tè glise–—Haitian Creole for sliding land or slippery ground.

The dancers in Grounding Practice regenerate understandings of Haitian dance’s potential for fomenting decolonial consciousness, meaningfully sustaining African-derived culture, birthing new social relations, activating the queer potentials of tradition, and ultimately making place. Through ethnography and vivid descriptions, Dasha A. Chapman’s attention to embodied knowledge illuminates how movement practice operates as a site of theorization—wherein not just subjectivity, but also concepts of sovereignty, relation, and futurity, are articulated through the body. Paying homage to important forebears yet moving us beyond static narratives, this study brings our understanding of Haitian dance—and Haiti—through expansive landscapes into the contemporary.