Dance, Modernity and Culture: Explorations in the Sociology of Dance Book

In Dance, Modernity and Culture, Helen Thomas provides an original, interdisciplinary, approach to the study of dance. By examining the development of modern dance in the US during the inter-war period she develops a framework for analyzing dance from a sociological perspective.In applying her approach to the works of St Denis, Ted Shawn, and Martha Graham, amongst others, she relates the emergence of modern dance to contemporaneous artistic developments, and locates dance within a wider social and economic context. Thus, she draws attention to the importance of popular culture in the development of modern dance, music and painting, and the crucial role women played in establishing dance as an art form. By way of exemplification, she looks at the work of Yvonne Rainer in order to demonstrate how this sociological approach might be applied to a post-modern work.Read More