Starting from differences between reenactment and the more established practice of historical reconstruction, leading practitioners and theorists ask how the notion of preservation and representation associated with reconstruction is transformed by reenactment into historical experience and affective relation to the past in the present. In other terms: How does dance convey historical meaning through sensuous form? Danced reenactment poses the problem of history and historicity in relation to the troubled temporality inherent to dance itself. Ephemerality as the central trope of dance is hence displaced in favor of dance as a reiterative practice that confounds categories of chronological time and opens up a theoretical space of history that is often invisibilized by ideologies of immediacy traditionally attributed to dancing.

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics presents cutting edge research investigating not only how dance achieves its politics, but also how notions of the political are themselves expanded when viewed from the perspective of dance.

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment brings together a cross-section of artists and scholars engaged with the phenomenon of reenactment in dance from a practical and theoretical standpoint. Synthesizing myriad views on danced reenactment and the manner in which this branch of choreographic performance intersects with important cultural concerns around appropriation this Handbook addresses originality, plagiarism, historicity, and spatiality as it relates to cultural geography. Others topics treated include transmission as a heuristic device, the notion of the archive as it relates to dance and as it is frequently contrasted with embodied cultural memory, pedagogy, theory of history, reconstruction as a methodology, testimony and witnessing, theories of history as narrative and the impact of dance on modernist literature, and relations of reenactment to historical knowledge and new media.

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition examines the complex interactions between dance and competition, and addresses six areas of investigation: how dancers invest in competition to ensure economic survival and social standing; how dancing bodies and movement aesthetics are re-choreographed in response to a competition format; the strategies that dancers use to negotiate the dominant rhetoric of competition; the values and criteria that underpin frameworks of judgment and experiences of spectatorship in the competition realm; how failure, loss, and a resistance to structures of winning are engendered through danced attitudes toward competition; and the veiled ideas and strategic agendas that underpin dance competition.

In recent years, a growth in dance and wellbeing scholarship has resulted in new ways of thinking that place the body, movement, and dance in a central place with renewed significance for wellbeing. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Wellbeing examines dance and related movement practices fromthe perspectives of neuroscience and health, community and education, and psychology and sociology to contribute towards an understanding of wellbeing, offer new insights into existing practices, and create a space where sufficient exchange is enabled. The handbook's research components includequantitative, qualitative, and arts-based research, covering diverse discourses, methodologies, and perspectives that add to the development of a complete picture of the topic. Throughout the handbook's wide-ranging chapters, the objective observations, felt experiences, and artistic explorations ofpractitioners interact with and are printed alongside academic chapters to establish an egalitarian and impactful exchange of ideas.

This handbook offers new arguments about the ways that dance improvisation informs understandings of history, socio-cultural conditions, lived experience, and technologies.

This title collects a critical mass of border-crossing scholarship on the intersections of dance and theatre. Taking corporeality as an idea that unites the work and embodiment as a negotiation of power dynamics, it addresses the politics and poetics of the moving body in performance on and off stage. Contemporary stage performances have sparked global interest in new experiments between dance and theatre and this volume situates this interest in its historical context by investigating other such moments from pagan mimes of late antiquity to contemporary flash mobs and television dance contests.