Yes No Maybe : Seductive Ambiguity in Dance

Covering fifty years of British dance, from Margot Fonteyn to innovative contemporary practitioners such as Wendy Houstoun and Nigel Charnock, "Yes! No! Maybe!" is an innovative approach to performing and watching dance. Emilyn Claid brings her life experience and interweaves it with academic theory and historical narrative to create a dynamic approach to dance writing. Using the 1970s revolution of new dance as a hinge, Claid looks back to ballet and forward to British independent dance which is new dance's legacy. She explores the shifts in performer-spectator relationships, and investigates questions of subjectivity, absence and presence, identity, gender, race and desire using psychoanalytical, feminist, postmodern, post-structuralist and queer theoretical perspectives. Artists and practitioners, professional performers, teachers, choreographers and theatre-goers will all find this book an informative and insightful read. Contents: Acknowledgements List of illustrations Introduction 1. Setting the scene 2. X6: A hinge in time Part 1: Yes? Fantasies of Perfection: Setting the Scene for Change 3. Upward line 4. Watching ballet: Illusion becoming real 5. Performing ballet: Real becoming illusion 6. Classical androgyny 7. Cracking the myth 8. The Oedipal narrative 9. An articulate silence 10. Dying to please Part 2: No! Coming down to Earth as Dancing Subjects 11. Expressions from the lifeworld 12. Figures of parody 13. Subverting tragedy 14. Feminist battles with androgyny 15. Within the frame of new dance 16. Letting go of the mirror 17. A figure of jouissance 18. K/no/w body of illusion: Seduction in reverse 19. Derrida's presents 20. Parallel emergences 21. Different visibilities 22. Negation of seduction 23. The other of the other 24. Kristeva's crunch 25. Collective strategies 26. The X6 legacy 27. Drawn to the mainstream 28. Repertory versus project 29. Middle-mush Part 3: Maybe... Full Body, Empty Body and Ambiguous Points of Play 30. Process to product 31. Full body empty body 32. The chameleon 33. Boys transcending 34. His look is his gaze 35. Bodies of pleasure 36. Letting go of fear 37. Re-figuring androgyny 38. Queer living 39. Re-dressing the girls Conclusion 40. Eye flight Notes Bibliography