Sondra Fraleigh presents us with an in-depth description of modern dance as it relates to existential phenomenology, the dancer, choreographer, and the perceptive audience.
In her remarkable book, Sondra Horton Fraleigh examines and describes dance through her consciousness of dance as an art, through the experience of dancing, and through the existential and phenomenological literature on the lived body. She describes, with performance photographs, specific imagery in dance masterworks by Doris Humphrey, Anna Sokolow, Viola Farber, Nina Weiner, and Garth Fagan.
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This is not a surface account, but a carefully crafted record from an American dance academic which draws on her twelve years' engagement with Butoh.
This is an extraordinary work, and one which reinforces my belief that the essential elements and processes of dance/movement therapy can be revealed and illuminated most forcefully by a continual examination of dance from various perspectives.
Sondra Horton Fraleigh chairs the Department of Dance at the State University of New York, Brockport. She is the author of Dance and the Lived Body and co-editor (with Penelope Hanstein) of Researching Dance: Evolving Modes of Inquiry. Her articles have been published in texts on dance and movement, philosophy, and cognitive development. She has been a guest teacher of dance and somatic therapy in America, Japan, England, and Norway. She has served as president of the Congress of Research in Dance and is a Faculty Exchange Scholar for the State University of New York. Her innovative choreography has been seen on tour in America, Germany, and Japan, where she has also been a visiting scholar at several universities.