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Don't Act, Just Dance : The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture / Catherine Gunther Kodat.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, [2014]Copyright date: ©2014Description: 1 online resource (256 p.) : 12 photographsContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780813565279
  • 9780813565286
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 792.80973 23
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Summary: At some point in their career, nearly all the dancers who worked with George Balanchine were told "don't act, dear; just dance." The dancers understood this as a warning against melodramatic over-interpretation and an assurance that they had all the tools they needed to do justice to the steps-but its implication that to dance is already to act in a manner both complete and sufficient resonates beyond stage and studio. Drawing on fresh archival material, Don't Act, Just Dance places dance at the center of the story of the relationship between Cold War art and politics. Catherine Gunther Kodat takes Balanchine's catch phrase as an invitation to explore the politics of Cold War culture-in particular, to examine the assumptions underlying the role of "apolitical" modernism in U.S. cultural diplomacy. Through close, theoretically informed readings of selected important works-Marianne Moore's "Combat Cultural," dances by George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, and Yuri Grigorovich, Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus, and John Adams's Nixon in China-Kodat questions several commonly-held beliefs about the purpose and meaning of modernist cultural productions during the Cold War. Rather than read the dance through a received understanding of Cold War culture, Don't Act, Just Dance reads Cold War culture through the dance, and in doing so establishes a new understanding of the politics of modernism in the arts of the period.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780813565286

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

At some point in their career, nearly all the dancers who worked with George Balanchine were told "don't act, dear; just dance." The dancers understood this as a warning against melodramatic over-interpretation and an assurance that they had all the tools they needed to do justice to the steps-but its implication that to dance is already to act in a manner both complete and sufficient resonates beyond stage and studio. Drawing on fresh archival material, Don't Act, Just Dance places dance at the center of the story of the relationship between Cold War art and politics. Catherine Gunther Kodat takes Balanchine's catch phrase as an invitation to explore the politics of Cold War culture-in particular, to examine the assumptions underlying the role of "apolitical" modernism in U.S. cultural diplomacy. Through close, theoretically informed readings of selected important works-Marianne Moore's "Combat Cultural," dances by George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, and Yuri Grigorovich, Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus, and John Adams's Nixon in China-Kodat questions several commonly-held beliefs about the purpose and meaning of modernist cultural productions during the Cold War. Rather than read the dance through a received understanding of Cold War culture, Don't Act, Just Dance reads Cold War culture through the dance, and in doing so establishes a new understanding of the politics of modernism in the arts of the period.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Mai 2022)