Dance and Silence - (Dance in Dialogue) by Vipavinee Artpradid & Petra Johnson (Hardcover)

About the Book

A series of conversations with researchers and practitioners that explores the critical dynamics of silence within choreography, performance and composition.

Book Synopsis

The age of humans has gotten increasingly loud in terms of literal sound and environmental impact. Recognising silence as a disappearing ontological value, there is grief around our loss, but there is also a greater desire for opportunities to experience silence in its various diverse forms.

This book explores the critical dynamics of silence within choreography, performance and composition, comprising a series of conversations with researchers and practitioners, including choreographer Rosemary Lee, architect Richard Dougherty, architectural historian Pérez-Gómez, Natural Horn player Isaac Shieh, neuroscientist Tony Steffert and drummer and aerialist Jonny Leitch.

These conversations:

- question what has been silenced through the immobilisation of our bodies through movement-saving technologies;

- discover points of convergence through silence in seemingly separate and unrelated physical, conceptual and philosophical spaces;

- examine neglected intelligence and marginalised ways of knowing of gesture and movement

Ultimately, we come to see how dance, embodied modes of inquiry and corporeal-based understandings within socio-cultural and ecological contexts can propose pathways in the absence of sound.

Review Quotes

A sonorous study of the labyrinth of silence and its powerful collaboration in the choreography of life. Artpradid and Johnson reveal silence as far from empty and far from broken.
lucy crowe, Centre for Dance Research, UK

As a study in humble, open, interdisciplinary exploration, this is a sensitive and artful text that aligns content and form to weave together issues of mythic resonance, marginalisation, mapping and art-making. It will appeal especially to dance and music scholars and to those within cultural studies more generally. The form of the text hovers and settles in the reader's understanding; it captures the central themes in its shape. The Minotaur, the authors' trope, acts as the very thread of which we are reminded, taking us in and amongst meanings. The interspersed 'Movement Snacks' invite not only an 'entering into' that renders the reading of the book something akin to an event or happening, they also let the reader consider Leith's Radical Rest from an embodied perspective. This book is timely and expansive, not shying away from thinking related to technology and the body, whilst unabashedly lamenting and politicising the undervaluing of the latter.
Georgie Cockburn, Centre for Dance Research and Community Dance Artist, UK

About the Author

Vipavinee Artpradid is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University, UK.

Petra Johnson is an independent multidisciplinary artist and researcher. She holds a PhD in Social Sculpture and has devised cross-cultural art projects, bridging communities in China and Germany. She runs annual workshops at the China Academy of Art and occasional workshops at the Urban Ecology Lab at Tongji University, China. Between 2018 and 2020, she directed the curatorial program for Lijiang Studio in Jixiang Village, Yulong Naxi Autonomous Region, China.