Facial Choreographies

Performing the Face in Popular Dance

By: Sherril Dodds

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Paperback | 18 March 2024

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Paperback
256 Pages

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15.6 x 23.5 x 1.7

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The face contributes a vital, yet often overlooked, component of dance performance. Facial Choreographies: Performing the Face in Popular Dance examines what the face does in dance and what it may mean. Author Sherril Dodds focuses on popular presentational dance, which permits the face to be one of excess and spectacle, as well as disclosure or deception. The concept of facial choreography resists the idea that the expressive countenance in dance is simply by chance, and instead conceives its movement as purposeful, creative, and communicative.

The book centers on three facial case studies: global celebrity Michael Jackson, whose face has occupied a site of fervent controversy; Maddie Ziegler, child star of the reality television series Dance Moms and de facto face of pop star Sia; and a community of hip hop dancers who engage in fiercely contested dance battles. Chapters are organized according to action-expressions, actively working even in times of stillness: SMILE, LOOK, FROWN, CRY, SCREAM, and LAUGH. Across each case study, the book explores pedagogies of facial composition, the purpose of codified expressions, and how dancers re-choreograph their faces as a critical unworking of what a dancing visage might represent. Facial choreographies engender opportunity for startling creativity, the articulation of identity, a cathartic expression of emotions and attitudes, and the capacity to dismantle previously held assumptions. As the dancing face tauntingly slips between visual, sensory, and kinetic registers it ensures that nothing can be taken at face value.

Industry Reviews

""Professor Dodd's luminous and incisive imagination makes us think seriously about that most emotive part of the dancing body: the face. This book is a major and original contribution to Dance studies and should open up a bountiful new area of scholarship in the field."" -- Pallabi Chakravorty, Stephen Lang Professor of Performing Arts, Department of Music and Dance, Swarthmore College "Facial Choreographies delivers on its promise of the "hyperbolic and hypermobile" face in presentational popular dance whose meaning in motion is both the realm of the visual and semiotic as well as the sensorial and experiential on the part of the dancer." -- Hannah Schwadron, Dance Chronicle

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