Sharing the Dance

Growing out of the 1960s avant-garde and counterculture, contact improvization is an underground, experimental movement in modern dance that captures artistic and social forces in transition. Cynthia Novack considers the development of this dance form within its historical, social and cultural contexts. While focusing on the changing practice of contact improvization, Novack's work incorporates the history of rock dancing and disco, modern dance and experimental dance movements and a variety of other physical activities, such as martial arts, aerobics and wrestling. Providing a cultural history of a number of American dance/movement styles from the 1950s to the present, she also compares contact improvization to other dance forms, both American and non-American. Novack concludes her study with a discussion of contact improvization both as an icon of the end of the 1960s and as a dance practice which continues to demonstrate the subtle ways in which movement represents and creates culture.

"Sharing the Dance is valuable not just for its insights into the recent history of dance but also for the structures through which Novack analyses dance as a medium which conveys cultural meanings and values. . . . A much needed contribution to dance studies."--Burt Ramsay, Music, Theatre, Dance, "[Novack's] detailed descriptions of dancing, learning to dance, and watching dance provide substantive insights into processes through which the body is disciplined. Because of its comprehensive interpretation of dance, Novack's work should serve as an important model for future research by all those interested in the body's cultural construction."--Susan L. Foster, American Ethnologist, "Cynthia J. Novack is an anthropologist, dancer/choreographer, and teacher. With striking intelligence and patience, she writes from all these perspectives in this book."--Steve Paxton, Contact Quarterly, "In her book on contact improvisation and American culture, Novack finds a good balance between a clear analysis of the movement itself and a selected history of the cultural context of the inception of this dance form. . . . Novack has included a chapter based on her own experience with learning contact improvisation, which gives her historical writing a kind of self-reflexivity that is especially important within the field of dance scholarship."--Choice

Cynthia J. Novack is an anthropologist, dancer/choreographer, and teacher. She is assistant professor of dance at Wesleyan College and a member of the Richard Bull Dance Theatre.