Anna Pakes

Focusing on Western theatre dance, Choreography Invisible explores the metaphysics of dances and choreographic works. It draws on a range of resources from analytic philosophy of art to develop the argument that dances are repeatable structures of action. The book also analyses the idea of the dance work in long-term historical perspective. Tracing different ways in which dances have been conceptualised across time, the book considers changing notions of authorship, fixity, persistence, and autonomy from the fifteenth century to the present day. The modern work-concept is interrogated, its relativity and contested status (particularly within contemporary dance practice) acknowledged. As the dance work disappears from contemporary discourse, what can be said about the kind of thing it is? Choreography Invisible considers the materials of dance making and the nature (and limits) of choreographic authorship. It explores issues of identity and persistence, including why distinct (and sometimes quite various) performances are still treated as performances of the same work. The book examines how dances survive through time and what it means for a dance work to be lost, considering the extent to which practices of dance reconstruction and reenactment can recuperate or reconstitute lost choreography. The focus here is dance, but the book addresses issues with wider implications for the metaphysics of art, including how the historical relativity of art practices should inflect analytic arguments about the nature of art works, and what place such works have within a broader ontology of human and natural worlds.

'Thinking Through Dance' explores important philosophical questions raised in and by dance. Its themes include the embodiment and personhood of dancers; issues of dance work ontology and performance identity; how dance is perceived and understood; the relevance of philosophy to dance as an artform; and whether dance itself, or its associated practices, are themselves philosophical in any significant sense. Individual essays draw on different philosophical traditions, including analytic, phenomenological and poststructuralist, and the primary focus is on theatre dance in the Western tradition, although the issues discussed have a much broader sweep. The volume poses fundamental questions about what it means to be or witness a dancer moving, about the nature of choreography, dance works and performances, and about the interest and value of a dialogue between philosophy and dance. The philosophy of dance is a burgeoning field of enquiry and this volume seeks to represent something of the breadth of international research currently underway. It draws together contributors who are professional philosophers, dance scholars and dance practitioners, from Britain, continental Europe, the USA and South Africa. As the first anthology of essays about philosophy and dance to be published in English for some time, the aim is to provoke debate and develop the existing reflection on dance, but in new and invigorating directions. The Editors: The editors are colleagues at University of Roehampton, London: Jenny Bunker teaches aesthetics on the philosophy programme of the Department of Humanities; Anna Pakes and Bonnie Rowell are from the Department of Dance, and have a longstanding interest in the application of analytic philosophy to dance, as well as the intersections between this and other philosophical traditions and dance studies.