Choreography, Visual Art and Experimental Composition 1950s–1970s

Winner of the 2023 Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics, The American Society for Aesthetics.

This book traces the history of engagements between dance and the visual arts in the mid-twentieth century and provides a backdrop for the emerging field of contemporary, intermedial art practice.

Exploring the disciplinary identity of dance in dialogue with the visual arts, this book unpacks how compositional methods that were dance-based informed visual art contexts. The book provokes fresh consideration of the entangled relationship between, and historiographic significance of, visual arts and dance by exploring movements in history that dance has been traditionally mapped to — Neo-Avant Garde, Neo-Dada, Conceptual art, Postmodernism, and Performance Art — and the specific practices and innovations from key people in the field, such as John Cage, Anna Halprin, and Robert Rauschenberg.

This book also employs a series of historical and critical case studies which show how compositional approaches from dance—breath, weight, tone, energy—informed the emergence of the intermedial. Ultimately, this book demonstrates how dance and choreography have played an important role in shaping visual arts culture and enables the re-imagination of current art practices through the use of choreographic tools.

This unique and timely offering is important reading for those studying and researching in visual and fine arts, performance history and theory, dance practice and dance studies, as well as those working within the fields of dance and visual art.

Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at Taylor & Francis.