Dancing Communities

Winner of the Book of the Year Award from the Ethnography Division of the National Communication Association 2008!

Dancing Communities is a landmark volume in dance scholarship, and examines performances that create urban communities by blurring, or reinforcing, complex cultural and ethnic boundaries. It argues that amateur and concert dance practices are laboratories for examining the myriad complex intersections of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and culture. In the five sites examined here, dance creates small and generative worlds: sometimes havens, sometimes hauntopias. The everyday labors and final products of dance in the global city offer intimacy, solidarity, and communal and cultural continuity for performers and audiences.

Dancing Communities examines performances that create urban communities by blurring, or reinforcing, complex cultural and ethnic boundaries.

Judith Hamera is Professor and Head of the Department of Performance Studies at Texas A&M University, USA. She is the editor of Open Acts: Performance in/as Communication and Cultural Studies and co-editor of The Handbook of Performance Studies. She is the recipient of the National Communication Association's Lilla Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies, and received her PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University.