ABSTRACT
The writing spans across the past 50 years of British dance and the development of British independent dance culture. It also spans my life’s experience and I use the lived events over this period of time to physicalize the narrative. The text conjures up a spectrum of performers from ballerina Margot Fonteyn in the 1950s to the physical theatre performer Nigel Charnock in 2003. The 1970s British phenomenon of new dance provides a core focus, offering a crucial framework of structures, forms and politics that instigated independent dance culture and supported its practitioners. Situating itself in this context, the book is concerned for the most part with British artists. The vibrancy of this Western dance culture lies in its unique and contradictory layering of genres. These include American post-modern minimalism, British ballet, South Asian and African dance forms, and European theatre expressionism. British dance may be a microdot on the global map of performance, but the ideas, debates, investigations, strategies, analyses and illustrations of this book ripple outwards to reach an extensive range of performance practices across a wide arena.
