ABSTRACT
The introduction lays out the scope and aims of this book, which analyzes forty Anglo-American and European dance adaptations of eleven plays and selected sonnets by William Shakespeare. These works, created between 1940 and 2016 in the genres of ballet, modern dance, and hip-hop, negotiate tensions between Shakespeare’s texts and the wordless medium of dance. All of the dances aim in part to stage Shakespeare’s plots and characters; yet they also transcend textual concerns by celebrating the beauty of pure movement, asserting the importance of bodily knowledge, and acknowledging the influence of dance, musical, and other performance traditions. The adaptations are continually remade through performance and the embodiment of individual dancers, revealing that Shakespeare is not their only frame of reference. This book is part of an emergent and interdisciplinary field of inquiry, bringing together literary studies, performance studies, and dance studies. It is the first solo-authored project to analyze the under-theorized subject of adapting Shakespeare for the dance stage.
