Overview

Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of Song and Dance offers new, cutting-edge essays focusing on song and dance as performative gestures that not only entertain but also act on audiences and performers. The chapters range across musical theater, opera, theater, and other artistic practices, from Glee to Gardzienice, Beckett to Disney, Broadway to Turner-Prize-winning sound installation. The chapters draw together these diverse examples of vocality and physicality by exploring their affect rather than through considering them as texts. The book's contributors derive methodologies from many disciplines. Resisting discrete discipline-based enquiry, they share methodologies and performance repertoires with discipline-based scholarship from theater studies, musicology, and cultural studies, among other approaches. Together, they view these as neighboring voices whose dialogue enriches the study of contemporary music theater.