Chapter 4 unpacks the conundrum faced by Restoration acting companies. Audiences wanted new works, spectacle, and theatrical innovation, but the unforeseen consequences of the duopoly hobbled the ability of the companies to respond nimbly to changing conditions. Strapped for money and shackled by the costs of maintaining their expensive, high-tech playhouses, the acting companies were hard pressed to keep up with rival entertainments and products now enticing Londoners. Coffeehouses, spas, pleasure gardens, dance recitals, and music concerts all offered convenience, variety, and value for money. Goods in expanded bourses also tempted consumers. The theatre largely responded to the new world of goods and pastimes through allusion and imitation, oftentimes to brilliant results. Intermedial exchange between the worlds of music and theatre resulted in the gorgeous dramatic operas still staged today. The new consumerism featured in the sparkling, witty comedies spoofing the London elite. Nonetheless, allusiveness could not rival actual experiences and commodities, which often could be had for less money and greater convenience than an afternoon at the playhouse.

This chapter balances practical advice with aesthetic considerations to give an overview of a composer’s numerous roles in writing music for opera, dance, and theatre. The chapter begins with an overview of collaborative techniques and language, before understanding a bit more about how to shape musical ideas both by yourself and then through workshopping and rehearsal processes.

Marcel Dietschy declared, early in his centenary biography La Passion de Claude Debussy, that there was a woman at every crossroads in Debussy’s life. Years later, William Ashbrook and Margaret Cobb chose to omit many of Dietschy’s ‘effusive personal comments’ about the composer’s love life from their updated, more ‘objective’ 1990 translation. In trying to navigate the avenues by which myriad ideas and cultures of dance intersect with that context, a slight reframing of Dietschy’s romantic conceit suggests a useful guiding thread. At a time when musicologists seek to complicate individualistic focus on ‘great men’ with attention to the countless Others who aided their practice, this chapter notes the central role various foreign women played, directly and indirectly, in the dance worlds that impinged upon this compositional œuvre. From the outset, it frames the œuvre against the historical evolution of several overlapping worlds of dance, beginning with Debussy’s first publication, in Moscow in 1880, which was a four-hand arrangement of three characteristic dances from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s first ballet, Le Lac des cygnes (1875–6) – a direct emergence from his youthful sojourns at the piano with Tchaikovksy’s patron Nadezhda von Meck. A few short decades after this, a last work written expressly for dance, the unfinished children’s ballet La Boîte à joujoux of 1913, serves as an illustration of the new possibilities that had by then emerged for the art form.

New Negro writers and artists often spotlighted the contrast between the liberatory potential of dynamic bodily movement and the restricted social spaces of Harlem, which were shaped by segregation. This chapter examines a variety of cultural texts – social and cultural history by Wallace Thurman and James Weldon Johnson, visual art by Winold Reiss, and short fiction by Rudolph Fisher and Langston Hughes – to argue that representations of dance and bodily movement opened the way for creative engagement with the spatial dynamics of segregation and overcrowding in Harlem, which was fascinated by the look, the sound, and the feel of dance. Fisher’s short story “High Yaller,” for instance, probes the affective or subjective dimensions of segregation, passing, and colorism through a sustained focus on dancing bodies in “jim-crowed” scenes of Harlem cabaret and the traversing of “color lines” in the cityscape of New York.

Omar García Brunelli provides a solid historical overview of tango music, dance, and poetry. He first broadly lays out tango’s African, European, Argentine, and Uruguayan origins in the Río de la Plata region of South America, then focuses on the musical changes that took place through time. In doing so, García Brunelli highlights important contributors from tango’s guardia vieja (Old Guard), guardia nueva (New Guard), and Golden Age; discusses Piazzolla’s nuevo tango (New Tango); and brings his overview up to today by describing active contemporary tango musicians.

Chapter one argues for the significance of visualized divine music by situating ancient viewers’ experience of representations of divine music within their ancient contexts, thereby establishing a well-defined space in which divine music could have been seen, imaginatively heard, and experienced. Laferrière takes as her focus a corpus of fourth-century BCE votive reliefs that depict Pan playing his syrinx and the Nymphs dancing; dedicated to these same gods, the reliefs were consistently deposited in cave shrines throughout Attica. Since the clear archaeological record allows for a reconstruction of the worshipper’s religious experience, Laferrière draws attention to the ways the reliefs provoked specific sensory experiences in the ancient worshippers. Within the cave shrines, worshippers could have gazed upon votive reliefs that were visually similar to the physical cave, so that the distinction between image and reality blurred and collapsed. As a result, these reliefs allowed for a fully embodied experience of the Nymphs: by imaginatively listening to the music that Pan plays, and perhaps even contributing their own music, worshippers are invited to join in the Nymphs’ dance.

Chapter five focuses upon scenes of revels in which Dionysos is surrounded by the musical and danced performances of satyrs and maenads, the mythical beings who accompany him. Dionysos exhibits a distinct kind of musicality: unlike the other gods, Dionysos rarely plays an instrument himself. Rather, he acts as the source of inspiration for satyrs and maenads, prompting them to play their instruments, dance to the wild music they produce, and lose themselves, collectively, to the ecstatic sounds that envelop them. The movements of the satyrs and maenads also communicate to the external viewers how they might experience Dionysos’ presence. Within the symposium, ancient viewers created the opportunity for Dionysos to manifest when they consumed wine from the vases, looked at the representations of mythical revels, listened to music performed on similar instruments, and moved their bodies in response to the music they both saw and heard. Such immersive and imaginative seeing and hearing thus allowed the symposiasts to join in the divine revel, where, under the influence of Dionysos, they played instruments and danced with satyrs and maenads.

Katerina Teaiwa explores the relationship between embodied knowledges, indigenous identity, and place-making in South Pacific dancing. Her studies, training, and experience highlight the issues of how to decolonize something without decolonizing its form. Teaiwa demonstrates how dance is embodied and emplaced for Indigenous people of the Pacific islands: her own Banaban, I-Kiribati, and African American heritage influences her approach, pedagogy, and values rooted in kinship, reciprocity, and a deep connection to land and sea. Methods and means for experiencing this epistemology are shared through exhibition curation.

People move their bodies to metal music and interact with it – they dance. Audience members and performers on stage do so in various ways, some of which have become iconic practices of metal, such as headbanging, and others which seem rather uncommon and are not as closely associated with metal at first sight, such as belly dancing. This chapter aims to provide an introductory overview of dance practices in metal, their social organisation and avenues for future research. Therefore, the social organisation of mosh pits is investigated, discussing them as contested communities since they offer communal experiences while simultaneously perpetuating existent obstacles to participation, especially along the lines of gender identities. The subsequent section turns to gaps in hitherto research in order to emphasise the need and possibilities for further research. These include an expanded scope beyond headbanging and moshing in extreme metal, dance practices in virtual spaces and the global south, histories of metal dance and the relation between music and movement in metal.

The American New Woman is an archetype for the generations of women who, in the early twentieth century, were engaged in defining new forms of femininity and forging new public identities, through work, leisure, art, education, and politics. The New Woman also signaled a complex, and sometimes contradictory, modernizing of embodied femininity. Beginning with the New Woman as a sociopolitical individual, mobilized in feminist discourse and suffrage politics, this chapter goes on to explore Greenwich Village women, Black women’s responses to the New Woman, fashions for bobbed hair, and the bodies and performances of different kinds of women dancer (Isadora Duncan, Josephine Baker, Irene Castle). The chapter concludes with Djuna Barnes’ ambivalent encounters with the fashionable New Woman in her work, and Gertrude Stein’s engagement with the legacy of Susan B. Anthony, a crucial pioneer for the women’s suffrage movement and modern feminism, in her final opera The Mother of Us All (1947).

The third chapter turns to the body in erotic poetry. Here the temporal frame widens to embrace the experience of the present within longer human spans, a rhythm over lifetimes garnered through instances of erotic embodiment. Poetry can bind the inexplicable presence of touch to time, and can also summon the past as presence through the reenactment of the poem itself in performance, a dynamic we see at work in Sappho and then again in the modern erotic poetry of Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds – begging the question of why certain poetics recur across time. This is poetry that challenges the ephemerality of embodied experience by showing its power to reenact the force of touch.