Theater and Performance

Glances at Dramatic Dialogue by Ruby Cohn

I Want To Be Ready by Danielle Goldman

Glances at Dramatic Dialogue

Ruby Cohn

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

Glances at Dramatic Dialogue is a valentine to Ruby Cohn's favorite playwrights and productions of the past five decades. Written primarily for theater aficionados, and containing a minimum of footnotes and other scholarly apparatus, the book engages with Shakespeare's dialogues, Restoration comedy, and the language of Oscar Wilde, Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, Lee Breuer, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

Ruby Cohn is one of the most highly regarded theater scholars and critics writing today, and is considered by many to be the leading expert on the work of Samuel Beckett. Her books include Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut; Currents in Contemporary Drama; Dialogue in American Drama; Modern Shakespeare Offshoots; Just Play: The Theater of Samuel Beckett; New American Dramatists; From Desire to Godot; and Anglo-American Interplay in Recent Drama. Ms. Cohn is also Emerita Professor of Comparative Drama at UC Davis .

May 2008

I Want To Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom

Danielle Goldman

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

I Want To Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom explores everything from the hey-days of the Palladium dance club in the 1940s and '50s, when the allure of the mambo at least temporarily integrated an otherwise segregated society, to recent avant-garde experiments in improvised dance that make use of imaging and other digital technology, and Goldman provides a rich cultural history of improvised dance in America. Paying particular attention to the racial and gender dynamics that have influenced the evolution and reception of improvised dance, Goldman also provides a robust new conceptual frame for exploring the practice of improvisation. Most scholars and critics of improvised dance celebrate the freedom it enables, while leaving the concept of freedom itself unexamined to mean, in Goldman's phrase, "something good with vaguely political implications." Drawing on philosophy, jazz studies, critical race theory, and gender studies, Goldman develops a rigorous theory of improvisation, by redefining it as an engaged response to an ever-shifting array of social, historical, and formal constraints.

Danielle Goldman is a winner of the Deena Burton Memorial Award for Outstanding Dissertation Research, and the 2005 Gertrude Lippincott Award. She is also a professional dancer in New York City.