SoftBooks@Metamedia launches e-Publication of ReConstructing and RePresenting dance: Exploring the dance/archaeology conjunction by Alessandra Lopez y Royo
Alessandra Lopez y Royo, Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at the School of Arts, Roehampton University London, has launched her e-book exploring reconstructions of dance movements from the archaeological record.
"This online book brings together dance and archaeology, engaging with body knowledge, understanding archaeology as a corporeal way of knowing."
Dr. Lopez y Royo's work simultaneously engages with issues of cross-cultural interaction and the relocation of cultural and artistic practices, in the past and in the present. As she describes the project in the preface. "The dance past is fragmentary: dance reconstruction is based on reassemblages of fragments and traces of the dance past and interpretation of these. The dance past translates into a notion of dance heritage, often posited as both value and conflict–free, and predicated on authenticity and purity. Dance reconstruction involves engaging with issues of dance representation and documentation. The documentation of dance is itself a form of dance representation. The documentation of dance is inevitably partial and based on classifications which are not meant to reflect a definitive order of things, but are conceived as flexible tools of understanding. Representation changes its object, thus representing dance is not about capturing its ‘authentic essence’ but about transformation; documentation of dance is about capturing (and transforming, through interpretation) fragments of the dance experience."
Read more of Alessandra Lopez y Royo's book@Chiasme.soft.books here.
The e-book medium of the project merges the rich content of the book, an analysis of how dance is re-presented in contemporary performance and media, with a form capable of offering multi-media examples and interactivity. As Dr. Lopez y Royo states in the preface: "For a number of reasons: this is work in progress and I wish to start making it available as I am writing it, hoping to reach as wide a readership as possible (the global community of internet users keeps on growing by the minute). I also wish to complement the writing with images, video-clips and web links to interesting sites, something that would lack immediacy if it were done on paper. ."