On the one hand, Performance Studies places dance scholarship in a wider cultural context, creating a space where writers can bridge disciplines and establish new relationships between and within various subject matters. Through its emerging discourse it is possible to compare and contrast the ethnic implications of the television series I Love Lucy with the performance of Cuban ethnicity in the commercial movie The Mambo Kings (based upon a novel by Oscar Hijuelos) and, at the same time, locate this "textual" analysis within the multiethnic, "translational" experience of eating at Taco Bell, as Gustavo P6rez Firmat does in "I Came, I Saw, I Conga'd: Contexts for a Cuban-American Culture." On the other hand, in its effort to redefine viewing practice, Performance Studies has created academic jargon and unwieldy language that can limit the breadth of its influence to a small group of self-applauding scholars. The book Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America, edited by Celeste Fraser Delgado and Jose Esteban Mufioz exhibits both the best and the worst of Performance Studies writing. Contributors to the volume come from a variety of disciplines: English Literature, Communications, Ethnic Studies, Spanish Language and Literature, American Studies, and Performance Studies proper. The project emerged from a "Politics in Motion" conference held in North Carolina sponsored by "the Mellon Foundation and two North American Universities" (p. 4). As Delgado states in the preface, the book's perspectives on Latin American dance and performance are generated by North American scholars who have an interest in examining "cultural
Urban Bush Women are an African-American women's dance ensemble that have repeatedly sought the utopian ensemble — a collective that forms alliances through community rather than through the notion of the hero — in their performance of African diaspora experiences. The Urban Bush Women collectively create an idealized space, realized in their dances by physical contact between the performers' bodies. The company, founded by lawole Willa Jo Zollar, began presenting work in 1984 and has continued to develop an extensive and evocative dance repertory. At times overtly political, the dances embody the black female experience in a way that "invites critical interpretive readings largely because of the way in which aesthetic and political agendas are intertwined". While recent articles about the Urban Bush Women discuss the political nuances of their work, the repeated use of the collective ensemble is a unique feature of the company's dance style that merits further discussion.
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