Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Body Impossible: Desmond Richardson and the Politics of Virtuosity

Body Impossible: Desmond Richardson and the Politics of Virtuosity

Osterweis, Ariel

Paperback

Series: Oxford Studies in Dance Theory

DanceBlack American StudiesGLBTQIA Studies

ISBN10: 0190645822
ISBN13: 9780190645823
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: May 7 2024
Pages: 248
Weight: 0.85
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
Body Impossible theorizes the concept of virtuosity in contemporary dance and performance through a study of the career of dancer Desmond Richardson. A virtuoso for the ages, Richardson is renowned for delivering commanding performances over decades in contexts ranging from the stages of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Ballett Frankfurt to featured appearances with Michael Jackson and Prince, along with his work as co-founder of Complexions Contemporary Ballet, inaugurating a virtuosic queer black aesthetic with choreographer Dwight Rhoden.

Focusing on Richardson's creative insistence on improvisatory fun and excellence throughout the decades approaching the millennium (shaped by Reaganism, the Culture Wars, the AIDS epidemic, the New Jim Crow, and MTV), this book brings dance into conversation with paradigms of blackness, queerness, masculinity, and class in order to generate a socioculturally attentive understanding of virtuosity.

Virtuosity obscures the border between popular and concert performance, and Richardson's versatility epitomizes the demands on the contemporary virtuosic dance artist. Author Ariel Osterweis suggests that discourses of virtuosity are linked to connotations of excess, and that an examination of the formal and socio-cultural aspects of virtuosic performance reveals under-recognized heterogeneity in which we detect vernacular influences on high art. In doing so, Body Impossible accounts for the constitutive relationship between disciplined perceptions of virtuosity's excess and the disciplining of the racialized body in national and transnational contexts.

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