Dancing Women:Female Bodies - Tapa dura

"Banes, an internationally known dance historian and critic, has written an extraordinary, fresh interpretation of dance history from a feminist perspective. . . . [S]he suggests new ways of seeing the female dancer. . . . Banes supports her work with in-depth, well-documented evidence, but she retains a reader-friendly style. An excellent addition to collections serving upper-division undergraduates through professionals, this book will have an audience that extends beyond scholars of dance."-"Choice, November 1998 "Banes...grounds her sophisticated critical reflections in the material realities of dance production, performance, and audience reception. In the process, she offers what is a rarity in any field: an inquiry that sustains itself over the course of an eminently readable book."-"Interchange, 1998 "Is the sort of narrative that draws one on in fascinated pursuit of the author's guiding thread as it snakes through more than a century of danceperformance...Banes' is the sort of book that makes me want to sit down with the author and argue a bit, I disagree with this, find that misleading, note an error here, want to pursue a question there. In other words, it's provocative. And a remarkable achievement."-"Village Voice "After Banes, ballerina brides and modern dance witches will never seem the same. Neither victim nor vamp but a little of everything in between, the mainstream dancing woman, thanks to Banes, recovers some of a real woman's complexity."-Cathryn Harding, "The Isthmus ..."and impressive attempt to recast western dance history since the early 19th century from a feminist perspective, Banes's assiduously researched and often imaginativetext is aimed primarily at fellow academics and dance practitioners, but even the uninitiated, who only occasionally attend a dance performance, may find the book entertaining and intellectually stimulating."-"Montreal Gazette

Taking a fresh and innovative approach to dance history, "Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage" examines Western dance--from the Romantic ballet to modern dance--from a feminist perspective. Renowned critic and historian Sally Banes brings nuance and complexity to a wide range of representations of gender, departing from the common positions that stress either the victimization or celebration of women.