Ramsay Burt
Biographic Data
| ID | 3608916 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ramsay Burt |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ramsay |
| FAMILY NAME | Burt |
| SIGNATURE | BURT R |
| AFFILIATIONS | De Montfort University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8818-7057 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 18 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Margaret Morris’s Angkorr (1917)
This essay examines Margaret Morris’s development as an innovative choreographer from 1910 to her 1917 piece Angkorr. Using archival material, it traces her involvement with networks of modernist painters, writers, and musicians, particularly through the Margaret Morris Club in Chelsea during the 1914–18 war. It examines the lack of support for modern dance in Britain and for the more avant-garde art of the Chelsea network, which caused modern da…
Physical solidarity as feeling the feeling
This provocation reflects on the experience of taking a class in contemporary African dance in Senegal, arguing that it represents a physicalisation of solidarity. The class included dance students from Europe and the African continent who came together through moving rhythmically despite having no common verbal language. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s proposals about solidarity and Judith Butler’s theory of performative assembly, this intervention argu…
Decolonisation and solidarity roundtable discussion
‘Funmi Adewole Elliott, Alethia Antonia, Ramsay Burt, Tobi Poster-Su, Thea Stanton, and Negar Tahsili were invited to participate in a roundtable discussion on ‘Decolonisation and Solidarity’, chaired by Víctor Ladrón de Guevara, as part of the conference, Borderlines IX: Seeking Solidarity and Wonder Through Performance, which took place at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, on 30 June and 1 July 2022. The provocations precede this article…
Avoiding Capture
This essay discusses three recent British contemporary dance works that radically rework the spatial relation between audience and performer. These are Nicola Conibere's Assembly (2013), Katye Coe's (To) Constantly Vent (2014), and Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small's Voodoo (2017). The essay draws on Henri Lefebvre theorization of the social and political production of space to analyze the kinds of reworkings of space-time that these w…
Katherine Dunham and Maya Deren on ritual, modernity, and the African Diaspora
In the early 1940s, Katherine Dunham engaged the future experimental film-maker Maya Deren to act as her secretary. In 1946 Deren wrote about the importance of ritual in her films, two of which had been made with dancers from Dunham's company. The following year she made her first visit to Haiti to study and film voodoo rituals that had been the subject of Miss Dunham's research. These rituals was then generally seen as a survival from a more 'pr…
The Specter of Interdisciplinarity
Theater dance is an interdisciplinary form, and some of the most interesting advances in progressive and experimental dance work in recent years have been interdisciplinary in nature. Where Anglo-American dance scholarship is concerned, however, a “theoretical turn” that has led some dance scholars to develop interdisciplinary methodologies has proved highly controversial. Interdisciplinarity is in danger of becoming a specter haunting dance scho…
Trio A in Europe
Since the mid-1990s European dancers and audiences have played a significant role in the revival of interest in Yvonne Rainer's dance work. Two key examples of this are the restaging of Rainer's Continuous Project-Altered Daily (CP-AD) in 1996 by the French group Quatuor Albrecht Knust and the more recent creation and trial of the Labanotation score of Trio A in London. In her reminiscences printed above, Pat Catterson suggests that Trio A' s “re…
History, Memory, and the Virtual in Current European Dance Practice
Focusing on current European dance, this essay identifies two recent phenomena among virtual dance pieces: calling upon beholders to use their imaginations and evoking histories and memories. Such works have the potential to transform society by creating time for a belief in the impossible. This account of virtual dance draws from Susanne Langer's dance theory and Henry Bergson’s ideas about memory and the virtual, particularly as developed by Gi…
Preferring to Laugh
Against Expectations
This DOI is not currently attached to any metadata records. DOIs can’t actually ever be deleted (they’re persistent), but sometimes our members create DOIs in error. We do have a process to approximate deletion which we follow only in rare cases where the DOI has been genuinely created in error, and most crucially, if the DOI has never been published anywhere online or in print and never otherwise distributed to or communicated with anyone (autho…
Against Expectations
This essay gives an overview of recurring themes and concerns in Trisha Brown's work through close readings of three dance pieces from three very different periods in her career: Trillium (1962), from the early stages of Judson Dance Theatre; Roof Piece (1973), when Brown was working in close proximity with visual artists in SoHo; and Newark (1987), from the period when the Trisha Brown Company had begun performing in major international theaters…
Steve Paxton's Goldberg Variations and the Angel of History
Using Paxton's Goldberg Variations—an improvised dance performed between 1986 and 1992 to pianist Glenn Gould's celebrated recordings of Bach's music—Burt investigates the problems of live performances long since passed into memory and videotape. Burt's intention is to help imagine another way of writing about performance that acknowledges the value of all those qualities within dance performances that cannot be fixed and are gradually destroyed …
III. Dance Theory, Sociology, and Aesthetics
Books
March 01 1999 Dancing Female: Lives and Issues of Women in Contemporary Dance; Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage Dancing Female: Lives and Issues of Women in Contemporary Dance. By FriedlerSharon and GlazerSusan . Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997; 319 pp.; illustrations. $106.00 cloth, $36.00 paper.Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage. By BanesSally . London and New York: Routledge, 1998; 279 pp.; illustrations. $75.00 cloth, $22…
Interpreting Jean Borlin's Dervishes
(1999). Interpreting Jean Borlin's Dervishes: Masculine subjectivity and the queer male dancing body. Dance Chronicle: Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 223-238
Dance, Gender and Psychoanalysis
Now Jocasta kneels on the floor at the foot of the bed and then she rises with her leg close to her breast and to her head, and her foot way beyond her head, her body open in a deep contraction. I call this the vaginal cry; it is the cry from her vagina. It is either the cry for her lover, her husband, or the cry for her children. The dance proceeds but there are small intimacies that I have never revealed in words. All of these things mean a tre…
The Male Dancer
Zurich Dada Conference (Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, England, 4–6 November 1994)
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
III. Dance Theory, Sociology, and Aesthetics
Dance, Gender and Psychoanalysis
Now Jocasta kneels on the floor at the foot of the bed and then she rises with her leg close to her breast and to her head, and her foot way beyond her head, her body open in a deep contraction. I call this the vaginal cry; it is the cry from her vagina. It is either the cry for her lover, her husband, or the cry for her children. The dance proceeds but there are small intimacies that I have never revealed in words. All of these things mean a tre…
Avoiding Capture
This essay discusses three recent British contemporary dance works that radically rework the spatial relation between audience and performer. These are Nicola Conibere's Assembly (2013), Katye Coe's (To) Constantly Vent (2014), and Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small's Voodoo (2017). The essay draws on Henri Lefebvre theorization of the social and political production of space to analyze the kinds of reworkings of space-time that these w…
The Specter of Interdisciplinarity
Theater dance is an interdisciplinary form, and some of the most interesting advances in progressive and experimental dance work in recent years have been interdisciplinary in nature. Where Anglo-American dance scholarship is concerned, however, a “theoretical turn” that has led some dance scholars to develop interdisciplinary methodologies has proved highly controversial. Interdisciplinarity is in danger of becoming a specter haunting dance scho…
Trio A in Europe
Since the mid-1990s European dancers and audiences have played a significant role in the revival of interest in Yvonne Rainer's dance work. Two key examples of this are the restaging of Rainer's Continuous Project-Altered Daily (CP-AD) in 1996 by the French group Quatuor Albrecht Knust and the more recent creation and trial of the Labanotation score of Trio A in London. In her reminiscences printed above, Pat Catterson suggests that Trio A' s “re…
History, Memory, and the Virtual in Current European Dance Practice
Focusing on current European dance, this essay identifies two recent phenomena among virtual dance pieces: calling upon beholders to use their imaginations and evoking histories and memories. Such works have the potential to transform society by creating time for a belief in the impossible. This account of virtual dance draws from Susanne Langer's dance theory and Henry Bergson’s ideas about memory and the virtual, particularly as developed by Gi…
Preferring to Laugh
Interpreting Jean Borlin's Dervishes
(1999). Interpreting Jean Borlin's Dervishes: Masculine subjectivity and the queer male dancing body. Dance Chronicle: Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 223-238
Zurich Dada Conference (Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, England, 4–6 November 1994)
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Male Dancer
Dance, Gender and Psychoanalysis
Now Jocasta kneels on the floor at the foot of the bed and then she rises with her leg close to her breast and to her head, and her foot way beyond her head, her body open in a deep contraction. I call this the vaginal cry; it is the cry from her vagina. It is either the cry for her lover, her husband, or the cry for her children. The dance proceeds but there are small intimacies that I have never revealed in words. All of these things mean a tre…
Books
March 01 1999 Dancing Female: Lives and Issues of Women in Contemporary Dance; Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage Dancing Female: Lives and Issues of Women in Contemporary Dance. By FriedlerSharon and GlazerSusan . Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997; 319 pp.; illustrations. $106.00 cloth, $36.00 paper.Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage. By BanesSally . London and New York: Routledge, 1998; 279 pp.; illustrations. $75.00 cloth, $22…
Interpreting Jean Borlin's Dervishes
(1999). Interpreting Jean Borlin's Dervishes: Masculine subjectivity and the queer male dancing body. Dance Chronicle: Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 223-238
III. Dance Theory, Sociology, and Aesthetics
Steve Paxton's Goldberg Variations and the Angel of History
Using Paxton's Goldberg Variations—an improvised dance performed between 1986 and 1992 to pianist Glenn Gould's celebrated recordings of Bach's music—Burt investigates the problems of live performances long since passed into memory and videotape. Burt's intention is to help imagine another way of writing about performance that acknowledges the value of all those qualities within dance performances that cannot be fixed and are gradually destroyed …
Against Expectations
This DOI is not currently attached to any metadata records. DOIs can’t actually ever be deleted (they’re persistent), but sometimes our members create DOIs in error. We do have a process to approximate deletion which we follow only in rare cases where the DOI has been genuinely created in error, and most crucially, if the DOI has never been published anywhere online or in print and never otherwise distributed to or communicated with anyone (autho…
Against Expectations
This essay gives an overview of recurring themes and concerns in Trisha Brown's work through close readings of three dance pieces from three very different periods in her career: Trillium (1962), from the early stages of Judson Dance Theatre; Roof Piece (1973), when Brown was working in close proximity with visual artists in SoHo; and Newark (1987), from the period when the Trisha Brown Company had begun performing in major international theaters…
Preferring to Laugh
The Specter of Interdisciplinarity
Theater dance is an interdisciplinary form, and some of the most interesting advances in progressive and experimental dance work in recent years have been interdisciplinary in nature. Where Anglo-American dance scholarship is concerned, however, a “theoretical turn” that has led some dance scholars to develop interdisciplinary methodologies has proved highly controversial. Interdisciplinarity is in danger of becoming a specter haunting dance scho…
Trio A in Europe
Since the mid-1990s European dancers and audiences have played a significant role in the revival of interest in Yvonne Rainer's dance work. Two key examples of this are the restaging of Rainer's Continuous Project-Altered Daily (CP-AD) in 1996 by the French group Quatuor Albrecht Knust and the more recent creation and trial of the Labanotation score of Trio A in London. In her reminiscences printed above, Pat Catterson suggests that Trio A' s “re…
History, Memory, and the Virtual in Current European Dance Practice
Focusing on current European dance, this essay identifies two recent phenomena among virtual dance pieces: calling upon beholders to use their imaginations and evoking histories and memories. Such works have the potential to transform society by creating time for a belief in the impossible. This account of virtual dance draws from Susanne Langer's dance theory and Henry Bergson’s ideas about memory and the virtual, particularly as developed by Gi…
Katherine Dunham and Maya Deren on ritual, modernity, and the African Diaspora
In the early 1940s, Katherine Dunham engaged the future experimental film-maker Maya Deren to act as her secretary. In 1946 Deren wrote about the importance of ritual in her films, two of which had been made with dancers from Dunham's company. The following year she made her first visit to Haiti to study and film voodoo rituals that had been the subject of Miss Dunham's research. These rituals was then generally seen as a survival from a more 'pr…
Avoiding Capture
This essay discusses three recent British contemporary dance works that radically rework the spatial relation between audience and performer. These are Nicola Conibere's Assembly (2013), Katye Coe's (To) Constantly Vent (2014), and Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small's Voodoo (2017). The essay draws on Henri Lefebvre theorization of the social and political production of space to analyze the kinds of reworkings of space-time that these w…
Physical solidarity as feeling the feeling
This provocation reflects on the experience of taking a class in contemporary African dance in Senegal, arguing that it represents a physicalisation of solidarity. The class included dance students from Europe and the African continent who came together through moving rhythmically despite having no common verbal language. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s proposals about solidarity and Judith Butler’s theory of performative assembly, this intervention argu…
Decolonisation and solidarity roundtable discussion
‘Funmi Adewole Elliott, Alethia Antonia, Ramsay Burt, Tobi Poster-Su, Thea Stanton, and Negar Tahsili were invited to participate in a roundtable discussion on ‘Decolonisation and Solidarity’, chaired by Víctor Ladrón de Guevara, as part of the conference, Borderlines IX: Seeking Solidarity and Wonder Through Performance, which took place at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, on 30 June and 1 July 2022. The provocations precede this article…
Margaret Morris’s Angkorr (1917)
This essay examines Margaret Morris’s development as an innovative choreographer from 1910 to her 1917 piece Angkorr. Using archival material, it traces her involvement with networks of modernist painters, writers, and musicians, particularly through the Margaret Morris Club in Chelsea during the 1914–18 war. It examines the lack of support for modern dance in Britain and for the more avant-garde art of the Chelsea network, which caused modern da…
Art (16 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Dance (11 works) · Diversity and Impact of Dance (11 works) · Visual arts (11 works) · Art history (10 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Political science (7 works) · Musicology and Musical Analysis (6 works) · Law (5 works)