Dance Analysis Wins Award
By Elizabeth Romero Student Intern of CHASS College Computing
Jacqueline Shea Murphy, an associate professor, teaches courses in dance history and theory in the Dance Department, and now is an award recipient for her newly published book 'The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Stage Dance and Modern Dance History’. Murphy has been awarded the de la Torre Bueno Prize® by the Society of Dance History Scholars for 2008. This prize is awarded to books in the English language that progresses the study the of dance history. This award, which was established in 1973, recognizes scholarly excellence.
In her critical study, Murphy analyzes the Native American dance and it’s presence over the past thirty years. She brings into perspective how Canadian and American policies attempted the silencing of Native American dances, but still wanted to have stage performances. University of Minnesota Press states that Murphy’s book “illustrate[s] how Native dance enacts, rather than represents, cultural connections to land, ancestors, and animals, as well as spiritual and political concerns. Shea Murphy challenges stereotypes about American Indian dance and offers new ways of recognizing the agency of bodies on stage”.
To find out more about Jacqueline Shea Murphy, please click the link below.
http://www.dance.ucr.edu/people/faculty/murphy/index.html
To find out more about the book, please click the link below.
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/S/sheamurphy_people.html
To find out more about the de la Torre Bueno Prize® please click the link below.
http://www.sdhs.org/awards.html