New Books in Performing Arts

Updated: 01 Aug 2025 • 1082 episodes
newbooksnetwork.com/category/arts-letters/dance

Interviews with scholars of the performing arts about their new books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Categories:

Show episodes

Why does critical theory matter today? In Critical Theory: The Basics (Routledge, 2024), Martin Shuster, a Professor of Philosophy and the Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, explores the history, thought and legacy of the Frankfurt School to demonstr

44 min
00:00
44:37
No file found

What happens when precarious urban cultural laborers take data collection, laws, and policymaking into their own hands? Buskers have been part of our cities for hundreds of years, but they remain invisible to governments and in datasets. From nuisance to public art, this cultural practice can help us understand the pol

35 min
00:00
35:40
No file found

The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators (Oxford University Press) is the first book-length study to examine the historical foundations and stylistic mechanics of pure cinema. Author Bruce Isaacs, Associate Professor of Film Studies and Director of the Film Studies Program at the University of Sydney, explor

72 min
00:00
01:12:41
No file found

Jazz is the music that many people associate with New Orleans. But before there was jazz in New Orleans there was opera. It was the only city in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century with a resident opera company that produced the latest European works. In New Orleans and the Creation of Tra

49 min
00:00
49:39
No file found
22 Jul 2025 • EN

Lost Women of Disco

Women have been central to the evolution of dance music culture since its earliest days, yet their contributions have often been overlooked. From Régine Zylberberg's pioneering work in creating the modern discotheque in 1950s Paris to Sharon White's trailblazing presence at New York's legendary venues in the 1970s, fem

49 min
00:00
49:47
No file found

Kelefa Sanneh was born in England, and lived in Ghana and Scotland before moving with his parents to the United States in the early 1980s. He was a pop music critic at the New York Times from 2000-2008, and has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since then. His first book, just released on Penguin, is called Major L