Bernstein, perhaps more than any other conductor in the last century, seemed to dance on the podium. This chapter explores the reception of Bernstein’s dancelike conducting by both critics and musicians. When describing Bernstein’s conducting, whether praising or panning it, critics have regularly described it as ‘choreography’, with the word almost always used pejoratively. For some, Bernstein’s shameless bodily movements enhanced their appreciation of the music; for others, it was a distraction approaching desecration. What has been overlooked is that Bernstein’s conducting was surprisingly consistent – not only in the general movement vocabulary he employs (his infamous leaps, for an obvious example) but also in set patterns of specific movements that he employs from performance to performance of the same work across years. The chapter suggests that we understand Bernstein’s conducting not as spontaneous and random, but as planned, iterative, and locked in his muscle memory: that is, as choreography.

This chapter draws on experiences of mixing methods in the interdisciplinary research of dance, choreography, immersive performance/participatory performance, and fandom. Reflecting on the methods employed in the author’s book Tandem Dances: Choreographing Immersive Performance, the chapter treats the research process as improvisational and compositional, emerging in tandem with the work being researched. These methods include audience research, choreographic analysis, participant observation, and analysing media content. The aim of the chapter is to make the research process explicit so other researchers might apply a similarly compositional approach in audience research in other performance contexts.

Intersecting critical dance studies and performance studies, this chapter examines K-pop dance as an emerging popular dance medium. It situates K-pop music video choreography within the genealogy of popular dance scholarship by closely reading select point choreographies of iconic K-pop idols over the past decade, such as BTS, BIGBANG, Seventeen, PSY, EXO, BLACKPINK, and TWICE. Styles of K-pop music video include schoolgirls and schoolboys, beast idols and bad girls, dance-centric, experimental, and hybrid. While these categories are preliminary and overlap with one another, the basic styles of choreography open room for discussion on racial and gender identity, hybridity, authenticity, and tourism in transnational contemporary Korean dance beyond the mediated screen.

Chapter 5, on the showroom at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas (1958–2006), investigates the international production of theatrical revue for a tourist audience. It exemplifies the modernist design of twentieth-century theatre architecture, with an aesthetic of curved planes and smooth surfaces designed to facilitate the flow of people through performance and level the encounter between artists and spectators. We focus on the initial 1958–9 design, which accommodated the latest stage technologies, including a swimming pool, an ice rink, a waterfall, and a firework show. The Stardust became the venue for the Lido de Paris, the long-running revue, which played in various editions until 1991. Since the showroom was demolished within the Stardust in 2007, our reconstruction illustrates how theatre venues were shaped by the capitalist development of international tourism. Virtual praxis in the model embodies insight into the design of the Stardust showroom as a tourist attraction and the choreography that made a gendered spectacle of international relations.

As a theatrical art form, puppetry has existed for as long as 4,000 years and has been traced to Europe, Asia, and Africa. Even now, puppetry continues to evolve – from representational to abstract and from traditional to avant-garde. One of today’s leading puppeteers is Basil Twist, who excels in both traditional and avant-garde performance. Twist vaulted to fame in 1998 largely because of his breakthrough performance of Symphonie Fantastique. That work propelled his receipt of a 2015 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship – the so-called genius award. Twist’s Symphonie Fantastique is an amazing assemblage of water, feathers, fabric, classical music, and dramatic lighting. How did the piece come to be? Was it the result of meticulous and foresighted planning? Or was its origin more improvisational and experimental? The answers shed fresh light on the meaning of creative genius and on the nature of puppet art.

Joseph Fort ponders a specific case of late eighteenth-century musical embodiment, one that has its origins in social and popular dance: a minuet by Joseph Haydn (Minuet in D major, Hob. IX/11, no. 1), emblematic not of contemporary concert-hall music, but of the music performed in front of a living – and physically mobile – audience at the charity ball held at the Hofburg Redoutensäle in Vienna, 25 November 1792. Reconstructing both the music and the dancing, Fort offers a revealing account of the Vienna dance scene, as well as the minuet’s position within it. More than this, though, he presents a close reading of the interrelations between music and dance from a specifically somatic perspective – one that is deeply intuitive, subjective and sensorial. Realizing his innovative approach alongside similar scholarly attempts at ‘live’ musical embodiment (particularly the work of Elisabeth Le Guin), Fort offers an analysis of the movement that reveals insights into not only the musical score, but also the intrinsically musical and gestural experience of dancing to it.

Wayne Heisler Jr addresses ‘song-ballets’ from the 1960s and 70s, choreography set to Lieder by Gustave Mahler, in order to explore inter-relationships between music, dance and the written word. He pursues the historical implications of his subject matter, considering social, cultural and philosophical discourses, and their appeals to music and the body with an aim to expanding interpretive pathways, suggesting ways in which dance can refuel Mahler’s music, repurposing its expressive vocabulary. Through critical readings of both live and recorded performances, Heisler suggests the resonance of Mahler’s danced songs with the composer’s biography and musical personality, as well as their impact on characterization, drama and musical structure. In doing so, Heisler acknowledges the inter-disciplinary methods underpinning his analysis, noting in particular the relevance of both performance studies and phenomenology.

Davinia Caddy examines the role of music and music-listening in the stage shows and reception histories of dancer Loie Fuller. A midwestern American, Fuller found fame across Western Europe and the United States with her dance-and-light effects, theatrical performances that seemed to transform her body into a flower, fire, waves or the sun: to her symbolist observers, into pure metaphor or idea. Music was often incorporated into this abstract mélange, thought to symbolize a sphere of influence or aesthetic condition that text and visuals (dance, set design, props) could only aspire to. With reference to little-known source material, the author offers a revisionist reading of Fuller’s musical initiative and her spectators’ attention to it. Drawing analogies with early modernist visual art and advertising, the chapter suggests new and different ways of envisaging music, and music-listening, in relation to Fuller’s dance shows and the copy-cat craze they inspired.

Addressing recent screen productions of Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice (dir. Langton, BBC1, 1995; dir. Wright, 2005), and 1815 novel Emma (dir. Lawrence, ITV, 1996; dir. McGrath, 1996), Maribeth Clark explores the function of music, dance, drama and visuals in specific danced divertissements. She focuses on choreographed versions of social dance scenes set to the late-seventeenth-century music of Henry Purcell and his contemporaries up to the late eighteenth century. Her chapter describes an impulse towards unity and congruence, towards the establishment of a stable repertoire, a conservative tradition – a canon that builds on the work of those involved in the twentieth-century English country dance revival.

David J. Code explores the reception of Vaslav Nijinsky’s L’Apres-midi d’un faune, a 1912 choreographic reworking of Claude Debussy’s orchestral Prélude (1894). He peels off layers of historical reference, looking backwards to Debussy and Stéphane Mallarmé from Faune’s 1912 Nijinskian embodiment. In the process, he questions the ballet’s accepted relationship to cubism in favour of a Matisse-inspired framework for understanding the underlying modernity of the Faun. With attention to scene and character types, structure and style, diegesis, eroticism and Freudian psychological interiority, Code highlights ways in which music and dance might both embody and subvert typically modernist modes of dramatic expression.

This chapter by Thomas Grey presents a focused yet far-reaching account of the significance of dance to Richard Wagner. First, it explores how Wagner theorized the roles of dance, music and text in his ‘total artwork’; then it considers historical practice – examples of the actual dances (and also what the author calls the ‘sublimated choreography’) in several Wagnerian music dramas, especially Tannhäuser, with its infamous Venusberg ‘Bacchanal’. Wagner’s feelings towards dance were double-edged. On the one hand, the composer acknowledged the importance of movement and gesture in the creation of his ideal artwork. Indeed, as Grey suggests, Wagner sought to play up the two, emphasizing the role of the erotic, sexualized body onstage. On the other hand, Wagner liked to ridicule contemporary ballet. But, to Wagner, ballet’s problematic status did not relate to its explicitly bodily and human aspects. Instead, it was the genre’s association with an institutional context – ballet as produced and consumed at the Paris Opéra – that troubled the composer.