Choreography of the Poem
Description
This book explores analogies and correspondences between dance and poetry, with an emphasis on how dance and dance choreography can shed light on poetry, poetic form and the teaching of poetry.
Chronologically, the book examines the Renaissance/Baroque period in Europe and moves through early modern to contemporary poetry and dance. Internationally, it explores Asian, African and American dance choreographies and poetry alongside European, as well as hybrid influences of the different traditions on each other. It argues that the poem on the page, and in spoken performance, inhabits space within frameworks of expectation.
Choreography of the Poem accesses interest from the perspectives of each of the modes of communication: physical movement in dance, and spoken and written communication in poetry. It reveals what dance choreography can bring to an understanding and appreciation of the making of poetry in schools, colleges and universities.
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Richard Andrews' previous book for Springer is Polyrhythmicity in Language, Music and Society: complex time relations in the arts, humanities and social sciences (2021) in the 'Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education' series, edited by Aaron Koh and Victoria Carrington.
Richard worked in Hong Kong in the 1980s as Head of English, Drama and English-as-a-Second Language in an international school. Since then he has travelled extensively in the USA, Europe, the Middle East, India, SE Asia, mainland China, Korea, Taiwan and Japan. He is author of several books for Routledge, including Argumentation in Higher Education (2009), Re-framing Literacy (2010), A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (2014), A Prosody of Free Verse (2016) and Multimodality, Poetry and Poetics (2018). He was winner of the Edwin Hopkins award (National Council for Teachers of English) for an article on democracy and argument in Chicago in 1996, and his 2016 and 2018 books for Routledge were given the highest rating (4*) by external assessors in the fields of English Language/Literature and Education (as a Social Science) in the build-up to the UK's Research Excellence Framework (2021). He has also published with Sage. He is co-series editor for Cambridge University Press of its Cambridge School Shakespeare series, now published in China. He is now Emeritus Professor in Language Education at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
The author has recently been re-appointed to the Chinese University of Hong Kong as external adviser to its English Language Teaching Unit. He has published three books of poems: A Sense of Place (2009), Falling Uphill (2021) and Birdsong in the Subway: Poems from China and Japan (2025).