Bench, H: Perpetual Motion Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common

"In Perpetual Motion, Harmony Bench achieves a stunning tour de force rendering of dance created for internet distribution. Reading the digitized bodies-in-motion as the basis for a twenty-first century common, she constructs essential theoretical models for considering asymmetrical access to dance, travel, the technologies of digital production, and modes of global distribution. A crucial offering for dance studies."-Thomas F. DeFrantz, former president, Society of Dance History Scholars

"How does dance move through digital cultures and how do digital cultures move through dance? Perpetual Motion explores acts of transfer among and across on-screen and off-screen bodies that manifest as dance. A highly skilled dance scholar and a precise and accessible writer, Harmony Bench reads embodied, screenal entanglements as a matter of performative commoning and offers both historical perspective and immediate experience of mediatic, danced, choreographic, and spectatorial encounters."-Rebecca Schneider, Brown University

"With an unmatched skill at plain-language engagement with dense philosophical problems, Bench lays out a wide-ranging case for the radical possibilities inherent in the online dissemination of even the corniest dances, while avoiding neoliberal language of democratization and universality."-Performance Research

"This book is a rewarding way to further study dance in the digital age, with deep considerations of access and distribution, and explorations of what technology means for audience engagement, collaboration and more."-Dance Teacher