Department of Music

Professor Kiri Miller Wins 2018 de la Torre Bueno Book Award

Professor Kiri Miller's book, Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media, has been awarded the 2018 de la Torre Bueno© Book Award.

This award, given by the Dance Studies Association, is made possible by the generosity of Mary Bueno. It was established in 1973 to commemorate José Rollin de la Torre Bueno, who was the first university press editor to champion our field by cultivating a list of Dance Studies titles. This prestigious prize is awarded annually to the English-language book that advances the field of Dance Studies.

The de la Torre Bueno Award selection committee had the following to say about Professor Miller's book:

Kiri Miller’s Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media brilliantly considers the strategies and implications of dance video games by asking “what can machines teach us about ourselves?” Expertly probing how these “immersive multisensory experiences” reconfigure the contours of choreographic instruction, skills acquisition, and archiving possibilities, Miller also insightful demonstrates how dance games use popular music to foster bonds between sonic and kinesthetic modes of perception. By broaching the roles and contributions of a broad range of stakeholders, including game designers, professional choreographers, and dance game players, Miller challenges her readers to think about how dance games advance theories of gender and race while conditioning participants to be pliant subjects of surveillance technologies. The committee was particularly impressed with Miller’s conversance in multivalent methodologies such as digital ethnography as well as her ability to communicate her sophisticated analysis through vivid and engaging prose. Playable Bodies promises to become a valuable teaching resource while serving as an exemplar of innovative and incisive analysis for other scholars. Miller is to be commended for advancing the field of Dance Studies with her ground breaking research on the interface between dancing bodies and interactive technologies. She is, without a doubt, a richly commendable recipient of the de la Torre Bueno Prize.

Congratulations, Professor Miller!