Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900's and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Featuring an eight-page gallery of full-color illustrations, here is a major new biography of Serge Diaghilev, founder and impresario of the Ballets Russes, who revolutionized ballet by bringing together composers such as Stravinsky and Prokofiev, dancers and choreographers such as Nijinsky and Karsavina, Fokine and Balanchine, and artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Bakst, and Goncharova.
An accomplished, flamboyant impresario of all the arts, Diaghilev became a legendary figure. Growing up in a minor noble family in remote Perm, he would become a central figure in the artistic worlds of Paris, London, Berlin, and Madrid during the golden age of modern art. He lived through bankruptcy, war, revolution, and exile. Furthermore he lived openly as a homosexual and his liaisons, most famously with Nijinsky, and his turbulent friendships with Stravinsky, Coco Chanel, Prokofiev, and Jean Cocteau gave his life an exceptionally dramatic quality. Scheijen's magnificent biography, based on extensive research in little known archives, especially in Russia, brings fully to life a complex and powerful personality with boundless creative energy.
A New York Times Editor's Choice

The Diaghilev Ballet existed from 1909 to 1929; and from its beginningto its end Serge Grigoriev acted as r gisseur-that is to say he was responsible for every aspect of the venture save its finance. In theearly 1950s he began reading back among the "logs" of the Ballet'smany seasons, and decided that he would write what no one elsecould write-the story of Diaghilev's extraordinary enterprise as seenby one of its major participants. His book offers a chronology of the Ballet's history, beginning withthe first preparations in St. Petersburg, through triumphs and setbacks in Paris, disaster in the United States, revolution in Portugal, tothe last phase when, cut off from Russia, the Ballet found an official home in Monte Carlo. Almost without exception, the leading European practitioners of music and painting came to collaborate with Diaghilev. Add the names of the dancers, and virtually all the famous figures in theartistic world of the period find a place in Grigoriev's record. Of Diaghilev himself-the strange genius behind this fabulous adventure, the creative artist who could only create in collaboration with dancer-choreographers-a vivid portrait emerges. He underwent every kind of fortune, good and bad, deserved andundeserved, finally refusing to regard himself as a sick man, gambling with death and losing his stake.

"Golden Autumn 4" is the fourth installment in composer/pianist Fariborz Lachini's celebrated series of piano albums called Golden Autumn that includes his original writings for solo piano, some of which were originated from the themes he created for film scores. This is the companion songbook for Fariborz Lachini's CD of the same name. 1. Whisper in the Wind 2. Raindrops 3. Forever Autumn 4. Moonlight Memories 5. Morning Dews 6. Lonely Leaf 7. As Dusk Falls 8. Bare Branches 9. Distant Dawn 10. Days Gone By 11. Words to Say 12. Sunlight Through the Mist 13. Reflections 14. A Leaf's Caress 15. Autumn Theme ISMN: 979-0-706060-03-3 Corresponding MP3s: http: //www.amazon.com/Golden-Autumn-4-Pieces-Piano/dp/B003XSXV66 Single Sheet Music or complete eBook, compatible with Kindle/iPad/other eBook readers, in PDF format is available from artist's official website for download using your amazon.com account: http: //www.lachini.com

"Golden Autumn 2" is the second installment in composer/pianist Fariborz Lachini's celebrated series of piano albums called Golden Autumn that includes his original writings for solo piano, some of which were originated from the themes he created for film scores. This is the companion songbook for Fariborz Lachini's CD with the same name. Dance of Leaves Memories of Autumn Whirlwind in Autumn Silence of Stars Loneliness Desire to Stay Childhood I Remember Staring in a Mirror Stranger Trail of Loneliness What Must Have Been Autumn Slumber Reincarnation Shadow

ISMN: 979-0-706060-01-9 Corresponding MP3s: http: //www.amazon.com/Golden-Autumn-2-Pieces-Piano/dp/B003XSZATW Single Sheet Music or complete downloadable eBook, compatible with Kindle/iPad/other eBook readers, in PDF format is available from artist's official website for download using your same amazon.com account: http: //www.lachini.com

"Golden Autumn 1" is the first installment in Iranian/Canadian composer/pianist Fariborz Lachini's celebrated series of piano albums called Golden Autumn that includes his original writings for solo piano, some of which were originated from the themes he created for film scores. It was first released right after the dark years of Iran/Iraq war. Crossing all barriers, the album quickly became the most popular album in Iran and made Lachini's a household name. Since then his solo piano books have been taught by music teachers in Iran. This is the companion songbook for Fariborz Lachini's CD with the same name. Autumn, Autumn, Autumn 'Twas a Soft Autumn (/Autumn Lightness) Autumn Was Lost in the Leaves In Autumn the Leaves Came to Our House 'Twas Uprising of the Leaves, 'Twas Autumn Perplexed, I Reached the Edge of Autumn Faces Lost in the Autumn Leaves In My Little Autumn, the Trees Had Only One Leaf In A Corner Of the Sky Were the Leaves of Autumn Confused, the Leaves Went to the Sea 'Twas the Morning of the Leaves, 'Twas Autumn You Were a Guest in Our House in Autumn The Autumn Leaves Went Towards Winter The End of Autumn Without Autumn

ISMN: 979-0-706060-00-2 Corresponding MP3s: http: //www.amazon.com/Golden-Autumn-1-Pieces-Piano Single Sheet Music or complete downloadable eBook, compatible with Kindle/iPad/other eBook readers, in PDF format is available from artist's official website for download using your same amazon.com account: http: //www.lachini.com

Insights and guidelines for teaching the best students "Not since Noverre and Fokine has a master teacher sought to clarify the present state of ballet. The goals John White sets for each level of training, the psychological philosophies he sets forth for teachers, the emphasis on a positive approach to teaching and forming relationships with students and parents can be read over and over again throughout a teacher's career."--Charles Flachs, Massachusetts Academy of Ballet "It has been an inestimable privilege to have worked with John White for more than ten years. This book, along with his first, provides an outstanding opportunity for generations of teachers to learn from him as well. Bravo "--Michele MacDonald, St. Louis Center of Creative Arts Staying true to the Russian Academy of Ballet (St. Petersburg) pedagogy he has taught for forty years, "Advanced Principles in Teaching Classical Ballet" is a continuation of the work John White began in his first book. Designed for teachers, company directors, and advanced dancers, the book explores the importance of disciplined dancing, choreography, acting, conditioning, and performance. White's writing style is as straightforward as he is unyielding in his insistence on excellence. White also confronts serious issues dealing with the future of classical ballet and what is needed to maintain its rightful place as an important theater art. He argues that theatergoers with high expectations deserve nothing less than masterful choreography performed by superior dancers. Decidedly not a primer, "Advanced Principles in Teaching Classical Ballet" is a must-read for anyone serious about teaching and performing ballet. John White, former soloist and ballet master of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba and interim ballet master of the Pennsylvania Ballet Company, is codirector of the Pennsylvania Academy of Ballet.

"Golden Autumn 3" is the third installment in composer/pianist Fariborz Lachini's celebrated series of piano albums called Golden Autumn that includes his original writings for solo piano, some of which were originated from the themes he created for film scores. This is the companion songbook for Fariborz Lachini's CD of the same name. Fall in Love Again Silver Winter A Thousand Leaves Forever in My Dreams Sepidar Autumn Whispers It's Snowing Leaves of Light Fragments of Autumn Blue Sky Autumn in My Heart Calling Out for You Signs of Rain On the Wind Autumn Eve

ISMN: 979-0-706060-02-6 Corresponding MP3s: http: //www.amazon.com/Golden-Autumn-3-Pieces-Piano/dp/B003YBM18G Single Sheet Music or complete eBook downloads, compatible with Kindle/iPad/other eBook readers, in PDF format is available from artist's official website for download using your same amazon.com account: http: //www.lachini.com

In the current dance scene, performers contend with choreography that involves extreme dance, multiple techniques, and acrobatic moves, exemplified in the popular reality television show, "So You Think You Can Dance." The dilemma for aspiring professionals is that dance class no longer provides sufficient preparation for performing at this level. Dancers who want to achieve their best, avoid injury, and perform at their peak will welcome the insight and advice in the pages of "The Dancer's Way."

The world-renowned New York City Ballet developed their proven wellness program to help dancers reach their potential without compromising their health. As one of the key designers of this program, former dancer and clinical psychologist Linda Hamilton, Ph.D. provides the essential principles of wellness that will help you achieve your goals in all levels and forms of dance. These include keeping yourself physically healthy, nutritionally sound, and mentally prepared as a dancer. New York City Ballet's celebrated program, here for the first time in book form, highlights every tool you'll need to stay in great shape.

From adagio to voyage, over 800 steps, movements, poses, and concepts are fully defined. A pronunciation guide and cross-references to alternate names for similar steps and positions that vary from the Russian to the French or Italian schools are also invaluable aids.

The literature on Balanchine is vast, but it is primarily biographical. "Balanchine Variations "is the first book to concentrate on the ballets themselves, providing critical analysis and detailed descriptions of what the dancers actually do. Beginning with "Apollo" (1928), Balanchine's first extant work, and ending with one of his last ballets, "Ballo della Regina" (1978), Nancy Goldner offers detailed insights into more than twenty individual ballets. Based on lectures given across the United States, under the auspices of the Balanchine Foundation, they are intended to illuminate his art. Goldner discusses the history of each ballet, places each in the context of Balanchine's life and sensibility. She also addresses his taste in music and whether his style can be considered particularly American. The ballets Balanchine choreographed for the New York City Ballet are danced by companies around the world, and this innovative book is sure to become an indispensable guide to dancers and spectators alike.

Dance is a uniquely significant art form, whose primary material is not simply the 'body', but energy as it is used and experienced in movement. Energy is central to discourses of modernity and modernism, in which choreographers and dancers can actively intervene through their innovative uses of energy. Mary Wigman, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham are key choreographers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whose rhythmic innovations challenged established norms of energy usage in their socio-cultural contexts, enabling their contemporaries to engage differently with dominant economies of energy. This book explores their rhythmic innovations by combining discussion of cultural contexts with close analysis of specific dance works. Uses of energy in dance are described and analysed with the aid of concepts drawn from Rudolf Laban's writings, and are theorized with reference to historical, social and cultural contexts and to phenomenological and post-structuralist approaches to the embodied subject, constructing the argument that choreographical innovation - including recent work using digital technologies - involves a process of 'kinesthetic imagination'.

The art of character dancing in classical ballet is now almost lost, but when this unique book was first published in Russia in 1939 it still thrived. The authors, all brilliant character dancers themselves, were teachers at the Kirov Ballet and its school, and were establishing a five-year course in character dance at the Kirov School. The first part of the book is devoted to class character exercises and the second part gives specific character dances in various national styles. "Character Dance" has been translated and adapted by Joan Lawson, a noted specialist in the subject, who herself studied in Leningrad in the 1930's and was for many years a teacher at he Royal Ballet School in London.

Originally published in 1899, this is a comprehensive study of the art of Dancing throughout history. It goes into great detail about dancing through the ages, including musical notation, right up to the start of the 1900s. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Hesperides Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork. Contents Include - The Natural and Origin of Dancing - Dancing in Ancient Egypt - Dances of the Greeks - Dancing in Ancient Rome - Religious, Mysterious, and Fanatical Elements in Dancing - Remarkable Dancing of Later Times - The Minuet - Modern Dancing

Newly edited and engraved. The composer considered an orchestral suite from his great ballet, but never got around to extracting it. An unknown editor compiled the first version, which was issued by Jurgenson in 1900. The Soviet state publishers produced their own version in 1954, adding 3 dance movements and omitting the finale from the original suite. This new score includes all the movements found in the two different versions of the suite.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

1925. Also the pictures of Holbein etched in the author's time, to which are added Mr. Angarola's conception of the period and drawings by way of contemporary comment by Gene Markey. The Praise of Folly is the best known work of the greatest of the renaissance humanists, Erasmus of Rotterdam. Originally meant for private circulation, it scourges the abuses and follies of the various classes of society, especially of the Church. It is a deliberate attempt to discredit the Church and its satire and stinging comment on ecclesiastical conditions are not intended as a healing medicine but a deadly blow. It ends with a straightforward and touching statement of the Christian ideals which Erasmus shared notably with his English friends, John Colet and Thomas More. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

A lively discussion of North America's favorite ballet-its history, productions, and significance The Nutcracker is the most popular ballet in the world, adopted and adapted by hundreds of communities across the United States and Canada every Christmas season. In this entertainingly informative book, Jennifer Fisher offers new insights into the Nutcracker phenomenon, examining it as a dance scholar and critic, a former participant, an observer of popular culture, and an interviewer of those who dance, present, and watch the beloved ballet. Fisher traces The Nutcracker's historyfrom its St. Petersburg premiere in 1892 through its emigration to North America in the mid-twentieth century to the many productions of recent years. She notes that after it was choreographed by another Russian immigrant to the New World, George Balanchine, the ballet began to thrive and variegate: Hawaiians added hula, Canadians added hockey, Mark Morris set it in the swinging sixties, and Donald Byrd placed it in Harlem. The dance world underestimates The Nutcracker atits peril, Fisher suggests, because the ballet is one of its most powerfully resonant traditions. After starting life as a Russian ballet based on a German tale about a little girl's imagination, The Nutcracker hasbecome a way for Americans to tell a story about their communal values and themselves.

An irresistible inside look at one of the world's great dance companies, Winter Season is also a sensitive, intimate, and almost painfully honest account of the emotional and intellectual development of a young woman dedicated to one of the most demanding of all the arts. Bentley's association with the New York City Ballet began when she was accepted by the affiliated School of American Ballet at the age of eleven. Seven years later, she became a member of the company. In the fall of 1980, as the winter season opened, she found herself facing an emotional crisis: her dancing was not going well. At 22 she felt that her life had lost direction. To try to make something of her experience, on paper if not on stage, she began to keep a journal, describing her day-to-day activities and looking back on her past. The result is perhaps the closest that most of us will ever come to knowing what it feels like to be a dancer, on stage and off. It also offers memorable glimpses of some notable members of the City ballet, with, at the center, the man whose vision they all served--George Balanchine.

In 1930, dancer and choreographer Martha Graham proclaimed the arrival of "dance as an art of and from America." Dancers such as Doris Humphrey, Ted Shawn, Katherine Dunham, and Helen Tamiris joined Graham in creating a new form of dance, and, like other modernists, they experimented with and argued over their aesthetic innovations, to which they assigned great meaning.

Their innovations, however, went beyond aesthetics. While modern dancers devised new ways of moving bodies in accordance with many modernist principles, their artistry was indelibly shaped by their place in society. Modern dance was distinct from other artistic genres in terms of the people it attracted: white women (many of whom were Jewish), gay men, and African American men and women. Women held leading roles in the development of modern dance on stage and off; gay men recast the effeminacy often associated with dance into a hardened, heroic, American athleticism; and African Americans contributed elements of social, African, and Caribbean dance, even as their undervalued role defined the limits of modern dancers' communal visions. Through their art, modern dancers challenged conventional roles and images of gender, sexuality, race, class, and regionalism with a view of American democracy that was confrontational and participatory, authorial and populist.

"Modern Bodies" exposes the social dynamics that shaped American modernism and moved modern dance to the edges of society, a place both provocative and perilous.

In distinction to many extant histories of ballet, The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet prioritizes connections between ballet communities as it interweaves chapters by scholars, critics, choreographers, and working professional dancers. The book looks at the many ways ballet functions as a global practice in the 21st century, providing new perspectives on ballet's past, present, and future. As an effort to dismantle the linearity of academic canons, the fifty-three chapters within provide multiple entry points for readers to engage in balletic discourse. With an emphasis on composition and process alongside dances created, and the assertion that contemporary ballet is a definitive era, the book carves out space for critical inquiry. Many of the chapters consider whether or not ballet can reconcile its past and actually become present, while others see ballet as flexible and willing to be remolded at the hands of those with tools to do so.

"Pas de Deux" has been widely regarded as the foremost existing textbook on the art of partnering. First published in 1969 in Russian by one of the world's most respected experts on partnering, the original book was created for the Vaganova Ballet Academy in St. Petersburg, the school that produced Pavlova and Nijinsky. This expanded edition contains new text, sketches, and photographs that describe 32 new poses and lifts, along with new information about strengthening exercises and balance points. It is adaptable to instruction based on the Royal Academy of Dancing and the Cecchetti methods, making it invaluable for teachers and dancers of all three major methodologies. Beginning with simple exercises for young dancers, the comprehensive text guides students, teachers, and choreographers safely to complex lifts and tosses. The instruction is useful to all forms of dance, including ballet, jazz, modern dance, ballroom dancing, and ice dancing.

From Christiane Vaussard in Paris, to David Howard in New York City and Larisa Sklyanskaya in San Francisco, Gretchen Warren profiles ten world-renowned master ballet teachers to capture their philosophies, training methods and the classroom presence that makes their instruction magical. Based on extensive interviews and classroom observation, each profile is an entertaining and enlightening mix of personal anecdotes and details about teaching techniques, class content and organisation. Warren also includes a section of signature exercises drawn from each teacher. Because of the master teacher's diversity of styles and methods, as well as their occasional disputes with traditional wisdom, the book offers a brisk stimulant for reflecting on the values of developing and holding true to one's own style and beliefs. Warren combines her years of experience as a dancer and master ballet teacher and her engaging writing style to create a living history of 20th-century classical ballet training. Like their legions of students, readers should appreciate not only these teachers' philosophies, their endless curiosity and their devotion to ballet, but also what distinguishes them. As Warren observes, ""A great teacher, like a great chef, is a master at presentation, at making something - even something as painstakingly difficult as the study of classical ballet - so palatable that students swallow without hesitation. And do so joyfully!"".